Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA - Friday, July 16, 2004, Last updated 8:12 a.m. PT
Chinese cartoonist sues Nike
By AUDRA ANG, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BEIJING -- A Chinese Internet cartoonist is suing athletic footwear and apparel maker Nike Inc. over its use of a stick figure in an ad campaign, state media reported Friday.
Zhu Zhiqiang has filed a lawsuit asking for 2 million yuan ($240,000) in compensation from Nike as well as a public apology for allegedly copying his "Little Match Man" illustration in one of its worldwide ad campaigns, the China Daily said.
Nike's "Stickman" was a "pirated a logo of my serial Flash works," Zhu, 28, was quoted as saying in the newspaper. Flash is a type of computer software.
The Beaverton, Ore.-based Nike denied Zhu's claim.
"The small man figure created by the plaintiff and his gestures are absolutely different from Nike's Stickman," the China Daily quoted Nike's lawyer in China, Zhang Zaiping, as saying. He added that the U.S. company was "devoted" to the protection of intellectual property rights.

He said the logo for the "Creativity in Sports" campaign was designed by an American advertising company in 2002 at a cost of 25 million yuan ($3 million).
The official Xinhua News Agency said Nike argued that the image is a common symbol not entitled to protection under copyright law.
"From mural and stone paintings in ancient times to Sherlock Holmes stories, the logo has been used repeatedly," Zhang was quoted as saying in the China Daily.
Telephones rang unanswered at the Beijing First Intermediate People's Court on Friday. Operators at Nike's Beijing and Shanghai offices said relevant officials were not available.
The case is an unusual reversal of roles for China, which has frequently been criticized by the United States for being lax about protecting patents and other intellectual property.
The country's thriving industry in product piracy routinely violates copyrights, trademarks and patents on movies, designer clothes and other goods, despite promises by Beijing to crack down.
Zhu said he had been negotiating to release a book about his "Little Match Man" when the Nike advertisement was first broadcast in Beijing last year. Now, he said, negotiations are off.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/apbiz_story.asp?category=1310&slug=China%20Nike%20Sued

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XinhuaNet.com - www.chinaview.cn 2004-07-16 09:48:55
Beijing designer sues Nike over copyright

BEIJING, July 16, (Xinhuanet) -- Claiming copyright infringement, a Beijing designer is suing Nike over an television ad broadcast around the world, according to Friday's China Daily.
[image] Zhu Zhiqiang, a Chinese designer widely known as Xiaoxiao on the Internet, said the stickman in a recent advertisement of Nike pirated a logo of his serial Flash works. [newsphoto]
"The stickman in a recent advertisement of Nike pirated a logo of my serial Flash works," 28-year-old Zhu Zhiqiang said.

Zhu, who is widely known as Xiaoxiao on Internet, asked for 2 million yuan (US$240,000) in compensation from Nike as well as public apologies.
Flash is computer software often used to design cartoon characters.
The Beijing No 1 Intermediate People's Court held the first hearing Thursday.
Sources with the famous sports wear company denied the charge.
"The small man figure created by the plaintiff and his gestures are absolutely different from Nike's stickman," said Nike's lawyer Zhang Zaiping.
"I was told by friends last year that my logo had been used by Nike in its advertisement overseas," he said.
The ad was also broadcast in domestic television stations, Zhu said.
"My commercial interests out of the logo, which was registered in the year 2000 for copyright protection, have been severely damaged due to Nike's illegal use." .
Zhu said he was negotiating with a publisher to release a book based on the birth of the little man logo when the Nike advertisement was first broadcast in Beijing last year.
"Negotiation stopped due to the advertisement," he said.
Zhang, the intellectual property rights (IPR) agent representing Nike, said in court Thursday that Nike takes IPR very seriously.
"As one of the world biggest sports wear producers, Nike is devoted to protection of IPR and respects others' rights."
He said the stickman was independently designed by the advertisement company Wieden & Kennedy in 2002. Nike spent some 25 million yuan (US$3 million) on the design.
"According to agreement between Nike and the designer, Nike owns the copyright of the advertisement," Zhang said.
"It is obvious that the plaintiff intended to promote himself and his Flash works by accusing a famous multi-national company," he said.
Zhu did not deny the charge Thursday but said Nike wanted to use the logo to boost the company's popularity among young people.
"This is because my logo and works are well-known in that group," he said.
Zhu first started using the small stick man in 1989 when he was still a student, the indictment said.
He said he was one of the first people in China to use Flash.
"My Flash works are so warmly welcomed by netizens that I have received more than 30,000 letters from them since 2000," Zhu said.
Nike, however, holds Zhu's stickman cannot be protected by copyright because it lacks originality, Zhang said.
The law says originality refers to independent design, instead of copying others' works or images in public domain, he said.
"From mural and stone paintings in ancient times to Sherlock Holmes stories, the logo has been used repeatedly," he said.
"This is obviously a logo usually used in the public domain."
The court reached no decision Thursday. Both parties are now waiting on a date to be set for the next hearing. Enditem
(China Daily)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/16/content_1604987.htm

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WELT am Sonntag 18.07.2004
Bayerns begehrteste Auszeichnung - Ordensverleihung
von Natascha Gottlieb

München - nag - Die Auszeichnung "Pro Meritis Scientiae et Litterarum" wird am kommenden Freitag im Gartensaal des Prinzregententheaters an vier Persönlichkeiten aus den Bereichen Kunst und Kultur sowie Wissenschaft und Forschung verliehen. Bayerns Wissenschaftsminister Thomas Goppel überreicht je eine der Skulpturen an Schauspielerin Cornelia Froboess ("Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss"), Schriftsteller Herbert Rosendorfer ("Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit") sowie Professor Ann-Kristin Achleitner von der Technischen Universität München und Professor Helmut Altner, Altrektor der Universität Regensburg.

Der Orden gilt als Bayerns begehrteste Auszeichnung, wird er doch an maximal acht Persönlichkeiten pro Jahr vergeben. Er ist ein Werk des bayerischen Goldschmieds und Designers Hermann Jünger. Weitere Träger sind Senta Berger, Mario Adorf, Stefan Schörghuber.

