Lawrence Osborne

FBI Body Farm, Tennessee, from the New York Times Magazine

The nameless teenage Mexican immigrant killed in a drug skirmish could hardly have imagined that this would be his final resting place. His knees are drawn up into the fetal position; his body appears almost mummified, the skin a leathery brown merging with the fall leaves underneath. The sloped woods around him hum with cicadas. All is deathly peace in this hillside spot. A few feet away, a leg lies perfectly camouflaged in the brush, given away only by crimson strips of flesh still clinging to it. Under a row of trees nearby, a woman lies on her back, half rotted away, her arms outstretched in a frozen gesture and her hair lying in a molted mat around her skull.

The Body Farm

Che? from the New York Observer

Long declared to be mere footnotes to history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are riding high in the American media. The Cuban Revolution, it seems, is everywhere once again, and cold, hard historical judgment is harder and harder to find. HBO may have pulled Oliver Stone's fawning documentary Comandante after Mr. Castro, in April, sentenced 78 dissident Cuban writers to the gulag for 28 years, then executed three Cubans who hijacked a ferry, but the scheduling decision doesn't appear to be a sudden spasm of political conscience. Those events, HBO said, merely mean that Comandante "has become incomplete" and would have to be updated. If viewers get impatient waiting for Mr. Stone to work in the new material, another biography of Castro is currently being produced for the PBS American Experience series.

Che Guevara

A Bloody Rift : Tom Cholmondely

On that day, Cholmondeley and his friend Carl Tundo, a rally-car driver, were prospecting a remote area of the Delamere estate near Lake Elementaita. They were looking for a suitable site for a house Tundo wanted to build. The place was thick with mpilipili trees, which look a little like densely growing olive trees, and it was late afternoon. In the fading light, the two whites stumbled upon a poaching party — three men from Kenya's majority Kikuyu tribe and as many as six dogs (accounts vary) — and their slaughtered impala. These men allegedly set their dogs on Cholmondeley and Tundo. Cholmondeley was armed, as Africans often are in a bush filled with dangerous Cape buffalo, and he shot at the dogs with a Winchester .303 hunting rifle, killing two but also hitting Njoya. A game warden at nearby Nakuru National Park later testified that Cholmondeley had phoned him after the shooting and uttered the Swahili words "Nimechapa mmoja matako" — "I have hit one in the buttocks."

Cholmondely murder case Kenya

Macau's casino industry, from Vogue 2007

An excerpt:

During my first term at Cambridge, I took part in many clandestine poker games. Participants had to wear red-velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, and debts were written on pieces of paper and collected afterward with gentlemanly menace. I lost so much money at these aristocratic games—thousands of dollars—that over my first Christmas holiday I was forced to take a job on a North Sea oil rig in order to pay it all back.

Macao Gambling

Essay on dating younger women, Men's Vogue 2007

Oscar Wilde once famously quipped that past the age of 25 everyone is the same age. There is a grain of perennial truth in this observation, which makes possible the curious spectacle of the older man and the woman half his age. The older European man, in particular, falls into an inevitable comedy of manners with younger American women. The two combatants eye each other with a wary curiosity, separated by so many chasms of expectation and experience that only the lightning-flash of animal desire can bridge them. There is a delicious mutual horror, even, that fascinates as much as is complicates. As you might have guessed, I am that older European man—not so old, but a tenuous figure in many ways.

I came to New York in the 1990s, divorced, a little jaded, mid-thirties, British. It’s a wonderful combination in a novel. In real life, it’s anything but. I was immediately taken aback by the tension, the finger pointing, the blatant distrust, and sometimes the borderline disdain that made New Yorkers of both sexes dance around each other like so many snake charmers and their cobras. It became quickly apparent that New York is more about power and money than it is about love and sex, and I had certainly noticed a curious pattern in myself as I floated free and single through the bars and party rooms of New York. I was only desirable in so far as I was exotic. You could see it hopelessly in their eyes: Was there an estate in Cheshire somewhere lurking behind that twee accent? Did I offer the social climber some quirky Old World ladder they could climb? Did I matter?

