BRATTLEBORO-Artistic talent travels down the generations, and Cai Xi has the generational stories to prove it.
Cai (pronounced "Sigh") Xi, 65, is a painter, gallerist, caterer, Tai Chi teacher, and Chinese language teacher. She will be telling her family's story at the CX Silver Gallery, 814 Western Ave., on Saturday, May 17, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Her paintings will be on the walls of the gallery to illustrate the story in an exhibit, "Then and Now."
The story starts with Xi's great-grandfather, who painted stunning traditional landscapes while serving as the Qing dynasty's governor of Zhejiang, a coastal province in eastern China.
"It's the long historic tradition," Xi told The Commons. "Anybody who is a government official must know art. They must be an artist or a poet or a calligrapher. In the tradition, dynasty after dynasty, art is elite. It makes a most respectful and elite intellectual."
Even Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong was a poet and a calligrapher.
After Xi's great-grandfather's generation, the family's talent was put on hold while the men went into banking. But they still painted or did calligraphy in their spare time.
'This way he can do art'
It was in her father's time that art became not only a profession but a way of life. Her father, Xi Hua (1927–2007), started as a banker in Shanghai but soon ditched the work to become an actor, a painter, and a stage designer.
His life's story is the story of modern China. He participated in Mao's Long March and was excited when Mao prevailed and China became Communist in 1949.
"The Communist slogan is 'Changing China and Making People's Life Better,'" Xi said. "All the young people had to decide who they wanted to follow."
Her father "thought it was an opportunity to join the art group, because he never had a chance to get into art and he could stop being a banker," she said. "He joined the performance group of the Communist army. This way he can do art. And he moved to the city of Chongqing, on the Yangtze River."
Xi's mother, Xia Wei (1930–1990), is the granddaughter of that Qing dynasty governor-artist. She also participated in the Long March but didn't meet her husband until later, in Chongqing.
"She was very intelligent and energetic, and she was the first secretary to the mayor of Chongqing," Xi said.
Chongqing is a large and mountainous city on the Yangtze River, southwest of Shanghai.
"The majority of people in China bicycle," Xi said. "In my city, people don't bike. It is a mountain city."
The couple met, married, and had three children.
"I grew up in theater," Xi said. "I grew up with my father in that theater company, which was owned by the state."
In that environment, "actors, actresses, designers, carpenters, and workshops are all in one place," she said. "My neighbors were actual actors, and they had children. We grew up together, and backstage was like our playground. We enjoyed sneaking in when the shows were going on. We loved the songs, the sound system, the makeup rooms."
Banished to re-education
But life in Communist China offered suffering as well as glamour.
When the country went through the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 to purge society of history, culture, and tradition, Xi's father and mother were sometimes denounced as "elite" and "intellectual" and were banished to work on farms for "re-education."
"My mother suffered in Cultural Revolution time," Xi said. "They took away her position and sent her to the countryside."
Her father was also sent down to the countryside to be re-educated.
"It's very delusional," Xi said. "Communists will say, 'You've been sent down. It's a glorious thing. You're lucky.' It's to make people feel like this is a lucky thing. They're always cheating people that way, or brainwashing people. And people look happy to go, but you cannot not go. There is no choice."
Xi told a story about her father on the farm, forced to save a piglet that had fallen into a pond of human waste that at the time was used for composting.
"Everyone was yelling, 'Save the piglet.' And so he jumped to try to show his earnestness and his wanting to be re-educated. He saved the pig, but there was no fresh water to wash off. He just washed off from the rice paddy and a little muddy water. And he [slept] with farmers on the same bed."
The point, she said, was that "you have to show that you're earnest. You have to do all the hard work to show you're really meaning to learn from them."
Another time, her artist father had to walk 10 or 15 miles across mountains to get cement for his village.
"On the way back walking, it starts raining," Xi said. "The powder on his back is going to bubble, but he cannot arrive empty-handed to the village. There will be punishment. So he has to keep carrying it to get it back."
Once back in Chongqing and working again in the theater, her father was doing about 100 shows a year. The plays were Russian or Chinese. No Shakespeare was allowed.
'My idea is to see more of China'
By then, Xi had shown considerable talent as a painter. When she was 12, her father gifted her with a large new wooden paint box, which he had been hiding in a closet because oil painting was considered "Western" and forbidden. She still uses it today.
Xi also wanted to be a ballerina and learn violin, but those arts were also considered "Western," while painting could be done in secret, in quiet, in a closed room.
So she became a painter.