Artikel erschienen am 18. Juli 2004
http://www.wams.de/data/2004/07/18/306405.html

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Die Welt 17. Juli 2004
Von 800 auf 36.000 Euro gesteigert
Europa bei Nagel in Stuttgart, Asiatische Kunst bei Lempertz und Klefisch in Köln
von Marion Zipfel und Marianne Hoffmann

Der Umzug des Auktionshauses Nagel in Stuttgart wurde mit einem Rekord-Halbjahr belohnt. Insgesamt wurden 13 Mio. Euro umgesetzt, wobei die Juni-Auktion mit einem Ergebnis von 3,27 Mio. Euro inkl. Aufgeld abschloss und sich damit als eine der stärksten Sommerauktionen der letzten Jahre hervortat. Robin Ph. Straub: "Dabei gab es aufgrund der regen Beteiligung aus dem In- und vor allem aus dem Ausland zahlreiche Zuschläge, die ihre Schätzungen mehr als verzehnfachten". Für das Spitzenlos der Auktion traf dies allerdings nicht zu. Mehr als das 36-fache der Taxe entlockte die Portraitbüste aus bemalter Terrakotta ihrem neuen Besitzer, die bisher Franz Xaver Messerschmidt zugeschrieben wurde. Diese Zuschreibung, so war klar, würde sich zukünftig nicht mehr halten können. Die Büste, so die einhellige Meinung von Fachleuten, sei wohl das Fragment einer ursprünglichen ganzfigurigen Darstellung. Bereits um 1500 in Norditalien entstanden, könnte es sich um den Kopf einer Stifterfigur handeln. So steigerte sich das auf 5000 Euro geschätzte Objekt im Bietgefecht auf 180 000 Euro.

Ebenfalls eine Überraschung barg der Aufruf eines Gemäldes von Theodor Horschelt. Die Schlachtenszene mit Kosaken, 1853, zog russisches Interesse auf sich. Hier fiel der Hammer bei 36 000 Euro (800 Euro). Denselben Zuschlag erzielte ein Verwandlungsmöbel aus der Bietermeierzeit. Der in Berlin um 1820 entstandene Modellsekretär zeichnete sich durch seine komplizierte Mechanik aus, er ging in den deutschen Handel (10 000). Überhaupt schnitten die Abteilungen Möbel und Kunsthandwerk besonders gut ab. Ebenfalls sehr erfolgreich verlief die 65. Varia-Auktion, das beste Ergebnis erzielte ein nicht näher bezeichnetes Kinderbildnis, das bei 11 000 Euro von einer Bieterin aus Übersee übernommen wurde (400 Euro). zp.

Asiatika in Köln
Glaubt man den Experten im Kunsthaus Lempertz in Köln, scheint es einen neuen Trend innerhalb der Asiatischen Kunst zu geben. Dieser Trend weist China als das Land aus, dessen historische Kunstwerke das Interesse der Fangemeinde asiatischer Kunst besonders beweckt haben. Chinesische Kunst und Kunstgewerbe erfreuen sich großen Zuspruchs und schlossen in Köln brillant ab. Japanische Kunst ist zwar nach wie vor gefragt, jedoch mit weitaus schwächerem Ergebnis. Dies belegt auch die starke Präsenz von chinesischen Interessenten während der Auktion. 90 Prozent der chinesischen Kunst ging ins Ausland, das meiste wieder an Chinesen.

Lempertz wartete mit einem geschlossenen Angebot an "Mark and Period" Porzellan aus einer alten Berliner Sammlung auf. Heftige und langanhaltende Bietgefechte hoben viele Stücke weit über ihre Taxe. Zwei Famille-rose-Deckelbecher des 18. Jahrhunderts stiegen von 400 auf 7500 Euro und zwei Daoguang-ducai-Kummen erreichten 8600 (2500) Euro. Ein blau-weißer chinesischer Pinselbecher der Transitional-Periode sprang von 1500 auf 7600 Euro.

Wenig anders war es bei der chinesischen Malerei. Auch sie überwand überwiegend ihre Taxen. Ein Blatt der Kaiserin Cixi (1835-1908) stieg von 2000 auf 7500 Euro und eine Hängerolle eines Anonymus mit der Kopie des Portraits eines kaiserlichen Pferdes kam von 3500 auf 4800 Euro.

Aus der Sammlung eines Japaners kam eine bedeutende Pekingglassammlung. Darunter war ein sehr seltenes ruyi-Zepter mit Uhr aus dem späten 18. Jahrhundert. 40 000 Euro Schätzwert waren hier angemessen und bei 60 000 Euro wurde dieses ungewöhnliche Stück abgegeben.

Star des Angebotes an chinesischer Kunst wurde in dieser Auktion allerdings ein Buddha Amitaya aus China, der von einem chinesischen Händler für 70 000 (5000) Euro erworben wurde.

Lempertz verzeichnete ein besseres Ergebnis als bei der Frühjahrsauktion.

Wenige Tage später lud Trudel Klefisch zur Auktion. Auch hier der Trend zur chinesischen Kunst, obwohl diese im Hause Klefisch sonst nicht so populär ist.

Höhepunkt wurde ein Divinations-Kalender in Laporelloform aus der Sammlung Lucien Francois. Er war mit 250-350 Euro vorsichtig geschätzt und ging für 5000 Euro. Junge Fans japanischer Kunst konnten sich schon für 80 Euro an einer Buchseite von Katsukawa Shunsho erfreuen, oder aber etwas teurer für 1400 (700-800) Euro an drei Einzelbuchseiten aus dem frühen 18. Jahrhundert.

2000 Euro erzielte bei den Netsuke ein kleiner, rundgelegter Wels aus makellosem, hellgelben Bernstein, mit Augen aus schwarzem Horn (1000-1800). mh
Artikel erschienen am 17. Juli 2004
http://www.welt.de/data/2004/07/17/306274.html

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The New York Times, Jun 7, 2004.
Driven by Wealth and Patriotism, Chinese Collectors Bid for Their Treasures
Jane Perlez.

When Sotheby's opens the bidding on some prize Chinese antiquities at its New Bond Street auction rooms in London on June 9, more than a dozen mainland Chinese art collectors will be there.

The rise of the Chinese art buyer has been swift and spirited. Five years ago private art collectors on the mainland were virtually unheard of. Now, driven by plenty of money and a patriotic rush to return treasures smuggled away over the centuries, Chinese collectors are bidding here as well as in New York and London.

Their emergence is another reminder, subtler than others but persuasive, of China's multifaceted reach beyond its surging economy. Growing personal affluence and in some cases outright fortunes, are spawning Chinese cultural and social interests abroad that are likely to be enduring.

''There are a lot of industrialists, a lot of money floating around,'' said Dr. S. Y. Yip, a well-known Hong Kong collector of Ming furniture. ''You buy cars, houses, boats, then you buy some culture. It's the same all over the world.''

The recently finished spring sales in Chinese art at Christie's and Sotheby's in Hong Kong posted some record prices, in part, because of the play of the mainland Chinese, both houses said.