I have never been especially attracted to younger women per se. The vaunted physical beauty is rarely enough to offset a host of complications. But then again, there is always that thirst to experience the world for the first time—and how can one not be moved by that? It’s a return to one’s own prior self, a nostalgia (which in Greek merely means “the pain of returning”). And perhaps, too, there is a sadder, more primitive force at work, namely, the possibility of children. At a certain point, to be with a woman one’s own age one has to close that door, and it’s not an easy door to shut forever.

Everyone in New York has their appalling dating tales, in which they trade like anecdotes of prison or unhappy childhoods. In part it’s because nowhere else is this elaborate sham of a ritual taken more seriously: The New Yorker dates because he doesn’t know how to get it on with ease. He or she is not comfortable with the opposite sex, deep down. There is something perpetually strained and tense.

In other places that I am familiar with, like France or Italy, people decide they like each other, then they jump into bed to see if their first impression is correct. If it isn't, no harm done. Courtship exists, of course, but it is not a formulaic ritual. The tone is different, in some way. Mischief and humour, perhaps, are allowed their due. In any case, although I am only an adopted New Yorker, I offer my little tales in a spirit of scientific objectivity, and without a shred of remorse. I am actually curious about them myself.

My first attempted date arose at a loud literary party where I met a 24-year-old beauty who worked for a notable film director. I competed for her with another British guy, and, as British men do, we fenced furiously with tinny verbal swords. Even though he was wearing the better suit, I got the girl’s number, and three days later called to ask her out. To my great surprise, she was rather friendly on the phone. We met at a bar in the East Village and when I walked in a look of horror came over her face. I was obviously the wrong Brit. Naturally, we all sound the same. I made a mental note as I labored through awkward, agonizing chitchat followed by a hasty exit: never underestimate the power of a suit.

Next up, a girl called Amanda whom I met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while walking around the Oceania rooms in scholarly mode. Perhaps I looked shabby and lost, or easy pickings, or else Amanda, a second-year Columbia student, had a sadistic streak. We got chatting, and I thought, “An American girl came right up to me. How wonderful. And this time I am the right Brit, there can be no error.”

The older man is allowed to be a gentle pedant. I have traveled in Oceania quite a bit ( which was why I was there ) and so I could play Pygmalion to the younger Eliza Doolittle. Amanda, needless to say, knew more about Oceania than I do, and she was no Doolittle, but nevertheless I was given licence to drone on.
I’ve found that younger women are quite amused by this act. It puts you on display.
“Among the Fore of Papua,” I said, “a menstruating woman is forbidden from walking across a man’s shadow.”
“Really? Do you approve of that?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“Don’t Fore women eat their mens’ brains after they die? Isn’t that why they get Jacob-Kreutzfeld disease?”
A twinkle in the eye and a hint of rapier.

We made a date for the following Friday—same place, same time, and I wondered if this how dating could happen, accidentally, with a tiny amount of vestigial spontaneity? But at the same time I found myself fascinated by the passive-aggressive nature of the relation between the older man and the younger woman. It is like a duel whose real motives are unclear. Martin Amis notes somewhere of one of his characters that he had reached the age—his late forties—when women looked right through him as if he didn’t exist. Personally, I always rather looked forward to this mystical state of invisibility. But no such luck. As a foreigner, your age is viewed in a subtly different way—and vice versa. I wondered if I could be with a European girl of 23 or 24, and I found the idea bizarre. But here, it became increasingly easier to get involved in tormented affairs with younger women, perhaps premised on VAST confusions and driven by Freudian dramas best left unconscious. As the astute doctor said, “Whenever two people make love, four people are involved.” Perhaps that is why we have dating: so that the four people involved can get to know each other subliminally. It’s a testing ground, a mock-up, a trial run. So the parents can get to mentally copulate.
It was with these thoughts and anxieties in mind that I met Amanda at the first-floor gallery bar at the Met. She arrived with that overdone physical perfection that seems to characterize the dating person. We chatted, endured the awful string quartet and drank the house dry Martinis, which are generous by any standards. At 8:45, 15 minutes before the Met closes, she said she had to go to the bathroom. The loos are located at the end of the Greco-Roman galleries, so I said I would meet her back at the front doors. She staggered off, a little tipsy. By nine, however, she was nowhere to be seen. By 9:15, as the doors were closing, I was obliged to tell the guards that my friend had not returned from the toilets. A female search party went to investigate. Sorry, no ladies in the ladies room.
“What relation do you have with this woman, sir?”
I couldn’t say I was on a date. That would be too absurd. “She’s my wife.”
Aha. That made them urgent.
“The gentleman,” the supervisor was told, “has lost his wife.”
“Lost your wife, sir?”

