\'~^*^~'/Chinese McDonald's don't feature apple pies, but instead have peach, pineapple and taro root pies. (Yummy purple!)
12/4/07
11/28/07
人民日报很快乐!The blissful happiness of the People's Daily.
Alright, so when I get my news I don't necessarily look to the People's Daily, but it's important to see what kind of news China is projecting to its' countrymen and the rest of the world. It isn't pretty, especially the opinion section. Most of these articles, like one on global warming, are tame but seemingly well-meaning, and feature some scattered, unattributed statistics. (however the point is summed up well in the second to last paragraph as to who is really to blame.) Expect droll, numbing writing with state mandated "positive outlooks", pointing the blame, or, occassionally, ridiculous stuff like this.
Of course this is a state owned paper in the most censor heavy country on earth, so making my case is like shooting fish in a barrel. What is more interesting is state media getting hip to new, more Western or 1st world concerns like gay marriage, lessening the death penalty, even democracy. Still, China needs to deal with the hundreds of millions that live on pennies a day first and foremost rather than building the largest opera house on earth. A rich slum is still a slum.
An excellent article on the Sanlitun bar street bust. (certainly not from China Daily.) This bust specifically targeted black guys in an area filled with African drug dealers and happened nearly two months ago. I was unaware of this event before today.
* Background on Sanlitun: Sanlitun (三里屯) is an incredibly grim bar district and old expat favorite filled with Chinese girls belly dancing with snakes on KTV bar tables while 50-something American men in Hawaiian shirts drink 50RMB mojitos with massage parlor girls. (Or something like this.) Lots of drugs, prostitution and sleeze out in the open, so it's a bit like the touristy or Club-y parts of South Beach. Regardless, they have a lot of good restaurants and great DVD shops.
感恩节
*~> Late Thanksgiving <~*
*~> Late Thanksgiving <~*
This weekend (Saturday night) we celebrated a very expat Thanksgiving with friends. No turkey, but we had chicken and duck, cornbread, dressing, baked sweet potatoes with apples, salad, green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, wine and arroz con tofu. It was a potluck kinda deal. Great fun.
These will soon be nicely browned and ready for mashin' and mixin'. (The results were great!)
Me with company, good wine and cornbread.
朋友们 (that's Anna on the right)
Silvy in her awesome apron.11/21/07
Memorization12x12, oil and acrylic on canvas
Learning a language from scratch is like being a child looking in picture books at monkeys and elephants. Especially with learning nouns in Chinese, you start a whole new way of matching actual images with the character representation of the image. It's hardcore memorization all over again.
So on our weekly Sunday outing we went to the brand new, sparklin' Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. The center was founded by the fabulously wealthy Ullens art collectin' couple powerhouse and was actually built by selling a number of Turner watercolors. The Ullens are now focusing on contemporary Chinese art exclusively, which is well timed considering rising prices on 20th century Chinese painting. However, saying that Chinese painting is now "it" is a few years off, since this has been an ongoing phenomenon. The only thing that is surprising about this center is that someone hadn't thought of a permanent, actual space for major contemporary Chinese art in China before the Ullens. (That is to say, I'm not counting places such as 中国美术馆, or the China National Gallery, because the quality of the new work is commie, crappy and of questionable value and taste.)
The show on display, "'84 新湖" or the "'84 New Wave," is an ambitious effort to categorize some of the more "new concept" artists that were working with this contemporary model while still remaining in China. It's a given that it would be hard to put this all together given the scale and scope of work produced during this period. The '84 wave, which "marked the end of a monolithic artistic model," according to Fei Dawei at UCCA, is perhaps the most sought after by art historians and collectors. Naturally there is a lot of painting on display, but also some sculpture and less transient, more physical (thereby collectible) performance pieces.
People in the west like to collect Chinese contemporary art because it shows a worldly understanding of China's past in relation to China's future and current (since they're now sort of lending the US a lot of money) leadership roles. This is because we in the West seek this self-gratifying, free spirited, democratic, anti-communist, digestible, consumer critique out of Chinese artists. This has, in turn, created a slew of new artists dealing with these subject in earnest, but also as a way to dip deep into the 老外 (foreigner's) pocketbook. The refreshing thing about the Ullen's Center show was the lack of a lot of this "easy art," what I've dubbed "Mickey Mouse Mao," and an abundance of subtler work. There were quite a lot of cultural references, language, etc. that was lost on me. Sometimes a few white people in New York and Paris are NOT the intended audience for a work of art. (Or at least I'd like to hope so!) Good show and I'll be returning for the next opening.
Ariel in the 798 cafe. This is attached to the fairly famous, but usually empty, 798 gallery (housed in an abandoned 1950s munitions or steel factory complete with slogans still painted on the walls.)
Silvy and I in the cafe.
One of the pieces in the show. The red paper cut figures are typical from 贵州 (Guizhou) province and absolutely litter the room, which is a recreation of the artist's apartment. The piece itself is mystical and particularly Chinese, being that paper cutting is a long standing art form here. The display is highly "contemporary art-ized." There were two other recreated living spaces on display that I think worked extremely well.
The show on display, "'84 新湖" or the "'84 New Wave," is an ambitious effort to categorize some of the more "new concept" artists that were working with this contemporary model while still remaining in China. It's a given that it would be hard to put this all together given the scale and scope of work produced during this period. The '84 wave, which "marked the end of a monolithic artistic model," according to Fei Dawei at UCCA, is perhaps the most sought after by art historians and collectors. Naturally there is a lot of painting on display, but also some sculpture and less transient, more physical (thereby collectible) performance pieces.
People in the west like to collect Chinese contemporary art because it shows a worldly understanding of China's past in relation to China's future and current (since they're now sort of lending the US a lot of money) leadership roles. This is because we in the West seek this self-gratifying, free spirited, democratic, anti-communist, digestible, consumer critique out of Chinese artists. This has, in turn, created a slew of new artists dealing with these subject in earnest, but also as a way to dip deep into the 老外 (foreigner's) pocketbook. The refreshing thing about the Ullen's Center show was the lack of a lot of this "easy art," what I've dubbed "Mickey Mouse Mao," and an abundance of subtler work. There were quite a lot of cultural references, language, etc. that was lost on me. Sometimes a few white people in New York and Paris are NOT the intended audience for a work of art. (Or at least I'd like to hope so!) Good show and I'll be returning for the next opening.
Ariel in the 798 cafe. This is attached to the fairly famous, but usually empty, 798 gallery (housed in an abandoned 1950s munitions or steel factory complete with slogans still painted on the walls.)
Silvy and I in the cafe.
One of the pieces in the show. The red paper cut figures are typical from 贵州 (Guizhou) province and absolutely litter the room, which is a recreation of the artist's apartment. The piece itself is mystical and particularly Chinese, being that paper cutting is a long standing art form here. The display is highly "contemporary art-ized." There were two other recreated living spaces on display that I think worked extremely well.
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