People first noticed China's desire to repatriate its plundered art when the Poly Art Museum in Beijing acquired three ancient bronze animal heads that had been looted when French and British troops razed the Summer Palace in 1860, one of the spectacular humiliations of China during the Western invasion.

The museum, a subsidiary of a Chinese arms company, paid $4 million for the pieces at Sotheby's in Hong Kong four years ago, a fairly stiff price.

The museum made a lot of noise about the purchase, and announced the bronzes were specifically bought to ''return to the motherland.'' Since then, it has been actively buying, most recently what it called a ''rare national treasure'' dating to the Western Zhou dynasty of 3,000 years ago, bought in Hong Kong in May.

''Once the Poly Art Museum thinks they should buy something, they go crazy,'' said Dr. Yip, who had just returned from a trip to Beijing.

After this museum's entrance into the market, auction houses noticed Chinese businessmen showing interest. Xu Qiming, China's biggest exporter of eels, dominated the sale of a fine American collection of Chinese porcelain at Doyle's auction house in New York last fall. The porcelain was owned by F. Gordon Morrill and his wife, Elizabeth Hunter, and Mr. Xu's exuberant purchasing showed that the Chinese were interested in provenance as well as quality. In the same auction season, Lu Hanzehn, a major tire manufacturer, paid $1.5 million for a double-gourd Qing dynasty vase that was valued at less than $200,000.

The Western auction houses do not have licenses to sell in mainland China. So they have been quick to coax potential Chinese buyers to travel to their traditional sales rooms. For the coming London sale, Sotheby's is helping the collectors arrange their visas and travel plans, and the group will be squired around by Wang Jie, the representative for the auction house in Shanghai.

In some cases the auction houses have tailored their catalogs accordingly. In the Hong Kong spring auctions, Sotheby's fashioned a sale called ''The World of Qianlong.'' There were seals, lacquer chests, celadon vases, Buddha figures, a ceremonial court costume from the period 1736 to 1795, when Emperor Qianlong, a mega-collector himself, reigned.

Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby's Hong Kong-based director for China and Southeast Asia, compares the Chinese fascination with Qianlong art to the American interest in the belongings of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Just as Americans were impressed by the celebrated name, so some Chinese collectors covet the Qianlong patrimony, he said. But over all, Mr. Howard-Sneyd said, the Chinese were buying from a ''sense of bringing history back to China.'' To that end, auction houses in China itself are receiving consignments of Chinese art from abroad and selling to eager buyers at home. In May the Guardian Auction Company in Beijing sold for $4.3 million an 18th-century silk weaving designed at the behest of Emperor Qianlong with calligraphic renderings of a poem by a fourth-century poet.

The buyer later told The China Daily that the piece was bought for a ''private Chinese museum.'' One thing is for sure, Dr. Yip said, ''all the American Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese were outbid by the locals.''

The drive to bring Chinese art home is beginning to spread beyond antiquities. Alice King, who runs one of Hong Kong's most distinguished 20th-century art galleries, Alisan, recently took a show of paintings by Chao Chung-hsiang to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Shanghai Art Museum.

Chao, a student of Lin Fengmian, the revered founder of the Hangzhou Art Academy, left the mainland for Taiwan in 1948 and continued to paint there, as well as in Europe and in America. His canvases in bold splashes of color mix acrylic and ink. Some deep blue paintings are reminiscent of Joan Mitchell, the New York Abstract Expressionist.

Ms. King said she was encouraged that the Beijing Art Museum acquired two of Chao's works for its permanent collection.

So far China's new collectors have zeroed in on the familiar -- traditional works they recognize from history -- and have shown little taste for contemporary painting. But now the museum is showing the way. ''Hopefully that acquisition will encourage others,'' she said.

The Chinese still have a way to go before they reach stratospheric prices the Japanese paid in the 1980's and early 1990's for Impressionist paintings. The Chinese may not be in the same league as collectors who pay $104 million for a Picasso. They have yet to collect outside their own Chinese-centric sphere.

But it may not be long before their horizons expand. ''The big move will be seen when they start to pay really big money for Chinese art,'' Mr. Howard-Sneyd said. ''The ultimate move will be when they start to compete with the big boys in New York.''

[Photograph]
Chinese art buyers examine a rare Northern Song Dynasty vase, part of an auction of Chinese works at Sotheby's in London this week. (Photo by Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images)(pg. E5); Ming vase at Sotheby's in London, which is coaxing buyers from mainland China. (Photo by Sotheby's); Alice King, who runs a Hong Kong art gallery, with works by Chao Chung-hsiang. (Photo by Jeremy Stigter for The New York Times)(pg. E1)
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abstract?res=F60713FC35550C748CDDAF0894DC404482
http://www.lezhou.net/0613/19.htm

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Art boom
Shanghai Daily news [no date - MA]

