“Horses, thought to be related to dragons, played on the Chinese imagination from an early date. But besides their involvement with myth, they were also regarded as military necessities, as China was constantly menaced by the superior horse count and riding skills of barbarians from north and central Asia. By the fourth century B.C., images of horses as symbols of power had emerged in royal tombs…It was the Tang dynasty, however, that went in for horses in quantity, both live and as a subject for art. Recognizing the need to keep big herds as a national security measure, the Emperor Taizong, who ruled from A.D. 626 to 649, made the procurement of horses a major priority. By the middle of the seventh century, gifts from tribute states and good breeding practices had produced a pool of some 700,000 animals. And with such royal attention paid to horseflesh, could art be far behind? By depicting horse activities, artists could work their way to recognition, as would, a thousand years later, their English successors, like George Stubbs (1724-1806), the popular painter of race horses for the British aristocracy. In Chinese art, horses became symbols not only of military and political clout but also of barbarian faults and virtues, along with the attributes and troubles of nobles.”
Grace Glueck (for the New York Times), “ART REVIEW; The Chinese Horse, A Symbol of Power”
A few years ago in the spring, in the height of my reluctant foray into casual dating, I invited a fine fellow to my apartment for a thinly veiled Netflix-and-chill. This guy looked like a Kennedy, could deadlift twice my bodyweight, and used to send me hip-hop songs so obscure, SoundCloud housed the only trace of them. He showed up to my place on a silver scooter. He was an oddball, but this was forgiven by the obscenity of his hotness.
We made small talk on the worn suede couch in my living room for a little while before we settled on watching the pilot episode of Westworld. We were arranging ourselves on the tiny couch in the rigid manner of two strangers touching each other without yet actually knowing how, when he noticed in his periphery a massive and strange tableau on the opposite wall.
“What in God’s name is that ?”
“I know, isn’t it majestic ?”
“A bit freakish if you ask me,” he said with a tone of couched awe.
“I know. One of my roommates just found it at the bottom of the hill on trash day and hauled it up here. We think it belonged to a Chinese restaurant at one point.”
He kept his eyes affixed to it with a pensive, squinted expression. “I’m trying to see if I can tell what it says. I took a couple years of Mandarin in college. But these are traditional characters, not simplified, and I didn’t learn too many of those.” He continued making sounds in his closed mouth, as if rolling the hard candy syllables over his tongue. Eventually he got fed up and pulled out his phone.
“I got it !” he exclaimed – “mǎ dào chéng gōng”.
“What does it mean ?” I asked, my curiosity intensely piqued.
“It’s something to the effect of, ‘As the horse approaches, so does immediate success.’”
“…Immediate success ?”
“I think so.”
“That’s a bold promise. Anyway, I’m thoroughly impressed by your translation skills, thanks for that.”
“My pleasure,” he said with a Cheshire Cat smirk.
Reader, I fucked him.
The painting affectionately referred to as ‘the Chinese horses’ in absence of a formal title measures five feet and one inch long, three feet and five inches high, and two inches deep. It consists of eight horses total—two white, two black, and four a color only describable as midway between orange and brown—tromping through a body of water, kicking up spray against a backdrop of hazy tangerine clouds. The horse in the center of the painting is white with a long snout and what appear to be six-pack abs. Most of the other horses are painted in profile with no expression, with the exception of the other white one, in the back, which has its head tossed back and mouth wide, looking almost crazed. In the top-left corner, the traditional Chinese characters 馬到成功 appear in black calligraphy. To anyone who has had the chance to visit my first apartment in Brighton between the years of 2016 and 2020, the Chinese horses are legendary. They just appeared one day, and in the gallery of my memory, it is impossible to imagine the house without them – they are one and the same.
Even today, one might hear me refer to the Chinese horses in a deferential way, as if they were the pinnacle of high art. For one thing, the painting is tremendously large. Just about any image stretched onto a 5-by-3.5 foot canvas takes on an awe-inducing quality from the largesse. The horses’ owner has to consider the wall on which they’d hang; the sheer size makes it impossible to be hasty. The immensity of the landscape juxtaposed with the cartoonish rendition of the horses’ faces is simultaneously entertaining and off-putting. The color palate injects liveliness into the host room with its primarily white and hot orange composition (it was the backdrop for many glamour shots at karaoke parties over the years). And the center horse is… so buff. Beautiful and bizarre, it never ceased to get people talking.
Upon continued examination, the phrase 馬到成功 means exactly what my Tinder fling posited. Literally, the characters mean horse, arrive, become, success, respectively. But as this eerily specific blog post from a decade ago elucidates, the phrase is an idiom, meant to be a well-meaning wish or an observation of someone’s seemingly effortless achievement, like beginner’s luck. Apparently, ancient Chinese warlords depended so vitally on horses for military purposes that they became a cornerstone of economic and political society and thus morphed into symbols of ‘power, elitism, and success’. It’s almost as though horses were the nukes of ancient China; they were the cutting edge of warfare back then. Now, today's horse is associated with yeehaw conservatives, Brokeback mountain, and that weird girl that everyone knew in middle school. A grab bag of personalities if I’ve ever seen one, but who doesn’t want to align themselves with immediate success ? What I find most fascinating is that the word immediate, which ties the whole proverb together, is not actually in the literal translation; it’s inferred by the order of operations, the logistic coordination of the horses and the success to arrive simultaneously, as a package deal, not uncomfortably early or fashionably late, but right on time.
