International Herald Tribune, Saturday, July 31, 2004
Following the traces of Buddhism's march through Asia
Souren Melikian IHT

LONDON It is not easy to travel 10,000 kilometers, all the way from Western Iran to Eastern China, in just one show. The "Silk Road" exhibition on view at the British Library until Sept. 12 must have left Susan Whitfield, the organizer and editor of the mammoth book that comes with it, exhausted. Subtitled "Trade, Travel, War and Faith," it meanders between documents and works of art without ever achieving a sense of direction.

One reason is that instead of being built around clear-cut themes, it centers on the mass of written documents and artifacts collected by Marc Aurel Stein early in the 20th century in the area then known as Chinese Turkistan.

These do not tell a story with a beginning and an end. They are small pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the bulk of which is lost. The texts, mostly fragmentary, are in a number of languages belonging to the Iranian, Turkic, Tibetan, Indian or Chinese domain, not to mention long vanished languages like Tokharian or Khotanese. This diversity is reflected in the artifacts.

A framework is indispensable and a chronological table would be useful. Both are missing. One clear plot, however, emerges: the key role played by the Sogdians, the northeast Iranians whose homeland spread between Bukhara and Samarkand, which are in present-day Uzbekistan. From the third century A.D., they spread out into Chinese Turkistan and founded the oasis city famous for its Buddhist caves, Dunhuang, the Chinese form of Sogdian Dhurwan - which, oddly, is not mentioned in the book. From there, these intrepid missionaries and traders traveled to China establishing communities as far as Loyang.

Not least, they played a role in the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, and that weaves them into the subplot, the spread of Buddhism into China.

This philosophy without a deity born in the Himalayan highlands of India, possibly in the sixth century B.C., eventually metamorphosed into a religion with the Buddha as the Lord of the Universe. In this new guise, probably of East Iranian confection, Buddhism reached China where, sources say, its first missionary was one An Shigao, the sinicized form of the Iranian name Arshaka. A prince from the Parthian dynasty of Iran who became a Buddhist monk, he arrived in Loyang in 148 A.D., as Eric Zurcher wrote long ago in “The Buddhist Conquest of China."

What stages Buddhism went through during the next three centuries is virtually unknown. But by the time most of the texts, paintings or artifacts brought back by Aurel Stein from Dunhuang or Khotan were executed, Buddhism had become the prevalent faith in Chinese Turkistan, with Manichaeism far behind and Christianity even further away.

Buddhism inspired brilliant schools of painting. Unfortunately, their evolution is not easily reconstructed nor can we say for sure whether the artists were Sogdian, Uighur or Chinese.

Because of its date and provenance, one may assume, for example, that the wonderful silk panel of the early eighth century representing the Buddha Teaching the Law was painted by a Sogdian - it was sold to Aurel Stein as a painting from Cave 17, the "Library Cave," at Dunhuang. By the 10th century, the Sogdians were becoming a minority outnumbered by the Turkic-speaking Uighurs. Buddhist art became very different.

A large painting with Avalo-kiteshvara seated on the lotus throne is naïve, not to say gauche. Columns of Chinese characters indicate that the main donor, one Mi Gongde, was “prefect of Dunhuang." Presumably the work was painted locally. Was the artist Uighur? Sogdian? Or, perhaps, an inexperienced Chinese? Hard to tell.

Yet the diversity of origin of the paintings represented among the finds reputed to come from Dunhuang is not in doubt. A temple banner of the early ninth century depicting Vajrapani has two Tibetan inscriptions on the back and its style is distinctly Tibetan. This is clearly a Tibetan painting, either brought from Tibet or executed in Dunhuang during the Tibetan occupation.

Not even the period is assured by the Dunhuang provenance, although, as the Chinese scholar Rong Xinjiang plausibly conjectured, the cave must have been sealed for safe-keeping in 1006 A.D. The conquering armies of the Turkish Qarakhanid ruler who had just occupied Khotan then became uncomfortably close.

Xinjiang warns that Aurel Stein did not find the Dunhuang paintings and manuscripts himself. He bought them through his Chinese secretary from the cave guardian, Wang Yuanlu, who had taken out all the contents of the caves seven years earlier. This explains why a fine Tibetan painting tentatively dated “11th to 16th century?" is included among the supposed “Dunhuang finds."

Such uncertainty, though, is nothing compared with the lack of documentation plaguing many artifacts in the show.

One of the major consequences of Sogdian travel was the aesthetic upheaval that shook China in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Iranian fashions became the rage, from costume (as shown by the figures recovered from Tang funerary chambers wearing short tunics with lapels, baggy trousers and typical boots) to courtly pastimes (hunting with saluki dogs and hawks, the polo game) to silver vessels at aristocratic banquets.

A display of some of the artifacts from the excavations carried out by Chinese archaeologists over the last 40 years, many of them found in precisely dated contexts, would have been highly desirable. Instead, the objects come mainly from British or French institutions and have no provenance – they were acquired through donations or in the market. Artistically fine, they are historically useless. The same remark applies to the Iranian objets d'art. Several have been found in China, in precise contexts. These would be fascinating. Two glass vessels from the British Museum's own collections, acquired in the art market, are beautiful but irrelevant.