Yang Fudong, 33, left Beijing for Shanghai in 1997. The once penniless artist on the cutting-edge of contemporary art is now a media darling and considered a cultural icon.
"Coming to Shanghai was a turning point in my life," says Yang, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. "When I first moved to the city, some of my friends thought I was crazy because at that time, Beijing had a vibrant, avant-garde art scene."
Yang wanted "a new environment to refresh myself" and it didn't take long before he found it.
In Shanghai, Yang was soon contracted to one of the top galleries and his videos and photos gained massive exposure at overseas biennales and fairs.
Yang spends a lot of time traveling - he was recently in Venice and soon to be in the United States.
This year, he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Award, an honor given to six outstanding contemporary artists selected from around the world.
Critics say Yang is an example of the "Shanghai Phenomenon," a term coined to explain the rise of contemporary art in the city.
"A decade ago, artists from different regions in China flooded to Beijing and some of them later became the great figures of Chinese contemporary art," says Gu Zhengqing, a local critic. "Naturally foreign curators and collectors went to Beijing as their first choice to spot the artists of tomorrow."
Beijing used to be identified as a city of history and culture while the Shanghai's image related to economics and fashion. But that has changed.
"Now, few would think about the two cities in that way," says Yang. "We have the Shanghai Biennale, the Shanghai Art Fair and Shanghai Spring Art Saloon. All of these events have created a reputation for the art scene in the city."
With the shift, many artists have since traveled to the city to be where the action is.
Along Suzhou Creek, warehouses and industrial factories have been turned into studios and galleries.
"There are about 40 to 50 artists like me. We live and work here," says Zhang Zongmei, a 36-year-old artist from Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. "I enjoy the lifestyle. It's a perfect studio with a high ceiling. We frequently have joint exhibitions and solo shows."
These studios have become a compulsory visit for curators, critics and collectors as well.
"It's always good to have art communities in a city," says Lorenz Helbling, ShanghART gallery owner.
But the monthly rent for artists along the creek, about 4,000 yuan (US$482) to 5,000 yuan for a studio space, is not very affordable. Other studios on offer such as the "Painter's Village" in the city's suburb charges 500 yuan a month for a studio space.
"I am fully aware that most of the artists who choose to live here are unknown," says Tang Shengtian, the owner of the "Painter's Village." "But the fact is, some of them are incredibly talented and very ambitious. I hope that this place will be a temporary location for them on the road to fame."
Tang says around 80 artists from all around China currently live in the building.
"I wanted to try my luck in Shanghai," confesses Wang Bo, a 20-year-old from Heilongjiang Province. "Here is where my dream started."
While the city embraces young artists from all over the country, it also breeds its own - many have already gained an international reputation.
In March, Xu Zheng, a 27-year-old Shanghai native, won the 2004 Chinese Contemporary Art Awards - perhaps further proof of the "Shanghai Phenomenon."
"I hate this term," Xu says. "This is just another word invented by the critics, boring and meaningless."
Xu's words are echoed by Uli Sigg, one of the big names in Chinese contemporary art. "It is unnecessary to stress the regional differences," Sigg explains.
"Actually I found other terrific artworks in different parts in China. I guess I could name it 'Xi'an Phenomenon' or 'Sichuan Phenomenon'," he says.
Whether artists agree with the term or not, it is true that the Shanghai art scene is now at the forefront of art in China. Gallery owners believe it's just the start.
Shanghai Gallery of Art, which opened at Three on the Bund last year, is aiming high when it comes to exhibiting and selling. "We will be an important contemporary art center and hope to develop a dynamic influence in the art scene," says Wen Ling, gallery manager.
The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art is also on the list of important art spaces.
With an exhibition space of 4,800 square meters, the museum is the city's first contemporary art museum. It's astonishing to find six professional video rooms on the fourth floor, a rare treat for Chinese video artists.
"Sometimes my video works are screened at the museum. You know it has been so hard to expose this kind of work in China before," says Yang. "I feel so lucky that I stepped into the city right at the time of an art boom."
http://english.eastday.com/epublish/gb/paper1/1331/class000100006/hwz202877.htm

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Humanities, July/August 2004
Playful Pursuits - Games from Asia to the West
By Janis Johnson

Bridge, chess, backgammon, polo, and Snakes and Ladders have one thing in common: they all originated in pre-modern Asia and spread throughout the world. Games were transmitted from culture to culture by caravans, merchants, mercenaries, or invading armies such as that of Alexander the Great. Games were as significant as trade and religion for transmitting cultural forms and ideas, and as objects of art, they were treasured possessions and status symbols, often finely crafted and elaborately decorated to reflect the aspirations of their owners.

"In ancient times, people couldn't read or write, but they carried the designs of the games in their heads, and when they sat around the fire, they passed them on," says scholar Irving Finkel. "Games have vibrancy and vitality in people's lives on a level that has nothing to do with authority. When you have a really good game, nothing can stop it."

In "Asian Games: The Art of Contest," which opens in New York on October 14 before traveling to Washington, D.C., and the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont, Finkel and his co-curator have assembled nearly two hundred objects from around the world to demonstrate the pervasiveness of Asian games in ancient and contemporary culture--and the vocabularies, metaphors, values, and visual arts that they have contributed to the world. Asian games are a prism through which to explore social attitudes and values throughout history.

"Asia has been the wellspring of more games than any region of the world and certainly the most successful games," says co-curator Colin Mackenzie, curator of Asian art at the Middlebury College Museum of Art and former associate director of the Asia Society Museum. "Games are a component of that phenomenon we call culture, and are as important as the visual arts and the performing arts. They are a cultural activity that more people have indulged in than anything else--people listen to performances, but how many are performers? Europe and the West are in debt to Asia, as games are a significant element of cultural exchange."

Play, says David Parlett in his introduction to the exhibition catalog, "belongs to the superior field of activities which define us as spiritual beings, together with religion and the arts. . . . What makes a game 'real' rather than metaphorical is the sense that players agree that they are in fact playing a game and not using a game-like procedure in pursuit of practical, functional ends. Real play comes to an end when its players report back to the real world."

"What's very compelling is that unlike eating or sleeping, playing a game is the only universal human activity that is not a necessity," says Helen Abbott, associate director of the Asia Society Museum.

The art of contest involves social interactions such .as winning and losing, provides insight into skills necessary for education and the development of a young person in society, offers experiences in both the unpredictable and the controllable, and reflects class and gender roles as games are transmitted across cultures.

"The large number of world games, ancient and modern, boil down into a few families--war games, race games, hunt games, position games," says Finkel, an assistant keeper in the Department of the Ancient Near East in the British Museum. "This tells you something about games themselves. The hunt, the race, the fight are deep-seated in the human mind. There is a school of thought that believes the origin of games was a way of reducing everything to a miniature scale, where the danger of it, the true violence, was diminished."

"The fun of winning creates an adrenaline surge. After losing, you can say, 'I can win again--it's not the end of the day,'" says Mackenzie. "One is empowered by learning a skill, which can be physical or mental. A board game is a way of exercising your mind."

The Chinese recognized this more than four thousand years ago. The mastery of weiqi--a game of strategy in which a player defeats opponents by superior mental skill--was considered one of four essential cultural accomplishments, along with music, calligraphy, and painting.

"Games are important in society," says Finkel. "They are not trivial. There is no culture that has not played them. Before the modern world, before literacy, games were a way of spending time, finding fulfillment, and in many cases an outlet for aggression. . . . A game is preferable to war. And games are different from war. In war and love, anything goes. But a game without rules does not exist. The idea that you can win only within a constricted set of options that are shared by you and your opponent is fundamental."

The exhibition features games that shed light on aesthetic preferences, cultural values, and intercultural communication. Priority has also been given to games that have cross-cultural impact and have inspired significant art works. The exhibition is divided into four types of games--chance, strategy, memory and matching, and physical skill. Game paraphernalia, paintings, images of people playing games, and literary and historical background information are on display.

Games of chance include dice, backgammon, and the Indian "game of knowledge" that inspired Snakes and Ladders in England and Chutes and Ladders in the United States. Games of chance may have evolved in connection with divination systems, and liubo, a Chinese divination game, presents an example of a craze that lasted five hundred years, from the fourth century B.C.E. to the second century C.E. Liubo was a dice game and a game of displacement, in which players captured each other's pieces and the board's layout had cosmological significance. "It had the most remarkable dice that we know of in the history of dice-- eighteen-sided and numbered with Chinese characters from one to sixteen, and the characters on the other two sides we are not quite certain, but they probably depicted 'win' or 'lose,'" says Mackenzie. Liubo was very culturally specific and did not cross China's borders; ultimately it was eclipsed by weiqi, a game of pure strategy.