My date turned into a surreal search through the dim galleries of the after-hours Met with dogs and flashlights. Meanwhile, I tried to theorize what had happened to the eminently reasonable Amanda. There was only one way out of the Met. Had she simply run for her life at the first opportunity?
The guards regarded my accent with high suspicion, as if I were cognate with Jack the Ripper. I called Amanda’s cell many times, demanding that she call me as soon as possible. Nothing. It was a full two days before a return message appeared on my answering machine, and a mere three words—“Very funny, asshole.”

It was at this point that I realized that I was out of my depth. Strange American psychodynamics were at work that I could not fathom. True, it did transpire that Amanda had exited by mistake through the Met’s service door and had fallen asleep in Central Park on a giant bank of snow. She’d had no idea where she was when she woke at dawn, and how she had gotten there. But, she reasoned, it must have been my fault, and I must have taken advantage of her in some way.

It was her youth, her uncertainty, which had suddenly gotten the better of her. In the Pygmalion relation, as we might call it, there is a tussle between the striving egotism of the young and the vulnerable superiority of the old. Martinis only make it worse. Thus, when we finally spoke, she was furiously indignant, with a dubious authenticity which she wielded as a weapon. In the cosmology of American college students, after all, the Older Man is often a patriarchal villain.
“You ran away,” I said.
“How can you say that? You abandoned me!”
“Are you insane?”
“Don’t call me insane!”
“I didn’t call you insane. I asked you a question.”

Other young girlfriends and other affairs seemed to pass through predictable phases like the motions of celestial bodies. The seduction, the torrid weeks, the days locked inside Paris hotel rooms, the inevitable farewells, the years of fond little letters that could never find the right tone: clichéd, but moving, like many things in life. The younger American woman chews her way through these things with a kind of determined zest, never quite meaning what she says. She knows she’s headed elsewhere ultimately.

Sometimes I confided with male friends my own age who had gotten sucked ( willingly, oh so willingly ) into the same vortex. “The worst thing,” one of them once said, “is that eye-rolling, condescending disapproval from women our own age. They think we’re Humbert Humberts. Whereas they’d do the same if they could – and they do. Of course, then the age difference is all cool and wonderful. Stella gets her groove back, and all that.”
“Yes,” I said, “but what are we doing exactly?”
“Look at it this way. We didn’t get it right first time round. It’ bloody complicated, after all. It’s hard to get right. So we giving it a second go. But this time, with a bit of wisdom. Plus, face it, we treat them better now. We’re not total pricks any more. They know that. They’re not stupid.”

But there may well be deeper cross-cultural confusions at work. Perhaps it’s the idea of love itself, which Europeans and American seem to share, but don’t. The Constitution’s injunction to pursue happiness as a right has set up an incorrigible paradigm for the sexes, one that paradoxically makes them more suspicious of each other. The temperature is notched up, the tension heightened. The American idea that a relationship is like a well-run company with two shareholders always struck me as bound to end in tears and recriminations.

As a European I cling to the idea that love is not about equity but about unconditional surrender. Cyril Connolly once wrote (and I am sorry that I am so fond of quoting middle-aged, white, male, European writers) that it is impossible to love someone without “being torn limb from limb,” and by the same token “nobody was ever made unhappy in a brothel.” That, in a nutshell, is the European model. But during my dark dating days I often used to wonder if I was doing something that this great Anglo-Irish critic would condemn, for he also noted, with true Christian pessimism: “As bees their sting, so the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.”]]]
The solution to this dire dynamic, of course, is not to carry on dating but to find the right woman via this thankless rite. I finally did, as I assume most people do. Which brings me to a parallel subject—meeting the parents. Perhaps the frivolously archaic formulas of dating are still, deep down, about children and family—even though the subject is barely mentionable in New York.

