To Live and Die in N. Y. : Chinese Artists Eke Out an Existence on Hostile Streets

On any given weekend night in New York, a visitor walking north on Broadway from Times Square is apt to be tugged on the arm by a young artist who wants to draw his or her portrait, for as little as $5, in a black-and-white. A color portrait can cost as much as $60.

That artist is likely to be Chinese in his or her 20s or 30s, one of dozens--perhaps hundreds--of Chinese artists to settle in the New York area over the last five years. By day, many of these street artists are highly-trained painters, sculptors and art students who left China in the hope that New York’s artistic vitality--thanks to its reputation in China as the center of the art world--would bring them closer to their creative goals.

Tonight those artists will be on the street again after 11 p.m.--when the pedestrian traffic is still strong and the police presence relatively light--even though one of them, 34-year-old Lin Lin of Shanghai, was shot to death on those streets three weeks ago.

After 1 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 18, Lin, his wife Duan Haimeng and two other artists moved to Eighth Avenue, a block away from where a large group of other Chinese artists were working on Broadway. While they were sketching, witnesses say, four black youths approached the artists and began shouting racial insults and throwing chicken bones at them. A crowd of about 15 people watched.

(The Chinese street artists say ethnic insults are routine in the Times Square area. Indeed, throughout New York racial tensions between blacks and Asians have been high recently, culminating in last year’s much reported boycott by blacks of a Korean grocery in Brooklyn. Interestingly, however, the artists say that many of their customers are black.)

Witnesses to Lin’s killing say that after the harassment continued, Duan threw some water at the youths and Lin rose from his folding chair to ask them to leave. One of the youths walked away and returned in minutes with a gold-plated .32-caliber pistol, which he fired once at Lin.

When the bullet struck his chest, Lin fell to the ground on his back, his arms groping upward toward his wife as he coughed up blood. Within seconds, Lin’s arms dropped to the ground, witnesses say, and the artist stopped breathing.

The two Chinese artists who had accompanied Lin and Duan were joined by two plainclothes policemen who had driven by just as the fatal shot was fired. The four chased the gunman two blocks.

James Skinner, 21, of Brooklyn was arrested and charged with second-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon. He is being held without bail.

The shooting brought attention to a small circle of immigrants that few in the public would have noticed otherwise. The killing was also a sober reminder to Chinese artists in search of inspiration that New York’s violence is as much a part of the city as its art.

Police admit the artists don’t report crimes, if they occur. The artists, who are working illegally, say harassment is routine. There has been at least one non-fatal stabbing, and street artists are sometimes mugged when they use the bathroom at a McDonald’s nearby.

“For living in New York, we have to take risks in danger,” explained an artist scanning the sidewalk for portrait customers at 1 a.m. on the morning that followed Labor Day.

Lin’s death has been all the more sobering, some Chinese artists say, because the painter epitomized creative artistic energy set loose in New York. Expelled from the elite Zhejiang Art Academy in Hangzhou for battling with the stringent realist style still taught in Chinese art schools, Lin was banned from working in his native city of Shanghai, where his father was a Communist Party member and a teacher in the city’s maritime school. For several years, he made frames for other artists.

In 1985, thanks to help from an American whom he had met in China, Lin came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts, where he earned a master’s degree.

Lin settled in a Harlem tenement, where a number of Chinese students had found affordable rents. Lin had begun calling himself “Billy Harlem” in honor of his noisy, lively surroundings and the objects from the street that soon found their way into his work.

Zhang Baoluo, a portrait artist who studies art history, lives nearby. “The rent is more cheap,” he said, “I’m used to living there.”

Within less than five years after he came to the United States, Lin’s three-dimensional “paintings” of slashed tire sections, mounted like undulating limbs, and glass shards on plywood, won him a prize in a group show featuring the art of “spiritual residents” of Harlem.

Throughout 1989, when demonstrators paraded through Tian An Men Square, Lin helped organize activities on behalf of the Chinese pro-democracy movement in New York. Crowds protesting the firing on those demonstrators by Chinese troops carried a papier-mache replica of the Goddess of Liberty that he and other Chinese artists made through the streets of Manhattan.

Last year Lin had his first one-man show in a SoHo gallery, the same year he was awarded a $12,000 grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Established in 1984 by Jackson Pollock’s widow, artist Lee Krasner, the foundation gives money to artists “based on merit and need.” Several other young Chinese artists have recently gotten similar grants.

While Lin did manage to sell several large paintings--mostly Picasso-inspired groups of white, grotesque figures against light blue backgrounds, the income from those works never brought in even the $500 a month that the artist said he and his wife, also an artist, needed for rent, food and art supplies. Most weekends, then, the two painted portraits near Times Square.

“Sometimes when he’d be sitting here doing a portrait and the rest of us had nobody to draw, we would just stand behind him and watch him work,” said Sunny Tu, who stood on a Broadway corner last week with a charcoal portrait of Madonna to attract customers in one hand, a summons from the police for doing business without a license in the other.

Tu said he always kept a second set of art supplies around, because whenever the police gave him a summons, they would confiscate his materials.

Unlike most of the other artists on the street, Tu said, Lin seemed to be motivated by a desire to create the best possible likeness of whoever happened to be posing, often taking an hour to do it. “That meant he wouldn’t always make as much money as he could,” said Tu, “but we respected him for the work he did, even though it was just a portrait.”

As well known as he was among his peers in New York, Lin had come to the United States with a reputation. When he entered the academy, classmate Pan Yi Hang recalls, Lin’s skill at drawing human figures was at a level teachers expected of students about to graduate. Lin and Pan’s class was the first to enter the Zhejiang Art Academy after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. (Six of the 13 students in their oil painting department are now in New York.)