Backgammon, on the other hand, is a game that has become so much a part of Western culture that many may assume it came from Europe. The game was known in Rome, but it also had roots in Asia. The Persians claimed to have invented it, and by the fifth century it was closely associated with the ruling Persian elite. From Persia it traveled to China and Japan, and scroll paintings illustrate Japanese women playing backgammon, which was part of an aristocratic lady's dowry.

Games of chance were not only about a race to the finish, but also about players attaining a spiritual or material goal or state. Snakes and Ladders is a simple form of a race game, with one or two dice and the goal of arriving at a destination as quickly as possible.

Finkel is a specialist in pachisi, the second most important game to come out of India after chess. It reached Britain and America in the mid nineteenth century, reduced to a game requiring little skill. "The original game played in India for centuries was a complex sophisticated race game with dice, involving skill, strategy, and pure luck," Finkel says. "It was played by Muslim rulers as well as the poor, and was for centuries a national game. It was complicated as well in that in different parts of the country there were different rules."

In India the "game of knowledge" had a clear religious, moral, and didactic theme. "As you ascend in the boxes, you get closer to nirvana," Mackenzie says.

In Chinese versions the idea was "to get ahead because the road to success was to climb the ladder of official bureaucracy. . . through merit. You could write a history of the Chinese bureaucracy through these games. Yet this was almost totally a game of chance, not skill," Mackenzie continues. "From India, Snakes and Ladders was picked up by British colonials, but it lost its real moral and didactic element and becomes just a children's game."

The exhibition focuses on two consummate games of intellectual skill, chess and weiqi, also known as Go in Japanese. Both games enjoyed high status in Asia and Europe, with the exception of Chinese chess.

Perhaps more than any other game, chess has been associated with political power and authority. Differing styles of chess sets reflected religious and cultural differences. It is believed to have evolved from an early Indian game, chaturanga, which is Sanskrit for "having four limbs," a reference to the four branches of the Indian army: elephants, horsemen, chariots, and infantry. Although no early example of Indian chess survives, in Persia and much of the Islamic world chess came to be regarded as a royal game. Its sets were abstract, perhaps reflecting Islamic avoidance of figural representation. The transmission of chess from Islam to Europe sometime in the tenth century had an effect on European leisure habits, and pieces took on an explicitly military form with images of power and authority, such as the queen and bishop.

Some games of memory and matching--card games, dominoes, and mahjong--have unexpected origins. Chinese printed money, for example, was the original inspiration for playing cards. Games of connoisseurship include Japanese poetry cards, the playing of which depended on one's knowledge of poetry rather than card suits. The Japanese incense game was dependent on olfactory memory, but again, as a game that was particularly culturally specific, it did not find favor elsewhere.

Games of physical skill, including kickball and polo, dispel the misconception that such games are primarily Western or modern in their origin. These games also display the importance of physical skills in the societies they represent, and suggest gender roles. Polo's origin is probably horseback chase games such as buzkashi, which is still practiced among the nomadic peoples of Central Asia. The first literary and visual references to the game in China date from the late seventh century, after which time it became a popular sport in court circles throughout the Tang dynasty, where polo was played by both men and women in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Particularly among the elite, women's enthusiasm for physical sports was curtailed in the following Song dynasty, which spanned the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. But polo continued to move westward to Persia and on to India, where it was adopted by British colonials who carried it to the West.

Finkel does not believe that today's computer games are a death knell for traditional game forms. "Competition against a machine is very shallow," he says. "And the traditional games of the world are in the hands of huge numbers of people who live in parts of the world that are more or less unaffected by the computer."

"Games will always be popular," Mackenzie says. "In this sense, society is competitive; the idea is to get ahead, and yet you do it within a set of assumptions about what is right."

Janis Johnson is a writer in Los Angeles.

The Asia Society received $340,332 in NEH support for "Asian Games: The Art of Contest." The exhibition opens at the Asia Society Museum in New York on October 14 and will travel to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Beginning in 2005, a version of "Asian Games" will travel to small and midsize museums as a part of the NEH on the Road initiative.
http://www.neh.fed.us/news/humanities/2004-07/playfulpursuits.html

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The Asahi Shimbun, July 14(IHT/Asahi: July 15,2004) (07/15)
Koguryo art rises above identity dispute

Even in a photograph, the angelic inhabitants of heaven that adorn the walls of the tombs of Koguryo-an ancient kingdom thought to have existed on Korean Peninsula-were stunningly beautiful. Whoever painted them used bold colors to depict weightlessly moving nymphs.

Judging from the quality of the picture distributed by a Chinese news agency last week, it is unimaginable that the nymphs now, thousands of years later, are any less vivid or beautiful than when the mural was painted.

This year the Koguryo tombs, including the one with this painting inside, were named World Heritage cultural site by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Prior to this, though, the ancient tombs were engulfed in a wave of international politics. Because those tombs span beyond the North Korean border into China, an obvious dispute arose: Did the Kingdom of Koguryo exist in China or on the Korean Peninsula.

Objections raised by China reportedly led UNESCO to put off its approval of a North Korean request for World Heritage classification last year. This year, China and North Korea agreed on a compromise, which allowed them to file separate applications.

Even so, protests against China have gained momentum in South Korea, partly because of a Chinese newspaper's assertion that Koguryo was a Chinese kingdom. Late last year, a South Korean academic society issued a statement of protest, fearing that Koguryo might eventually be incorporated into Chinese history.

Japan played a hand in putting the Koguryo tombs on the World Heritage list. Well-known painter Ikuo Hirayama led an intensive lobbying effort in the hope that UNESCO's approval of the ancient tombs as World Heritage cultural site might prod the reclusive North Korea to open its doors to the world.

It may even be conceivable that Japan will emerge as a ``bridge'' for promoting joint research and mutual interchanges among China, North Korea and South Korea.

Don Shou, who sought asylum in 336 from China, is said to be buried in one of the largest Koguryo painted tombs on the Korean Peninsula. The giant tomb attests to his having held an exalted post in the kingdom.

According to Lee Sungsi, author of a book published by Iwanami Shoten that deals with ancient East Asian races and states, Dong Shou is thought to have played an important role when the kingdom faced a diplomatic crisis with China.

The influence of Koguryo culture is strongly in evidence in the wall paintings inside the Kitora tumulus in Asuka, Nara Prefecture. Considering this, the registration of the Koguryo tombs as World Heritage site offers an excellent opportunity to look back over cultural links and the movement of people in ancient East Asia.
http://www.asahi.com/english/vox/TKY200407150139.html

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Burrell set for Chinese exhibition?