I had often wondered about this when my teenage son occasionally met my girlfriends, some of whom were not so far distant in age from himself. They’d talk about music in ways that were beyond me, and I felt the dividing lines that demarcate generations whether we like it or not. He himself never had a problem with it, however. He would tease without judgement. On one fractious jaunt in Italy with a Parisian girlfriend he did take me aside with gentle irony and say, “I am the kid here. I’m the one who’s supposed to have tantrums, not her!” But as it turned out he was simply making a practical point, and giving me a warning. Age, he was saying, has to be itself, and not pretend otherwise.

When I met the woman who ended dating for me (younger, but not in her twenties), the next ritual was soon embarked upon. We flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, and then drove to the tiny town near Montgomery where she grew up. I was struck how similar it was to where I grew up in England, a place called Lindfield in East Sussex: the same secretive, flat roads with their secluded detached houses, the same low deciduous woods, the same schoolhouses and the high streets.

Her parents came to the door, and her father, an electrician with the local power company, said to me, “We’re rednecks and we talk funny. Think you can handle that?”
How like a first date the initial parental meeting is! Except that by the time you have made it that far, you know you are not going to exit by a service door.
“I am British,” I said. “We not only talk funny, we all sound the same.”
He nodded. “You do.”
“How old are you?” her mother asked at dinner.

Essay "Riding in Red Hook," published 2008 by Riverhead in the collection "Brooklyn Was Mine"

To leave a city for another is to invite a harrowing return. After a year in Bangkok, I returned to Brooklyn, not knowing what to expect and, even worse, not knowing how to move like a local. It is tantamount to saying that I didn’t know what to remember, and it was akin to ending one relationship and beginning another.

I began by buying a bike, an antique Peugeot. I thought perhaps that a bike would lessen the shock of moving from one city to another, would help me forget the streets I missed so much in Asia. Alreay, walking around Brooklyn at night I felt sorely abandoned to myself, sinking like a stone into some clutching boredom, cold and tired and confused. Near State Street where I live, the only rowdy street life I could find was the Salvation Army outlet on Bond, where men high on meth shout along to music and tap-dance opposite the Goodwill donation store. It’s joy of a sort, the nearest thing to the wildness of a Bangkok street.

Brooklyn felt spacious, pious, half-empty. I couldn’t get the hang of it. I couldn’t get over the way the sideways offered ample room for three people abreast, or the way you could rush down them without hurtling into tables piled with cilantro, sugar pots and dancing hookers. I was astonished by the wind, the non-stop sirens, the verticality of those proud, brittle churches. It was like a devout village which has solved even the problem of dog shit - and most surprising of all there was no vice, no decadence, and no sex. Certainly, there were men screaming “Fuck you bitch” on the street outside my bedroom, but that is not quite sex, is it?

Where did one eat guaytio soup on the street at three in the morning? Where did one go for a three hour Hot Stone Massage at midnight? The carnal appetites? You go home quietly, you lock yourself inside your apartment and you pick up a magazine if you suffer a little insomnia. There’s nowhere to go, and so you behave. You behave because you are not ingenious, and because you are afraid of the police.
One of my friends in Bangkok was a Jewish aid worker from Brooklyn called John Purdoe, who works at the main AIDS charity hospital in the Klong Tuey slums. We were driving through a Bangkok traffic jam one night and he confessed to me that he had never missed Brooklyn after a decade in Asia. Why not? A motorbike with two girls flashed past our window, and as they passed us they smiled at him for no reason, as people on two wheels do in Bangkok, with sexual intent with no ulterior motive. “That’s why,” Purdoe said. “The come-hither look.”

No matter. I came back to Brooklyn to try and salvage a failing relationship, and come-hither looks on Bangkok’s streets were immaterial. Perhaps I could salvage something if I survived a summer of biking without losing a leg like the dismal hero of Coetzee’s Slow Man.

The bike turned out to be a stroke of genius, and if the truth be told it was the suggestion of the estranged girlfriend. She must have suggested it as a therapeutic measure to cope with the abrupt end of an already short relation which my absence in Bangkok had rendered impossible. I felt guilty about it, and the bike became a sort of atonement. I cycled hard, pouring out all my misery on two pedals and a pair of brakes.
I raced pointlessly around Red Hook and the waterfronts, around Fort Greene and the anonymous wastelands of Bay Ridge. It was like flogging myself with nailed whips, because the fact is that I dislike bicycles, and I especially dislike the sight of myself on a bicycle, where I look like a war-time British air raid warden waiting for a finalizing bomb. There is something a little sanctimonious about bicycles, something gratingly superior. They are the trusted vehicles of vicars.

