Page 19

Apr 072016
 



ALT TEXT

Mike Little

At my first session (New Year’s Day) with Mike Little’s dotty artist wife, Trish, she draws me on her iPad, all the while chattering incomprehensibly about Saussure’s signs and referents and abstraction. Then she projects the drawings onto my body, and Mike photographs me. Meanwhile Bel, in fly-on-the-wall mode, is getting material for a movie about Trish’s work. Creative collaboration, or what?

1st January. Bel is let off lessons. The new year begins with us slobbing in bed, drinking Columbian coffee, reading.
    ‘He’s definitely after you.’ Bel tosses aside a note.
    ‘Oh – is that my note from Cyril?’
    ‘You left it in this book he gave you. Do you like being considered his “muse”?’
    ‘God, no. I hate how he puts me in that role, being so over-complimentary and acquiescent and submissive with me.’
    ‘Told you he’s into submission.’
    ‘Yes, I know.’
    ‘Proper BDSM scene. Collars and chains.’ She is looking at me a bit sternly. ‘Does that give you “writing ideas”? That why you want to do more shoots with him?’
    Sigh. ‘He pays me, Bel. That’s the main reason. And secondly, I have free rein to mess about with his mundane photos and turn them into fantastic images. I love that.’
    But Bel has stuck her head back into ‘Chinese Whispers’, the book her brother sent. Is she sulking?
    I grab back Cyril’s ‘The lives of the muses’ and open it at random:

Charis knew that Weston had a horror of female competition, therefore never touched a camera herself. …a swooning acolyte who fell at Weston’s feet… united with him in a common purpose – his life’s work as a photographer…’

I try to re-engage with Bel. ‘You know – Lee Miller is in here as Man Ray’s so-called muse, but she just isn’t one. Not like Charis Weston was. Lee Miller used Man Ray to learn and perfect her own photographic skills.’
    ‘Charis who?’
    ‘The model and second wife of that obnoxious photographer Edward Weston. He picked her up when he was 48 and she was only 19.’
    ‘Oh. I quite like Edward Weston, though.’
    ‘…humourless and egotistic, it says here.
    ‘His photos.’
    Success! I’ve got Bel talking about photography. ‘Shall I make us more coffee?’

The kitchen stinks of drains. The superficial semblance of a decent fitted kitchen doesn’t bear close inspection. Blackened cracks vein the worktops. Door hinges are broken. We put up with the mess of mysterious leaks and dirt traps. It’s a mere temporary residence, after all.
    Waiting for the coffee to percolate, I receive a call.
    A chirpy voice: ‘Hello Suki and happy new year to you! Mike Little here. We met at the Shanghai Art Nude Photographers’ group about three months ago. Listen – might you be interested in a series of shoots led by my wife Trish who’s an artist?’
    ‘Hey – brilliant! New Year, new opportunities! Totally interested!’
    ‘Lovely jubbly. It’s her Masters project. Something to do with the Swiss semiotician Saussure. I’m just along for the ride. Well: if you can drop by this afternoon for a first ‘go’, we could make a New Year’s Day party of it? Bring Bel along! Long time no see – she hasn’t been to the group for months.’
    ‘Wonderful. Don’t worry, I’ll drag her out.’
    ‘Champion! That’ll be grand.’
    ‘Just thinking on my feet now, Mike: could Bel be a fly-on-the-wall for this project and make a film recording its progression? Would Trish be up for that? Bel’s made some great movies; we can show you some.’
    ‘Sounds magic! Happy days – let’s discuss it anon.’

When I return to the bedroom with tea, Bel looks up from her book. ‘I’m like Somerset Maugham.’
    ‘Good grief,’ I set down her cup, ‘why?’
    ‘He felt alienated from the Chinese. Way back in 1900. Just like I do now. Listen to this: ‘You cannot tell what are the lives of those thousands who surge about you. Upon your own people sympathy and knowledge give you a hold: you can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively… But these [Chinese] are as strange to you as you are to them. You have no clue to their mystery. For their likeness to yourself in so much does not help you; it serves rather to emphasize their difference.’ Bel’s face is desolate. ‘That’s like me. I have no connection with my students. They don’t want to know me. They’d be more interested in me if I had a Gucci handbag. If I were a Gucci handbag.’
    I sigh. ‘Never mind – we’ve just been invited to a party.’
    ‘But don’t you identify with him, Suki?’
    ‘Look Bel – it’s New Year’s Day. Think of positives. Plans for this year.’
    ‘Right. So’ – Bel snaps shut her book, tosses it aside – ‘when are you going to write your novel, Suki?’
    ‘When are you finally going to start your Art Nude project with me, Bel?’
    ‘Dunno. It’s the teaching. Takes up my headspace.’
    ‘That’s not the real issue.’ I take Bel by the shoulders and ask, dangerously, ‘Why are you really here?’
    ‘What are you really doing here, Suki?’
    Holding each other (at arm’s length), we laugh. Raucously, theatrically: what is this life? – ha ha ha… (furiously, desperately) – ha ha ha why have we run away to China ? Why?…


 

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Page 18

Mar 312016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

Aussie Cyril has lent me another book. I’m being educated. So this latest crop of one of his photos is informed by the hard-edged geometries of Edward Weston who belongs to an important group known as the Photo-Secessionists. In 1902 this group split from the Camera Club of New York to pursue Pictorialism: techniques of manipulating negatives and prints to make them look like drawings, etchings, and oil paintings (and this group did include some women! Clarence White worked with Stieglitz. Also Annie Brigman). They drew inspiration from European art movements with similar goals such as the Linked Ring. The later works of group member Alfred Stieglitz and those of Weston (who was also influenced by modernists Sheeler and Strand) mark the decisive start of contemporary Art Nude photography. But I’m deffo not aiming, like Weston does, to ‘purposely neutralise the uniqueness of the human form by equating it with inanimate objects’. Weston got perverse satisfaction from achieving images of the nude that were ‘entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest which might call attention to a living, palpitating body’. Is Weston the same type as Uglow? Two haters of humanity?


