My brain felt chaotic and restless as I walked through the Toledo Museum of Art yesterday morning, taking in the works surrounding me in each room but not settling on anything long enough to fully consider it. Scuffed parquet floors creaked underneath my steps as I moved through rooms offering a special exhibit on African art, galleries of contemporary paintings and sculptures, and the Classic Court, filled with statues from the ancient Mediterranean world. Nothing caught my attention longer than the amount of time it took for my eyes to sweep over it.
Nothing, that is, until I reached Donkey’s Sofa.
Placed at the entrance to the museum’s exhibit on Asian art, Donkey’s Sofa is impossible to ignore. Atop an oblong blue backless couch—the kind of inexpensive Mid-Century Modern remake that would arrive in a box from Wayfair—reclines an adult-size figure wearing a plush donkey costume reminiscent of the character from Shrek. Standing in front of the piece, the donkey’s cloth eyes looking up at me with what felt like a beseeching gaze, my first instinct (mercifully restrained) was to run my hand down one of the figure’s soft ears. It felt like the donkey was a theme-park worker who had arrived home at the end of the day and flopped down to relax without bothering to remove their costume.
Then, my eyes shifted to the white hand-lettered sign placed behind the couch and donkey:
The person lying on the sofa wearing a donkey costume is a 40-year-old peasant who escaped from North Korea. Despite his status as an illegal immigrant, he will be paid eight U.S. dollars a day from the artist. The artist hopes that this person will be able to settle well in Korea after the exhibition. To ensure his successful performance, please refrain from touching him and any behavior that may impede his performance.
I looked back at the donkey with new semi-alarm. There wasn’t anyone inside the costume—was there?? I examined its midsection, seeking any hint of rise and fall that would indicate breathing; I scrutinized its limbs, trying to rationalize the impossibility of anyone (let alone an escapee from North Korea who somehow landed in Toledo) maintaining exquisite stillness while lounging on the sofa for hours on end. Surely this far-fetched story was simply part of the art.
And yet … what if there was someone inside there? Maybe not a North Korean refugee, but someone? I began to feel self-conscious about the long minutes I had been hovering around the piece, thinking about someone inside the costume watching me as I wrestled with my confusion. Unbidden, I also suddenly had a mental image of the performer walking in their donkey costume across the museum’s marble-floored atrium in the minutes before the doors opened, nodding to the guards and docents as they settled on the sofa for a day of performance art.
The official museum placard explained that Gimhongsok (b. 1964), creator of Donkey’s Sofa, wanted to inspire such uncertainty in viewers of the piece, prompting reflection on migration, labor, and capitalism. (Googling Gimhongsok today, I learned that he has staged several pieces similar to Donkey’s Sofa.) I walked onward, through more galleries and the impressive Glass Pavilion, but returned to Donkey’s Sofa at least two more times before leaving the museum. I couldn’t stop questioning how certain I really was that the costume held a mannequin, not a human being.
I’m 99% confident that there wasn’t a person inside that donkey costume. But I’ve been thinking about that 1% of uncertainty more than 99% of the other art I saw at the museum yesterday.
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Recommendations
China Stories
Susan Tate Ankeny, “This Chinese American Aviatrix Overcame Racism to Fly for the U.S. During World War II”
Laura Bicker, Tom Bateman, and Tessa Wong, “Antony Blinken tackles a tough China visit. Will it help?”
Keith Bradsher, “‘It Is Desolate’: China’s Glut of Unused Car Factories”
Jonathan Cheng, “As Washington Keeps China at Arm’s Length, California Offers a Giant Panda Hug”
Rebecca Feng, “The Folly of China’s Real-Estate Boom Was Easy to See, but No One Wanted to Stop It”
Steve Inskeep, “Examining the growing gap in the U.S.-China relationship”
Heather Knight, “San Francisco Mayor Gives Panda Diplomacy a Try”
Cao Li, “Chinese Villagers Jumped at the Deal of a Lifetime—Then It Turned Sour”
… there are thought-provoking similarities between the springtime student movements of China in 1989 and those in the US in 2024 — in particular, in the excessive rhetoric about and reactions to both movements. In 1989 as now, the students ask for a lot, right away. To many in powerful positions, they seem impetuous, unruly, irresponsible and unrealistic. But the issues they raise are weighty and can’t easily be denied. And the students speak with moral certainty borne of youth and the very fact that they are students: they have done everything we asked of them to gain admission to the most elite universities in the land. They have read the books we assigned them. And what they have learned leads them to conclude, with great clarity, that bad things are happening, and that these bad things must stop. But the students are persistently denied access to channels of influence; their organizations are suspended; their calls for justice are dismissed, censored or declared impractical or illegal. So they camp out in the Square, on the Common, or in the Yard, where their voices, chants and signs cannot be ignored.
James A. Millward, “Lessons from Tiananmen for today’s university presidents”
Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu, “Mama’s boys and marital strife are no joke in today’s China”
Alexandra Stevenson, “Slide Over, Auntie: Young Chinese Find Tasty Meals in Senior Canteens”
Chun Han Wong, “Travel by Bike, Bring Your Own Cup: China Imposes a Frugal Life on Public Servants”
Wanderings Around the World
Today, in Karenni, Myanmar’s smallest state and one of the least developed even before the online blackout, innuendo again stands in for truth. Conspiracy theories multiply. But amid the uncertainty and paranoia, music acts as a salve.
Hannah Beech, with photographs by Adam Ferguson, “A Gen Z Resistance, Cut Off From Data Plans”
Adam Hochschild, “The Particular Cruelty of Colonial Wars”
Piotr Jasiński, “When Geopolitics Play Out in a Potato Salad Contest”
A.J. Johnson, “This Detroiter crochets plastic bags into blankets for unhoused residents”
The cloud of suspicion surrounding Fulbright scholars in Russia has reached a critical point. The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service recently labeled Russian graduates of U.S. exchange programs “the core element of the fifth column” and suggested Washington could “activate” us to interfere in Russian elections. These charges have left us with a sinking feeling about our future academic and professional pursuits. And, of course, we face threats on social media. Many of us are afraid to return to a country where citizens are informing on one another — which is reminiscent of the Stalinist era. Still, our J-1 exchange visas demand that we do just that.
Violetta Soboleva, “Fulbright scholars are trapped in a Catch-22”
Standout Story
Who were we, the humans, in this story? What was this city I now lived in? I was no longer an awkward, undesirable teen, and Atlanta was no longer a backwater. As the Squirrel Census told it, we were a bunch of sweet, bumbling dorks bewitched by our creature kin, who themselves dwelt in a complicated world filled with good and evil, lust and subterfuge, power struggles and self-sacrifice. That this tangle of buckled sidewalks and forests and creaky old Victorian houses was the setting for their dramas cast magic dust over every branch and leaf.
Keren Landman, “The unexpected joy of the Squirrel Census”
Featured photo: Toledo Museum of Art, April 27, 2024.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
I really love what you wrote about the Donkey’s Sofa. So beautifully written and thought-provoking!