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The China Information Company

Mai 14, 2013
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BookWorm

Sitting in the BookWorm Cafe in Chaoyang District in Beijing. Although it is very famous especially among foreigners I hardly could find it the first time – looks like one of those temporary containers at construction sites! (yes, this pale green thing)

Bookworm Cafe, Chaoyang, Beiijng

But inside you enjoy all those little things you need for a relaxed and comfortable afternoon: lounge music, fully loaden shaky book-shelves, free W-Lan – and depending on your actual mood you can choose between the classical being-in-a-country-or-culture-far-away-from-home-menu, i.e. caesar salad & a real coke (don´t like the diet nor the zero variety – if you´re going to do something, then do it) or you opt for the tasty local food. I love this atmosphere, it feels a bit like you are out of place & time.

The Bookworm is a mix between China, a bit of the West, topped with a bit of improvisation, providing also this global apple-flair (uuups, advertising!). But what the hell are all these people doing here, tucked away behind their computers? Are they all blog-writers??

„The Bookworm is a bookshop, library, bar, restaurant and events space, now with five locations in three cities – Beijing, Suzhou and Chengdu.“

Mai 8, 2013
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AN ELEGY

AN ELEGY I

O youngest, best-loved daughter of Xie,
Who unluckily married this penniless scholar,
You patched my clothes from your own wicker basket,
And I coaxed off your hairpins of gold, to buy wine with;
For dinner we had to pick wild herbs —
And to use dry locust-leaves for our kindling.
…Today they are paying me a hundred thousand —
And all that I can bring to you is a temple sacrifice.
Yuan Zhen

One of the famous Tang Dynasty poems…

Browse a collection of more than 300 Tang Dynasty poems at the University of Virginia Library here. First compiled around 1763 by Sun Zhu who selected the poems based on their popularity and educational value. The collection has been popular ever since and can be found in many Chinese households. All editions contain over 300 poems: in this case, three hundred means not exactly 300, but refers to an estimative quantification. Some 50,000 poems survive.

The Tang Dynasty (618A.D. – 907A.D.) is generally regarded as having been a Golden Age of Imperial China – and it was particularly noted for its poetry. During the Tang Dynasty, poetry continued to be an important part of social life at all levels of society, e.g. composing poems was part of the Imperial examination system or were part of the interaction at banquets or social gatherings.

Li Bai, source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai

Tang poetry has since developed an on-going influence on world literature and modern and quasi-modern poetry; for instance, as in the case of Lǐ Bái, also known as Lǐ Bó, who was one of the most acclaimed poets not only in Tang times, but generally in the history of Chinese poetry – his influence extends as far as Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in which some of Lǐ Bái´s poems have been set to music.

The first part of Das Lied von der Erde makes use of Lǐ Bái´s drinking poem “Bei Ge Xing” (a pathetic song) which mixes drunken exaltation with a deep sadness.

“The wine in the golden cup calls us, but first let me sing you a song of sorrow which shall ring laughingly in your soul.
When sorrow comes the gardens of the soul lie waste, joy and song fade and die: Dark is life, dark is death.
Master of this house! Your cellar is full of golden wine! This lyre I shall call mine,
for emptying the glass and sounding the lyre are things that go together.
A full beaker of wine at the right time is worth more than all the riches of this world:
Dark is life, dark is death. The sky is endlessly blue, and the earth will long remain, and bloom in Spring.
But you, Man, how long will you remain? Not even a hundred years shall you enjoy all the mouldering trinkets of this earth!
A wild, ghostly figure crouches in the moonlight on the tombs – it is an Ape!
Listen, its howling cuts through the sweet scent of Life. Now, drink the wine! Now is the time, comrades!
Empty your golden cups to the lees! Dark is life, dark is death.”

Further bits:
For scholars and students: all poems in Chinese with English translation.
300 Tang Poems (basics, wiki).
Tang Poetry (wiki).
Classical Chinese Poetry (wiki).

April 29, 2013
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Boooom! Museums

Countless is the number of plans and projects concerning new buildings for artworks in China.

In a recent article in The New York Times, A Building Boom as Chinese Art Rises in Stature, Holland Cotter briefly outlines what´s happening at the moment: „Museums – big, small, government-backed, privately bankrolled – are opening like mad. In 2011 alone, some 390 new ones appeared. And the numbers are holding.“
To name but a few:

Shanghai: The city government of Shanghai recently gave its blessing to a museum of contemporary art, the country’s first government-supported museum of up-to-the-minute work that brings the space to some 2.1 million square feet. The project made it the largest art museum in China and put it among the largest in the world when it opened on Oct. 1st 2012.