    ‘A baby froze to death on the Gaza Strip because it was living under a tarpaulin.’
    ‘Oh dear.’ I set down at Bel’s bedside her morning cup of green tea.
    Her not-long-awake face is already set in a frown. ‘This is why Muslim gunmen shoot randomly into coffee bars. It’s simple cause and effect. It’s people with no legitimate forum to protest all the historic injustices committed against them.’
    ‘Well, Merry Christmas, anyway’.
    She snaps shut her iPad. ‘I hate the world, Suki. Where is safe?’ –
    ‘Well, let’s see…’ Oh no – Bel is clearly about to cry!
    ‘We’re all just animals.’
    ‘Look Bel, I think that too. But come on…’ I pass her a Chinese rice-bowl overflowing with peanut M&Ms – ‘it’s Christmas Day.’ No response. ‘Sorry they’re not Quality Streets.’
    Bel throws off her quilt and heads for the bathroom. ‘“Empathy” isn’t innate in human nature; that’s just a self-righteous myth of Western culture because actually anyone who’s non-white and/or non-Christian-heritage is viewed as alien.’ I hear her landing on the loo. ‘Altruism’s a myth too. We only do stuff for others in order to get something.’
    ‘That’s fair enough, isn’t it, though?’ I hover outside the bathroom. ‘Like for example, if it’s to get love? Hey – are you off out or something?’
    ‘Told you: I’m teaching. It’s a normal day. Communist State, remember?’ The shower starts but she rants on. ‘So-called “values” are purely social constructs created for pragmatic reasons. For particular purposes. Everything’s fake. Love is fake. Huh. Lerv. I lerv ya, babe.’
    She is being scarily weird. ‘Okay – we’ll do gifts later, yeah? And I’ll cook!’
    Will my cooking lift Bel’s mood – or at least distract her? Or be the final straw? I don’t know how to help her. After she’s gone to work I prepare her an extra gift. A poem I wrote years ago called Bethlehem, after the 2002 Siege of Bethlehem that reduced to ruins the nativity scenes I had learned in childhood. I print it out and decorate its edges.
    How to spend the rest of Christmas Day?
    I go to the Delightful Peony with my iPad, and email Aussie Cyril.

Happy Christmas Day, Cyril! Am half-way through the book about muses. Edward Weston’s photos of Charis are totally about sex. Never mind what the book says. With muses there’s always something sexual going on. In Weston’s case he has sex with his model at the same time as objectifying the female body to the extreme. The model is no more than a tool. A lifeless plastic sex toy.

As ever, his answer is instantaneous.

Jingle Bells! Hope you’re enjoying today as much as our afternoon together yesterday, which has been the highlight of my Christmas. Aha – you think Weston’s work is about sex? He always insisted his intentions were purely formal and not in the least erotic. You must have read in the ‘muses’ book by now that his nude portraits of the back of Anita Brenner suggest faintly distasteful similarities with his toilet bowl! Yet these are in his own view his ‘finest set of nudes… in their approach to aesthetically stimulating form’. For him they are an ‘absolute aesthetic response… Every sensuous curve of the “human form divine” but minus imperfections’. Stieglitz himself did actually express dislike of Weston’s art nude images, calling them ‘sterilised’; that they lacked fire and life and were ‘more or less dead things not part of today’. No sex!

At teatime Bel returns from class with a polite greetings card from the university’s hierarchy and a very pretty box of dried fruits from Lily Hong. Nothing from any students.
    ‘Here’ – I hand her a Tsingtao beer and clink it with mine. ‘Cheers! Let’s do gifts!’
    Bel opens a small package from Belgium: a book on China sent by her brother. Then my poem, and a grey sweater. ‘It says cashmere but it might be fake.’
    ‘It’s great. Fake’s great – it means “authentically Chinese”.’ She hands me two packages wrapped in red paper. ‘For you.’
    In a pretence of gayness I rip at them. ‘Omigod, where the heck did you find a percolator? You’ve been trawling those fancy malls!’ My second parcel is – ‘Oh joy! Thank you so much!’ – ground Columbian coffee.
    Then she is sidling off onto the balcony. ‘Just making a call.’
    ‘Bel – why do you never say “I’m just calling my Mum”, or whatever?’
    ‘My brother. I normally call my brother on Christmas Day. Sorry. Excuse me.’
    ‘Got any sisters? Are your parents alive?’
    ‘My brother’s it. Childless bachelor, lives in Antwerp because of his solar panels business, very kindly acts as the contact person for Élise. With the unit. He lets me know if he’s been informed of anything by the staff. If there’s anything to tell.’
    ‘Staff? Unit?’
    ‘Sorry. Élise lives in a psychiatric hospital.’ Bel steps outside, tapping at her mobile.
    ‘Oh. Thank you. Sorry.’
    Élise. Like Für Élise. I guess she might be – what – thirty-ish?