On closer inspection, even some of the most famous texts brought back by Aurel Stein raise provenance questions. Leaves from the "Book of Zambasta," written in Khotanese, were given to the British Museum by the British consul general in Kashgar. He bought them from one Badruddin, who in turn cited as their provenance some dwellers in Taklimakan, a huge desert. At least here authenticity is not an issue - Khotanese had not been deciphered, and the calligraphy is sublime.

Not all visitors will feel the same confidence when gazing at the carved marble panels of a funerary couch bought by the Miho Museum in central Japan from a New York dealer who acquired them in Hong Kong. (The catalog refrains from mentioning this).

The panels, of various sizes, display iconographic oddities. In one panel with a royal banquet, for example, a man stands holding a harp in an improbable posture while others hold lutes even more bizarrely. The handling of the cross-legged king's face bears a curious resemblance to the kind of Western sculpture beloved in the days of Socialist Realism. One of the couches from an archaeological site excavated by the Chinese would have been immensely preferable.

The overriding impression is of a show hastily cobbled together on the cheap. Some very interesting scholarly contributions in the book by Etienne de la Vaissière ("The Rise of the Sogdian Merchants and the Role of the Huns") or Prods Oktor Skaervo (“Iranians, Indians, Chinese and Tibetans: Rulers and Ruled of Khotan in the First Millennium”) do not make up for the complete lack of unity. Indeed, some other essays seem out of place. Not many in the general public may want to follow a linguistic commentary of a Tibetan text scrupulously transliterated.

The display, atrociously cramped and badly lit, does not help. Some will feel that the trek is as tough as any in the sands of the Taklimakan.

http://www.iht.com/articles/531974.htm

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Newsweek International, Aug. 9, 2004
China's Glasnost
The country's communist leaders are beginning to embrace the avant-garde art and literature they once considered taboo.
By Melinda Liu

Aug. 9 issue - A decade ago avant-garde photographer Rong Rong lived in a ramshackle farmhouse and took odd jobs to support himself. "No one was interested in buying my work," he recalls. On the contrary: once when he was photographing performance artist Zhang Huan, who had stripped naked, covered himself with honey and then sat for an hour in a Beijing public toilet while flies landed on him, a villager stumbled upon the shoot and called the authorities.

Today the arresting images created by Rong and his Japanese wife, Inri, also a photographer, get a much better reception. They sell for more than $10,000 each, and 20 are currently on display in "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China" at New York's International Center of Photography (ICP).

Dozens more photos, many featuring nudes, were exhibited last winter in a show in Beijing that Rong, 36, says he thought authorities would shut down "on the first day." Instead the exhibit ran without a hitch for two months. "In the 1990s I never imagined that this could happen," marvels the goateed artist, who now lives in a two-story home designed by a top Beijing architect.

Talk about a cultural revolution. It wasn't long ago that government censorship severely curtailed creative freedom in China. Everything from nudity and abstract art to rock and roll and literary erotica was taboo. No longer. A group of private shows held in Beijing last year contained all kinds of shocking images: a video of an artist sleeping with 20 sex workers; photos of Rong and Inri standing naked near Mount Fuji; an installation of two nudes slowly entwined together by live silkworms; a performance artist tearing up a Communist Party flag; a "shock" installation by Peng Yu and Sun Yuan in which eight pit bulls chained to facing treadmills lunged futilely at each other. Now one of the shows' patrons, real-estate mogul Zhang Baoquan, is preparing his next big splash: a Woodstock-style open-air rock-and-roll concert in the remote western city of Yinchuan, better known for poverty than for artistic progressiveness.

From Beijing to the boondocks, China's contemporary culture scene is flowering. Liberalization triggered by a quarter century of capitalist reforms is transforming not only the visual arts but music, theater, fashion design, architecture and literature. Contemporary artists are selling their works to Western and Chinese collectors alike—and local real-estate developers have emerged as wealthy patrons of the alternative arts (sidebar). To be sure, censorship has not entirely disappeared. But some Chinese authorities are becoming convinced that "the amount of attention paid to the arts is, like GDP, an index to measure the success of a city," says Wong Shun Kit of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, whose annual international film festival provides an outlet for underground mainland artists. To that end, the government is beginning to support some formerly contraband art.

The rise of a new generation of top leaders has even prompted some to compare China's creative explosion to the glasnost era of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Since Hu Jintao, 61, became president last year, his government has signaled a more flexible approach to creative expression. "The government hasn't given up control, but it is being more lenient," says artist Huang Rui, who was a member of China's first avant-garde arts group, the Stars, back in the 1980s when artists were often arrested and their shows shut down. "Possibly, Hu Jintao will become China's Gorbachev."

To be sure, Hu's no Gorby when it comes to politics. China's awakening—first economic and now cultural—has yet to transform its hidebound political system in any fundamental way. Artworks deemed overtly political may still be banned. And the same old subjects remain taboo: Taiwanese independence, ethnic tension, the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and, above all, the legitimacy of Communist Party rule.

