Hair-Cutting the Artist-Canvas Relationship

你想怎样剪?

I had just sat down at the local haircutter's, after hanging up my coat and awkwardly failing twice in the process. It was a Chinese-owned haircutter's shop, of course; as my mother would say, the "foreigners" would not, and indeed could not understand the shape of a Chinese man's head as well as a Chinese haircutter who would have ostensibly been working on Chinese heads for as long as I lived. That "foreigners" had no qualms about visiting a Chinese haircutter didn't seem to factor into the reasoning here.

你想怎样剪?

The question, for my non-Chinese readers, means "How do you want your hair cut?" I had already prepared a response to this question--however she thought would look nice, me being the opposite of an expert on matters of fashion--and with that, she went to work. It made me realize, though, the implications at the heart of this question.

Haircutters are, in a way, the most tragic artists. Most artists have to consider the relationship between their art and their audiences; haircutters, though, have the added relationship to their canvases. In a way, haircutters have the opportunity to craft the most unique art--each canvas is different in the most beautiful, most human way, and each work of art is complemented by each individual canvas's distinct human characteristics. As an artist trying to encapsulate human interaction, and indeed, the universal human experience in my artworks, haircutting thus fascinates me in how it innately embodies this concept: just as a painter needs a canvas to craft a work of art, so a haircutter needs a person's head as a canvas to create art, but in this latter case, the canvas, too, actively plays a human role in determining the nature of the end product.

And yet, her question to me was:

你想怎样剪?

Embedded within this question is an assumption of a business-client relationship, rather impersonal and certainly not as beautiful as the artist-canvas relationship that I had been thinking about. This is why I earlier referred to haircutters as the most tragic artists: every day, they work with countless different canvases, all differing not only in the shapes of their heads but, more importantly, in the shapes of their personalities, each of which will add to and work with the artist haircutter in a unique way. And yet, the way almost all of these interactions go is a ceding of artistic control from artist to canvas, from patron to client. All of the posters and images at a haircutter are reflective of this: they show pictures of other people and other people's hair, for their clients to pick and imitate. Some of the great beauty of this art comes from the fact that both artist and canvas, patron and client both contribute to the art, but the business model necessitates that the haircutter cedes all artistic control to the client: how does the client want it cut, not at all how the artist thinks it should be. They are the most tragic artists, for having such a wealth of uniquely different canvases at their fingertips, and yet be wholly unable to tap the artistic potential of the vast majority of them.

I wanted to tell her this: tell her to cut my hair any way she wanted to, that it was a canvas for not just her art but for our art. I wanted to tell her I didn't care how it ended up looking, so long as she was satisfied with it. I wanted her to, for one of the many clients she had every day, finally have an open canvas. Perhaps for the better, as perhaps part of this artistic and human experience is that it innately arises and needs no proselytizing on my part, my Chinese wasn't good enough, and so when she asked again whether things were going all right partway through, I simply responded with 你觉得怎样好就怎样剪: roughly, "Cut it how you think is good".

At the end of the haircut, she handed me a mirror and asked if everything looked ok. I asked her if everything looked ok to her, and she said yes. Nevertheless, as I got up to leave, she insisted on making a few final corrections. Perhaps the idea of pride in her work on this open canvas was not lost in my inability to convey complex ideas in Chinese.

Either way, I'm happy with my haircut. I'll flaunt it proudly, knowing that nobody has the same one--for even in the rare case that someone has my head shape, nobody else has my unique character, and certainly nobody else can replicate the artist-canvas relationship that my haircutter and I shared.

I'm happy with the art on my head right now, and I hope she is too.