Christmas night. Early to bed. Not a candle lit, not a carol played. Apart from yesterday afternoon (Cyril – overjoyed – treating me to a festive tea at the Peace Hotel), a truly crap Christmas.

Bel is a silent lump in her bed, her lamp already out.
    I’ll just do a last check for any emailed greetings.

One more gift: click on this link.
I’m sorry.
Thanks for being here.



 

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Page 17

Mar 242016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

My spiky Schiele-esque crop of one of Aussie Cyril’s pics. Not at all suited to the festive season. But this Christmas is looking like a write-off anyway.

I wake up to find a text from ex-flingette Tamara:

Hey! Wish u cool yuletide. U getting on wid ur writing, u clever novelist?

Sigh.
    I reach for my iPad, shoot her an email (cheaper than international texting).

No not my manuscript. But readin JG Ballard about Shanghai wartime anarchy which is makin me write apocalyptic poems. Bel has put one on her blog this week if u fancy a read.

I doze until – ping! – Tamara replies.

Re poem – Shanghai and Bel are clearly bad for your mental health. I am good for your mental health. You SO need directing. I would direct you.

Bel’s bed is already empty. I get up to make tea and find her at the window, frowning out at the dirt-heavy sky, an unlit cigarette between her fingers.
    ‘Look’ – I show her today’s Air Quality Index graph on my iPad. The red line has steeply risen to ‘unhealthy’. Everyone may begin to experience health effects, members of sensitive groups may experience more serious health effects. Likelihood of respiratory symptoms and breathing difficulty. Citizens are advised to limit prolonged or heavy exertion outdoors.
    I grimace: ‘bad start to the day.’
    I barely catch her murmur.
    ‘What did you say? “What a thing to have in common”? What thing?’
    ‘The death of a child.’
    ‘Oh god,’ – an even worse start to the day – ‘you too? Your daughter?’
    Bel lights her cigarette. ‘It’s just… a dark thought.’
    ‘What is?’
    But I seem unheard. She is staring out at nothing. Then – ‘And all from a one-night stand.’ Is her little laugh ironic?
    Pause.
    I try to prompt. ‘At one time I myself was obsessed with wanting to be a mum.’
    Bel’s fingers are trembling. Maybe from emotion.
    She flicks ash. ‘I sometimes wish she’d never…’
    What?
    The rain starts. Little spits. Not enough to wash the filth from the air.
    What?Surely not…
    When I find a reply, my voice comes out funny. Like, too low. ‘Look, I don’t know what to…’
    But Bel abruptly steps out onto the balcony, into the rain.
    God. How have I ended up living with such a strange person? I don’t normally relate this badly. I’ve got friends, me.
    Well, not here in Shanghai, obviously.
    I join Bel outside. Racket! The building-site blasting away. ‘Erm. D’you want to talk?’
    Drizzle is settling on the grey frizz of her untended hair. Below us, the concocted Disney-esque landscaping; tawdry, on this grey December day. Beyond the campus wall, the incessant soundtrack of construction. Urgent clanking and drilling. On the horizon, scores of cranes that seem to multiply daily.
    ‘A decade ago there was nothing here except swamp.’ Bel is lighting another cigarette from her stub. ‘And I believe in another decade it’ll all be gone again.’
    ‘What – this suburb, or Shanghai?’ Pause. ‘Or the world?’
    ‘Fake is easier to live with than real.’
    Does she mean that positively or negatively? And how can she chain-smoke – isn’t the pollution quite enough?
    The drilling is horrendous. I zip back indoors. Relief!
    Oh how I love my iPad! A couple of jolly Christmassy emails. Tiffany! I’m even grateful for one from the plumber.
    But I need to escape further from all this. ‘Just popping to the Delightful Peony,’ I call out. ‘Quick stretch of legs.’
    No response.
    Hanging on the flat’s outside door-handle is – surprise – a gift from Aussie Cyril! Back from Australia! When was he at the door? Bel probably wouldn’t be happy about this. I shove it in my bag.
    In the café I unwrap it. A really interesting book: ‘The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired’. Inside is a rambling note.

Merry Christmas to my precious muse!
Please forgive my disappearance. Personal matters in Melbourne are now decisively dealt with and I am very happy to have ended that chapter for ever. On to higher things: am curious to hear your thoughts about Edward Weston, some of whose photos you may view on this link. His muse, Charis, is a subject of this book. Well. my dear Suki, I have no wish to intrude on the revelries you are undoubtedly having with your friends. Personally I will be spending Christmas quietly, alone, in nostalgic reverie rather than revelry. Such is life – but there is at least a bright star on the horizon who gives me delight and hopefulness for the future.

I could call Cyril. Now. Get him to whisk me from the Delightful Peony to… to the Peace Hotel, or the Radisson. A rooftop champagne bar…
    Aussie Cyril? Yeuch! How can I even contemplate that idea for one nano-second?
    Because it’s bloody Christmas Eve.
    Because I am lonely.


 

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Page 16

Mar 172016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

I cropped and rotated this pic by Aussie Cyril to create the geometry of the black box having its corner exactly at the image’s centre, and reduced the colour and contrast to achieve the sculpted look of the figure.

