JoongAng Daily, February 18, 2005
Signs of subversion in Chinese art
by Park Soo-mee

For decades, the Chinese government forced artists to view their
creative activity from a utilitarian point of view. In retrospect, it's
obvious what the results would be.
Up until the mid-1980s, the work of Chinese artists focused on the
ideological propaganda dictated by the government, in styles that were
mainly based on "socialist realism."
Pi Li, a lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, says
that the turning point in modern Chinese art was the Tiananmen Square
massacre of 1989, which "caused artists to realize that they really did
not have the ability to carry out their own artistic convictions."
Tiananmen Square, he says, allowed cynicism and malaise to put down
strong roots in Chinese art.
Indeed, the Chinese works currently on display at the National Museum of
Contemporary Art suggest a certain resistance to the "party line," both
in style and in subject.
Perhaps surprisingly, given their subversive qualities, the works in the
exhibition, titled "Currents in Contemporary Chinese Art," were selected
for a government-run national art competition, a prestigious event held
once every 5 years.
In "Harvest Time," Li Yong-wen deploys grotesque realism to depict a
young schoolgirl in the countryside. The picture is simply an image of a
girl playing alone at home after school. Yet the details of the
painting, such as a string of keys around the girl's neck and the
manufactured toys she is surrounded by, are suggestive of the reality of
Chinese capitalism today and what it means for the lives of suburban
children with working parents.
A great deal of tension is conveyed in the settings of these paintings
as well.
In "Raining Night," Liang Feng creates a dramatic situation by depicting
a nurse drooping in an armchair, making it unclear whether the woman is
sleeping or dead.
Sun Hong-min's "Girl, Girl" depicts two city girls lying on a sofa with
expressions that are absent and exhausted, almost decadent.
Though many of the works in the exhibition follow the technical styles
that the state's art academies have imposed on Chinese artists, they
also represent a dramatic shift from the art of previous generations,
which was reactionary in its use of conventional symbolism.
Perhaps the exhibition's most important subversion of the Chinese
aesthetics of the recent past is found in the artists' increasing
emphasis on individual style, and the depth of cultural understanding
that they demonstrate.

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200502/17/200502172111165509900091009101.html

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The Korea Times, 02-11-2005 19:34
Contemporary Chinese Art Looks to Redefine Realism
By Park Chung-a
Staff Reporter

In Liu Da Wei’s painting ``Snow Line,’’ a great winding mountain covered
with snow dominates the landscape. However, a nomad leading cattle looks
dauntless and firm, prepared to overcome any tough road ahead of him.

The painting, which is part of an exhibition of Chinese art at the
National Museum of Contemporary Art in Kwachon, south of Seoul, is
representative of an Eastern idea of harmony between nature and humans.
The painting also deals with the valiant spirit of the Chinese people
who have endured the tough natural environment and political upheavals.

``The exhibition shows the current trend of Chinese artists who do not
stop at realistic expression but try to reveal the inner thoughts of an
individual through abstract and modern painting methods,’’ said Chang
Young-joon, a researcher at the museum and one of the show’s organizers.
``Deviating from the subject of state propaganda based on socialist
realism, many works here present individual characteristics of artists.’’

Indeed, a work like ``Bright Sun’’ by Liu Ming may be as far from
propaganda as it can get. The painting shows a gentle domestic scene of
a man and a woman sitting on a sofa in front of a window on a sunny day.
The man grimaces while the woman concentrates on cleaning out his ear.

Liu Ren Jie’s ``Corridor’’ presents a composition of young women and men
standing with blank expressions. They are standing not in one straight
line but askew from each other, as if refusing an order of uniformity.
Through a contrast of the people who gaze out in the front of the
picture and an asymmetrical oblique line, the painter unveils a dynamic
force in the static atmosphere.

The 141 works exhibited were selected from 3,500 prize winners and works
of jurors from last year’s Chinese Art Exhibition, China’s most
authoritative open art competition. The works are of various genres,
including Chinese traditional paintings, oil paintings, watercolor
paintings, posters and prints. They vary from traditional works based on
elaborate description and close observation to those with a more modern
touch based on a sense of pop art dealing with ordinary lives, free from
political ideology that had long been a main theme of Chinese art.

According to Chang, Chinese contemporary art is changing at a fast pace.
With waves of reform and the opening of Chinese society in the late
1970s, an avant-garde movement expanded, owing to influences from
Western art. Taking this opportunity, young artists of a new generation
have been displaying their potential and talent in pursuit of new forms
of artistic expression.

``Young artists in their 30s and 40s who have a new perspective on
existing Chinese culture are currently emerging in Chinese art
circles,’’ Chang said. ``With experimental ideas in terms of materials
and techniques, China is heading toward the mainstream of art circles in
the world.’’

Currents in Contemporary Chinese Art
When: Through Feb. 20
Where: National Museum of Contemporary Art.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/culture/200502/kt2005021119323811690.htm

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Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Friday, February 11, 2005
SAM China exhibit a great leap forward and back
By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC

On a weedy section of the Great Wall of China, a naked young man is
taking a stroll.

