The 14th Month (After the Great Flood)

Abstract

This article reflects on the work of the Paris-based painter Yang Jiechang.

There was strict discipline on the ark…Remember; this was a long and dangerous voyage – dangerous even though some of the rules had been fixed in advance. Remember too that we had the whole of the animal kingdom on board; would you have put the cheetahs within springing distance of the antelope? A certain level of security was inevitable…It wasn’t a nature reserve, that ark of ours; at times it was more like a prison ship.

…in Year Two, when the rules had been just a little relaxed…selected travelers were allowed to mingle. Well, Noah caught the ass trying to climb up the mare. He really hit the roof, ranted away about no good coming of such a union—which rather confirmed our theory about his horror of cross-breeding—and said he would make an example of the beast. So they tied his hooves together, slung him over the side, dragged him underneath the hull and up the other side in a stampeding sea. Most of us put it down to sexual jealousy, as simple as that.

—Julian Barnes, from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (Barnes 1990, pp. 3 and 20)

Published in Yang Jiechang: Tale of the 11th Day, exh cat. (Paris: Galerie Jaeger Bucher, 2011), pp. 16–23.