‘I assumed you knew, Bel. I thought word had got round. Sorry.’
    ‘No, I’m sorry.’
    ‘You didn’t hear about it from anyone who drew me, then.’
    ‘No. And I didn’t keep up with your Two Small Lives serial…’
    ‘Oh god, that! I mean, no-one does…’
    ‘…All along, you must have been thinking I knew. I’m so sorry.’
    ‘…Honestly Bel, I don’t expect people to read my story; it’s just my cathartic online drivel…’
    ‘I did read it faithfully every week, but then… I had a lot going on last winter. I’m just really sorry.’
    ‘No, I’m sorry!…’
    I go to put the baozi on a dish, no longer hungry. I don’t want to revisit last year. I wish I was under my duvet. Alone. ‘Actually I did email you at the time, but you were… I can’t remember now.’
    ‘Sorry, Suki.’ Bel is sidling towards the bedroom. Is she, like me, wanting to escape? Are we as bad as each other? ‘I had too much to deal with last year,’ she says.
    ‘No, it’s really alright. It was just, back then, I was thinking you’d be a good person for advice coz we’re so similar; like, in age, both single, childless and everything. I mean, what would you have done if you’d found you were pregnant at forty-seven?’
    ‘I have a daughter.’
    ‘A daughter?’
    ‘Sorry.’ She leaves the room.

I don’t know what to think. I need a fag. The rickety screen door to the balcony is permanently shoved back since cool December has seen off the mosquitoes. I go outside, light up.
    The way Bel and I relate is so disconnected. Life in Shanghai is altogether, in every way, disconnected. Huh. That’s why Bel’s so at home here.
    The tower-block opposite ours is chequered with murky windows, many now in darkness at this late hour, some still bluish from the depressingly low-wattage utilitarian strip-lights. Millions of people stacked up in functional boxes. At home in England there’ll be fairy-lights everywhere, and Christmas trees and candles.
    I look down onto the college’s ornamental gardens. The staff housing area is well landscaped, albeit in a Disneyland-ish style: ornamental ponds; fake rocks made of something synthetic; a toy-town bamboo bridge. The croak of frogs echoes loudly between the apartment blocks. Bizarre. But nearly lovely, in a way. When all’s said and done, it’s not desert. It’s not Parisian HLMs. It’s not bombed-out Baghdad, or an African refugee camp. Why not think positive?
    Someone on the paving below hawks and spits. Christ. I can’t get used to that. Day and night. The glistening globs make me nauseous. They are everywhere. I tread in them by accident. My skirt trailed into one. They are disgusting.
    And we don’t know anyone, and no-one wants to know us. And here in suburban Shanghai there’s no bar to go out for a drink. And the internet connection is crap, and anyway it’s all censored.
    From somewhere above, a dark soft nest comes floating down – the contents of a cleaned hair-brush: black hairs bonded by crud – and wafts onto our balcony, touching the back of my hand. Yeuch.
    For all that people are strange and inaccessible, they are much too close.

I go put the untouched baozi into the fridge and turn off all the lights.
    Bel is already in bed with the lamp switched off, thank god.
    How old is her daughter? Who, and where, is she?


 

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Page 15

Mar 102016
 



ALT TEXT

Loiza

‘Schiele-esque’ by Tamara’s niece Loiza

Despite Aussie Cyril’s enormous enthusiasm for doing more shoots, weeks pass with no further contact.

It is the fourth Sunday in Advent, and we are hanging out in the flat, not doing much.
    Bel is definitely depressed. I don’t know why. I realise she’s been like this since I got here. Or perhaps, since I’ve known her.
    It’s hard not to get depressed when you’re living with a depressed person. Should I stay here, in Shanghai? I wish she could bat it away, like we all have to. She scares me. Look, you have to just battle on.
    We have free time, the opportunity to do some photography… Should I suggest it? Will I only make her feel worse?
    Bel looks up from an email. ‘Your Cyril friend. Apparently he went to Australia.’
    ‘Darn. No more lucrative shoots with him, then. Never mind! Guess what – I’ve just been booked via Wechat by a school-girl for her project!’
    Loiza, half-Spanish, a pupil at one of Shanghai’s elite European high schools, turns out to be the niece of my ex-flingette. She has been given Christmas money by scheming Aunt Tamara with instructions to book a session with me immediately (it’s school hols)…

…to do Schiele-esque photos 4 my A-level project.
Btw Tamara sent me ur novel & poetry bks – love ur writing – reviewd Melanie Alone 4 my Eng lit homewk SO ENGLISH – god, UK gay culture total throw-back –

A new fan! Thanks, Tamara.

Hi Loiza, u r right re throw-back. Novel is set in north, v diff fr London. Ta 4 praise, if u intrestd, 2 more of my bks free online see www.sukithelifemodel.co.uk Lookin frwrd our shoot! c u tomoz 3pm Suki x