But Chinese authorities have become more aware of the costs of controlling creativity. "They know that if they shut down a show or arrest an artist, they're going to get lots of negative international media attention," says Robert Bernell, owner of the Beijing art-publishing house Timezone 8. Officials are also bowing to the realization that the Internet is impossible to control fully. Weblogs offer myriad new outlets for experimental writing. Online bulletin boards allow budding authors and artists to show their work, access international cultural news and critique one another.

Nowhere is the dynamism of avant-garde China more evident than at the former weapons factory in the Chaoyang district of Beijing known as Factory 798. The soaring Bauhaus-style structure now houses the country's largest single collection of private galleries and studios. What started as a funky, low-rent, grass-roots art enclave two years ago now hosts dozens of —cutting-edge shows a year and is home to international galleries run by collectors in London, Singapore, Tokyo and Berlin. "This is the only community of its kind in China," says Chaoyang district Mayor Chen Gang. "People are comparing it to New York's SoHo district."

The market for experimental works is booming, at home as well as abroad. Wary of both the mainland's stock market and its overheating real-estate sector, newly rich Chinese "are looking at art as an investment," says calligrapher and contemporary artist Wong Dongling. At contemporary-art galleries and auctions, individual pieces now sell for $2,000 to $100,000 each.

While most such works are displayed privately, government-sponsored venues are also beginning to test the limits of creative freedom. In mid-June a group of intellectuals, artists and photojournalists gathered at Shanghai's Duolun Museum of Modern Art to peer at artist He Chengbuo's nearly nude body bound with white duct tape—the first time the government had granted permission for a nude performance in an official public space. Beijing recently invested $18 million to renovate its National Art Museum, which now boasts several Picassos as well as works by Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns—all of which would have been banned during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

Avant-garde exhibits and performance venues are popping up in smaller towns too. In early July the tradition-bound inland city of Xian—China's capital during the Tang dynasty—hosted an exhibit called "Is It Art?" that featured, among other things, a shirtless man suspended high in the air moving bags of cement around like a human crane. Designed to draw attention to the relationship between man and machine, the installation also critiqued China's relentless construction boom.

The push for more artistic openness has sent expectations soaring. "In the past, if we could just have an exhibition without it getting shut down, that was good enough," says mixed-media artist Qiu Zhijie, who recently set up a Web site for artists to display works. "Now we have greater demands. We want a bigger audience. We want domestic and private foundations to support us."

Some forms of creative expression remain more circumscribed than others. The mainland doesn't have a single radio station dedicated to rock music, says a local DJ, because so much rock is anti-authoritarian. Censors still restrict alternative music, maintaining the right to vet song lyrics before all public concerts, from those of local rockers to the Rolling Stones. But some underground bands are emerging into the open. Last year state-run China Central Television invited heavy-metal band Black Panther to perform—one of the first times a Chinese rock band had been shown live on mainland TV, says Liang Long, the 27-year-old lead singer for Secondhand Rose, another Beijing band. "The government didn't understand rock and roll in the '80s and '90s," he says. "Today's leaders are younger and more open-minded."

Literature, drama and especially mainstream media remain on a tighter leash. That's because top leaders are still queasy about anything that might have unpredictable mass appeal. But public discontent is mounting: when government officials recently tried to stifle media coverage of the popular but controversial Beijing play "Toilet," media outlets revolted. Many simply disobeyed the ban, running articles about the drama, which traces three decades of Chinese history through the lives of a public-restroom custodian and his patrons.

Increasingly, being banned in Beijing is no deterrent to making a living. In fact, sometimes it actually helps propel an artist onto Western radar screens. Shanghai author and former junkie Mian Mian maintains that the ban in China on her two novels about sex, drugs and despair helped make her name abroad. The book "Candy" was published in the United States and France and ultimately became an underground best-seller on the mainland as well. Mian says her third novel, "Panda Sex," due out this year, may even pass the censors because it has "no drugs and no sex."

Chinese artists who once fled to the West in search of freedom and a broader audience are beginning to return home. This literary elite is no longer producing as many "Chinese books aimed at a Western audience," says London-based literary agent Toby Eady, who represents a dozen Chinese novelists. "It's indigenous Chinese writing for Chinese people." And today those writers are more interested in addressing such modern taboos as high-level corruption, AIDS, urban crime and the growing gap between rich and poor. Lu Tianming, a former TV scriptwriter, has become a sensation in China by writing about crooked government officials and corrupt underlings. One recent novel, "Pure as Snow," was inspired by a real-life whistle-blower in northeastern Heilongjiang province. By tapping into China's insatiable appetite for anti-corruption themes, it sold 185,000 copies. Shen Shao-min, a 48-year-old artist from Heilongjiang, moved to Australia in 1990 because his exhibitions were closed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. But now, he says, "it's better for my art to be in China. I can think more deeply in China because things are changing so quickly."

Indeed, for artists who rely on tension to fuel their creativity, there's no place like home. "In the West there isn't enough conflict," says Huang Rui. "In China there are conflicts everywhere—between capitalism and socialism, between tradition and modernization, between rural life and urbanization." The big question is whether China's cultural flowering will ultimately wither—or be crushed—without fundamental political reform. "Artists make the people smarter," claims rock-music pioneer Cui Jian, "and the leaders think that smarter people are harder to control." For the moment, China's seething frictions and contradictions are helping spawn creative energy—and, just as important, a growing market to bankroll it.