Shanghai: The Shanghai museum, popularly known as the Power Station of Art — it’s in a converted 19th-century power plant — is physically spectacular. It opened with a major globalist bang in the form of the 9th Shanghai Biennale which filled the capacious interior and spread out into the surrounding city.

Dunhuang: In the far West of China, at the oasis city of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert, another museum, or something like a museum, far less conventional than the Power Station, is under construction. Its purpose is not to attract crowds to new art, but to keep them away from damaging contact with old art, specifically the ancient and rapidly deteriorating Buddhist murals that cover the interiors of hundreds of caves in the Dunhuang area. Painted between the fourth and 14th centuries at a central point on the Silk Road, the caves constitute a virtual museum of cosmopolitan Chinese culture spanning a millennium. Dunhuang pictures.Beijing: The National Art Museum of China in Beijing extended its structure of almost 1.4 million square feet built next to one of the capital’s new landmarks, the National Olympic Stadium.

Private Museums: These state museums are only the tip of the new-art iceberg, with smaller institutions making up in sheer numbers what they lack in size. Most of the smaller museums are privately owned and financed, e.g. the Minsheng Art Museum or art spaces initiated and supported by an increasing number of wealthy philanthropists and patrons of experimental art, by collectors or entrepreneurs.
What is it all about?
Museums, and in any case new ones, answer manifold purposes – desire for architectural landmarks, cultural branding, cultural diplomacy (e.g. cultural strategy known as ”Going Out, Inviting In,” under which the government is giving its blessing to museums’ taking the initiative in offering an array of modern Chinese art for show abroad), national pride, economy boosting, and, well, also offering spaces for displaying and discuss all sorts of art. Most probably a mixture of at least some of these potential reasons…

Bilbao Effect
I would like to shed some light on one specific aspect: The construction of museum buildings is also about urban planning and regional or city development.

Ever heard of the Bilbao Effect? The small town Bilbao in northern Spain, capital of the Basque region, was nothing more than a dozy townlet full of industrial left-overs, being in economic decline, with an abandoned river bank full of rusting rails and wagons. But at the beginning of the 1990ies somebody decided to bring in some art & culture – and in 1997 the meanwhile famous Guggenheim-Museum (by Frank O. Gehry) opened its doors.

Museum´s website: http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/en/the-building/outside-the-museum/

Not only is it famous for its form, for its deconstuctive architecture but all the more for the economic and touristic stimulus it exerted within the region. Within only a few years, the city of Bilbao and in its surroundings experienced financial growth and prestige. Research showd a direct connection between raising numbers of tourists and the Guggenheim-Museum – the „Bilbao Effect“ therefore refers to the transformative power of a landmark architecture as long as the following criteria are fullfilled: central location, close by waters, with an architecture being innovative, impractical, and provocative.

Further bits:
Browsing through related news at The New York Times.
The Bilbao Effect (wiki).

April 4, 2013
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Asia Video Art

A wonderful exhibition at the famous ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/Germany!

February 9–August 4, 2013
Move on Asia
Video Art in Asia 2002 to 2012

Image: Miao Xiaochun
An exhibition at the ZKM | Media Museum
Opening: Fri, February 8, 2013, 7 p.m., ZKM_Foyer

„The ZKM shows the development of precisely this genre, and points to the increasing significance of Asia in global contemporary art.“

„Until the turn of the century, as an art genre the video continued to be attributed to the western hemisphere – and in spite of the fact that its most important representatives were from Asia; over the last two decades, however, independent video cultures have evolved that have found a global public last but not least at flourishing biennales and art exhibitions throughout the Asian continent.“

„It is not the adherence and conservation of past values, but the recovery, creation, integration and transformation which constitute the guidelines under which the new Asiatic art liberates itself from the western models and achieves an increasingly greater independence.“

I really appreciate that exhibitions at the ZKM regularly think outside the box of Western Art and equally display art works from around the globe!

This time featuring artists from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Indonesia, Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Notes on Photography & Video Art in China
Part of my master thesis in art history was dedicated to doing research on the history of art photography in China.

Photography has been present in China since the middle of the 19th century but usually in a marginalised, purely documentary and often political role. Until the beginning of the 1990s, with rare exceptions such as the work of Long Chin San, photography was simply not present as an art form. Only in the early 1990s did photography and video finally find their way into artistic work and begin to gain acceptance as an independent genre within the visual arts.

In China, the 1990s brought quite a lot different developments socially: the development of the concept of consumerism, the increased presence of mass media, increasing availability of the internet and digital media in general as well as the corresponding technologies.