A NEW exhibition of Chinese art and culture is to open in Glasgow tomorrow. [i.e. Thursday, 15 July, 2004 - MA]
The Chinese consul general to Scotland is to attend the opening at the Burrell Collection.
Liu Jingxue will join culture minister Frank McAveety and council representatives at the city's first major Chinese exhibition: One Million Days In China.
The display will celebrate 4000 years of Chinese history and culture using Sir William Burrell's collection of Chinese art.
Themes include archaeology, the beginning of a system of writing and after-life beliefs.
The present Chinese community in Glasgow is also included in the exhibition as well as details of the Silk Road trade route that established links between east and west.
Around 90% of the exhibits have not been put on public display before.
Councillor John Lynch of the culture and leisure committee said: "China is brought closer to Glasgow through Sir William Burrell's Chinese collection in this unique exhibition."
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/print/news/5028549.shtml

cf.: http://www.glasgowmuseums.com/onemilliondaysinchina/exhibition/

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Chinese Writer Composes Novel for SMS
By Eric Lin, Mon Jul 12 23:45:00 GMT 2004

Serialized works of fiction have been around for hundreds of years. In the newest update to this art form, a Chinese writer has composed a novel to be distributed over a series of SMS messages -- each only 70 characters long.

SMS, MMS and generally most cellular communication is suited to short transmissions -- ideas or snapshots, not large scale endeavors. Content creators have been busy at work porting games, soap operas and other broadband or large screen content to the mobile phone. Pioneering writers too, are developing large scale works for the small screen.

For some time Japanese subscribers have been reading serialized fiction (and now even comics) on their cell phones. Most stories are only available through web browsers, however Deep Love, a popular fictional work [http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/12/mobile_fiction_micro.html], has been sent to subscribers' handsets via email. Cellular email is limited to 1600 characters, which forced the author to keep chapters concise, and use simple language, both of which have been attributed to the story's success.

Now a Chinese author is challenging even the most succinct of writers by composing a serialized work in SMS [http://www.mobilepipeline.com/news/22104795], which is limited to only 70 characters for double-byte languages. Each SMS will compromise a chapter, with the "novel" totaling about 60 messages. Because China has an even more splintered cellular geography than the US, the author, a professor at Guangdong Literature Academy, will not be able to publish his story by himself. Instead the Academy will hold an auction for SMS service providers for publishing rights. Considering the number of mobile subs in China, the Academy is hoping the story draws quite a price.

For years psychologists and sociologists have been complaining that MTV and other new media was fracturing the attention span of younger generations. While it clearly wasn't premeditated, this has paved the way for short serialized works and other cellular friendly media. MTV probably didn't realize it was raising the mobile generation, but it's done a good job.
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100872&threshold=-1&ref=1909963

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mobilepipeline.com, Juli 12, 2004
Novel Designed for Text Messaging Service
By Associated Press

BEIJING -- A Chinese author has written a novel meant to be read in 70-word chapters transmitted by cell phone text message.

"Outside the Fortress Besieged," the story of an extramarital affair, consists of 60 such chapters totaling about 4,000 words, the Xinhua News Agency said.

"The plot develops just like that of an ordinary novel," author Qian Fuchang was quoted as saying.

The potential market is huge: China has the world's biggest mobile phone market, with more than 300 million users. They are avid buyers of services that send news, sports, horoscopes and other material by mobile phone message.

Qian's employer, the Guangdong Literature Academy in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, is planning an auction to sell the novel to short message services.

"The novel, which contains all literary elements, will be a real literary work," said Xie Wangxin, the academy's vice chairman.
http://www.mobilepipeline.com/news/22104795

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The New York Times, July 11, 2004
New York's Bizarre Museum Moment
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

SUDDENLY museums all across town are suffering identity crises. Just as New York is shaking off its sorrows and crawling out of debt, making new claims on the world stage with a bid for the Olympics, our museums seem to be going through weird convulsions, falling apart, abandoning their collections, being hijacked by trustees or suffering delusions of grandeur. This is their most precarious moment in many years.

The Whitney — oh, the poor, perennially insecure Whitney, which can never get its act straight — is going through another of its periodic upheavals. Its last director was pushed out, a new one was hired, the old staff gracelessly purged or induced to quit, yet another curatorial crew brought in. The Whitney has become like Stalin's politburo. The only long-term survivors are the people everybody in the art world knows really need to go: the trustees.

Cash short as always and feeling inadequately loved by the Manhattan art world, the Brooklyn Museum seems virtually to have said to hell with it all. Raising a fortune for a glitzy new facade, it has at the same time been shopping or thinking of shopping parts of its great collection, renting exhibitions of "Star Wars" costumes and cheapening its venerable permanent displays, all in the name of community outreach. "If that's not significant to critics," its director, Arnold Lehman, told The New York Times last April, "you know — and you can quote me — I don't care."

The New-York Historical Society, the city's oldest museum, is in turmoil again, scaling back local-theme shows, firing experts, betting questionably that expensive blockbusters will save the place rather than destroy it.

The once high-rolling Guggenheim, which a decade ago was expanding in New York and around the world, is now crumbling, literally, the facade of its landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building cracked and peeling. Its SoHo satellite is, like SoHo's heyday, a dim memory; the dream of a Frank Gehry-designed palace on the East River in Lower Manhattan has gone the way of the museum's intemperate scheme to bank its fortunes on a branch in Las Vegas.

As for the Museum of Modern Art, its new building opens this fall, a sprawling megastructure in Midtown. Will bigger be better? Born a frisky place, it became increasingly defensive and constipated as it grew. Now we'll see whether it becomes what it promises — the ultimate treasure house of modernism, rejuvenated, majestic and frisky again — or just a bloated, super-size custodian of its own self-importance. And at $20 a ticket, who will go?

Even the Met, the gold standard of museums, is in some transition. A reshuffling of its European paintings and modern-art departments sounds eye-glazingly irrelevant. But it may be lousy news for anybody still hoping that the museum will fulfill its decades-old promise to deal properly with the art of its own time.

At the Whitney, the most recent director to get the boot is Max Anderson. He wasn't perfect — he'd staged his own messy staff turnover and miscalculated the quality of some curators and exhibitions — but he brought in a bunch of good shows. Attendance and membership were up. A team of curators he put together staged the recent Biennial, a good one for once. The permanent collection and art conservation were getting professional attention, finally.