With Craig Simons and Jen Lin-Liu
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5570520/site/newsweek/

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Taipei Times, Sunday, Aug 01, 2004,Page 19
Kaohsiung puts on a show, divides critics
Taiwan's first international ceramics biennale has met with mixed success
By Joan Stanley-Baker

[image] Transluscent porcelain bowl by Arnold Annen. PHOTO COURTESY OF KAOHSIUNG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Ceramic arts including pottery, stoneware and porcelains have for centuries been the stuff for which China has been celebrated globally. Exported porcelains were given the name China (from Cina in Roman times) to mean ceramics among Europeans.

Back when Mesopotamia and Egypt were firing low-temperature earthenware, the Chinese were firing in proto-porcelains of great density and high ping, having developed the art of kiln making and temperature control early on.

Chinese potters experimented with lustrous and matt glazes, firing them under atmospheric and reduction kilns affecting the chemical composition of oxides in the glaze, resulting in heavenly jade-like celadons and the equally famous ox-blood reds. They were the first to use kaolin clay for porcelains, so that when thin enough, the walls revealed breathtaking translucency.

Ceramics celebrate the most fundamental "Five Elements" of our habitat: a skillful and artistic integration of earth, water and fire, together with metal in the glazes and wood for the firing.
[image] Gather by Huang Keng-mao. PHOTO COURTESY OF KAOHSIUNG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

When temperatures rise to incandescence, a look through the peephole will show the clay (earth!) in the act of dissolving, of melting and bubbling or blistering in white heat. It is like witnessing creation itself. These elements bring us close to nature and impart a sense of the sacred, rarely experienced elsewhere.

Chinese potters have for millennia reflected sensitivity to working this malleable, yet enduring medium, striving for more shiny, more polished effects.

Japanese potters, on the other hand, have long preferred naturalness of materials and processes, and have evolved an ethos highlighting firing marks, pits, blisters and irregularities in the clay that may arise in firing, so that Japanese ware, often tactile and dramatic, honors raw materials.

The long pottery traditions of China, Korea and Japan make it appropriate for Taiwan to initiate an international gathering of potters, and indeed the Council for Cultural Affairs (??????????) has launched Taiwan's first international ceramics biennale, organized by Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum (???????????).

Experts have hired seven judges from Europe, America. Japan and Taiwan, who together identified from among nearly 700 submissions from around the world, the 125 winning pieces from 26 countries.

Hereafter huge disappointment sets in. The Grand Prize of NT$1.3 million, the highest ever to be awarded, went to Yoshikawa Masamichi (????) for a large, but underwhelming, kaolin-based construction recalling Han dynasty funerary ware.

Huge (140cm x 78cm) in scale but low slung (20cm in height), the glossy thin-walled compound includes compounds and a proverbial pigsty. Crafted in precision rectilinearity, it typifies Japanese architecture and, ironically, it's glazed in the swooning shimmer of celestial yingqing -- an iron-based reduction pale blue beloved for centuries in Japan.

The work's chief merit is the difficulty in handling kaolin on such a large scale without supports. But otherwise, no advance is evinced in either firing or glazing and worse, there is no feel for the materials in this borrowing of porcelain to imitate lacquered steel.

Second prize was also a massive (110cm x 78cm) ceramic imitation of "fictitious machinery" by American Steven Montgomery.

Again, the elemental ingredients that enliven this genre were denied participation. Once more the strength lay in surmounting technical difficulties when making metallic forms with unsuitable material -- but we miss the inspiration of art.

Effort centers on imitating a broken junk-yard car engine. If this is a current trend, then is it meritorious for artists or juries to follow trends? Whither independence or taste?

Third prize went to Swiss potter Arnold Annen whoseTranslucent Porcelain Bowl invites light to shine through thin walls (1mm to 1.5mm) revealing abstract designs in graduated thickness. This is the anhua technique perfected in Song Dynasty China a millennium back, and is here given a handsome modern look, white on white in a natural asymmetrical balance.

There are a few other works of high originality that extol the qualities and capabilities unique to earth-fired art -- aspects not possible for other media -- but alas, these have been far too few, and not honored.

Exhibition notes:
What: Taiwan's first international ceramics biennale
Where: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts Galleries, 101-103, 80 Meishukuan Road, Kaohsiung (??????????80?). Telephone: (07) 555 0331.
When: Until Sept. 12, 9am to 5pm (closed Mondays).

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/08/01/2003181336

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The Plain Dealer, Monday, August 02, 2004
Staff changes could affect public's cultural experience at museum
Steven Litt, Plain Dealer Art Critic
Art lovers, get out your scorecards. The lineup is changing at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

A cluster of retirements, promotions and ongoing job searches is creating transitions this year in positions that have a direct impact on the public's experience of art and culture at Ohio's largest art museum.

