By Maggie Gill-Austern,Staff Writer
Farmington couple to show collection of Chinese art at the UMF art gallery tonight.

FARMINGTON – When Farmington-based author Ann Arbor and her husband, Beloit Poetry Journal co-editor John Rosenwald, moved to China in 1987, they coined the slogan “Just Say Yes,” a takeoff from the familiar D.A.R.E. slogan “Just Say No.”

Now they pepper their conversations with the phrase, Arbor said Monday. “In China, it’s Just Say Yes,'” she said.

The go-with-the-flow attitude Arbor and Rosenwald learned to live by during their first stint in Shanghai helped them when they began collecting Chinese peasant paintings. These paintings are a prized form of primitive art done mostly by relatively unschooled factory and farm workers taught to paint by a few traditional artists.

Tonight, from 5 to 7, Arbor and Rosenwald will share stories about these artists and their work at the opening of an exhibit at the University of Maine Farmington Art Gallery, featuring some of the pieces they have collected while living in China. The exhibit is called “Net Work: Chinese Peasant Art from Jinshan and Huxian.”

The couple also will tell tales from their own travels in China. The stories range from funny, to moving, to simply curious. They may tell (if asked) of Arbor’s utter terror upon learning from an American exchange student just back from China that Shanghai has no trees (which turned out to be a mistake); or of the time the two had to be smuggled out of town in an ambulance after visiting a friend in a town off-limits to foreigners; or the day a strange man knocked on their apartment door to tell them the car hired to take them to a speech had arrived. One problem: They didn’t know they were giving a speech.

Arbor said the two learned quickly to get used to changing their plans spontaneously, seeing friends, giving speeches, leaving for and coming home from trips on the spur of the moment. They learned to say “yes” to every invitation, she said, since plans made ahead of time were difficult to keep without phones or reliable transportation.

“In China in the early years, there was one telephone for maybe 500 people,” Rosenwald said.

Transportation and scheduling also were unreliable, he said – even at universities vacation weeks were not planned ahead. A staff member at Fudan University in Shanghai, where he was a visiting professor, once surprised him by informing him his classes had ended “yesterday.”

They met artist, teacher and father of the peasant painting movement, Ding Jitang, visiting his shop in Xi’an in northern China again and again, and through him and other artists, met a majority of their favorite Chinese painters.

Ding’s work became the cornerstone of Rosenwald and Arbor’s collection recently when on one of their trips to China he offered them “half his life’s work,” said Rosenwald, in the form of the first prints of many of the wood cuts he is now famous for.

Some of Ding’s work is included in the UMF exhibit.

Now that they’re back in Farmington, Arbor said she and her husband spend “all our time trying to explain the Chinese to Americans,” and when they are in China they try to explain Americans to the Chinese.

“We’re teachers and as teachers we’re bridges” between cultures, she said. She said she hopes art exhibitions like the one she and Rosenwald put together will eventually help bring about peace.

“I think it would be a great day when our government sends in an attack squad of artists to paint their stories, dance their stories, act their stories, so the world can help in appropriate ways,” she said. “Art supplies are expensive but they’re much cheaper than bombs.”