Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

A return to joy.

A return to joy.

Tiao continued by examining Cat in the Mirror. There were a series of three variations on the same theme, in the same setting, that spanned the sixteen years from 1977 to 1993.

The first is a nude girl, who has just awakened and leans against her bed, combing her hair, comb in one hand and mirror in the other. On finding that the cat squatting at the end of the bed is staring at her, she turns the mirror around to invite the cat to examine itself. In that moment, the girl’s expression and body both appear natural and relaxed, fresh and soft. Her invitation to the cat has an element of playfulness.

The second one: The girl has been leaning against the head of the bed, viewing herself in the mirror, with a little book in her other hand. On finding the cat, hiding at the foot of the bed, staring at her, she turns the mirror around and forces the cat to examine itself. In this painting, the girl has grown older and there is more of both reserve and wantonness in her expression, though she is clothed in a thin blouse and a pair of long pants. Fully dressed, she holds the mirror and makes the cat, who hunches at the end of the bed, see itself, as if saying, Do you want to watch me? You’d better have a look at yourself.

The third: The girl still leans against the bed; judging from her face she is again older. She wears elaborate, conservative clothing and her face reveals a forcefully controlled anger and willfulness. She thrusts the mirror directly at the cat on the end of the bed, whose entire body is visible, as if saying, Why look at me? Why observe me, you seductive, sinister thing! No longer the naked girl, relaxing, briskly combing her hair, she obviously dominates the scene, in the tight clothing she’d prepared in advance — nervous, combative.

How people fear being watched — spied on — particularly by their own kind who hide in the dark. When humans are subject to the cold scrutiny of a cat, who knows all, is ever-present and often pleased with itself, what an unsettling feeling it must be. People love to gaze at themselves in the mirror, but who ever sees the true self in the mirror? All of us expect to see a beautiful face on that self in the mirror. So, to watch others is to shield the self.

To watch is to shield.

When people are annoyed and shove the mirror into the cat’s face, they want to watch the cat make a fool of itself — and to shield themselves. The coquettishness of the nervous cat, and the insidious psychology that has it always waiting for the chance to rebel, people fear these things, so they thrust the mirror at the cat. To spy, to embarrass others, is the most basic human instinct.

The cat has no mirror to turn on a person; to a person the cat is a mirror. Squinting its seemingly tired eyes in the dark, it quietly snuggles up to people, in surface harmony, but spiritually distant.

Balthus’s work, his relationship with his subjects, which became more chaotic the more he tried to put it in order, his high taste, his emotional but controlled style, all fascinated Tiao. Sometimes she felt she was the cat curling at the end of the bed; sometimes she believed she was the naked, playful young girl, who eventually grew into the fully armed, smouldering young woman: Why do you look at me and why do you observe me? You coquettish, sinister little thing!

All our watching is done to shield ourselves. When will we inspect our own hearts? Almost no one can bear to look closely within. Self-scrutiny leads us into stumbling vertigo, but we must deal with others and have no escape. Others are always our mirrors. The more we fear to look closely at ourselves, the more eager we are to scrutinize them. We comfort our heart’s core with this scrutiny of other people’s flaws.

1

Like many women in love, Tiao was fearful, bold, and incapable of rational thought. Her emotional entanglement with Fang Jing prevented her from seeing herself — or others — clearly. His surprisingly frank “love letters” not only didn’t drive Tiao away but, on the contrary, drew her closer. His repeated tales of dalliances with other women only served to convince her that she was the only woman Fang Jing could trust and that only she had the power to save him. So the mix of Fang Jing’s personality, sincerity plus hooliganism, drove Tiao to distraction. After hearing his story of the tenth woman, she became reckless and crazy, demanding that he have her, as if that would help him cleanse his previous impurity. She was no longer the Tiao of before, who couldn’t even find his lips, whose heart was excited and whose eyes were opened by his love letters. Not wanting things to have the least suggestion of barter, she didn’t even think about marriage. Marriage. That would be his request of her later.

After knowing her for two years, he finally had her.

Her body felt no pleasure but her heart was content, some part of which was vanity, as well as a young woman’s primitive instinct for love, simple and unaffected to the point of silliness.

He finally had her. He was, in every way, satisfied, happy, even delightfully surprised, the biggest surprise of all being something he wouldn’t confide to anyone — he had never told Tiao, either — that she had restored his manhood.

For years Fang Jing had been impotent, which he attributed to the enormous mental and physical suffering he’d endured in the decade of the Cultural Revolution. When he regained freedom and his talents began to be recognized, the most important thing in his life was to find a cure. Big hospitals and small hospitals, folk remedies and secret family potions — he stooped to anything, even visiting those shady little clinics with ambiguous names and clear theme located in backstreets and tucked away in alleys. But none of the treatments worked on Fang Jing. He didn’t understand why life would play such an ironic joke on him, which filled him with hostility and made him curse the overwhelming temptation that came his way.

So he made a point of exaggerating his various relationships with women, intending embellishments and fabrications to carry juicy news of his debaucheries to the world. How he wished he were a real hooligan, or at least a man with hooligan potential.

It was difficult to tell whether his initial approach to Tiao had any clear intent or not, and therefore difficult to say that he had seduced her gradually with his letters. Those letters represented, in part, a test of his own charm as well as his response to the inexplicable impulse of his attraction to this young woman. Later, on the night they said farewell, when she gave him that irrelevant half kiss, his missing her became real hunger and thirst. Hunger and thirst. Yet expressed through avoidance; suddenly he was afraid to see her. He was afraid to smell her breath, to embrace her, to touch her soft hand, or to look into the depths of her large, dark eyes. He was afraid he couldn’t take her, or give himself to her, as a lover; he was afraid to humiliate himself on her body — he didn’t care about other women’s bodies, whom he had experimented on dozens of times already, each more of a failure than the last. He made a fool of himself while feeling superior to those women, an arrogant pretence of superiority he used to cover up his embarrassment and helplessness, which he would rather die than do with Tiao. For a while, he’d put her off stiffly in rough language, even when she took it on herself to come to Beijing and called him. Afterwards he wrote her a passionate letter. He intensified his secret quest for folk cures and “miracle” doctors, and any quack could raise his hopes. Once, late at night, after a visit to an old folk healer, he covered his face and wept in a quiet alley, a grown man crying like a baby, his sobbing enormous and defenceless, like that of a wronged, homeless orphan.