What I didn’t know until recently was that in addition to the significance of horses in Chinese culture, they hold significance in Indian culture as well. According to Vastu Shastra, which is the Indian equivalent of Feng Shui, there is apparently a predefined set of rules to adhere to in order to reap maximum energetic benefit from one’s horse painting, including :
Ideally, the horses should be facing South. If that is not possible, East or North are also auspicious directions. West is to be avoided at all costs.
The painting should be facing the inside of the space, they should NOT be facing toward any door.
The horses should ideally be white (to symbolize peace and welcome positive energy), although orange or gray are also acceptable.
They should be free and unfettered, without any chain, leash, or rope; their expressions should be peaceful, not aggressive, the background should not depict turbulent weather, nor the foreground any obstacles (ideally the horses should be running on dry land rather than water).
The painting should NOT be hung in the bedroom, office/study, pooja room (prayer room), or near the bathroom or toilet – this leaves the living room as the most sensible place.
Seven is an important number in Hinduism and the luckiest horse paintings contain seven horses. However, eight is also an acceptable number because this way the horses represent the eight yearnings of life : career, marriage, health, children, personal development, recognition, education, and happiness.
My oldest childhood friend recently bought a condo, and one night, having dinner and reminiscing about good times we had in our old shitty apartments, he happened to remind me about the Chinese horses. They were no longer hanging in the house on a hill - Josh had moved to New York City right before the pandemic and taken them with him, as was his right. For some reason, my brain latched onto the memory of the painting, and I scoured the internet for hours, trying to find the closest thing. I had to have them.
After losing myself completely in the rabbit hole for several days, I came across a suspicious link on Amazon that had that instant, jarring familiarity (in case you’re curious, it is still available here). Seven horses, perfectly Vastu-compliant and just like the original, only missing a shy little orange one from the back. The backdrop in this version was a mountain range looming above a crystalline forest, and the Chinese characters in the corner were missing. The aspect ratio was also garishly warped; in order to compensate for the dimensional shift from very long to very square, the horses were compressed together until they looked malnourished. Sixty dollars, potentially illegitimate, but that was them all right. I had to have them.
About a week later, I received a delivery notification from Amazon. I tore the cheap bubble wrap off the package and swore I could feel the positive energy radiate into my aura from the first instant. We didn’t have much remaining real estate for art on our living room walls, so I hung it in the bathroom, across from the toilet (whoops). It was the funniest thing I could think of. I texted everyone who had conceivably been to my place between 2016-2020 to see it, including Josh.
He texted back, “That’s so cool! I’m worried I might have to get rid of mine bc I’m moving and it doesn’t fit in my storage unit 🙁” As it happened, we were heading down that way in a couple weeks anyway for a vacation in Philadelphia and would be back in New York for a birthday party. The obsession intensified. I wanted that sweet, ripe, immediate success. I HAD to have them.
When the time finally came, we parked on the street and I brought Larry in to meet Josh. I was giddy as could be. We chatted for a while, and I remarked that I was now the age he had been when we first became roommates (neither of us could quite believe it). On our way out, Larry paused to get a good look at the painting for the first time after hearing me mythologize it for months. “Wow...” he said, “it’s big.”
“I thought I told you it was big,” I replied.
“Yeah, but I just didn’t realize it was that big.”
It took the two of them to take it down and bring it downstairs. The entire time, I kept saying how I was sure it would fit in the car, even though Josh had been so apprehensive, he had even given me the exact dimensions. I didn’t think they would be necessary. We brought the front seats of the car forward, then started sliding the painting in the back – it fought the rubbery seal on the door at every angle. They tried folding the back seat down and sliding it in through the trunk – it was an inch or two too wide.
We could not bring the horses home.
I was surly on the drive home, cursing fate with a closed fist. We were going to hang it facing east ! Was it because I’d hung the smaller one across from the toilet ?? We didn’t even really have anywhere to put the original, but we were going to rearrange everything else in order to make it the centerpiece of our apartment. I had chased immediate success and failed.
For now, I'm holding out hope that patience is the key to getting what I want – what, did you think I’d given up ?? Nope, the saga continues. I found a shipping center within a half-mile of Josh that would take a shipment that large and allow me to pay by phone once dropped off. It won’t be cheap, but it’ll be worth it, if only to keep the legend alive and be an excellent story for when we have company over. If my plan works, it will be a tautological achievement—I will have had success in obtaining the horses because I had the horses, which granted me immediate success, of course—and from that point on, if it works as advertised, I will be pretty much unstoppable.
Watching : Rules of Attraction • Atlanta S3 • Conversations with Friends • The Worst Person in the World • Everything, Everywhere, All at Once • The Dropout • Get Shorty • Umbrella Academy S1-2
Listening : Sawayama (Rina Sawayama) • Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (Kendrick Lamar) • “Scarlett” & “Please Don’t Leave Just Yet” (Holly Humberstone) • “Knife” (hex gf) • CRASH (Charli XCX) • Candydrip (Lucky Daye) • “CULT” (Van Buren Records) • “Truly” & “When You’re Wrong” & “Patient” (Twin Shadow) • “As it Was” (Harry Styles) • “Breathe Deeper” (Tame Impala) • “No Chill” (Duckwrth) • “Frozen” (James Blake feat. JID & SwaVay)
Reading : The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion) • Real Life (Brandon Taylor) • Trick Mirror : Reflections on Self-Delusion (Jia Tolentino) • Detransition, Baby (Torrey Peters) • The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)