Peabody Museum

Last time when I was in Salem, I did not have enough time to visit Peabody Essex Museum there. The museum has nothing to do with the witchcraft trial. Rather, it connects to another aspect of Salem’s history: its maritime trade with Asian countries since the 17^th century. Consequently, PEM houses over 10,000 Asian export products, witnessing a period of increasing cultural exchanges in the global context.

That was the impression when I visited the museum early today. Most of the exhibitions are in the Asian context. PEM even reconstructed a certain Chinese house of the Huang family in the region of Huizhou (徽州) named Yin Yu Tang (蔭餘堂). Meandering inside the house, I was perplexed with a strange feeling of loss. The reconstruction appeared to be a collapse of time and space: it aimed to preserve the original settings and configuration of the house, yet a house is a peculiar form of art because unlike painting or sculpture, it changes along time. Hence I saw a piece of 18^th century furniture, an early 20^th century textbook, and quite a few portraits of Chairman Mao on the walls. Perhaps the juxtapotion is a sober reminder of the vicissitudes the Huang family experienced in the tumultuous past. As I walked out of the house and entered the main hall of the museum, with the sunlight piercing through the glass ceiling of the modern building, I had a sudden, odd sense of dizziness and realized that how much our perceptions could be altered once we moved things out of their contexts.

In the PEM, I spent quite some time in an exhibition about Man Ray and Lee Miller’s partnership in Surealism. I did not know the two until I walked into the exhibition, and was rivited by their story and their art. Both Ray and Miller were American expatriates in 1920s Paris (yes, the legendary circle of artists and writers including Picasso and Hemingway). Ray was already an established avant-garde artist, while Miller was a young, pretty, model-turned photographer. They fell in love, collaborated extensively in their works, and after a few years, broke up. Miller came back to America, leaving Ray agonizing over their relationship in Paris. That was the period when Ray produced some of his most powerful and memorable art. In one piece, he painted a huge pair of lips, undoubtedly those of Miller’s, floating in the sky with a tiny image of the observatory in the background. The work, titled “Observatory Time,” seems to reveal that there was no other time but the time set by Miller’s luscious lips that mattered to Ray. Another body part of Miller that Ray was obsessed with is her eyes. Here is a piece of ingenious device by Ray: he attached a picture of Miller’s eye onto the pendulum of a metronome, and set the pendulum in motion with Miller’s eye swinging back and forth. If a viewer thinks that this was the way Ray tried to remember Miller forever, he/she is surely mistaken. Because Ray intended to eventually demolish the whole apparatus as a decisive way to exorcise Miller in his life. Nevertheless, Ray was unable to execute his plan until one day he was “helped” by a group of radical students in Paris. As a gesture of protesting the deterioration of modern art, the students stole the metronome and smashed it right in front of Ray. Furious but unwavering, Ray made a hundred copies of his original and distributed them to many places around the world.

Whatever the means Ray took to struggle with his relation with Miller, he eventually got over it and developed a genuine friendship with Miller, which lasted for the rest of their lives. Later Miller became a war journalist during the WWII, reporting its devastating cost on humanity. The painful experience tossed her into a swirl of depression after the war ended, and that was the time when Ray produced many art works to cheer his friend up. At the end of the exhibition, I saw a fascinating juxtapotion of two pictures of Ray and Miller. The first picture was taken in Paris in late 20s when the two were lovers. Ray was using his toy rifle to aim at something in the direction of the viewer, while Miller was watching with a gentle, nonchalant smile. The second picture, taken half a century later when the two reunited in a conference, shows the two fragile elders looking at each other with amiable smile. Of course they had lost the vigor and playfulness of the youth, but deep in their eyes I saw something truly caring and touching, something only time can create and attest.