ART REVIEW
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: New Photography and Video From China
WHERE: Seattle Art Museum, 100 University Ave.
WHEN: Through May 1. Hours: Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays
till 9
ADMISSION: $7 general, $5 seniors andstudents, free for members and
children under 12

Lovely as a wood nymph, Ma Liuming's androgynous charisma makes Marlene
Dietrich's seem cheap and obvious.

While compelling, Ma's delicacy is not his point. He's using it to
dramatize his engagement with the blunt end of history.

The famed wall built thousands of years ago contains the remains of
workers who exhausted themselves in forced labor and became filler for
the final product. Ma walks for them, those numberless ancestors whose
mouths were stuffed with stones. Trodding those stones till his feet
were bloody is a way for him to talk to the dead and say, "I remember you."

Photos and a video documenting the 1998 walk along the Great Wall are a
highlight of "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From
China" at the Seattle Art Museum.

Another highlight is everything featuring Zhang Huan. In one series of
nine photos, Zhang's face becomes a scroll on which the history of his
family is written. A few characters in the first photo become a thicket
in the final frame, covering him in inky dark and leaving only his eyes
peering out of a cave.

Ma and Zhang were part of "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," curated by Gao
Minglu for New York's Asia Society and the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art and presented at both the Tacoma Art Museum and the
University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in 1999.

That truly groundbreaking exhibit featured post-Cultural Revolution
Chinese artists who were unsanctioned by the government and managed to
connect spectacularly with contemporary art audiences around the globe.

Organized by New York's International Center of Photography, "Between
Past and Future" isn't nearly as good. There are fabulous artists here,
but they tend to be the ones included in "Inside Out."

Downhill from them, there's a lot of sensationalism for its own sake.

Feng Feng's massive photo mural of a much-scarred leg fitted with
fearsome mechanical plugs is gruesome to no purpose. Some may see a
metaphor for the state repressing the body, but it's a stretch. Even if
that's the idea, it doesn't work.

Sheng Qi's photos of his own hand with a pinkie missing are palm up
against a red background, suggesting Sheng lost his digit in some
horrible digit purge in the late 1960s. At least then his photos would
carry historical weight.

Instead, Sheng cut off his own finger when he left China and buried it,
leaving a piece of himself at home and enabling him to make art from his
mangled body ever since.

Note to Sheng: Thirty years ago, American and European performance
artists investigated the aesthetics of self-mutilation. Believe me,
we've moved on.

Speaking of the 1970s, Zhang Dali's contemporary demolition performances
in Beijing pale next to Gordon Matta Clark's in New York. Zhang may want
to know that Clark was dead by his mid-30s thanks to carving up old
buildings. What he breathed in turned to cancer. Here's hoping you wear
a mask, Zhang.

Song Dong's 24-piece photo mural showing himself standing waist-deep in
wide water and stamping the water with the Chinese character for water
is wonderful, evoking the ephemeral nature of all human endeavors. It
was good six years ago in "Inside Out."

Wang Wei makes far less of the water theme, providing a corridor to walk
through with piped-in water sounds. Beneath the feet of the audience are
faces of submerged young men who seem to be trying to break through the
surface. Similar things have been done for years. In Seattle, Juniper
Shuey showed a breathtakingly better video version at Howard House.

Zhou Xiaohu offers a naked torso on which a drawing of a girl wiggles
and pole dances. So what? Qiu Zhijie drew an X through his photo with a
large red character for no. I couldn't agree more, and I don't care what
Cang Xin does with her tongue.

Lin Tianmiao's big portrait beaded with fabric whose threads trail
behind looks expensive.

Bring on the wacky humor. It's slight, but in this show, every fun
fragment counts.

Liu Jian and Zhao Qin's altered photos of themselves in the midst of a
Big Mac attack are cool in a wacky way, and I'm a sucker for Cao Fei's
"Rabid Dogs" video, with office workers as woofing canines.

Xiong Wenyun has a lot of nerve. According to wall text, she finds the
Tibetan plateaus drab. To lighten and brighten, she drapes colored
fabric across doors and takes pictures of the results. These photos may
play well in China, but if the curators couldn't have anticipated a
negative reaction elsewhere, there's no way to explain it to them. They
may notice those bumper stickers all around Seattle saying, "Free Tibet."

"Between Past and Present" offers a few new artists worth knowing about.

Zhao Shaoruo turned everybody in a photo of a Cultural Revolution-era
trial into himself. Thank you, Photoshop. It's quite moving to see
everybody as the same person: victims, oppressors and gaping bystanders.
In this sorry affair, Zhao suggests we are all one.

I like Li Wei's optical illusion floating heads, especially "Mirroring:
Tiananmen." History suppressed becomes a haunting.

Big cheers for Xu Zhen. Xu took photos of body parts off the Internet
and printed hundreds on Post-It Notes. The bodies look exquisite, as if
a master drew them in pencil. For the first time ever, I was looking at
something at SAM I wanted to steal. Just one, I thought to myself. Who'd
miss it?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/211548_newchina11.html

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Haaretz, Thu., February 10, 2005
A blossoming of Chinese art
By Dana Gilerman

The meeting with Gu Zhenqing, curator of the "Living in Interesting
Times, A Decade of New Chinese Photography" exhibition that opened last
Saturday at the Israeli Museum of Photography in Tel Hai, was set to
take place in the dining room of the Renaissance Hotel in Tel Aviv.
"Why are there so many Chinese here?" asked the astonished receptionist
at the entrance to the dining room, and informed this reporter that the
Chinese had already left the dining hall and were in a meeting one floor
below.