The changes affect several curatorial departments, the museum's library and its music programs. They're part of what staff members describe as a normal flow of change, not an upheaval. The changes are unrelated to the 10 percent staff cut made by the museum last year to save operating money after the stock-market slump hurt its endowment.

This year, "there is a coincidence in that we have a number of very different things that have come up all at once," said museum director Katharine Reid.

The transitions include the following:

Stephen Fliegel, former assistant curator of medieval art, has been appointed curator, an increase in rank that signals a rising level of responsibility over one of the best medieval collections in the country. Fliegel, who has served the museum since 1982, is organizing its upcoming international loan exhibition "Art from the Court of Burgundy: The Artistic Patronage of Philip the Bold," opening Oct. 24.

Holger Klein, the museum's incoming Robert P. Bergman curator of medieval art, will start work at the museum in September after finishing duties as an assistant professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University in New York. Klein, whose appointment was announced in December, will occupy one of four endowed curatorial chairs at the museum. In this instance, it's one named in honor of former museum director Bergman, a specialist in early Christian, Byzantine and medieval art, who led the museum for six years before his death in 1999. The position also is one of two funded in part by a $1.5 million matching grant from the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Heather Lemonedes, formerly assistant curator of prints, has added drawings to her portfolio. She's taking over responsibility for the museum's small but choice collection of drawings, following the departure of former drawings curator Carter Foster, who left Cleveland last year to become a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ann Abid, who served the museum as head librarian for 19 years, retired at the end of April and has been succeeded by Elizabeth Lantz, formerly the museum's interim head librarian and assistant librarian for acquisitions. Abid oversaw a significant expansion in the collection of the noncirculating research library, considered one of the top four museum libraries in the United States, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Karel Paukert, the curator of musical arts, will retire at the end of this year after 30 years at the museum. Paukert, a concert organist, oversaw an ambitious expansion in performing-arts programs at the museum, which generated a huge following. "His own particular achievements as a world-respected organist have combined with an achievement of really establishing a music and performance program of great stature and quality," Reid said. A search for a successor will begin soon, she said.

Job searches are under way for curators of American painting and Chinese art. Reid said the museum hopes to name a Chinese curator soon, perhaps this month, and to bring an American painting curator on board by the spring. The new Chinese curator will succeed Ju hsi-Chou, who retired from the museum this month to return to Arizona, where he previously taught at Arizona State University. He will work as an independent consultant on a catalog of the museum's Chinese paintings collection.

Two positions - for a curator of decorative arts and Japanese and Korean art - remain frozen in the wake of last year's budget cuts. Henry Hawley, the museum's long-serving curator of decorative arts, retired last year and is contributing to a catalog of its 18th-century French decorative-arts collection. The Japanese and Korean post formerly was held by Michael Cunningham. Last year, as part of the budget cuts, the museum eliminated the position. Reid said the position will be reinstated "at the earliest possible moment."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
slitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4136
cleveland.com.

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People's Daily Online, July 31, 2004
Ancient city site in Inner Mongolia jeopardized by sand

Heicheng, the largest and best preserved ancient city site along the Silk Road that linked China with Central and Western Asia, is being devoured by flowing sand.

About 25 km to the southeast of Dalai Hubu Township in north China's Inner Mongolia, the archeological site is well known for its ten-meter-high city walls and a pagoda dating back to the Xixia Dynasty (1038-1227).

Given that the dynasty established by Dangxiang, a branch of the Qiang nationality, left no official written documents, Heicheng has been viewed as priceless by archeologists worldwide.

But as the ecology of nearby Juyan Oasis keeps deteriorating over the past three decades, many previously solid sand dunes started to move toward the archeological site. Although some biological projects have been done in an attempt to curb the sprawling sand, archeologist Liu Honggui believe the danger has not been defused yet.

As a result, many parts of the city walls have been gradually reduced to debris and virtually made way for the sand pushing ahead.

Since it was discovered by a Russian explorer surnamed Potanin in 1886, Heicheng has become a mecca for worldwide archeologists including P. K. Kozlov, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin.

After its founding in 1949, the People's Republic of China initiated two large-scale archeological research projects in 1983 and 1984 respectively. From then, archeologists excavated hundredsof tombs owned by Muslims of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) crucial to the study of Islamic culture's spread in China.

Source: Xinhua

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Forum on China's art industry scheduled for Nov.
www.chinaview.cn 2004-07-10 11:25:52

BEIJING, July 10 (Xinhuanet) -- A forum on the development of China's art industry and an exhibition of Chinese and foreign art galleries will be held here in November, sources with the Chinese Ministry of Culture said Saturday.

The forum, the fifth of the annual event since 2000, will be held on Nov. 6 and 7, while the exhibition is slated for Nov. 5 and 9.

Both events are sponsored by the Department for Cultural Marketof the Ministry of Culture and organized by the ministry's Center for Cultural Market Development and the Shanghai Culture Development Foundation.

The forum will focus on the establishment of a credit system inChina's market for art craft and promote a number of galleries with good reputation. It also seeks to forge a regular cooperativemechanism between Chinese art galleries and international art expositions and galleries, the sources said.

