Lasting legacy

The terracotta warriors return this month to the National Gallery of Victoria, this time accompanied by their younger brethren

Chinese Bitch Western Han Dynasty 206 BCE –24 CE earthenware. Picture: Han Yangling Museum

Even in the most genteel democracies, a certain amount of ambition is required to reach the top. Self-belief is especially important, and history is crowded with megalomaniacs and dictators who liked to position themselves at the centre of the universe. None of them, though, conveyed a sense of personal assurance quite like Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.

The emperor was ruthless and paranoid but his legacy is ­unquestionable. He unified the warring states, launched a series of major infrastructure projects and standardised currency, measures and writing across the land. But political reform is tough, and he faced several attempts on his life. An obsession with self-preservation extended from this life into the next, which is why he ­ordered the construction of a life-size army, as well as acrobats, chariots and animals, to be buried in his tomb when the time came for him to leave this world. Elaborate funerary plans had been common with other leaders, but never to this scale.

The emperor died in 210BC, aged 49, possibly after drinking a toxic potion that was supposed to lead to immortality. He was touring the empire’s eastern regions, which was a problem since it would take a while to return his body to the capital. What if someone seized power first? His people took the initiative, filling his final days with a sense of theatre: for the long journey home, they would pretend he was still alive by transporting his corpse with a cart of dead fish to disguise the smell of rotting flesh inside.

As it happened, the Qin dynasty crumbled within a few years, and the terracotta army stayed buried — forgotten, neglected, ­unlamented — for the next 2000 years.

Later this month the National Gallery of Victoria opens the doors to its latest winter blockbuster, one that draws on the shifting stories of Chinese identity, then and now. It consists of two parallel shows. The first, Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality, centres on the extraordinary archeological discovery that continues to conceal its secrets. The second, The Transient Landscape, is devoted to the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of China’s best known contemporary artists, popular both internationally and — unlike his activist countryman Ai Weiwei — within China itself.

The Melbourne gallery has made a habit of dual-focused shows in recent times. Three years ago it paired Andy Warhol with Ai. Last August Brett Whiteley faced off against George Baldessin. In December MC Escher was set in dialogue with Japanese design studio Nendo. And later this year Keith Haring shares space with Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In the China show’s case, though, there’s a clear need for fresh curatorial thinking, since local audiences have become well accustomed to the terracotta warriors. A handful of them first appeared at the NGV in 1982, their first international exposure, celebrating their discovery outside Xi’an just eight years earlier; they have since appeared in Australian exhibitions in 2002, 2010 and 2016.

Unarmored officer Qin Dynasty 221–207 BCE earthenware

To make it as a blockbuster in 2019, the warriors alone may not have been enough. This is why, as well as pairing them with Cai (see separate story), the gallery is rounding out the ­exhibition with more than 100 treasures from ancient China, hoping to present a broad perspective on this vast and endlessly complicated nation.

Wayne Crothers, the NGV’s senior curator of Asian art, says the gallery had been pursuing a “significant historical show” for many years. Advances in research and new discoveries meant the gallery was ready to return to the warriors three decades on.

“We just felt it was a perfect formulation to bring that historical dialogue up to present China in a really holistic way, for people to make up their own ideas about Chinese history and contemporary Chinese identity,” he says. “China in itself is such a huge story from ancient times right through to the contemporary. It’s such a topic of discussion and very much on the forefront of people’s consciousness at the moment.”

Crothers first visited Xi’an in 1985, when the region was a world away from the sight that greets visitors today. To travel the 40km from the city centre to the warriors themselves was to traverse a distinctly rural environment, a society only starting to open itself to the world. These days, the scene could not be more different, with high-rise apartments crowding the metropolis in all directions, more sprouting each year in a building boom barely keeping pace with a rapidly growing urban population.

The warriors themselves are heaving under the weight of their own popularity. About 8.5 million people visited last year, an endless procession of coaches, selfie sticks and flag-waving tour guides. It’s not hard to conclude, after pushing through the hordes of people as they nudge and shuffle for a better glimpse, that Qin Shi Huang has obtained a sort of immortality after all.

All this enthusiasm dates back to 1974, when local farmers came upon a mysterious spread of fragments while digging a well. (One of the farmers is still alive and he signs autographs near the mausoleum.) Until that point, no one had even known the assortment of antiquities existed. This is one of the most remarkable parts of the story, how the existence of the warriors had been kept secret for so many years. They don’t appear in historical records, including those by the early historian whose account forms so much of our understanding of the Qin dynasty today.

Once reassembled, the fragments formed an imposing army of warriors, each with individual features and divided by rank, all of them on alert, ready to protect the emperor with weapons that have long been lost to time. The whole site is spread over more than 56sq km, and sits at the foot of Mount Li in northeast Xi’an. Some of the 700,000 workers and craftsmen who toiled at the site over 36 years apparently were buried underground, along with their knowledge of the project itself.