But now there developed a strange chemistry between the absence, the girlfriend and bike. And then, out of the blue, the disappearing girlfriend called to ask if we could go on a bike ride together. I didn’t refuse, though I couldn’t see what the point of it now would be - the relation itself was broken beyond repair, and the request made no sense except insofar as it was an invitation to explore something together with the meandering delicasy of a bike ride, which never has a precise objective. It came after months of quarrels and absences and finally silence. What would a bike ride cure?

We exchanged possible routes by email, and this shared virtual map reading itself became a reassurance that neither of us was dead or forgotten to each other, at least not yet. It was not clear why we should do this, or why the back streets and forgotten neighborhoods of Brooklyn should be the places where our love affair could peter out of its own accord, like something pulled by gravity down a long slope towards a resting place from which it will never recover. Look, she seemed to be saying, we could have been doing this while you were wasting us away in Bangkok, a city where I could never have trusted you for a moment, not in the world capital of the come-hither look! But that was not quite it.

We planned to ride to Coney Island, but never did. Other, even more ambitious routes, never came to fruition. I wondered what I would say to her in this moving situation ( in both senses of that adjective ). Can one talk freely and intimately on the bike path, trespassing through traffic lights, avoiding SUV’s and children and overtaking prams? Or was this an invitation to rediscover the city itself, at least a small corner of it - as if I lacked it in some way and by lacking it had missed something on the way to break-up?

There are places in New York that take you back to Bangkok. Vinegar Hill, for example, with its gaunt power stations and warped streets, the sense of industrial decay that has continued too long to rewind. It is the sadness of the nineteenth century, which outside of Europe was a century of imitation and unease. For New York, like Bangkok, was no London or Paris - it was a place of desperate striving and Darwinian commerce and it left behind itself these zones of warehouses and ruins, of canals thick with heavy metals and typhoid. They have a decomposed quality inside which the bicyclist is marked by a sweet pessimism.
The streets of Red Hook are even more Bangkokian as they peter out at the water like the broken alleys of a riverside neighborhood like Wang Lang : Van Dyke with its lofty skeletal structures and its Valentino Pier, the battered wharves and destroyed jetties around the Flickinger glassworks and the old North Side bottling center. Thoroughfares like Creamer and Halleck and Otsego with their bird’s nests of cables : it is the same man-made forest look. The canal and its tributaries in Gowanus recall the klongs which run underground all over Bangkok, and which make it a water city.

It was a ride in which little was said, because there is usually very little to say. Riding was a way of getting around this looming silence by filling it up with sight-seeing. We rode down to the very ends of streets like Bond and Court, which are known for their more lively parts inland, and it was satisfying to see how they ended – Bond Street tapers down to a cobbled cul-de-sac by the canal just where the erector-set sign for Kentile Floors rears itself above Robert Moses’ freeway. From this side, the words appear backwards, like some vague threat from 1984. On a sign hung from the canal fence is the following instruction : “If you see discharge during dry weather call 311.” It was not a number I would ever be using.

Here the skies are always brilliant, crossed by soaring trains and by the tracery of dead trees. Strange little companies have their quarters here, things like Fireproof Door Company and Cyberstruct. As we went round and round, we passed the formidable mass of Treasure Island storage on Center Street, which asks you to “Store Your Treasures here” and offers you a large painted palm tree as an incentive. Hardly exchanging a word, we sailed down Bay and Bryant until we were in the shadow of one of the buildings I love most in New York, the abandoned grain terminal. It looks like a Crusader castle in the Middle East, Krak des Chevaliers perhaps, with the mysterious graffiti word BARONE painted across it. Beautiful in its sinister hugeness, it silences the passer-by. And on the far side of it one comes to the humble finale of Court Street, little more than an alley running past loading bays for the Hass oil company and ending at the prickly barriers of the US Coast Guard.