And so, the next afternoon…
    ‘I’m interested in sado-masochism.’ Loiza snaps, crouches lower, re-focuses, snaps.
    ‘Ah. Runs in the family, then.’ I hitch the black lace she has provided further up above my bony red-stockinged knees. The airy studio that Tamara has financed is, like everywhere in Pudong, brand new, still smelling of fresh paint, minimally furnished other than scattered spotlights, equipment, light-deflecting white umbrellas. Thankfully, white blinds block the views of the financial district’s space-age towers that would otherwise give me vertigo.
    ‘Groovy, that’s groovy – ‘ snap snap snap. ‘Yeah… When I told Tamara we were doing Schiele at school she posted me the Angela Carter book The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography and that book Venus in Furs by Masoch – have you read them?’
    ‘Can’t say I’ve…’
    ‘She’s always encouraging me to be an artist; an experimental, subversive one, though.’
    Gurgle, hiss – the electric percolator completes its cycle.
    ‘Espresso break!’ Loiza springs over to the kitchen area. ‘Here’ – she is turning through her school-issue folder of the print-outs of Schiele’s sketched figures; the poses I’ve been carrying out for her. ‘Let me read you something… Charged and explicit eroticism… Near-pornographic intensity… A subversive and challenging vision’ – she looks up. ‘That’s William Boyd the art critic. Coz like, Schiele did like loads of drawings of himself masturbating? So cool.’
    ‘Um. Yes. Very before his time.’
    ‘Maybe we can get to some of those poses next’ – sips espresso – ‘You’re Tamara’s girlfriend, right?’
    ‘Er…’
    ‘Everyone at my school is, like, bisexual, even my Chinese friends. Especially my Chinese friends. Straight is just so last century. Do you know the photographer Ren Hang? He’s so cool, you’ve got to check him out. Hey, you sprawled right there holding your cup’s great! Wait – [snap] yeah! [snap] Awesome. Can you like, hitch the skirt up further, just like in this picture? So I get more cunt?’

It is suppertime when I walk into the flat. ‘Baozi!’ I hold up the bag of still-warm dumplings. ‘God, precocious as hell! That scheming Tamara. Got a thousand yuan for it though!’
    Bel is in the bedroom doorway on her mobile. She quickly finishes, flips closed her phone. ‘My brother. Did you say a thousand yuan? So this Tamara… She obviously likes you…’
    The comment hangs uncomfortably in the air. Is this some kind of jealousy again? Like her thing against Aussie Cyril?
    A flurry: Lily Hong rushing through from the bedroom, a fairy in pink mini-dress, pretty as candy, clutching Bel’s iPad.
    ‘Miss Suki’ – Lily Hong is actually weeping! – ‘I reading your stories on internet…’ She strokes my upper arm – ‘Your baby die. Sorry for you’ – squeezes it. ‘Too much sad, very sorry’ – then turns, hands the iPad to Bel. For some reason, the back of her dress is fully unzipped. ‘Sorry I still here too much long time.’ She hurries out.
    I am left with Bel, who is looking at me blankly.
    So I have to explain.


 

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Page 14

Mar 032016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

I feel compelled to modify most of Aussie Cyril’s pics. But this is one is great as it is. I love the bright pop-arty blue and rounded corners: vaguely 1960s retro, no?.

    ‘I love women.’ The eye of Aussie Cyril’s small camera click-click-clicks, his plump lips smiling.
    I adjust myself on his chaise longue, offering him a shoulder. ‘Ah. No – I mean, my question was just in general terms. About how Art Nude photographers’ ways of relating to their models have differed from the historical precedent of artists’ relationships to their models.’ Slithering on the silk draperies I shift a cushion, pose again. ‘I’m curious to find out if there’s a difference.’
    ‘Wait’ – Aussie Cyril swaps the small camera for a chunky one with a vulgarly long lens, then continues snapping. ‘I don’t think one can generalise. About either photographers or artists. Personally I photograph women because I love women. I would not want to photograph a male model. The very thought makes me shrink. Ooh, that’s lovely. Absolutely lovely. More of that – yes – ’
    ‘That’s so different from my experience of working with artists. We models are certainly not always loved. We’re viewed as a kind of tool, and we just do as we’re instructed.’
    Aussie Cyril pauses at this, momentarily leaning on the oak panelling to look at me. ‘Whereas I’ll do anything you say.’ Click, click, click.
    ‘Erm … Is that – usual? The photographer led by the model?’
    Click – ‘that’s terrific…’ – click. ‘My dear Suki, you’ll find out that there have been very many Art Nude photographers and there’s a great diversity of behaviours. But I reckon by and large the relationship to a model is an intimate and caring one.’
    ‘Tuh. Whereas artists like Euan Uglow could work with a model for hours, days, months, years, and yet be absolutely disengaged from that human being. Like, one time a model died, so he just found another model with an identical physique and carried on with his painting! The model was a plank, not a personality. Why didn’t he just bloody well take photographs, if he was that fanatical about precision recording? Or else why not just set up a technically challenging still-life? Why use a human?’

As Cyril drives me home his hand comes to rest too close to my thigh.
    ‘Ahem. I liked your use of drapes and sheets to get those varied backdrops. And your apartment’s amazing.’
    ‘I was very lucky to find that historic French Concession villa before real estate went through the roof.’
    The fake grandeur of the new-built university campus looms ahead. ‘Okay, this is my gate. Thanks, Cyril – it’s been a really good session.’
    He pulls in, and presses a thick wad of hundred yuan notes into my hand. ‘Thank you, Suki, so very much’ – he leans in, breathing heavily – ‘I’d like to do many more shoots with you. Very very soon. A bientot!’

Before bedtime Cyril has already emailed today’s pictures. I show Bel.
    ‘He’s out to make you pretty.’ She walks off.
    I agree with Bel. I don’t like that either. But should I risk upsetting him by telling him? He pays so well.

Tanx 4 these Cyril! My absolute fave of urs will always be de Uglow-style pic, apres Uglow’s “plank-woman”, from de group session. Mus go bed now! S x
P.S. Btw tanx again 4 lending me books – have browsed Alfred Stieglitz – some of his Georgia O’Keefe pics r like Bel’s studies of my hands n feet.

I send Cyril this, then want to add a quick after-thought. I start another email.

