Hour of the Rat

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“IS IT JUST ME, or is this bullshit?”

The ducks sit on top of a large metal grill, a skinny rectangle as long as a pool table. Glowing coals underneath. The duck at one end is crispy brown, like Peking Duck. Which I love, but who knows how long it’s been sitting here? Moving down the row, the next duck is… I don’t know, boiled, maybe, the flesh a little greyish. The one after that is raw, I think, its feathers plucked, the naked skin yellow and pimply.

Harrison Wang shrugs. “As a piece, I think it’s not terribly sophisticated.”

Harrison, who knows from sophisticated, has dragged me along to this art opening. Some new-artists collective way the fuck out in Tongzhou, an eastern suburb of Beijing, in a patchy area of old red brick buildings and white-tiled storefronts between high-rise developments where the buildings are named “Rotterdam,” “Bordeaux,” and “Seattle.”

I mean, Seattle?

The opening is in a tumbledown warehouse across the ring road from the fancy developments, behind a row of cheap restaurants, electronics stores, foot-massage joints and “barbershops.”

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