morning, to hear a problem that was personal—cheating fiancee, two-timing wife—or professional—industrial espionage, embezzling employees. Straying spouses and shady secretaries are my daily bread and the Web site says so. It doesn’t mention art, a specialty outside any of my areas of expertise. If this case was about art, I had to wonder, why call me?
Dunbar sent a dollop of milk to join the sugar. “I’m a collector. Contemporary Chinese art. Do you know much about that?”
Oh. This had to do with my contemporary Chineseness? “Not much, no.”
He nodded and settled back. “It’s a cutting-edge collecting area. Not really inside the PRC, even among the new rich, but in the West. Chinese painters, especially, but also sculptors, photographers, installation artists— they’re all hot.” His voice was pleasant, measured, as though lecturing at a symposium on the globalized cultural marketplace. He looked the part, too: thirtyish, short dark hair, polished shoes, the only business suit in sight. That his art and his prospective detective were both Chinese couldn’t be coincidence, but the detective’s ignorance seemed okay with him. My antennae went up. There’s a class of Westerners who “like rice”: They’re attracted to Asians, or, really, to their own exotic fantasies. If Jeff Dunbar had chosen Chinese art, and me, for that reason, he was about to get a fast good-bye. And stuck with the check.
But he didn’t look it, and he wasn’t acting it. Those guys invariably wear something Asian, at least a tie with a double-happiness pattern. They order tea. And, during Zen-like pauses, they gaze soulfully into my slanty eyes. Jeff Dunbar came across as a guy in a boring suit conducting a business meeting.
I decided to see where this was going. “Tell me about this art. I don’t think I’ve seen much of it.” I ransacked my brain, came up with little besides misty mountains and pine trees from five or six dynasties back. “Is it like classical art? Ink on paper, that kind of thing?”
“Interesting you should ask that. Mostly, no. A lot of artists now work in Western media—oils, acrylics. But the paintings I’m concerned with happen to be inks.” He set his cup down. “There’s a painter named Chau Chun. Referred to as Chau ‘Gwai Ying Shung’—Ghost Hero Chau. Have you heard of him?”
“I’m sorry, no.” I added, “Your pronunciation is very good. Do you speak Chinese?”
“Thanks. Yes, I minored in it in college. It occurred to me that people who spoke the language would be increasingly in demand.”
“And you majored in?…”
“Art, of course.”
Of course, except for the half-second pause before he said it. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. You were telling me about Ghost Hero Chau.”
“Yes. Well, Chau was a young professor at the Beijing Art Institute in the 1980s. His work from that period is very valuable.”
“How valuable is ‘very’? ”
“A piece will sell for around half a million. A little more, a little less, depending.”
Yes, I thought, that would be “very.”
“A lot of artists his age were doing experimental work in those days,” Dunbar went on, “but Chau always worked in traditional media with traditional techniques. He made brush-and-ink scrolls: mountains, plum blossoms, lotus ponds. Classical-looking, and also traditional in another sense: They were political, but in arcane ways. Hidden symbols and metaphors, that sort of thing.”
“That’s traditional? I didn’t know that.”
“Nature painting with coded commentary goes back to the Yuan Dynasty. About eight hundred years,” he added, in case I didn’t know my dynasties. “The commentary’s aimed at educated people of the painter’s political persuasion, but the coding gives the painter deniability. But don’t worry, Ms. Chin. I didn’t expect you to have any expertise in this field. That’s not why I called.”
“I have to admit that’s a relief. So tell me, what can I do for you?”
“Recently, some new paintings of Ghost Hero Chau’s seem to have surfaced. Again, inks, and again, political, criticizing the government, the Party, the economic free-for-all going on in China and the social disasters it’s causing.”
“I’m surprised that’s allowed. Criticizing the government can get you in trouble over there.”
“Very much so, if you’re an activist lawyer, say. Or a writer. Artists, less often.”
“What makes them special?”
“Oh, it could be liberalization. Those hundred flowers finally blooming. Or,” he smiled, “maybe it’s that the artists are cash cows. The West loves political work. Collectors pay a fortune and the government takes a cut.”
“It does?”
“Well, so does ours, from our artists. We call it taxes. They call it something else but the result’s the same. Also, there’s national pride. Sky-high prices make China a player in the art world.”
“But if the paintings are critical?”
“Ah, but with visual works, you can always say seeing something as antigovernment misses the point. That it was meant as ironic, tongue-in-cheek.”
“Deniability, like in the Yuan Dynasty.”
“Exactly.”
“And that’s what the artists say? To keep the government off their backs?”
“It’s what the government says, to explain why someone’s allowed to say in paint what a writer gets years of hard labor for saying in words. Of course, writers’ manifestos aren’t going for half a million U.S. dollars. The artists who get in trouble are the ones who don’t keep their mouths shut. The ones who let their work do the talking are