P.P.S. May I bring more Egon Schiele and Lucian Freud poses to our next meet – these guys not yet out of my system! Rly looking forward, Sx
P.P.P.S. am ENORMOUSLY ENTHUSIASTIC about working togeth!!!

    ‘Why?’ Bel is close to my shoulder. ‘Why are you “enormously enthusiastic”?’ I hear a strange edge. ‘I thought you were a writer.’
    Is she jealous? So why isn’t she photographing me herself? What’s happened to this Art Nude project she invited me to Shanghai for in the first place?
    ‘It’s giving me writing ideas.’ I hit send. ‘It’s great he wants to photograph me. I like working with people who are being creative in their own field. It’s inspiring.’
    ‘I think he’s got ulterior motives.’
    I can’t help my horrible self, even though Bel is – I now think – depressed. Suki, queen of the barbed final word: ‘Least he is motivated.’
    A second’s silence.
    ‘Right. Whereas I don’t think you’ve even glanced at that unfinished novel of yours yet.’


 

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Post 13

Feb 252016
 



ALT TEXT

Jacques-from-Brussels

Aussie Cyril’s permissiveness re: ‘doctoring’ his photographs has disinhibited me. I am re-visiting all the photos emailed to me by attendees of that first session with the Shanghai Art Nude Photography Group. I’ve cropped this pic by Jacques-from-Brussels to make it more of a ‘hand’ study.

At one a.m. I am still at my makeshift desk (the chest of drawers in the bedroom). Behind me, Bel is on her bed asleep. I am delighted with my night’s creativity. So what, if it’s not writing creativity? This is me in these pictures: I claim the right to change my own look. After all I have my own ideas, and I have the software.
    The only images I have not touched are the ones sent me by Fei Mo Di. His are perfect. Which seems amazing, considering we didn’t like each other. Or maybe it’s because of that? For him I am not a woman but a series of shapes, interestingly shaded. So what. He’s just a French horn.
    Am I disturbing Bel? She’s not in that deep sleep where you can hear the breathing. Never mind – I’ll quickly email one of my best results to Cyril. Maybe he’s still up. Get his opinion.

Good evening Cyril –
First, re the crop I sent you of your ‘apres Freud’ pic – don’t worry about me “looking like a victim”. A victim of whom? I do this by choice. And just to let you know – you’re not the only photographer whose work I am adulterating. I’ve been working on some of Jacques’ photos. His shots of my Schiele poses were not at all Schiele-esque. Not edgy, not spiky, and (unlike some of yours) utterly unsexy. Attached is one of his I’ve drastically modified. Your thoughts?

Aussie Cyril must wear his cell-phone next to his heart. His response is almost instant.

Good evening to you, Suki! The attached ‘hand study’ reminds me of some of Alfred Stieglitz‘s pictures of his model Georgia O’Keefe. I am looking forward to seeing more of your crops. Please tell me – which Art Nude photographers do you like? Yours, Cyril sent from my iPhone

A sudden movement – Bel abruptly getting up. She sidles past to the toilet.
    Is she pissed off? Have I kept her awake? I’ll just shoot off a quick answer.

Don’t really know any except Lee Miller, though she is more model and muse for Man Ray than photographer in her own right – yes? C u tomoz S

I turn off the lamp, go the bathroom after Bel has come (wordlessly) back, clean my teeth. ‘Ping!’ – another email. Oh dear, I know she’s annoyed but I just want to take a quick look. In the dark I creep back to the laptop.

My dear Suki, re Lee Miller, in my opinion she was a photo-journalist more than art photographer – see this link. If you will permit me, I would be delighted to regale you with some Art Nude history. I’ve got so many books I can lend you from my very extensive photographic library accumulated during many, many years of Media Studies lectureships, too many years, how can I be so old? (-: Luckily I have not yet begun the process of shipping them back to Australia. I think you’ll find it interesting to look first at the Photo-Secessionist movement founded in 1902, led by Stieglitz. This is the movement that insisted on Art Nude photography becoming accepted as ‘art’. I’ll give you a book tomorrow. In fact it’s already tomorrow, and time for a beauty to get her beauty-sleep, so I’ll wish you goodnight! Sent from my iPhone

    ‘That Cyril?’
    I slide into my bed – ‘yes.’
    ‘Predatory.’


 

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Page 12

Feb 182016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

My photoshopped version of one of Aussie Cyril’s photos from the first group session (pose taken from a Lucian Freud painting). I rotated the image to makethe curtain’s edge a true vertical, removed the fabric’s creases, cropped right to the edges of my body, and bleached out colour until I am sculpted marble – a bloodless creature into which rigor mortis has set. Good, or what?

Dear Cyril, before our first 1:1 session tomorrow, a confession. See attached. Is the model allowed to change a photographer’s image of her? I did not ask your permission to change this and – sorry – others, too, of the ones you emailed me. I’m so sorry if I have broken the law. Most artists would cry ‘sacrilege !’ if someone altered their painting. Hope this doesn’t make you call off the booking. Kind rgds Suki

Week five of my Shanghai odyssey. A bright, warm mid-November afternoon.
    Not long after leaving for the teaching block, Bel is back at the flat again.
    ‘Thought you’d got photography undergrads this p.m.?’
    She drops onto her bed. ‘They’ve been sent out to sweep up the campus. Visit of dignitaries tomorrow.’
    ‘God. So chaotic. The way things shift and change without notice.’
    Bel already has her iPad in her hand.
    ‘Okay, look, I’m sticking to my writing routine.’ Pause. ‘Do you want to come with?’
    ‘It’s alright. I’d like to just sit and read the news.’
    ‘Well… I’ll see you later.’ She’s obviously going to spend another afternoon silently, depressively internet-surfing. I head for the door with my bag, and look back from the threshold. ‘You’re addicted to those news sites,’ I joke. ‘All the world’s bad news.’