Standing Archer Qin Dynasty 221–207 BCE earthenware

For its new show, the NGV is presenting eight standing figures and two horses, the maximum number of warriors allowed to leave China at any one time. (The 1983 show had eight figures and one horse but only 19 objects in total; this time the total number of works exceeds 170.)

The terracotta warriors opened to the public in 1979, and much research has since been done into their origins and how to protect them from the elements. Archeologists in Europe, for instance, are working on ways to preserve their colour, which disappears within minutes of being exposed to the air. But still no one knows for sure exactly how many items lie buried as well as the full story behind their construction. As one tour guide put it, more than once, when Review visited last month: “We are still very puzzled.”

The greatest mystery concerns the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang himself. He lies close to the warriors but his tomb has not been excavated, nor will it be anytime soon. The official position is patience. Shen Maoshing, one of the supervising archeologists, says the priorities are preservation and protection. Asked when they will be prepared to explore the mausoleum, he says: “We won’t. It’s the most important treasure. We will never do it.”

Pit one, where most of the warriors can be found, is the size of an aircraft hangar and crowded every day with tourists walking around the perimeter. Given the significance of the antiquities, it’s surprising to see them displayed in such a casual environment, with natural light and no obvious temperature controls. Local officials are planning to renovate during the next five years. The conditions are more controlled in the two other pits nearby, where more chariots, horses and warriors lay buried.

The environment is even more refined at another imperial burial site, near the Wei River, where thousands of terracotta warriors and animals were discovered in the late 1990s and are kept on display inside glass. These figures date back to the Han dynasty and were made 70 years after the ones that populate Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum. The most striking difference between the two sites is the size of the figures: the Han warriors are about a third of the size of their Qin counterparts, perhaps an attempt to avoid the excesses of the past. Thirty-eight small-scale soldiers and animals from two Han dynasty tombs are coming to Melbourne.

The NGV also has assembled a series of Shaanxi artefacts to tell the story of life in China through some of its earliest dynasties, ­including armour, arrow heads, bronze figurines and vessels. One of the oldest items is a bronze tiger holding her cub, which dates to the Western Zhou dynasty in the 11th century BC. From the main site, in addition to replicas of two bronze chariots buried 20m from the mausoleum, the gallery has cast its net across the ranks of the immortal army: two generals, two military officers, a standing archer, a kneeling archer, an infantryman, a civil official and two horses. All the while, a single figure stands out from the crowd, the ­leader with an eye on eternity, the paranoid reformer destined for immortality from an early age. “Everyone pokes fun a little bit at the emperor for seeking immortality with his great wealth and ­resources,” Crothers says, “but, in a sense, the last 40 years have been about achieving that quest for immortality.”

Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality and Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape run from May 24 to October 13 at the National Gallery of Victoria. Ashleigh Wilson travelled to China with assistance from the NGV.

Echoes of warriors

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang was a young student when he first visited the terracotta warriors of Xi’an. He was travelling with his girlfriend, now his wife, and recalls being touched by the scale and power of the figures assembled before him.

Later he moved overseas and his reputation as an artist took off, with solo shows in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries, as well as a high-profile role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Now based in New York, Cai works across various media, though he’s probably best known for incorporating the transient qualities of gunpowder in his art.

Along the way, he has seen several terracotta warrior exhibitions on display outside China, always conscious that the limited selections on offer can never match the spiritual charge of the original site.

To prepare for his upcoming show at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, a parallel exhibition to the terracotta warriors, Cai returned to Xi’an, and he was struck by the unique power of each soldier. “In the past, I didn’t look at them as individual sculptures, like David or Hercules in the Western art tradition,” he says. “This time I noticed more of their individuality, each figure’s distinct hairstyle and facial features.”

Cai’s show, The Transient Landscape, will feature new immersive commissions, including two installations: 10,000 porcelain birds and a porcelain peony mountain, each evoking Mount Li, the site of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum. Cai has worked with NGV curators on the design of the show, which also includes three large gunpowder drawings, two on paper and one on silk, which he created in March in front of local media and gallery director Tony Ellwood.

Speaking through an interpreter, Cai says he wants his work to “represent the lingering spirits of the underground army” in Xi’an.

“The most interesting element here is that there are two independent parallel exhibitions sharing a series of galleries, like two rivers of time separated by two millennia, sometimes intertwining, sometimes departing from each other,” he says. “Crossing through time and space, from ancient time to contemporary. The birds are dispersed throughout the entire exhibition route, acting as an emotional thread.”

For Cai, creating work in dialogue with the warriors is a logical next step in a career that has seen him responding to a range of Western art traditions across Europe. “I tend to regard all these preceding artists from the Western traditions as my own ancestors,” he says. “Getting together with them is like hanging out with them. Keeping this attitude is very important.”

Ashleigh Wilson