It's a surprisingly clear day in Beijing as Sarah Morris tuk-tuks in a hired SUV through the poky traffic, a relief from the usual choking scrim of sour pollution that burns your eyes and makes your throat feel as if you've just gargled with Tabasco. Despite the environmental aggravation, Morris's spirits are up, since soon she'll be getting inside Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's nearly finished Olympic Stadium. The Bird's Nest, as it's been nicknamed, is crucial to the big bet Beijing has made on avant-garde design. The city has gone all in, and done so without much regard for preserving its traditional architecture or taming its air quality, and without paying much thought to urban planning and its massive automobile congestion. Morris is here to map out a movie she'll produce on the Opening Ceremony, and she's focused on the part architecture is playing — how it's a stand-in for power, and how it might even bring a whole culture to the brink of collapse. That dark view is a recurring subject of her paintings and films.
The first order of business for Morris is a meeting with a prim, ponytailed woman named Zhang Xun, the president of the government-run China Film Co-Production Corporation, who has been offering Morris tips on securing permits, getting permission to shoot the candy stores and ping-pong parlors she's interested in, and navigating what should be catastrophic traffic. But practical considerations take a weird turn when Xun, speaking through her young interpreter, describes the CFCC's interest in providing security for the crew. An American curator helping Morris summarizes for us: "Their job is two parts, to protect the security of the crew but also to stop us from taking shots of images that they don't want us to take shots of." The interpreter responds, "Right. Destroying the image of China." Maybe something got lost in translation, but the sentiment conveyed is clear: Image is everything here, and the Chinese are supersensitive about it. During our visit, before the tragic earthquakes in the Sichuan Province, an Internet-fueled wave of anti-Western nationalism is cresting, and the China Daily is inveighing against those who would dare tarnish the state's reputation and dampen the spirit of the Summer Games.
The façades of respectability do seem more important than what is going on behind them. In the Wangfujing Dajie district — surely the only place in the world where a shopper can frequent a Cartier store and a food stall featuring fried sea horses on a stick within a block of each other — a worker dutifully mops off the shiny metal on an overhead outdoor clock, a Sisyphean task given all the dirt in the air. Near the American Embassy, Morris points out the just-erected Jackie Chan billboard reading PROTECT THE MOVIES, SAY NO TO PIRACY, on the front of the Silk Street shopping center — the Barneys of counterfeit designer brands, where a fake Paul Smith shirt will set you back 70 yuan, or 10 bucks.