But the place remained dysfunctional at the top. The chairman, Leonard Lauder, who has given millions in cash and art, and the president, Robert J. Hurst, were instrumental in bringing on as trustees Jean-Marie Messier, the subsequently indicted chief executive of Vivendi, and L. Dennis Kozlowski, the Tyco tycoon, also later indicted. Mr. Hurst is the former vice chairman of Goldman, Sachs, which took Mr. Lauder's company, Estée Lauder, public — and which has several executives on the board. Even after Mr. Hurst was investigated and found to have evaded millions of dollars in taxes on his art collection, the Whitney kept him on as president.

Meanwhile, the trustees were shoving vanity shows into the mix — an Agnes Martin display, for example — and were overheard grumbling that the place should be more fashionable, should reflect their own tastes in collecting, should expand but with an architect they liked now as opposed to yet another of the ones they thought they liked before, and should compete with the Modern, which just happens to be run by Mr. Lauder's younger brother, Ronald.

So Mr. Anderson had to go. The first move by his successor, Adam Weinberg, was to fire a curator who was on leave to care for her seriously ill child. After that public relations debacle, the subsequent turnovers were handled more discreetly. The latest to call it quits is a Biennial curator.

You can bet she's not going to be the last. At most museums, curators stay put when directors change, as professors do when college presidents go, because the affiliation is with the institution and its permanent collection. At the Whitney, they come and go like Yankee managers in George Steinbrenner's early days.

Over at the Met, the director, Philippe de Montebello, has appointed a seasoned expert in Impressionist art with a background in Cubism, Gary Tinterow, to oversee the museum's 19th-century European paintings and its modern and contemporary collections. Even some Met curators are baffled by the logic. Why European but not 19th-century American art or photography? Anyway, the larger question is whether this fuzzy reorganization means the museum will finally do better by contemporary art or even worse. The prospects are not great: the curator in charge is intelligent and resourceful but not a specialist in the period; his mandate is exceedingly broad and Mr. de Montebello has made many statements to the effect that he himself has little interest in the stuff.

Why should the Met bother with what's contemporary? Because history doesn't stop. Under Tom Hoving, its former director, the museum started collecting and showing new art more aggressively. It briefly became the anti-Modern, a troublemaker and alternative voice with special authority behind it.

Now it's the sleeping giant of contemporary art. Every modern curator in the world knows its enormous potential. Its resources and audience are peerless. One hundred percent of that audience is contemporary. Artists consider the museum a second home. Other great historical museums, even those without any new art in their collections (the Louvre, the National Gallery in London) collaborate with living artists, who bring in new audiences and put the older art in fresh perspective. But the Met's outgoing modern-art chief kept the place in limbo; he brought in gifts but mounted hardly any shows of new art, bought tons of junk and displayed the collection badly. An overhaul is due. A further retreat is not.

A friend called me the other day. Browsing through art sales catalogs, he came across a painting on the block at Skinner, a Boston auction house. The picture was by a once-fashionable, occasionally stylish Viennese-born society painter, Emil Fuchs, an acquaintance of Sargent's, who became popular in New York after World War I. The catalog identified the sitter simply as John McCormack.

My friend knew that McCormack was the great Irish tenor. But the catalog didn't mention it: apparently the seller had shipped the painting off for auction without bothering to figure out what it was. The estimated price: a few hundred bucks.

The seller, it turns out, was the Brooklyn Museum. Fuchs had bequeathed the museum all the art in his studio in 1929, shortly before he killed himself. He chose Brooklyn because he loved the place. My friend bought the painting for $360 (including commissions), which is exponentially less than what he has been told it would sell for had it been properly identified and auctioned more auspiciously by the museum.

This was alarming news. But not surprising. Curators at Brooklyn have said that their director, Arnold Lehman, has them scouring the whole museum for art to sell off or otherwise get rid of. A spokeswoman for the museum, Sally Williams, said it's just "business as usual," that museums always assess their collections. "Collections are always being reviewed with an eye toward gaps and duplications," she said. The Fuchs was just part of housecleaning.

A century ago, an ethnology curator named Stewart Culin collected American-Indian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Eastern European and Indian objects on expeditions for the University of Pennsylvania and for the Brooklyn Museum. This was the sort of museum Brooklyn was: a broad-minded and far-reaching place. Thanks to Culin, it even opened a study room for artists and designers to view the ethnographic materials he acquired. Pairing the art with fashion and textile designs it inspired, the museum arranged exhibits at department stores and elsewhere around town. That was outreach.

The ethnographic clothes Culin amassed ended up, along with who knows how many of the fashion designs, in the museum's costume collection, a populist gold mine full of high fashion but also dresses that real middle-class Brooklynites wore when the Brooklyn museum was in its heyday, throughout the early and middle decades of the 20th century.

Now museum officials are talking with the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Met about taking all or part of the costume collection. That would at least keep it in the city and in public hands. But it's appalling to think that Brooklyn might squander or give up on one of its defining assets just because it costs money to maintain.

And in favor of what? In favor of a pandering overhaul: Brooklyn's landmark gallery for American-Indian art, full of Culin's treasures, has been repainted with cheesy eagles and sunsets on the walls. Pseudo-Egyptian props in the Egyptian galleries, which are presumably supposed to make the rooms more accessible, cheapen a world-class collection. The American galleries are crammed distractingly with wall texts and videos. Brooklyn clearly believes that people weaned on television and the Internet need that kind of stimulation. Art isn't stimulating enough, apparently.

That's the heart of the problem: that museums don't all still trust art to excite people on its own; they increasingly think it needs to be packaged, marketed and diluted. Does the public also think so? How popular was that "Star Wars" show, anyway? Back across the river at the Modern, where a different sort of overstimulation may become an issue, the museum that started in a modest gallery space, then moved into a town house, is soon to become so vast it could qualify for its own ZIP code. Here's hoping it will be spectacular, but the Modern's entire temporary space in Queens, which demonstrated what could be done with a small gallery at an obscure location, would fit into one of the bigger rooms in the new building.

To explain the planned $20 ticket price, the Modern's director, Glenn D. Lowry, said "it's a more expensive museum to operate" (no surprise), and he compared it to "other leisure activities" that charge the same or more. But is that what a museum is?

Reducing museums to nothing more than a leisure activity would obviously be insane. So would consigning them to an ivory tower: part of their beauty is their hubbub. "Dream houses of the collective," the phrase Walter Benjamin concocted for the Paris arcades, suits museums today, with their shops and their mobs who go to flirt and eat and pose. But museums are also our traditional palaces of rational entertainment, places for people to discover something they didn't already know, or didn't know they needed to know. They are sacred spaces, too, no matter how unfashionable that may sound: we expect to have in them encounters with authentic objects in a context that is respectful of our intelligence.

