Between the inner and outer stone walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, stand the barracks that housed the emperor's army for five centuries. Since the conversion of the royal family's palace into a public site, however, museum employees, not soldiers live here. For eight years, Wu Hung, now a tutor in the Fine Arts department, lived between these walls as a curator for the Palace Museum.

Wu Hung, who is also a graduate student living in Adams House, recalls that at first, the conditions were terrible. "It was a very old Chinese dwelling, with no heat and paper covering the windows. The courtyard was overgrown with grass and there were wild cats everywhere."

The museum's fewer than fifty inhabitants were isolated from the daily bustle of Beijing. They were not allowed outside after 9 p.m. "In the evenings they locked the gates, like in ancient times. Life there had nothing to do with modern China at all," says the art historian and amateur artist.

Political Prisoner

Before his appointment to this position, Wu Hung was imprisoned for three years in a labor camp on the Inner Mongolian border. Wu Hung was caught in China's Cultural Revolution, a time when Chairman Mao attempted to purge the country of traditional cultural and intellectual values.

China in the 1960s was a politically tense place, especially for those who showed an interest in Western ideas and culture. A student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Wu Hung was part of a small group of friends and fellow painters who shared an enthusiasm for Beatles records and Impressionist paintings, among other things. "Once the Cultural Revolution came," says Wu Hung, "all these things were seen in a political light."

Although Wu Hung did not think of himself as counterrevolutionary, his comments about the prevalence of Communist propaganda were considered dangerous by the government "I suggested we paint Chairman Mao quotations on the inside of our eyeglasses," Wu Hung recounts. "I paid too much for this kind of joke."

Wu Hung spent a year in his college's detention center before he was sent to a prison camp. "It was like they turned Adams House into a jail. They put me in a dark room, asked me to write down my faults, my crime," he says.

But Wu Hung does not see his experience as negative. He calls the Cultural Revolution the most significant time of his life. "Because both professors and students were prisoners, there were no boundaries. I stopped seeing my professors as big names, they became just human beings," says Wu Hung.

"Before the Cultural Revolution, I felt very insecure. Afterwards I was confident. Before I was alienated by my orientation to Western culture. I was a very marginal person in Chinese society. My insecurity was rooted in feeling myself to be a different person from those around me," Wu Hung says. "But after the camp I felt a very deep connection with people, not just with books and academics."

Wu Hung also turned to traditional Chinese philosophy in his search for some stability in a "country that was like a madhouse." He studied Taoism, which holds as its central principle that power lies in the mind, in the self, and not in action. "I don't think I achieved the inner peace of the Taoists, but I tried," remembers Wu Hung.

While in the labor camp, Wu Hung wrote four books about his experiences, but then destroyed them, for fear of disastrous consequences if they were discovered by officials.

During this time, Wu Hung began to believe in Marxism. For him, its appeal lay in seeing beyond the personal concerns of the individual. He recalls, "I criticised myself. I thought my interest in Western art was selfish. It wasn't really very mature thinking and I realized when I got out what an illusion it all was."

Ancient Objects

After several years of organizing exhibitions, and researching and writing catalogues and books for the Palace Museum, Wu Hung decided to return to Beijing's Academy of Fine Arts to get his Master's in Chinese art history. "It was a personal choice to leave the museum and go back to school. My work had stimulated an interest in Chinese art and I was tired of just dealing with ancient objects; I wanted to talk to people again," he says.