As a college student in the early 1980s, Cai was in the first generation of art students after universities in China reopened after the Cultural Revolution had run its course following Mao's death in 1976.
She wanted to do her higher education at the fine arts school in Shanghai but failed the entrance exam. She passed the exam to the Shanghai Drama Academy and went there instead. Afterward, she was placed in a film studio.
"Those days, the government placed you after you graduated from college," Xi said. "So you have a job. It's called 'an iron rice bowl.' You have to stay there forever. But the film studio only produced propaganda movies, and I was not interested. So I worked there for a year and quit."
This was very brave of her. Her father worked in his company for 45 years, without a change - "for better or worse," Xi said.
"Was he happy? No. His salary always stays the same. So he was not happy, but he cannot change his work," she said.
Xi was rebellious and ended up going back home to paint. Then, she also did something distinctly unusual for a young woman in China in the 1980s: She traveled by herself all over the country.
"My idea was to see more of China," Xi said. "In those days, you're born somewhere, you study somewhere, you stay in the one city. You have your personal document ID and it stays where you born. You cannot go to a different city, because a different city doesn't have your personal ID. But I wanted to travel to different places.
"Once, since I didn't have an income, I ran out of money. I came back home, and my parents were so upset. And then I said, 'Let me, my way is trying to show I'm not wasting my time. I want to experience China and I am still continuing to be artist. I continue painting."
Sometimes Xi would knock on the door of a farmhouse and ask if she could spend the night. When she left in the morning, she left the farmers a portrait of their family. She would likewise do so in hotels: "I don't have money to pay, so I leave a painting.'"
Then one day, home in Chongqing, she met a tall American man, Adam Silver, who was traveling through China. Since there was no dating in her world, and especially not with foreigners, they were married some 54 hours later.
Inspiration in a new country
In 1987, her new husband took her to New York. It opened her eyes to many European styles of painting, plus the Modernist and Abstractionist movements developed in the U.S. It was all a revelation.
"When I was training, it was always said, 'This kind is art, but that is not art,'" Xi said. "But coming to New York broke that idea. It feels like everything can be art. Art is so much more. It's not just the traditional technique. There are so many different ways of expressing yourself."
Xi was inspired by museums and galleries as well as subway stations and cement pavements. She had a studio near a warehouse that provided her with wood chips to mix with her paint to give texture to her art.
Her mother developed cancer later that year and Xi went back to care for her. An operation proved successful and provided Xi with the opportunity to do a series of paintings of her mother, who died a few years later after the cancer returned.
Xi then brought her father to the U.S. He had retired from the theater in China, but in New York he started over, gaining energy from a new culture and a new language. He worked in television makeup, acted in a Chinese theater company, did advertisements for a Chinese newspaper, and painted.
Meanwhile, the Silvers wanted to leave the city.
"I never see the view, the sky, the landscape, the land, the earth, never in my life," Xi said. "I grew up in the city, and also coming to New York, I don't see the open skies."
They moved to Vermont in 2001.
"So coming to Vermont, I immediately change. I throw away the abstraction or any styles. I feel like knowing myself is not important. My style is not important. I need to obey nature. I need to listen to and copy nature every day. Nature is the power."
Art and life converge
Once, a long time ago, when teenage Xi told her mother she wanted to go abroad but didn't know how, her mother told her, "You go to America, teach Tai Chi, and make dumplings."
She told her mother she was crazy. Now she teaches Tai Chi and makes take-out dumplings and other dim sum treats. She taught Chinese at The Putney School for 20 years and gave her students tours of China. Next year, she plans to offer tours to adults.
In 2006, she and Silver started a gallery on Western Avenue that is now showing Xi's paintings, and which is where she will give her talk.
She and Silver are no longer together, but Xi's siblings, who are also artists, now live close to her. Xi's sister lives in Brattleboro, while her brother travels between Brattleboro and New York.
Carrying on the family tradition, both of Xi's children are also involved in the arts. Her daughter is a web designer and her son is an actor and director.
Art and life seem to have come together for Xi here in Vermont.
"Making food is the way my art expanded out of my studio," Xi said. "To be connected with the community, and making food as art. With Tai Chi movement, health awareness is art. So life is art. My mother showed me the example of living as art when I was young.
"I had ambition. I wanted to do something spectacular, out of the ordinary," she continued. "But my mother, all the time, quietly showed me that every day, daily life is a spectacle."
So every morning, when Xi wakes up, "I'm excited," she said.
"The day is coming. I have lots to do. It's exciting. I have many exciting ideas," Xi reflected. "This makes me feel it is something good I offered to the community."
This Arts item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.