In school, says Pan, Lin took a special interest in European art from the early 20th Century and in the philosophy of that period. Lin’s confrontation with the school administration came when he insisted on depicting the suffering of a small town in the south of China that experienced starvation in the early 1960s in the palette of Picasso’s Blue Period.

Lin never graduated from that school. “He was a very honest person, he talked directly,” Pan says. “He didn’t know how to deal with Communist leaders.

“If you saw a show in a Chinese school or in the National Gallery then,” says Pan, whom Lin encouraged to come to New York, “it would look as if all the work had been done by one person. It was all technique. You didn’t have any feeling inside.”

After Lin’s expulsion, his case was made an example to students throughout China, a warning to would-be rebels who broke the rules of accepted visual style. “I don’t remember it being in the newspapers, but everyone in China seemed to know what happened to him,” Pan says.

While he lived in Shanghai for several years after his expulsion from school, Lin’s parents’ apartment in Shanghai was raided by police and some of his paintings were confiscated. One of the paintings not taken in the police raid was brought out of China by David Moskin, a young businessman who sponsored Lin’s trip to the United Sates and art education. Moskin showed one of Lin’s canvasses to David Shirey, a former Newsweek and New York Times art critic who is now president of the School of Visual Arts.

Shirey took a particular interest in Lin’s efforts at reproducing the styles of Picasso and Leger. “This may to you seem like appropriation,” Shirey said, “but to an artist like Lin, who was living under an oppressive and repressive government in China, it was quite extraordinary. It demonstrated to me that he was an artist with guts who had passion that he was able to use these forms in a country that was not accepting them, that was, in effect, denouncing this work as degenerate.”

Soon after arriving in New York, however, Lin abandoned that style and turned to his “tire paintings,” composed with tires he found in and around junkyards and carried more than two miles back to his studio. Recalling that his art teachers had referred to the work of Robert Rauschenberg as “garbage” when Rauschenberg had visited China several years ago, Lin observed: “Tires are the garbage of the age we live in and of where I am living.”

Frank Bernarducci, a New York art dealer whose gallery organized Lin’s first one-man show, says: “To me, they were urban landscape paintings made from the materials he could find. The longer the strips of tires on plywood became, the more elegant and lyrical they were.”

Just as Lin had begun exploring that style, the pro-democracy movement emerged in China and artists in this country supported the Beijing demonstrators with political art as well as protests. Lin placed a portrait of Mao inside a turquoise-painted tire. Zhang Hongtu, another Chinese artist working in New York, painted an enormous parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” called “The Last Banquet,” with Mao Zedong as every character.

The exposure those political works gave to Chinese artists led to several large group exhibitions in New York, although an auction of contemporary Chinese art to raise money for Tian An Men victims produced only a few thousand dollars in relief funds. But by the time Lin’s one-man show opened, the art market was bottoming out.

Unlike many fashionable Soviet artists who had benefited from a booming market and political outcast status earlier in the 1980s, Chinese artists such as Lin and his peers were rarely seen as chic, or even as a visual movement, since they did not work in a common style.

Art dealer Bernarducci, whose gallery is now out of business, admits: “I wasn’t promoting it as hard as I could have, but there wasn’t much I could do.”

Bernarducci sold only one painting from that show, even though paintings were priced between $1,000 and $5,000, less than half the price of works Bernarducci usually showed.

But he is convinced that Lin would have had a promising future, had he not been murdered. “Even at 34,” Bernarducci says, “he was still very early in his career, and that career was always being interrupted. He couldn’t work in China for several years, then he came to the United States and had to learn to speak English, then the Tian An Men demonstrations interrupted his work. There’s no telling what that guy could have accomplished if he had had the chance to paint steadily over five years, he was so disciplined and proud.”

By coincidence, Bernarducci was robbed in the subway the night Lin was shot. “That’s just New York,” he reflected sadly on the city’s very randomness and unpredictability had so intrigued the Chinese artist. “Lin could have been mugged, and I could just as easily have been killed.”

The art slump and the closing of galleries isn’t keeping Chinese artists out of the country, however. At Ambassador Galleries in SoHo, where Craig Miner sells decorative landscapes and still lifes to “people who have homes in the suburbs” for as little as $1,500, Chinese artists account for more than 10% percent of sales. “I see probably one hundred new artists a week,” says Miner, “and maybe 15 to 20% are Chinese.” Pan Yi Hang, Lin’s classmate from China, is now one of the artists whose work Miner sells.

That glut of new Chinese artists in New York is also being felt on the street, the only place where most of the new arrivals can work. Lin had complained about competition among artists, recalls his friend Zhang Hongtu, and recently the price of a black-and-white portrait had dropped down to $5. “This is a terrible thing created by the street artists themselves,” said Zhang.

“These artists aren’t very good capitalists,” explained Zhang Baoluo, as he watched artists bargain with passers-by last weekend. It was the competition for customers on Broadway that drove Lin, his wife, and two other artists to Eighth Avenue, a block away, where the shooting occurred, said Zhang.

Two weeks after the killing, a group of street artists who attended Lin’s funeral in Chinatown presented his wife and sister with a check for $1,500. “Those artists were back on the streets that night,” said Lu Hong, a former classmate of Lin’s from China who is one of a handful of Chinese artists with a contract with a commercial gallery. And more are sure to be on the streets in the coming months. “We’ve told them that it is a tough life in New York, that there are too many artists--not just Chinese but Europeans and others,” she said. “They don’t want to believe you. If you never eat the apple, you don’t know what the taste is and you have to taste it yourself.”