14 | THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture

The fashion peacocks are parading in

Beijing this summer. A young woman

with a short crop of neon green hair. An-

other with scarlet bangs. Others in

pointy-toed shoes and perfect makeup.

A young man in a pale blue silk shirt,

matching bermudas and beige boots.

They are all part of the crowd lining up

to see the hot art show of the season —

works by the young Picasso at the UCCA

Center for Contemporary Art, a presti-

gious gallery in the 798 art quarter.

Beijing brags about its humming art

scene. Galleries thrive. The art schools

possess a certain frisson. Art is widely

taught in elementary schools.

But shrouding all this creative fervor

is the meddling hand of the government.

Censorship is rife in literature, and film.

Although few art shows have been

closed in the last few years, exhibitions

are self-censored, and many artists

choose to work abroad to escape the offi-

cial tastemakers.

For the under-35-year-olds flocking to

the Picasso show, some of them artists

themselves, the young Spaniard’s wild

imagination during the first three dec-

ades of his career has touched a nerve.

They have been captivated by Picasso’s

drive to experiment before he was even

30. The painter and sculptor didn’t just
    change the art world; he helped change
    how a new century saw itself.
    But the implicit theme of the show is:
    Would genius like Picasso’s thrive
    within the confinements of contempo-
    rary China?
    The answer isn’t an easy yes or no.
    Some Chinese artists compete favor-
    ably on the world’s freewheeling art
    stage, which prizes the outré, and the
    central government welcomes the
    global recognition its art stars bring.
    But the authorities can interfere as arbi-

trary censors at any time, and any work

denigrating the party or state, or even

hinting at separatism, is strictly forbid-

den.

For the artists and other creative

types visiting the show, Picasso’s works

seem to hint at what’s possible for art-

ists when they are completely unfet-

tered.

Yan Lei, a sculptor from Beijing, was

halfway through the show when he

peered into a plexiglass case with one of

the artist’s trailblazing works, “Violin.”

The blue, brown and white mélange of

metal sheets and iron wires was created

in 1915, when World War I was raging,

and Picasso was 34, about the same age

as Mr. Yan.

He was blown away by the originality

from so long ago.

“We are doing this today, and think it

is very modern,” said Mr. Yan, who

keeps a studio on the outskirts of the

city. “He was doing this 100 years ago.”

Boliang Shen, a 34-year-old content

director of a podcast, was riveted by a

sculpture of Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s

early girlfriend. In some places, the

rough-hewed wood looked as though it

had been hacked with a penknife.

“You can feel Picasso,” Mr. Shen said

as he circled the work. “He’s looking for

himself, his own voice.”

Picasso has long been accepted in

China. His onetime membership in the

Communist Party helped. When the

Communists grasped victory in 1949, an

image of a dove by Picasso hung as a

symbol of peace at an international con-

ference in Beijing alongside portraits of

Stalin and Mao.

He was blacklisted during the Cultur-

al Revolution, like almost all other art-

ists dismissed as a not-to-be-tolerated

bourgeois influence. But in the early

1980s, a small show of 30 works repre-

sented his comeback, attracting an ea-

ger audience hungry for European art

after China’s decades in the wilderness.

His celebrity, as important a driver in

shaping taste in China as in the West,

adds extra allure, as does the astronomi-

cal value of his art. The 103 paintings,

sculptures and drawings in the current

show are worth close to $1 billion.

“People are coming in part because he

is very famous and very expensive,”

said Philip Tinari, the director of the

UCCA gallery.

Another big question raised by the

show is whether China will learn about

projecting soft power from one of the

globe’s best at this, France. The Musée

National Picasso-Paris lent the 103

works for the exhibition.

When President Xi Jinping of China

met the French president, Emmanuel

Macron, in the spring, both men publicly

blessed the show. But a last-minute

glitch having to do with China’s strict

customs policies almost scuttled the

opening.

“The sticking point wasn’t censor-

ship,” Mr. Tinari said. “It was that the

works are so valuable.”

As the deadline for the opening

loomed in early June, Chinese customs

insisted on a $225 million deposit — 25

percent of the value of the works — as a

kind of sales tax, treating the art as if it

was to be sold. That amount was to be

paid by the gallery before the pieces ar-

rived.