This is the quietest place in the city, so close to the sea but separated from it by a mass of chimnies, warehouses and bright red pipes and taps with fire hazard warnings. Turn a corner and you hear the water lapping at ruins. I rode behind her, and all this time I followed the outline of the body, so familiar in the way it slanted to left and right, the violin form with – so to speak – its tightened strings, and now untouchable, like something moving off in the dark. We stopped at Halleck next to the Keyspan yards, where is a row of chocolate warehouses swept by dried up vines, and there was a tense, squinted glance. It began to occur to me that this wandering was a form of farewell, one in which hands would not be raised or words exchanged. The woman gives her time to the man for this sole purpose.

There were moments to get off and sun, for example at the lovely corner of Sigourney and Otsego, where no-one comes and where metal chimnies stand in shining rows. Further on is Coffrey Street, whose buildings have the liver-red oxide color of African roads. A drink at the Liberty Heights tap room, delightfully estranged as a pub can be, and then a slow meandering down Van Dyke, where stands the Clay Retort and Fire Brick house, built in 1854 by the superbly named Joseph K. Brick. It looks like a small Tuscan church made of grey schist, which was how it was designed, and it reminds you that people once bothered to build brick factories in the image of Tuscan churches.
As the ride progressed, I began to feel happier, more curious about the place where I lived but which I didn’t really know. The love relationship lost its subtle preeminence for a while, and I let my eye drift up tall brick chimnies slender as Egyptian steles, along lines of cemented windows and boxes of Fafard Canadian growing mix piled along a waterfront. There are moments when a city can suddenly acquire all the kinetic qualities of a human being, a person’s moods and expressions, so that she becomes a character of some kind – like a large woman, I often think, half asleep on her side. You find yourself talking to her, asking her questions, pestering her. And living in such a city is a long, monogamous affair, or else a marriage one abandons from time to time. Cities are rarely casual flings.

We went into the new Fairway’s down by the water, which must now be the largest supermarket in Brooklyn. It is a surprising labyrinth of gourmet pretension in such a neighborhood, and we wandered down aisles as long as subway platforms, half lost, perusing and window shopping and bitching about the cherries and not really shopping at all, just passing time and gossiping about the price of grapefruits and favorite coffees and the infuriating stickiness of plastic grocery bags. It was all curiously anticlimactic.
And then we stopped by the cheese counters and there was a moment when I caught her staring down for a moment at a Stilton, and there was something tired and sad in the mouth, an immense age, and I realized that in some way that she had simply been born away by the flow of ordinary life. If I had met her in a restaurant or in the usual bars I would never have seen it, and I would never have seen it if I had never bought an old Peugeot.

Our bike ride was not the last time I saw her, but it was almost the last, and it was the farewell that never otherwise happened. And I thought of Auden’s line the next time I rode alone along Van Dyke, which does not remind me of her at all : “Hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others.”

Profile of performance artist Zhang Huang for Men's Vogue, 2008

When Sotheby’s held its auction of Chinese art in 2006 and netted $12 million for works by the likes of Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei and former enfant terrible Zhang Huan, capitalism’s thirst for the Middle Kingdom’s contemporary art suddenly became obvious to far more than a few collectors and curators. Chinese artists are now bona fide stars because they command the cash at auction to make them so.

The recent retrospective of Zhuang Hang’s early performance art and later sculptural works at New York’s Asia Society marks another watershed for the forty-three year old farmer’s son from Henan province who first shocked the Chinese art world by staging a mock abortion in front of the Academy of Arts in Beijing in 1993 – in a fake blood-drenched piece called Angel - and who later strode through the streets of Manhattan dressed in a muscly body suit made of meat, looking a little like Yukio Mishima on his way to an abbatoir.

Zhang’s delightfully absurd videotaped stunts have been conducted across the world : he has had doves peck sesame seeds from his honeyed skin in Hamburg, swung himself in a giant ball across a church square in Santiago de Campostella, lain on a bed of ice at PS 1 in Queens hoping to melt it with his body heat and – most famously of all in a piece called “Twelve Square Meters” – sat in a public latrine in Beijing covered with fish oil while filming millions of flies eating him. Art writers, always in search of “transgression” have loved every minute. Zhang’s code is a little simpler. “Being alive,” he writes, “is the most important. Life is the priority.” Elsewhere he notes more drily that, “I wanted to kill myself but not able to do so.”