Other topics of the forum include the role of art agents, the status quo and future of China's art galleries and what sorts of policies are needed to advance the prosperity of the gallery business.

China is far behind some foreign countries in the development of art galleries, but is considered to have great potential in this sector.

As the living standards of the Chinese people rise fast, investment in art works is growing rapidly, said Chen Xingbao, an executive of the Center for Cultural Market Development.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/10/content_1588859.htm

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The Straits Time, AUG 2, 2004
Cash crunch at heritage havens
Cash is short and there is a list of nearly 800 world heritage sites to protect. A recent UN meeting looked at possible solutions, including the free-spending hordes of camera-toting tourists.
By Huang Lijie

HYPNOTIC chants echoed through Cambodia's Ta Som temple as workers heave-hoed under the weight they were carrying. Straddled between two poles was a 12th-century Buddha meditating, hands crossed before chest.

The statue's calm was a sharp contrast to the excitement of the temple guardian supervising its relocation.

The Buddha statue, uncovered by excavations on the Angkor site in 2001, was on its way to a different kind of nirvana - not spiritual but physical. The men were carrying it to Siem Reap's conservation headquarters, out of the reach of looters.

The statue's fate, therefore, was much better than some other relics from Angkor, one of 788 sites on the danger list of the World Heritage Committee, which held its 28th meeting in Suzhou, China, last month.p> Looting at the former Khmer capital became a serious problem in the 1980s, according to the Authority for Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap (Apsara). That was when the opening of its economy made dealings on the illegal art market lucrative.

The Cambodian government, unable to rein in the rampant theft and destruction on its own, called upon the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) for assistance.

The World Heritage Committee, a Unesco executive body, put the Angkor complex on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 1992. That allows it greater access to resources for protecting its heritage.

The 48-year-old International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property is one such organisation which works with countries whose cultural heritages are on the World Heritage List.

It offers expert advice on conservation methods and training in restoration techniques.

Other organisations teaming up with Unesco to offer technical expertise on conservation include The World Conservation Union and International Council on Monuments and Sites.

While there is no lack of specialist aid, financial support from the World Heritage Fund leaves much to be desired. It receives only US$4 million (S$6.9 million) in annual contributions from its members.

'That's not the kind of money that would suffice to preserve 754 sites worldwide,' Mr Dieter Offenhauser, spokesman for the German Unesco Commission, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle before more sites were added at last month's World Heritage meeting.

Making the cash crunch even worse, he said, was the fact that funds were used to help emergencies such as in Iraq, with much of its ancient heritage threatened by the recent war and ongoing insurgency.

Tourism, however, might hold the solution.

In fact, tourist dollars allowed the Angkor protection group Apsara to hire local residents as guards and pay them enough to prevent them and others from looting the site and selling artefacts overseas.

'Without tourism, it wouldn't have been able to protect Angkor,' said Mr Roni Amelan, spokesman for the Suzhou meeting.

The committee deemed the heritage safe enough to be removed from the endangered list this month.

If tourism is indeed the answer to funding conservation efforts, heritage sites on the prestigious list, considered to be of 'outstanding universal value' by Unesco, would have little trouble attracting visitors.

'Listing on the Heritage List brings tourism pressure. Everyone wants to (visit these sites),' said Mr Jing Sheng, a Chinese official working with Unesco.

The ancient walled city of Ping- yao in China's northern Shanxi province, for example, saw tourism revenue rise from a mere 180,000 yuan (S$37,400) to 5 million yuan a year after it was listed as a world heritage site in 1997.

However, Mr N. Ishwaran, director for ecological sciences at Unesco, acknowledged that tourism can be a benefit as well as a threat.

The Laotian city of Luang Prabang is one example.

Unesco declared the former royal capital a World Heritage Site in 1995, calling it 'the best preserved city of South-east Asia' - with its magic fusion of traditional Lao dwellings, French colonial architecture and more than 30 graceful monasteries from the 14th century.

The UN agency's involvement appeared to have saved Luang Prabang from the fate of many Asian historic gems razed by bulldozers or degraded by high-rises and alien architecture. But the accelerated visitor traffic might undo the good.

'Everyone has fears that a tourism boom will kill Luang Prabang. Maybe one day, you'll be visiting Disneyland,' Mr Francis Engelmann, a former Unesco consultant, told the Associated Press.

And it is not difficult to see why.

Today, its streets are packed with shaggy backpackers, pizza parlours, rows of guesthouses and Buddhist monks besieged by video-camera-toting tourists. The 100,000 annual visitors are placing increasing pressure on the city's scant resources and fragile charm.

Traditional life is also vanishing and the community dissolving, said Mr Pierre Guedant of the Unesco-supported Heritage House there.

Native homeowners are moving out and away to lease their land in exchange for fat cheques from foreigners who have flocked in to start chic restaurants, shops and entertainment spots.

'The town is basically being preserved for the sake of the tourist,' said Ms Joanne Smith, a former London fashion photographer who opened a boutique selling Lao fabrics four years ago.

This concern is echoed by Mr Guedant.

'The town will be turned into a museum, something Unesco wanted to avoid from the start but it's very difficult to stop now,' he said.