But the art was not for sale. So the

French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le

Drian, who happened to be in Beijing at

the end of April for a gathering of world

leaders to discuss China’s global infra-

structure program, asked his Chinese

counterpart, Wang Yi, to persuade

customs to forgo the deposit. And it did.

By June 10, the works had arrived on

nine different planes from Europe and

were then installed in the vast industrial

space of the UCCA gallery.

Primary school students come in

groups with their art teachers, all part of

an exercise in what is referred to in

China as improving the “good taste” of

young children.

One father had picked up his daughter

from a tough math exam and brought

her immediately to the show to join her

classmates so she could “relax and

learn” at the same time.

David Zhang, 42, an art instructor, as-

sembled his group of restless 9-year-

olds before the star piece of the show, a

melancholy 1901 “Self-Portrait” painted

in somber shades of blue, the face a

ghostly faint gray. It was painted after

the death of a friend.

Mr. Zhang, also an artist, looked the

part in a crisp round-collared white

shirt, rimless glasses and short cropped

hair, with an old-fashioned tan leather

camera bag slung over his shoulder.

“Just feel it, stand in front of it — this is

the original painting,” he said.

Some paid attention, others wriggled.

“The color of the skin is not true human

skin color,” he said. “How would you call

it?”

“They get really excited seeing the

real paintings,” Mr. Zhang said as he

pushed through the crowds.

The curators chose a 1906 self-por-

trait in pale pink-and-white tones with

big black eyes as the emblem of the exhi-

bition. The painting bears an eerie re-

semblance to characters in Japan’s ani-

mated movies and graphic novels

known as manga, one of the most cele-

brated foreign art forms in China.

The pastel image appears on the

show’s catalog cover, advertising post-

ers outside the gallery and shopping

bags in the store.

It was a good marketing choice, said

Wang Xingwei, a well-known Beijing

painter, who has exhibited at the

Guggenheim Museum in New York and

who dropped by the show one evening to

check out the response.

Like manga, the self-portrait was

“cute,” Mr. Wang said, offering a novel

interpretation of the young Picasso.

“Cute is a popular, important word in

China now.”

The portrait was not the most compli-

cated work in the show, he said, but it fit

with the moment and appealed to the

crowd, who jostled to get a better view.

Amid control, a taste of freedom

BEIJING

A Picasso exhibition

enraptures young visitors

at an art hub in China

BY JANE PERLEZ

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLES SABRIÉ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top: a guide giving a talk on Picasso’s “Portrait of Marie-Thérèse”

(1937) at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing; spectators pondering

“Reading” (1932); and others admiring “Head of a Woman” (1957).

“We are doing this today, and

think it is very modern.”

“Hindsight is my gift,” Hannah Gadsby

announces halfway through “Douglas,”

her startling new stand-up show and

unlikely follow-up to the groundbreak-

ing “Nanette.”

In context, the claim is a nugget of

self-deprecation; she has been talking

about her autism, which often leaves

her feeling confused in present-tense

social situations, like the “only sober

person in a room full of drunks.”

But it’s also a boast, a motto, a ban-

ner: She has spectacular rearview

vision.

There’s a lot for her to look back on

in “Douglas,” playing through Aug. 24

at the Daryl Roth Theater in New

York. Though Ms. Gadsby became

famous in the United States only last

year, when “Nanette” was picked up by

Netflix, she lived on earth for several

decades before that, mostly in Austral-

ia, without Americans’ consent or

acknowledgment.

“That’s a thing you don’t know,” she

says of Americans. “Other cultures

reference themselves without consult-

ing you first.”

Who makes the rules and defines the

categories in which others must strug-

gle for love and dignity is the overarch-

ing theme of “Douglas” — even

though, in a typical red herring, it is

named for one of her dogs. “Nanette”

was likewise named for a character

who had little to do with the story.

Like the earlier piece, too, “Douglas”

is angry — even furious — and draws

its comic energy from the effort to

master and direct that anger into

sharp insight and its byproduct, laugh-

ter.

Revenge would not be too strong a

word for the show’s huge scope and

dark aims. If it has a fault, that would

be the scale: There are so many ene-

mies to be shot down and re-educated

that they eventually threaten to blur

into one undifferentiated mass of aw-

fulness. But perhaps that’s actually

Ms. Gadsby’s point.

Most of them, in any case, are men.