I set out, like every afternoon, for the recently-opened Delightful Peony Coffee Home – the only cafe round here with a shop-sign and menu in English. The employees are migrants from the countryside with no English. The so-called lattes are made of condensed milk, served sweetened with syrup. Never mind. It’s quicker and cheaper than trekking to a Starbucks in the city. And there is wifi.
    I pick my way across the campus through gaggles of flirting students trailing the brooms with which they’ve been issued. The gymnasium, not five years old, is already tatty, its pretend-redbrick tiles coming unglued from the exterior and dropping off in patches due to the damp creeping up its cement structure. Pudong’s water table is barely subterranean. Dig six inches down and you’re in a pool.
    At the Delightful Peony I hook up to the WiFi. Damn. Today both the BBC and The Guardian newspaper are blocked. Techie Bel has yet to set me up with the illegal software everyone uses to get onto the web – a ‘VPN’. But my Chinese ‘qq’ email account opens without a hitch. God – an answer from Aussie Cyril already. Is he pissed off? Pride made me want to show him my massively improved version of his photo – but not in person, in case of wrath.

Regarding the attached photo – I do not have a problem whatsoever with your changes, except that I am more than a little uncomfortable that the image now makes you look like the victim of the portrayer – a bit too ‘apres Freud’! Discuss further tomorrow, still greatly looking forward. Very best wishes, Cyril Sent from my iPhone

When I get back to the flat Lily Hong is coincidentally, as on previous occasions, just leaving.
    ‘This is always happening – it’s uncanny!’ I grin.
    Bel calls out – ‘English practice!’ She comes over to the doorway. ‘I’ve given Lily Hong your website address and told her about the language notes you’ve put on A Small Life and Two Small Lives.’
    ‘I will read your story Miss Suki – thank you!’ Lily Hong flutters out, dimple-cheeked – ‘Have a nice day! Don’t worry be happy!’
    I close the door behind her. ‘Don’t you find her a bit much? So frilly and effusive.’
    ‘I’m grateful. She looks after me.’
    Am I being criticised? ‘Sorry – I’m crap at that. I’m deeply aware my only cooking contribution to this household is instant noodles. Bit of a liability, really. Bet you’re sorry I came.’
    ‘No.’ Bel takes my hand.
    Shock!
    ‘It’s so great you’re here,’ she says, not looking at me. ‘All those months when I was by myself… I was so lonely.’
    Is she being romantic? Oh my god; I don’t… She’s so…
    ‘Uff.’ I know I’m going pink. I slip my hand from hers. ‘Cuppa tea?’


 

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Page 11

Feb 112016
 



ALT TEXT

Aussie Cyril

Another photo from the first Shanghai Art Nude Photographers group session. Aussie Cyril says it is apres the work of early photographer Ruth Bernhard. He has lectured in photography. He has a lot of knowledge.

I flounce up to Bel who is waiting, as arranged, on the China Art Museum steps. ‘Huh. Pompous git.’
    ‘Fei Mo Di?’ She puts out her cigarette, wheezing. ‘Your shoot didn’t go too well, then?’
    ‘He called Anaïs Nin a ‘spoiled upper-crust adulteress’. Why does she get treated with such contempt? Lee Miller doesn’t, even though her sexual conduct was just as liberated and controversial…’ I follow Bel through the museum’s entrance. ‘It’s because Anaïs Nin was a writer, that’s why. Visual imagery is infinitely ambiguous – all about the viewer’s perception – whereas the written word is a record of a thing perceived, and furthermore, is the writer’s take on it – their analysis. So the writer is laid bare, and therefore more vulnerable to personal criticism.’
    Zero response from Bel. Which is becoming usual. Does she think I talk rubbish? When a man ignores me I assume it’s coz he’s a sexist pig.
    Do I talk rubbish?
    The foyer is a huge modern space. A ruddy-faced immigrant from the countryside in cheap gaudy leggings shows Bel and I to her toddler, like pointing out cows in a field.
    ‘Maybe I talked too much.’
    Bel hands me an English-language leaflet about the current exhibition. ‘Did you? That’s interesting. When you model for artists you never utter a word.’
    ‘But with a photographer there needs to be interaction, doesn’t there? To find the poses.’
    Checking the leaflet’s map, Bel heads off. ‘What did you think of his penthouse?’
    I hurry after her. ‘Oh my god. Space-age. Shiny high-tech everything. That whole district is so pristine, glittering, brand new. All those exclusive luxury tower blocks. Was there ever anything old there?’
    ‘Shanghai isn’t old. Pudong was all paddy fields twenty years ago. You should read JG Ballard. He spent his formative years in wartime Shanghai when it was pure anarchy, which is why everything he’s ever written has an apocalyptic undercurrent. That’s Shanghai. Those towers built for the elite remind me of his novel High-Rise. They spook me.’
    Why does Bel only get animated about climate change, wars, and the end of the world? I don’t like thinking about those things.
    ‘Anyway’ – I shift the subject back – ‘I don’t think he’ll book me again. He definitely didn’t fancy me, I know that much.’
    ‘Fei Mo Di? Apart from being twenty years younger than you he’s as gay as a French horn.’

