It’s getting late and I still need to get a batch of drawings finished for tomorrow morning. They’ve installed me in a comfortable serviced studio apartment with a view over the Qiantang river, that mighty waterway that has carried the wealth of China to the world for centuries. It was from here that tea left for the West. All the tea in China has passed my window at some point.

Across the river I can see the blocks of the Central Business District. Every night the entire cityscape lights up in a co-ordinated display of LED lights. Giant whales and strange anime characters leap from block to block. The sky is huge and I can watch monsoons roll in from the South China Sea. To my left I can see smoky hills in the distance edged by skyscrapers with

Asia-shaped rooftops.

I take a moment to stare

at my empty fridge.

I’ve been here for weeks and I still haven’t had a moment to sort out this food thing. Too busy.

I get back to work. I have some problems to solve here and I am the only one who can do it. I start tracing out lines with my pencil in the manner that a woodworker carves. Finding the shape within the space. And as I do so, I start to see the solutions. Sometimes I will chase a possibility, hurriedly sketching it out then find that it runs aground. I erase it and start again. One failure always leads to a success. Tonight, it is down to me.

China hasn’t been through our ‘Age of Individualism’. When our little company first got involved with the Chinese the tensions soon became clear. They couldn’t understand the maverick ‘me’ approach of the individuals in our set up. We interpreted this as disrespect, but it wasn’t. The Chinese just couldn’t understand the egos.

It is a paradox, they are hierarchical and people are conditioned to follow orders, but there is a baffling equality within that. But I was coming from the age of the individual, I wasn’t slotting into the hive and going with the flow.

I have learned otherwise since the early days of working with the Chinese and being frustrated and confounded, assuming they don’t understand the subtle nuances of advanced concept design. It is possible to be highly respected in a particular field, but at the same time be part of the hive and go with the flow. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. This is perhaps, the difference between the ego and humility. To be humble does not mean you cannot be elevated to a high level of expertise and respect and this is perhaps difficult for us to understand in the West. In our culture, the humble are liable to be exploited and trodden down, geniuses perhaps in their own right, but never able to reach their full potential. Stories abound of the artists that didn’t quite make it because they were too humble and thus weren’t able to do more. We value the artist who has hubris and is able to place themselves above others. The Western story is that you can be a genius but you have to be ruthless to make it. In China you can be a genius and be humble, and gentle, and this may get you elevated to a high position, maybe. But at least it’s a ‘maybe’ whereas in our culture it is seen as a ‘definitely not’

It seems that there is overlap between the two cultures now. China has many of these Western attributes and they are at times probing towards the age of the individual but there is something fundamentally different at their core and, seen this way, it does make sense. They squirm awkwardly at blatant displays of ego, they don’t celebrate the extroverted Western individual in the same way but applaud the introvert who quietly proves themselves through their work, and that seems typically Chinese.

I don’t notice the night trudging on because at some point, the concept manifests itself in entirety. Earlier today it had been a blank sheet of paper. Then it became an idea, and now it is a plan. The concept concretises and I sit back and throw my pencil on the desk. When I stretch and glance out of the window I see a faint glow of light on the horizon, threatening me with tomorrow.

I look at the clock on my computer. 4am.

I am lonely. But satisfied.

The main river in Hangzhou is the Qiantang River (钱塘江). It’s famous for its tidal bore, known as the Qiantang River Tide, which is one of the largest and most spectacular tidal bores in the world. I did this painting from a photo I took from my hotel room window during my long stay there while the pandemic raged in the UK

Extract from the book ‘Yet Here We Are’

DM me for signed prints or see my Etsy store: Finlay Cowan: Seasons in China. http://bit.ly/41DpOZ3

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