experiences take place on different levels in different acts and on different planes. But we can't be certain all is as it seems. The woman, with glazy eyes and a solemn expression, keeps her arms outstretched, carrying the “doll man” with her gently cupped hands (cupped as a bowl when trying to quench your thirst). Is it “power” and “advantage” or is it a desire for love she is expressing? Sure, she could ask in frustration: “ Do you desire me, love me? If not, there are, to be true, other men." Surely she could imitate the man and do what he has for millennia, objectify the loved and make of her an expendable doll. The question is: what energy and creativity is expressed in this gesture? On the last page of Faludi's book, an American soldier is quoted after the grave years of the Vietnam War: “All those years I tried to live up to the male stereotypes, but for what good... I don't feel like I can even define manliness anymore. I just see people as human beings nowadays. Sometimes when returning home after a long journey you see the familiar with new eyes. My meeting with China, my friendships with Chinese men and women, my meetings with Chinese art and culture; to me it has been like going on a long journey through something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Every time I have returned home from the City of Eternal Spring to the familiar “Cold North,” I have come to experience that the familiar here at home also somehow has alien traits—something I find easier to explain as the result of my experiences of the alien in an alien land! When Gao Xiang paints his poetically powerful works, somewhere between dream and prophetic vision, it turns out he is at the center of what is happening right now also in Sweden. In a series of oil paintings, he expresses an entire generation's feeling RISRZHUOHVVQHVV²EXWDOVRWKHIDVFLQDWLRQDQGKRSH²WKHGLI¿FXOW art of relationship, fellowship, kinship, mutuality, love, as well as and passion.
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Anna Mellergard, Founder, T C/G Nordica, International Culture Coordinator January 2004, Sweden
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