In an episode of American television show Mad Men, one of the copywriters, while stoned, has the best idea for an advertising campaign ever - whereupon he proceeds to celebrate his achievement with lots of brandy. The next morning, waking up half-dead in his office, he remembers he had a fantastic idea but has forgotten - completely and forever - what it was.
The three artists of the Yangjiang Group need have no fear of suffering a similar loss. Instead of forgetting their bright ideas while sozzled, they get drunk with the specific intention of thinking them up. And the words they splash with inebriated hands all over the canvas aren't notes to refer to later - they are the art.
It's Easter and we have descended on Yangjiang, a 'tiny' city of 'only' two million people or so in southwestern Guangdong province. A four-hour bus trip from Zhuhai, this brand new town is home to Zheng Guogu (Zheng National Valley), Sun Qinglin (Sun Celebrate Unicorn) and Chen Zaiyan (Chen Again Scorching).
My travel companion and I have heard they do drunken calligraphy and installation art with a twist - yes, even in the often bizarre world of installation art, getting friends to write out all the words of Das Kapital in Chinese characters on 7,000 loose pieces of paper, then filling a stadium with these while a football tournament involving six teams is being played, counts as 'a twist' - but we don't know anything else about the three.
We expect them to be a bunch of mildly subversive, acutely suffering artists in their mid- to late twenties, subsisting on scraps, living with their parents and surfacing briefly, on the odd occasion they are sober, to thrash out ideas for the next bacchanalia on a Formica-topped table with deep cigarette burns, before getting sloshed again on the cheapest of rice wine.
We picture them as having asymmetrically cut hair, if any, perhaps with that awful bane of male humanity: a goatee. We imagine them dressed in black polo-neck jumpers and wearing large black-rimmed glasses, wafting about androgynously and wand-like.
What we get, though, is three - well, geezers, quite frankly, ranging from 36 to 43 years old, chain-smoking and dark of tooth. The only thing that hints at 'artist' is a tuft of hair on the back of Zheng's head, dyed a rusty orange.