Recollections

I met Mr. Manfred Schoeni during the earlier half of the 1990s. He had a quick mind, was confident, assertive, and had a genuine gift for rhetoric. He was also restless and extraordinarily charismatic.

There has never been an official contract between us. Twice he asked Wang Yi Dong to persuade me to collaborate with him. Since I am used to working as a freelance artist, and recoil at the very thought of order and regulations, I refused him. Yet if I had to choose to sign a contract, Mr. Schoeni would have been my only choice. He was the only westerner who actively encouraged the Chinese artists who clung to the Realist movement, even as the whole of mainland China stood against Realism. He was quick to pick up on the strong and serious demand for Chinese Realism amongst European collectors. Over the course of ten years, his orders for Chinese Realist paintings, which require a rare set of skills that are difficult to achieve, remained unaffected by the rampant Modernist movement in China. Mr. Schoeni had our best interests at heart.

Mr. Schoeni was a man of courage and vision, who trusted the artists. There was an incident that occurred in the early 1990s that has left an enduring impression on me. One day Mr. Schoeni brought an English collector to my studio. Lu Jie, who is also an artist, acted as the interpreter. Mr Schoeni said the English collector had travelled a long way to see me. I was very touched. This collector, as he put it, always wanted to see "the hen that lay the eggs". The Englishman handed me two thick pictorials one was of David Hockney, and the other one of Matisse. We sat down to chat, with the English man sitting opposite me. Suddenly, he produced three large negatives from his windbreaker and showed them to me. I had never seen such large negatives, they were the size of a book. I recognised that one was of a work by Matisse, one by Van Gogh, and the last one was a painting of mine called It Was Still Snowing Slowly, which is about a Tibetan girl. The English man said that all three of these paintings belonged to his collection. I was shocked by the English man¡¯s candidness, so was Mr Schoeni. He probably did not expect for the English man to show me his collection in such a manner. During that time there were always visitors who came to my studio to tell me how I should paint and how I could improve. Perhaps the English collector had come to tell me how I could learn from Van Gogh and Matisse? So I explained that these three paintings were totally different, and there was no reason that they should be put together and compared. The English man said, "Though they are totally different, I like them all, so I collected them. Today I came here to see you." I was both surprised and confused: Why would Manfred Schoeni allow such an important collector to come see an artist directly? This was seen as something of a taboo in the trade. One ill-conceived remark on the part of a collector could damage the precarious relationship between artist and gallery. This incident not only made me realise how much Manfred Schoeni trusted his artists but also how much confidence he had in himself.

On 27 April 2004, one week before Schoeni's death, he came to my studio again. I reminded him of that meeting that had taken place ten years ago. He said, "Yes, that was a very important collector. Since then he has kept on buying your work. He likes your paintings very much." That was the last thing he said.

That afternoon, when he and his assistant walked out of my studio, a ray of springtime sunshine beamed down on Manfred Schoeni's vivid, confident complexion, reflecting a promising future. The sun was bright that day. But Schoeni's laughing face was even brighter.

Ai Xuan
June, 2004