The Accidental Exile: Stories of Cities, Strangers, and Silence

As the days pass there is an absence of talk about the place I have left behind. There is only here. There is only now. China does this in a way I have not experienced elsewhere. The fabric of my life, the culture that makes up ‘who I am’ is starting to fade in my rear-view mirror. This is the paradoxical way in which China is absorbing me, at once I am disconnected and alien but at the same time I am being enfolded into this breathless state of now.

From a selfie taken In the back of a taxi in Hangzhou, China.

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I found my way an art studio in the M50 art district of Shanghai and there she was... Lotus. I instinctively took off my shoes and stepped into another world, far away from the hubbub of the seething city of 28 million people outside. Lotus emerged, draped in a gown of her own design and invited me to tea. She poured blue flower tea into tiny cups, surrounded by her astonishing art.

The atmosphere in her studio was electric but soothing and she spoke in halting English of her vision of ‘life as art’. Myself, being useless at flirting, pontificated on the mythology and healing properties of the Silver Birch Tree and we communicated mostly by sketches and doodles. I felt a calm that I hadn’t experienced elsewhere in my stay here. She turned the lights down, curious Mongolian nose flute music (or some such thing) echoed around the room, and we meditated for a while. She projected images of herself, naked, covered in body paint, onto the walls around us. Note: If you think this was a ‘come hither’ moment then you might be mistaken, artists do this sort of thing. I drifted off into a cat-like doze until I came back to my senses wondering if it had all been a chapter in a novel. I bid her goodbye after gifting her with drawings of the Goddess Guan Yin and a few sketches of herself. She responded with a gift of tea from her ‘master Buddha type person’ in Tibet, some rare hand-made incense, and a strange and beautiful brass tool for hacking the rock-solid tea apart. When I found myself back on the street, navigating the intensely energetic metropolis that is Shanghai the thought occurred to me that this moment could have happened at any time in the past 1000 years. I could have been a traveller in the time of Marco Polo and it would have been almost the same (with the exception of the video projections of her beautiful bum 15 feet across on the studio wall). But she was, she is eternal. She has always existed, at any point in time and space. And, of course, her last words to me were, “Your blue eyes, so deep, they hold so many secrets”. And with that, I disappeared into the night.

When I returned there on a whim she was gone. Her studio had gone. As with the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon she had perhaps returned, along with her studio, to the endless realms of eternity, only to pop up again in some other reality.

The brass tool for hacking tea I carry with me everywhere - like a child that forms an attachment to a specific toy for reasons that can’t be determined.

I assured myself that the photo of us together was proof that she had existed. It wasn’t just a dream, she must have been real.

I will never see her again.

Enjoy the moment. It will not last.Extract from the book ‘Yet Here We Are’

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It’s getting late and I still need to get a batch of drawings finished for tomorrow morning. They’ve installed me in a comfortable serviced studio apartment with a view over the Qiantang river, that mighty waterway that has carried the wealth of China to the world for centuries. It was from here that tea left for the West. All the tea in China has passed my window at some point.

Across the river I can see the blocks of the Central Business District. Every night the entire cityscape lights up in a co-ordinated display of LED lights. Giant whales and strange anime characters leap from block to block. The sky is huge and I can watch monsoons roll in from the South China Sea. To my left I can see smoky hills in the distance edged by skyscrapers with

Asia-shaped rooftops.

I take a moment to stare

at my empty fridge.

I’ve been here for weeks and I still haven’t had a moment to sort out this food thing. Too busy.

I get back to work. I have some problems to solve here and I am the only one who can do it. I start tracing out lines with my pencil in the manner that a woodworker carves. Finding the shape within the space. And as I do so, I start to see the solutions. Sometimes I will chase a possibility, hurriedly sketching it out then find that it runs aground. I erase it and start again. One failure always leads to a success. Tonight, it is down to me.

China hasn’t been through our ‘Age of Individualism’. When our little company first got involved with the Chinese the tensions soon became clear. They couldn’t understand the maverick ‘me’ approach of the individuals in our set up. We interpreted this as disrespect, but it wasn’t. The Chinese just couldn’t understand the egos.

It is a paradox, they are hierarchical and people are conditioned to follow orders, but there is a baffling equality within that. But I was coming from the age of the individual, I wasn’t slotting into the hive and going with the flow.

I have learned otherwise since the early days of working with the Chinese and being frustrated and confounded, assuming they don’t understand the subtle nuances of advanced concept design. It is possible to be highly respected in a particular field, but at the same time be part of the hive and go with the flow. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. This is perhaps, the difference between the ego and humility. To be humble does not mean you cannot be elevated to a high level of expertise and respect and this is perhaps difficult for us to understand in the West. In our culture, the humble are liable to be exploited and trodden down, geniuses perhaps in their own right, but never able to reach their full potential. Stories abound of the artists that didn’t quite make it because they were too humble and thus weren’t able to do more. We value the artist who has hubris and is able to place themselves above others. The Western story is that you can be a genius but you have to be ruthless to make it. In China you can be a genius and be humble, and gentle, and this may get you elevated to a high position, maybe. But at least it’s a ‘maybe’ whereas in our culture it is seen as a ‘definitely not’

It seems that there is overlap between the two cultures now. China has many of these Western attributes and they are at times probing towards the age of the individual but there is something fundamentally different at their core and, seen this way, it does make sense. They squirm awkwardly at blatant displays of ego, they don’t celebrate the extroverted Western individual in the same way but applaud the introvert who quietly proves themselves through their work, and that seems typically Chinese.

I don’t notice the night trudging on because at some point, the concept manifests itself in entirety. Earlier today it had been a blank sheet of paper. Then it became an idea, and now it is a plan. The concept concretises and I sit back and throw my pencil on the desk. When I stretch and glance out of the window I see a faint glow of light on the horizon, threatening me with tomorrow.

I look at the clock on my computer. 4am.

I am lonely. But satisfied.

The main river in Hangzhou is the Qiantang River (钱塘江). It’s famous for its tidal bore, known as the Qiantang River Tide, which is one of the largest and most spectacular tidal bores in the world. I did this painting from a photo I took from my hotel room window during my long stay there while the pandemic raged in the UK

Extract from the book ‘Yet Here We Are’

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