In his own writings, in fact, Zhang’s cutting tone reminds one of Dali’s perpetual astonishment at the reactions of his own body to various phenomena of nature, observing himself with the laconic detachment of a doctor studying an interesting corpse. He is cool, scornful, curious and surprised as he ponders why his body cannot melt ice or why he feels anxiety when his face is painted over with Buddhist spells or is eaten alive by flies. Like Dali, he seems to be driven by a calculating but animal morbidity.

When I flew to Shangai to meet Zhang, therefore, I expected a petulant prima donna with a tiresome ego and a canny awareness of how easily Western tastes for modish exotica can be satisfied. China is in fashion across the board, and it has never been easier for Chinese artists to make a killing by branding themselves as iconoclasts. But I was wrong.

Although Zhang was a small, slender figure of modest intensity, dressed up in a kind of post-modern blue Mao cap and an Old Navy Athletics jacket, with only a hint of the designer clothes he apparently likes, it was immediately clear that he is more like the head of a large, sprawling production company that requires that constant, pragmatic attention. He has a hundred employees. Now that he has evolved beyond performance art, his work is increasingly communal in nature, turning out giant Buddha heads made of compacted ash gathered from Shanghai temples or photomurals mixed with traditional wood carving and projected onto huge antique doors salvaged from remote villages. “More Chinese,” he didn’t hesitate to say. And there is still a slightly awkward, shy element in him, a hint of the farmer’s son from Henan, the edgy outsider.

A tour of a western artist’s studio might take a couple of hours, but Zhang’s is more a miniature city than a studio. It lies in an industrial suburb called Ming Hang otherwise populated by textile factories and light manufacturing. There’s a company specializing in boat anchors down the street.

“I couldn’t afford anything like this in the West,” Zhang pointed out at once. “I came back to China from New York in 1999 precisely because I could do this sort of work in that city. I couldn’t employ a hundred Americans, nor even five. Here, land vales haven’t skyrocketed yet because the government still owns the land. And I also wanted to reconnect with China anyway – it’s a great time here, an explosive time. The West is sleeping, I think, but here we are awake round the clock. Twenty four hours.”
“That’s true of manufacturing,” I objected. “But art too?”
“Art too.”

Zhang’s Shanghai set-up more or less tries to prove the point. Each “factory” within this vast factory specializes in a different set of art works. In one, interns and students carefully applied hundreds of bird feathers to huge canvases designed to suggest Chinese divination books called Tui Bei Tu.; next door, inside the remains of a former Japanese garment workshop a group of village carvers from Dongyang set with their dozens of chisels pecking at slabs of timber to create fantastical freizes and shelves of three-dimensional heads inspired, one assumes, by both by Zhang’s nightmares and by Chinese folk lore : a one-legged pig, sows with human faces, birds pecking at cheeks, skulls and legs covered with beautifully carved flies, a human head with a mouse talking into its ear. Others carvers slaved over the aforementioned doors, copying pieces of a large photograph which showed a group of peasants building a thatch granary. It is obviously a world with which Zhang is intimately familiar : the unsung, long-oppressed Chinese countryside.

Although Zhang has left behind the antics which used his own body to alarming effect, the same primitive intensity which made those antics strangely gripping runs through this later work as well. Wandering through these hangers filled with folkish nightmares with their donkeys, flies and sundry mischievous animals, one feels very far from the usual conceits of contemporary art. Zhang claims to have felt the pull of a renewed interest in Buddhism. But one could also say that the Taoist view of nature and animals is also here present : the persuasion, for example, that the “best life” consists in refining to the utmost degree the virtues we share with animals.
“Animals are very important to me,” Zhang nodded. “As they are to Buddhism. But then I suppose I am already famous for my relationship with flies!”

Speaking of insects, there was an entire studio devoted to a series of monumental canvases upon which painters were laboriously inscribing various species of bug. Their ghostly images swirled through blocks of color that made them almost transparent, subtly evoking the unease that insects inspire in us. Elsewhere, a dead stuffed cow hung from a rafter with its head wrapped in a white cloth; monumental heads made of dozens of hides gave off the perfume of dead animals, and only after a moment’s shock did I notice that the faces were of giant nightmare babies.