The quasi reappearance, as it were, of photography at this time ensued almost exclusively in the digital form, and video technology and multimedia art appeared more or less simultaneously. In the field of art, photography had to reinvent itself as it still carried the burden of its decades-long historical-political and purely documentary past. Therefore these new beginnings of photography were based firstly in its potential use as an aid for other artistic means of expression, namely in accompanying and documenting predominantly ephemeral work like performances, particularly those in Beijing´s East Village.

With almost no connection to traditional art history in China, photography – and in this wake also video and digital art – was not bound to traditional styles or pictorial inventions thus enabling an autonomous development within the art context. Hence, these new media were able to bring forth completely new means of expression, making possible a new visual language outside of the traditional aesthetic experiences.

Further bits:
ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/Germany: Move on Asia. Video Art in Asia 2002 – 2012, until August 4th, 2013.
Previous posts on contemporary photography & digital art:
Me, Myself and I.
Invisible in Vienna.
Pictorial City.

März 28, 2013
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Modern Match Making

Modern times make it sometimes difficult to find the right „match“ for a romantic relationship.

In China, marriage has been a matter of arrangement between families. Traditional marriage rituals always involved a matchmaker: the first of the so-called Six Etiquettes (i.e. six traditional ritual pre-wedding steps) was the picking of a matchmaker – mostly after the parents had already found a potential candidate. The matchmaker´s job was to negotiate and settle the conflict of interests of the involved parties, to match the birthdays of both the potential bride and groom, evaluate the bride price and generally pave the way for the wedding ceremony itself.

Today, even the step of looking for a potential candidate can be outsourced – a phenomenon which of course emerges not only in China. The reasons for making use of these services are manifold: lack of time, missing opportunities, demands, and – concerning men – last not least the gender imbalance with something like 117 boys being born for 100 girls.

In a recent article, The Price of Marriage in China, Brooke Larmer reports on this development in The New York Times. It features the story of Yang Jing, a modern matchmaker or „love-hunter“: where and how she looks for potential candidates, about shopping malls being modern hunting grounds, about the demands of the wealthy mostly male clients who “outsource the search for their ideal spouse“ providing lists of requirements for the potential future wife. Bet on the most wanted attributes…. – ah, yes, nothing really surprising: young, white, slim, virginity. The other story in this NYT article, representing the opposite end of the social hierarchy, is about Ms Yu. She, like many other mothers or parents who cannot afford modern matchmakers, gathers regularly, often daily, in parks, showing around pictures of the to-be-married children, advertising their qualities – these „pop-up marriage markets“ with their matching of supply and demand are of course closely associated with contemporary urban life.

Also China Daily covers this topic regularly dealing recently with the flourishing online matchmaking services. Especially for the younger generation these services help them getting away from the obligation and pressure connected with familial arranged blind dates.

Musings
This small topic – when being put into context – reflects quite a lot of contemporary social developments: as a consequence of the One-Child Policy more boys than girls are born in China with the resulting gender imbalance making it more difficult for men to find a “match” and also leading to an increasing number of unmarried single men. China Daily quoted from The 2012-2013 Report about Marriage Values among Young Chinese according to which “among the unmarried population in the post-1970s, post-1980s and post-1990s are 23.15 million more males than females. The imbalance between men and women is obvious and the ratio among the post-1970s population is about 2 men for every woman.”

What sounds like an advantage for women in having a much broader choice than ever before has to be relativized: especially educated women, those with a successful career or those in their late 20ies or – perish the thought! – over thirty are very “difficult to place”. Conversely, men without a car or an apartment on their own are in little demand.

The changing life style particularly in the urban centres: traditionally, based on the Confucian ethics the married couple is thought to be the basic unit of society. The interest of the family or the clan is what needs to be respected, not the individual desires or ideas. This concept of the collective being of higher priority than the individual is slowly being weakened within an increasing urban middle class. Moreover, increasing higher education as well as job and career opportunities especially in the cities more and more postpones the moment for starting a family. With young singles still likely being under pressure from parents, this contributes to the existing generation gap.

PS: During research for this topic I have stumbled over a rather quirky sort of marriage – the so-called Ghost Marriage, a marriage in which one or both parties are deceased!

Further bits:
The Price of Marriage in China, The New York Times, March 9th 2013.
Online Matchmaking, China Daily.
Traditional Chinese Marriage (wiki).
Modern Chinese Marriage (wiki).

März 12, 2013
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Chinese Stuff

Every traveller to China has stumbled over some of these everyday real-life things and tools. What you find here is just a small selection!

Some of the pictures are taken from the wonderful book Chinese Stuff (popcorn idea) depicting somewhat more than 100 objects including a short explanation – and some photographs I have taken during my several trips to China.