There’s the doctor who tried to put her

on the Pill because he didn’t appreciate

her emotions; there’s another doctor, a

few centuries earlier, who “discovered”

an obscure part of women’s reproduc-

tive anatomy and put his name (also

“Douglas”) on it. “It’s amazing how

little men have to do to be remem-

bered,” she says.

More recently, there are the men —

and yes, she says, they are always men

— who feel the need, after “Nanette,”

to troll and disparage her. Sometimes

they offer inanely paradoxical insults

like “I’ve never heard of you,” and

sometimes they pile on to that show’s

story of the violent hate crime Ms.

Gadsby suffered with verbal violence

of their own.

Even among non-troglodytes, “Na-

nette” was polarizing. A kind of self-

canceling stand-up, it questioned the

capacity of comedy to encompass

traumas like the very one it was built

on. Some critics thus doubted it was

comedy at all, calling it theater or

monologue or lecture, none of those

words meant as praise.

In “Douglas,” Ms. Gadsby says she

doesn’t care what terminology you

use; that fight is a waste of time, giv-

ing too much power to those who make

the categories and not enough to those

who make the art. Nor will she let

others define her as a failure because

she’s a woman, a lesbian, “heavy of the

hoof” or a person with autism.

“I no longer believe that I am falling

short of expectations,” she says. “I

believe it is those expectations that are

falling short of my humanity.”

The unusual brilliance of “Douglas”

is in its long-game strategy to prove

this. Making expectations both her

subject and method, Ms. Gadsby be-

gins by telling us everything she will

be doing in the 95-minute set and

exactly what effects she intends to

achieve.

When she later collects double on

the gambit — scoring for both her

laughs and her prediction of them —

you are struck by the daring that went

into setting such a high bar. And you

believe, as she suggests, that her abil-

ity to think through and execute such a

plan is proof of a mind that is beautiful,

not defective.

The content is largely successful,

too. Some of it, as she has promised, is

relatively ordinary (though still funny)

comic material built on easy targets

(golfers, anti-vaxxers) and formulaic

punch lines and puns. “The word ‘aru-

gula’ sounds like a clown-car horn.”

“Waldo should have to find himself like

the rest of us do.”

But those are palate cleansers, low-

ering the audience’s defenses before

the main course arrives. Acknowledg-

ing that the success of “Nanette” is

“why everyone’s here — including

myself,” she at first insists she’s “fresh

out” of trauma to turn into material.

“Had I known, I might have budgeted

mine better, gotten at least a trilogy

out of it.” Even so, it wouldn’t be for us:

“My grief is not your train. Get off.”

Meanwhile, she has carefully been

stoking another train, one whose

freight is the much larger trauma we

all share, thanks to centuries of mi-

sogyny. Surely it’s no accident that Ms.

Gadsby brings to this material the full

range of comic invention she has previ-

ously been parceling out so carefully.

As she approaches the show’s climax,

we feel the temperature change, much

in the way we do when fireworks or

symphonies ramp up toward their final

cadences. The big guns come out.

So in answer to those men who

derided “Nanette” as a mere mono-

logue, she offers another, unanswer-

able one. And to those who called it a

lecture, not comedy, she responds with

one of the funniest lectures ever, on the

High Renaissance, complete with

slides. (Her bachelor’s degree is in art

history and curatorship.) In it, she

locates the supposedly universal ideals

of female beauty in the merely pervy

obsessions of privileged male painters.

And she convincingly explains why

Titian isn’t a Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtle but ought to be.

If the mixture of ingredients does

not seem as if it should cohere, the

result absolutely does. American self-

regard conspires with male privilege

(and, in one devastating story, a form

of female collaboration) to make such

an overwhelming antagonist that all of

Ms. Gadsby’s modes of attack wind up

aimed in the same direction. Everyone

is implicated, from Leonardo to Louis

C.K. Since only animals (though not

turtles) are unsullied, perhaps the title

is not so random.

And as for whether Ms. Gadsby’s art

is theater or stand-up or lecture or

monologue, who cares? There’s

enough trauma to go around.

Trouble ahead. Trouble behind.

THEATER REVIEW

Hannah Gadsby’s sequel

to ‘Nanette’ is as startling

and probably as divisive

BY JESSE GREEN

Hannah Gadsby in her one-woman show “Douglas,” named for one of her pet dogs.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

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