Half way through my tour I was joined by the Hong Kong curator and documentary film-maker Christine Cui, as famous as Zhang in her own right in the Chinese art world and a luminary of NYU, which has just – a sign of the times - opened a branch in Shanghai. The footage would be used in Zhang’s upcoming huge show at the Shanghai Museum in February. We went into a hanger filled with epic monochrome paintings derived from historical photographs and painted with temple ash. I asked her how she had first met Zhang.
“Simple. I saw this Chinese guy in an Isse Miyake store and I went up to him and observed that he must be making a lot of money. It was Zhang. It must be the first generation of Chinese artists in history who drive SUV’s.”

Nearby was a curious picture of Hitler. I asked Zhang about this, because I wasn’t sure if Hitler resonated with the Chinese in the way he does with us, and he struck a slightly moody expression which included a smile.
“Ah, Shit-te-le,” he said. “Well, he was a historical personality.”
“That’s how we pronounce Hilter,” Christine explained. “Shit-te-le. He’s quite well known to the Chinese.”
“But why Shit-te-le?”
“Because,” Zhang said, “Shit-te-le changed history.”

And here we came to one of those odd misundertstandings that arise when one culture looks at another’s art. For us, a picture of Hitler painted in dried ash suggests the obvious crematoria; but when I made this observation, Chrtistine and Zhang seemed slightly surprised. Ash for them did not signify doom, genocide or death. On the contrary, this ash was derived from temples where people made hopeful wishes for the future. It was therefore auspicious. Ash might suggest death in some way, but not our way.
“Ash is a strange field,” Zhang said. “Especially this temple ash. No-one goes to a temple alone. It expresses a kind of togetherness. For me, ash renews the spirit of those who are dead. It gives them a second life.”

We clambered up a scaffolding suspended above the largest painting, which was laid horizontally on the ground. Painted in the same differing shades of ash, it was transcribed from a photograph of an irrigation project during the Mao years. Transposed from photograph to ash, the image became even more unbearable. Not because it showed any obvious atrocity but because it made the bee-hive collectivism of that era so suffocatingly obvious.
“What would you say?” Chrtsine asked me quietly when we were alone on the scaffold. “Is that a political work or not?”
“Of course,” I said. And I asked Zhang how the government censors worked these days. He shrugged.
“They leave me alone, really. A lot of my stuff now is about the environment and pollution. Ash, for example, is poured into lakes as rubbish. So I am making a statement simply by using it.”

The artist Ai Weiwei has said that the present epoch of Chinese art is rather like the movie “Home Alone”, where the parents are away but might come back at any moment. But Zhang points out that the art market itself is growing at the same pace as the country’s phenomenal growth in other areas; it’s therefore another expression of the country’s “awakening.” The implication is that the government would no more hamper it than they would the semiconductor industry.

Moreover, the art market is now highly integrated with the rising middle classes of a economy growing at 10 per cent a year. Real estate tycoons and entrepreneurs like Zhang Lau and Pearl Lam have become free-spending collectors and patrons just like their Western counterparts. And in fact, looking at Zhang’s painting of the irrigation project, I couldn’t help thinking of a series of five paintings by Liu Xiaodong called “The Three Gorges Project”, which recently sold for a cool $2.7 million and which portrays an environmentally disastrous dam project. As in the West, environmental protest, art and big money are not unlikely bed fellows.

“The difference,” Zhang adds, “is that in the West entrepreneurs and artists come from completely different backgrounds. They inhabit different worlds. But here, we all come from the same background. We share the same experiences, the same dreams. That’s unique to China.”
On the other hand, isn’t environmental folly an intrinsic part of the Chinese boom which never sleeps? It’s a terrifying problem that Zhang’s work only eludes to. Recently, as if in response to it, he has been traveling to Tibet, moved by its poverty and raw nature, its dark, complex Buddhism and its aloof simplicity. I also love Tibet, and we talked for a while about what that elusive place offers that few others do – especially to both Chinese and Western intellectuals who probably romanticize it in similar ways.

“Well, for one thing,” Zhang said with an impatient grin, “they leave their dead bodies in the open air to be eaten by birds. It’s almost the ultimate performance art. Maybe I’ll open my next studio there. I’m definitely thinking about it. Perhaps in the end one just want to live on top of a mountain and wait each day for the sunrise.”

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