People go to museums, in the end, to have an experience unlike what they can get elsewhere, because works of art are not like everything else in life.

For a variety of reasons, many of the most important museums in New York find themselves simultaneously in the throes of transformation. Collectively they are grappling with identity, and some of them clearly have begun to lose track of their priorities. But their crises are also an opportunity. These institutions should seize the moment to interrogate their role in this swiftly changing culture — to recognize what their function is and get to it. Part of that function does not change: unlike "other leisure activities," museums still set standards of aesthetic quality, not equivocating but declaring what we should value about our culture and standing by those convictions. We can decide for ourselves if we agree.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/arts/design/11KIMM.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=f186c8b5fb10a58f&ex=1090123200

To do so, however, they must attend to one profound obligation: to cherish and preserve culture for posterity. Museums are our only institutions to do that, and the museums of this city set a standard. It's time for them to live up to that responsibility.

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The New York Times - July 15, 2004
Along the Silk Road, China Begins to Guard Its Heritage
By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

DUNHUANG, China — In late June this dusty small town, an oasis in the Gobi Desert that sprang up hundreds of years ago as a stop on the Silk Road, drew more than 200 art conservation experts from around the world. They came to advance the cause of preserving and managing the Mogao Grottoes, 492 cave temples carved into a cliff face about 15 miles outside Dunhuang between the 4th and 14th centuries and covered with elaborate Buddhist wall paintings portraying visions of heaven and earth in ancient China.

With China's economy expanding and tourism growing even faster, insiders and outsiders worry that China will not take the time and trouble, or have the resources and expertise, to preserve its rich cultural heritage. Much has already been lost.

But success in Dunhuang would help lead the way for other Chinese sites. "The tension between economic development and conservation is everywhere, and it's very serious," said Huang Kezhong, former deputy director of the China National Institute for Cultural Property. Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Academy, the guardian of Mogao, added, "Most frequently, it's the cultural site that loses the battle."

For Ms. Fan, a petite, feisty archaeologist said to rule the academy with an iron hand, the challenges come as much from the biting winds, sand, salt and water as from the growing ranks of tourists and the rapid development of this remote outpost. Still, with its comprehensive approach to managing the site — including conservation labs, scientific and environmental research arms, fine arts and archaeology institutes, publications and exhibitions units — "it's a model for the whole of China," said Li Yang, deputy governor of Gansu province. The caves — stretching in tiers for about a mile across the light gold face of Singing Sand Mountain — had long been abandoned and were largely unknown until about 1900, when a Daoist monk discovered a huge trove of manuscripts in what is today known as the Library Cave. Locals paid little attention.

Once word about the honeycomb of caves filtered back to Europe, however, archaeologists and adventurers began to arrive. The caves were damaged; some had collapsed, in whole or in part. But inside, the explorers found a hidden world of Buddhist art: sculptures of Buddha, bodhisattvas and warriors as well as detailed murals depicting paradise and of daily life in rich shades of blue, green, brown, red and black.

Soon "foreign devils" were paying a pittance to haul away poems, prayer sheets, commercial records and even the wall paintings. (Most now reside in museums in London; Paris; St. Petersburg, Russia; New Delhi; and at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Repatriation is part of the Dunhuang Academy's long-term goal.)

By 1944 officials had recognized the caves' importance, establishing the academy. During the Cultural Revolution, Mogao was protected by no less than Zhou Enlai, said Richard A. Englehardt, regional adviser for culture in Asia and the Pacific for Unesco, which made it a world heritage site in 1987.

After China opened its doors to foreigners in 1978, conservation experts arrived from Japan, Britain, Australia, Italy and the United States. The Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the Getty Trust in Los Angeles that was a co-sponsor of the recent conference with the Dunhuang Academy, started working here in 1988.

The task was huge. The Getty's work alone has several aspects. To stall sand erosion, it installed a mesh fence that reduces wind speed by 50 percent and helped arrange the planting of grids of straw and branches in the desert dunes. Then the Getty adopted Cave No. 85, where it has done extensive work analyzing water and salt damage to the murals. To save the wall paintings, the Getty has developed a process that removes some salt from the cave walls and readheres the mural plaster.

Even after years of work, only about 40 caves are accessible, on a rotating basis of 10 to 12 a day, to tourists whose numbers have grown to more than 300,000 a year from about 50,000 in 1980, the year after Mogao opened to the public. Most visitors crowd into the caves during summer, quickly increasing the temperature and humidity and adding to the mural damage.

"The scale of the site is so vast that there is conservation work for generations to come," said Neville Agnew, the Getty's top Mogao project specialist.

Nevertheless, the Dunhuang Academy's achievements have made its reputation around China. "There is a tremendous demand on the Dunhuang Academy to help other areas on cultural protection," Mr. Huang said. Kuqa and Kizil, two cave sites on the Silk Road in Xinjiang Province, have asked for help, he said, as have three sites in Tibet that need expertise with the preservation of cave paintings and the Shaolin Monastery in Henan Province. The Dunhuang Academy has also set up an educational training course for northwest China.

"There is almost an endless line at their door asking for help," Mr. Huang said.

Preservation experts are hopeful about Dunhuang as a model for another reason too. It is one of the first two sites in China — the other being Cheng De, the Qing dynasty summer resort north of Beijing — to follow what are known as the China Principles. These heritage preservation guidelines were drawn up by China's State Administration for Cultural Heritage, along with the Getty Conservation Institute and the Australian Heritage Commission, and adopted in 2000.

The China Principles, which generally update existing international conventions, enshrine conservation principles and mandate an interdisciplinary management process. They require a master plan that, for example, researches and sets visitor capacity limits.

These guidelines have now largely been disseminated to the provinces, which are responsible for most heritage sites. But several experts at the conference said that many local officials appeared to be ignorant of them.

China has "made great progress in training conservationists and establishing many legal systems in heritage conservation at different levels," said Tong Mingkang, a deputy director of the State Administration for Cultural Heritage. "We now have a full, complete set of legal principles. The government has spent lots of money at different levels, and these achievements make us very proud."

But he conceded, "We need to adopt various measures to implement the China Principles." There is no enforcement mechanism for the standards.

Zhang Webin, a former director of China's heritage administration, was even harsher. "We still lack a strategic plan," he said. "Some don't understand the depth of conservation. We need to train professionals, particularly professionals with foreign experience. We need to have a complete law system."

In the meantime experts are looking to the Dunhuang Academy, an appropriate view for perhaps more than one reason. Dunhuang means "blazing beacon."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/arts/design/15ROAD.html

____________________

Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

Phone: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 75
Fax: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 39

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de

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