We wander through the museum. Bel’s and other visitors’ pulled-off pollution-masks dangle against their chests, like surgeons taking coffee breaks.
    I stop to field a Wechat message. ‘Hey – another one-to-one booking! Next week. That elderly Aussie, Cyril.’
    ‘Three times married.’
    ‘God, Bel, your ex-pat world is incestuous.’
    ‘He likes to submit to women. Apparently.’
    ‘How on earth do you…’ –
    – ‘One of his ex-girlfriends told me.’ We have reached the central hall where the new exhibition is installed. Some are gigantic. ‘Look! This is the fantastic stuff I wanted to show you. There’s so much photography-based art here, of a kind you don’t see in Europe.’ Bel is again animated, and this time, for once, about something positive. Her sweeping arm takes in all the works: ‘This isn’t about photographs. Photographic techniques and media are merely tools in the creation of these works. This all goes way beyond the debate on whether a photograph can be considered art.’ Her enthusiasm is a wonderful relief. ‘I’m going to bring my students,’ she declares.
    This is our best moment together since my arrival a fortnight ago: Bel actually being relaxed, enjoying something. I am so happy! I link my arm through hers. ‘So. When are you going to start your Art Nude project with me?’
    She immediately tightens a little. ‘When are you going to get out your unfinished manuscript?’


 

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Page 10

Feb 042016
 



ALT TEXT

Fei Mo Di

At the Shanghai Art Nude Photographers group session, this guy Fei Mo Di spun off from the Uglow, Schiele and Freud poses I was doing, and did his own thing.

Two weeks in.
    It is still (by British standards) hot – even in mid-October.
    When will I start to write? Will I start to write?
    Each day, while Bel goes teaching, I wander about – “acclimatising”. Staring. Being stared at. The street market was traumatic the first time I went alone. Now I stare through the cat-calls, grin back at the smiles. Great writing-fodder. It’s just… all still too new.

Bel is as bad. When will she start this Art Nude project with me? Will she start it?
    Her morning coughing fits have become my alarm clock. Today the Air Quality Index reports only moderate pollution: Unhealthy for people with special sensitivities. Asthmatics and the elderly may have difficulties. But she coughs whatever the level, on her narrow bed next to mine, scowling at the news pages on her iPad.

Anyway. Got my first one-to-one booking for a photo-shoot! Fei Mo Di (he with the improbably posh English accent, crisply-ironed shirt, designer jeans) is the second Shanghainese person I’ll meet really properly, after Bel’s little assistant Lily Hong.
    So here I am in his bright white 24th floor penthouse. We begin with sparse, polite conversation. The cityscape beyond the glass walls is a sci-fi movie-set. Vertiginous. Construction sites in all directions; cranes everywhere you look.
    Turns out Fei Mo Di is not what he seems. He went to Eton, then the Central College of Fine Arts in Beijing, topped off with a Masters in New York. His mother is vice-chair of a metropolitan committee for culture or something, on the Communist Party’s Consultative Council. She owns real estate in Kensington.
    I’m sipping from a tiny translucent cup. Just beyond the floor-to-ceiling plate glass, the neck of a crane is slowly approaching… What if it doesn’t stop? The elegant tea-set is beside an Apple computer on a huge perspex desk. Fei Mo Di points at his photos from the group session on the monitor. ‘I haven’t sent you these yet. See – I was moving around you a lot, focusing in. So I want to do that again now. I’d like you quite simply, first of all, to stand absolutely still, statuesque.’ He gets up, goes over to where lights are rigged up. ‘Right here.’

I get into position. Silently he begins. What’s the etiquette when one-to-one? Should I chat?
    ‘Ahem. I’m really interested to find out if art-photographers relate to their models differently from artists,’ I begin.
    No immediate reaction. Click, click.
    ‘Like, whether there’s a more natural, human relationship with a photographer? I mean, doesn’t a photographer want somebody alive?’
    Click. ‘Yes.’ Click. Click.
    Was that curt? Should I say more? ‘Whereas artists… I mean, Uglow, for example; he objectified his models to the extreme. He was so fanatical about the precise reproduction of what he was looking at that he’d actually measure out graph-lines on his studio wall and number them to mark exactly where the model was positioned. Flipping autistic!’
    The tele-photo lens stares coldly. ‘Autism has been known to equate with artistic genius.’ The lens roams to my belly, comes in close to my left breast, shoulder…
    ‘Well, but the crap way Uglow related to the model…’
    Fei Mo Di cuts in. ‘Are you familiar with the work of Chuck Close? He’s an autistic man whose excruciatingly meticulous process creates astonishing paintings that happen to start from a photograph.’
    ‘But if it’s from a photograph it’s not really Art’. Okay, I argued the opposite point with Ilka, but this guy’s Etonian accent is aggravating. I hammer on: ‘A photo is conventionally believed to show “the real thing” whereas a painting holds greater interest and value because it’s a unique and expressive interpretation through the artist’s eye, because everyone knows – and as Anais Nin said – “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are”.’
    ‘Tuh. Glurge.’ Snap, shift, snap.
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Your Anaïs Nin quote. Asinine.’
    ‘That is not fair. People are always sticking the knife into Anaïs Nin. It’s because she was a writer. Words on the page are explicit in a way that visual imagery isn’t, so we’re easier to criticize.’
    Fei Mo Di looks round his camera at me, clearly annoyed.
    ‘Yes – I’m a writer myself.’ Standing there naked, I know I am ridiculous.


 

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