Sun Screen

Gives you a bit of an alien-like look…
however, it is highly effective not only against the sunlight but also against dust, wind, or sand.

Chinese Stuff, p.80

Mosquito Racket
No, this is not about sports! It´s an “electrical mosquito racket”, and you use it just like a conventional flyswatter.
When you push the little button at the handle, the wire netting becomes charged up
and mosquitoes, flies whatever die because of the electric shock.

Rickshaws

Well… nothing much to explain about this!

Exercise Book
This exercise book I got from the Confucius Institute in Vienna,
for practising the writing of Chinese ideographs … still veeeery empty…

Mojo / Lucky Charms
I love this inexhaustible diversity of colours and Chinese knot craft!

 Electrical tableau

This “electrical tableau” is mounted to the wall like a traditional painting – and like a computer screen saver it changes its animated display continually. The most popular sceneries are landscapes and rivers or waterfalls. This “stuff” already arrived in Fine Art, I discovered this piece of art at the China International Gallery Exhibition in 2011, the landscape changes depict the cycle of seasons, and here you “watch” autumn turning into winter within a couple of seconds. I apologize for not remembering the artist´s name!

Checked Bag

Chinese Stuff, p.96

Very popular already outside China, and already represented in high fashion and fine arts! Originally used as covering sheets at construction sites.

Coming soon: post on Chinese Food Stuff!

Further bits:
popcorn blog.
Book Chinese Stuff at amazon.

Februar 20, 2013
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The Snake

On February 10th the Chinese Year of the Snake has begun, extending into end of January 2014.

The Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is called since the 20th century, is the most important traditional Chinese holiday, and it still is the time for feasting with the family and exchanging gifts. Since it is based upon the lunar cycle its exact date varies from year to year, always beginning between January 21st and February 19th depending upon the full moon (the Western calendar has been adopted in China in 1912).

New Year decoration posters for inviting good luck & fortune.

The Snake -蛇Shé – is one of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Chinese symbology, snakes are regarded as intelligent, but with a tendency to be somewhat unscrupulous – and it is associated with Yin and the element Fire.

Check your personal Chinese zodiac sign here!  Born on January 25th, 1965 I am a Dragon, more specifically a Wood Dragon – and there exists a connection between the Dragon and the Snake with the later also viewed as “the Dragon’s less accomplished brother.”

Nüwa and Fuxi, Tang Dynastie, 618-907 AD; source: Bildlexikon China – Reich der Mitte, Parthas Verlag (publisher)

But as you can see from the picture above, the Snake also stands for something else, for a beginning: Nüwa (the women, on the left) and her husband Fuxi, who is also her brother, with their lower parts of their bodies consisting of two intermingling snake tails. They represent the most important ancestors in Chinese culture and together they are the first in the row of The Legendary Rulers of China.

As with any mythological tale there are many different narrations: despite of being viewed as the creator of human beings, Nüwa is displayed as a wife, sister, man, tribal leader (or even emperor), repairer of the Wall of Heaven, etc.

Interested in another Chinese creation myth? See my previous post on Pángǔ.

Further bits:
More on the Chinese New Year (wiki) and its history.
The World of Chinese.
On Snakes in Chinese mythology (wiki).
China Daily, on snakes in food, celebrity snakes, snake tales, the Mercedes Benz Snake Year Edition….

Februar 5, 2013
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Wen Fang: The Path of Art

… is from observing to getting involved.

Beijing-based artist Wen Fang has become especially famous for her works combining photography with bricks. One of her best-known works is the The Golden Brick, a series of six installations from 2008 focusing on various aspects of the social conditions of contemporary China – like migrant workers, values in contemporary urban China, rapid changes in Beijing and their side effects or increasing inequalities within society.

The works that make up another multi-part piece, Birthday Present (2009), explore events that affected China in 2008, for example, the Olympic Games, the earthquake in Sichuan province, and the scandal of tainted milk, as well as questions about climate change, environmental pollution, and globalization. This critical approach can be found throughout her œuvre, but in a very subtle way. And she always refers to the culture she is rooted in.

From: Arts for Crafts Sake; Wen Fang´s website: http://www.wenfang.org/en/archives/662

In her project Arts for Crafts Sake Wen Fang moves one step further with her art, relinquishing the perspective of an outsider who only observes and comments on situations and circumstances of daily life; instead, she gets directly involved with the life of people concerned.

In my article for Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art I described her art project with women from Ningxia province which she started in 2010 – focusing on traditional handiwork, especially embroidery, which she still uses in some of her recent works.

Further bits:
Wen Fang´s website.
My article for Yishu (pdf):  Wen Fang The Path of Art.