The trick in conserving world heritage sites then lies in striking a balance between milking tourism for funds and protecting these places against foreign cultural invasion.

This kind of sustainable tourism is something Unesco has been urging governments to do.

The Quebec Declaration on Ecotourism at the 2002 World Ecotourism Summit said sustainable tourism should contribute to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage and the well-being of local communities by involving them in the development and operation of these tours.

Heeding this call was a partnership last year between the Unesco World Heritage Centre and Ecotourism Australia. They will launch a World Heritage Tourism Programme and Fund in November.

Australian EcoCertified operators in heritage sites within the country will donate their tourism services for a series of Australian travel itineraries called World Heritage Eco-Escapes.

Revenue from the programme, which promises to prevent exploitation of the sites, will be donated to the World Heritage Fund in aid of conserving Australian heritage such as the Great Barrier Reef.

It is perhaps this confidence in the ability of heritage sites to enlist aid in conservation efforts that the Suzhou decision was passed at the World Heritage meeting.

The new regulation will see the committee reviewing 45 nominations for the World Heritage List instead of the original 30 annually.

Mr Zhang Xinsheng, chairman of the meeting, concluded: 'The Suzhou Decision represents a significant step towards making the World Heritage List more preventative and more credible.'

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/asia/story/0,4386,264736,00.html?

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The New York Times, August 2, 2004
Young Japanese-Americans Honor Ethnic Roots
By MIREYA NAVARRO

LOS ANGELES - In her rhinestone crown, Nicole Miyako Cherry had an air of royalty as she grabbed a heavy mallet and took a swing at a wooden barrel full of sake during the opening ceremonies of the Nisei Week Japanese festival in mid-July.

Not too long ago, the traditional ''breaking of the sake barrel'' to celebrate a notable event would not have been on Ms. Cherry's to-do list. As a Southern California teenager growing up in the suburban comfort of South Pasadena, Ms. Cherry was into skating on the beach, playing intramural soccer and Boyz II Men.

The daughter of a Japanese-American mother and a white American father, Ms. Cherry, 24, said her integrated lifestyle allowed for few conspicuous ethnic markers other than perhaps wearing a kimono for Halloween or attending an obon festival.

But last year, she competed for, and won, the title queen of Nisei Week, the oldest Japanese-American cultural event in the region.

"If people in my generation don't get involved, who's going to take over?'' she asked.

Ms. Cherry's transformation from typical American teenager to ethnic ambassador is a statement about how young Japanese-Americans have struggled to hold onto an identity of their own. Shrinking population numbers, high intermarriage rates and the legacy of the rush to assimilate after the World War II internment experience created an uncertain cultural path for the sansei (third generation) yonsei (fourth) and gosei (fifth).

Ms. Cherry is among a minority awakening to an unsettling realization - it is up to them to fight the forces of cultural extinction, even if most of them may not speak Japanese, or have visited Japan or, increasingly, even look Japanese.

Gil Asakawa, author of "Being Japanese American," said a reason some young Japanese-Americans are asserting their ethnic identity might be that it has become cool to be Japanese.

"Japanese culture is hip in American mainstream, so the door has been opened for these Japanese-Americans to embrace the culture more,'' said Mr. Asakawa, who said he was jolted into consciousness about his heritage by the death of his father in the early 1990's.

But even as Japan's exports like anime and karaoke, not to mention its influences in food, technology and design, have become popular globally, many among the younger generations of Japanese-Americans say they are also looking in another direction, at what it means to be Japanese-American, not just of Japanese descent. Central to Japanese-American pride is surviving and thriving after the indignities of World War II.

"The culture and the traditional aspects go back to Japan, but I tend to look at the Japanese-American experience - my grandfather being in an internment camp,'' Ms. Cherry said. "That's huge.''

Many other groups also struggle to nourish their ethnic roots, but Japanese-Americans are going about it with a sense of urgency.

The number of Americans who identify themselves as Japanese declined to 796,700 in the 2000 census, from 847,562 in 1990, partly because of low immigration and birth rates. The wave of new immigrants from other parts of Asia, including China, South Korea and the Philippines, now dwarfs Japanese-Americans, who once made up the largest Asian group in the United States.

The trends have left some Japanese-Americans feeling as if they are disappearing.

Although Buddhist temples, sports leagues and families sustain the ethnicity, many longtime Japanese-American organizations and institutions are losing members or eroding. Only three Japantowns are left in California, where there had once been dozens.

And "outmarriage,'' mostly to whites and other Asians, is diluting the ethnicity to the point that Larry Hajime Shinagawa, director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College in New York, said most Japanese-Americans face only two directions - assimilating into "whiteness'' or adopting a "pan-Asian'' identity.

But that kind of obliteration is not yet evident in people like Ms. Cherry, who just spent a year immersed in all things Japanese (tea ceremony, kimono etiquette, a visit to Japan) or at places like the University of California, Los Angeles, where taiko drumming is suddenly the rage.

With an undergraduate student body that is about 41 percent Asian-American, there is a dynamic pan-Asian youth culture on campus, said Don T. Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center, but half of more than 60 Asian-American student groups are still "ethnic specific.''

Among these is the Nikkei Student Union, formed when Japanese-American students predominated among Asians enrolled at U.C.L.A. and now open to "anyone interested in Japanese culture,'' said Tracy Ohara, 22, a past president.

One member, Jason Osajima, 19, said his parents sent him to Japanese-American "cultural summer camps'' and basketball leagues as a child, but that he grew up mostly with Caucasian friends and not particularly connected to his Japanese side. But last fall, when he enrolled as a freshman, he said, "I realized I really wanted to get involved with the Japanese community.''

"Before college, I didn't realize how important that was, but in college you have so many cultural resources,'' he said.

Mr. Osajima now spends some of his time planning Japanese cultural events and commemorative pilgrimages to the sites of World War II internment camps and, on a recent Thursday night, could be found at U.C.L.A.'s athletic center barefoot, with legs spread and sticks wielded like swords, pounding a fat drum used in the ancient art of taiko drumming.

He was in a practice session of Kyodo Taiko, U.C.L.A.'s drumming ensemble and a group so popular that it holds auditions and has led to a second, nonperforming group and recreational classes.

The group includes members with names like Lee, Fuller and Avila, and its Japanese-American version of taiko includes swing, hip-hop and other American genres.

Mr. Osajima said some friends of an aunt visiting from Japan were "shocked'' when they saw one of the group's nontraditional performances, but for him, he said, "You just feel you're preserving a part of your Japanese ancestry.''

Older Japanese-Americans said that time has given the latest generations distancing from the traumatizing effects of the internment and a clean slate. Ms. Cherry said her maternal grandfather, who was an intelligence officer for the United States during World War II, once brushed aside her questions about her family crest. He did not want to get into it, she said, as if trying to erase any memory of Japan.

"They had to prove they were American'' after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, she said, "and that pushed more for assimilation. Our generation is kind of reclaiming that. I'm lucky to have my grandparents around, so I'm trying to get all this information now.''

Bill H. Seki, a 43-year-old Los Angeles lawyer, said both his parents were interned in camps before they met (his father left his by volunteering to serve in the American military). After they married, no Japanese was ever spoken in their home as a way of proving, Mr. Seki said, "that they were Americans first, not enemy aliens.''

That experience was so searing, Mr. Seki said, that after Sept. 11, the Japanese-American Bar Association, which he presided over last year, offered legal assistance and moral support to Arab-Americans and Muslims who felt singled out by new antiterrorism laws.

Mr. Seki said his awakening to the culture came in his late 30's as he realized that the nisei, the generation that was interned during the war, were dying off. Last year, for the first time, he went to Japan as part of delegation put together by Japanese American National Museum, which sponsors programs intended to create interest in Japan among Japanese-Americans.

"Others don't feel like we have a separate identity, but our story is so compelling,'' he said. "People just take Japanese-Americans for granted. One comment you commonly get is, 'You're just like another white guy.' No, that's completely wrong.''

In their movement to maintain their ethnicity, Japanese-Americans have become more accepting of those with partial Japanese ancestry, known as hapas, or part Asian.

Eric Tate, a 34-year-old lawyer in San Jose whose mother is Japanese and father African-American, said he co-founded one of the first hapa student groups in the early 1990's as a student at the University of California, Berkeley in response to feeling unwelcome by Japanese-American groups and sports leagues.

Mr. Tate said the tide had turned. Along with those who identified themselves as Japanese in the 2000 census were more than 350,000 who cited Japanese and other backgrounds, the highest rate of multi-ethnic identification of any Asian group.

"There's been a shift in paradigms from 'Oh, outmarriage is a problem' to 'Aw, shucks, we have to make these people embrace the culture because there won't be anybody left to embrace it,' '' Mr. Tate said.

Phenotype and experiences like today's shared Asian culture may be part of an evolving ethnic identity, but Japanese-Americans from various generations said there was plenty to hand down.

Mr. Asakawa, 46, executive producer of the Web site of The Denver Post, said he wrote his book to explore the things "that keep us connected as Japanese'' - values like honor, endurance and loyalty to family, and, of course, food.

"There will always be rice in your life,'' he said.

John Tateishi, national executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights organization, said: "We have a really rich history in this country and we have a history of real pride, and we want to pass that on to our kids. It's like giving religion to your kids. You hope they go away with the moral teachings if not the religion.''

Ms. Cherry, whose boyfriend is Mexican-American, clings to her biracial identity. "I won't take sides,'' she said.

But Ms. Cherry, who will soon become a social work therapist, said she would like her own children to learn Japanese, go to Japanese festivals, play in Japanese sports leagues and have a Japanese first name.

"Even if they're a quarter, I want them to know that that's still part of who they are,'' she said.

For now, she will be passing on her crown to the next Nisei Week queen during this year's festival Aug. 7 to 15. Of all she learned during her reign as goodwill ambassador for Japanese-Americans, she said, visiting Japan last year was an eye-opener.

"All the girls dye their hair brown and they're obsessed with expensive jeans,'' she said. "Even in Japan, they're becoming very American.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/national/02japan.html

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