In the room below sat dozens of Chinese and a few Israelis around tables
with laptops. One of the women there said that Gu was not among those
present - that this was a convention of the Feng Shui Society.

"Curators of contemporary art are stars in China these days," said Gu
during our conversation. "They plead with us to appear on television
guest shows, journalists interview us nonstop and we are invited to
fancy dinners."

Turning point

This success also translates into money. Good Chinese curators of Gu's
caliber (and there are, in Gu's estimation, about 30 of them in that
giant country) earn a good living. Gu has managed to purchase two
apartments in the past four years, but his situation was not always so good.

The attitude of the Chinese government to contemporary art has
fundamentally changed since 2000. Gu notes this as the year of the
turning point. That is the year several important group exhibitions were
held and aroused tremendous media interest, the year in which the rulers
realized that it was impossible to stop the wave and that it would be
better to ride with it, and more, to bolster it and finance it.

Up until four years ago, says Gu, exhibitions could be held only with
government approval. It often took many months to get an answer, and
sometimes no reply was received at all.

"Artists and curators wanted to exhibit, and many of us gave up on
getting approval and exhibited in artists' homes, commercial centers and
Buddhist temples," continues Gu. "If we were lucky, the audience would
come before the police."

Gu notes that it was the curators who organized the exhibitions, found
the display spaces and barely recruited sponsorships. This is also the
reason that they became the most important people in the developing
contemporary art exhibition landscape.

The underground feeling that accompanied their efforts stemmed from a
real danger. Sometimes the police came to exhibitions and confiscated
works. Some of the artists were arrested and imprisoned. Gu relates that
one of the artists, who participated in an installation exhibition that
he curated, was compelled to flee to the mountains for five days for
fear of the police.

"It was like an underground struggle," says Gu. "Art that effectively
influences the political situation."

Wanting to shock

All this only fed the curators' desire to shake up the regime.

"A situation developed in which every curator wanted to create a
shocking exhibition of his own, that would make a noise," continues Gu.
"That's how it came about that three big exhibitions that were presented
in different places in China in 2000 and had a resounding effect turned
that year into the most significant for local contemporary art."

Gu himself curated an installation exhibition on man and animals in a
main park in Nanjing and was harshly criticized by the mayor, gaining
him broad press coverage.

"Two million people heard about that exhibition, so we did manage to
change something."

When he describes one of the more difficult installations at the event,
of an artist stuffing himself into the carcass of a recently slaughtered
cow, it is reminiscent of the American installations of the 1960s and
1970s, which used blood and the slaughter of animals for shock value,
and of the stuffed and preserved animals by British contemporary artist
Damian Hirst. Things like this have already been done and did shock
viewers. The revolution in the West finished long ago; it seems that the
one in the East has only just begun.

Now the government, which has switched from persecuting to promoting, is
the one organizing and financing a large share of the exhibitions and
biennales for contemporary art. Gu himself is the head curator at one of
the museums and receives his salary from the government. The revolution
in the attitude toward the art scene has also attracted China's
well-to-do. Whereas Gu was once forced to sell his apartment in order to
pay the expenses of an exhibition whose sponsor fled, today he speaks of
real estate moguls who come to him with suitcases full of dollars,
asking to sponsor contemporary art exhibitions.

What do they get out of this?

Gu: "A lot of publicity and honor," says Gu. "Contemporary art makes a
lot of noise, gets TV exposure and coverage in the first few pages of
the newspapers. Everyone in China is curious about contemporary art. It
is the best way to get attention in the newspapers and TV. I am not
willing to accept a sponsor now who offers less than $50,000. That is
the minimum I need to hold an exhibition.

"Things are much better for the artists, too. They have begun to publish
impressive catalogs even beyond the country's borders, exhibitions
travel and are displayed on the international scene, and collectors from
outside China are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the
works of the more prominent artists."

Gu also travels the world and curates international exhibitions. During
his visit to Israel he has already managed to visit a few galleries and
artist studios. He hopes to exhibit Israeli artists in China sometime soon.

Gu Zhenqing. "Everyone in China is curious about contemporary art. It is
the best way to get attention in the newspapers and TV."
(Yaron Kaminsky)

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/537360.html

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the art newspaper.com
The illicit trade: US considers Chinese request for import restrictions
Opponents say China must first prove it is adequately protecting its own
cultural heritage
By Jason Edward Kaufman

The US Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) is meeting in closed
session on 17 and 18 February to consider a request from the People’s
Republic of China that the US restrict import of all Chinese cultural
materials predating 1912. The request, made last September under the
1970 Unesco Convention, seeks assistance in protecting Chinese cultural
heritage, which China says is increasingly subject to pillage and
smuggling. It has elicited objections from both the US market and
scholars, and faces an uphill battle to gain approval.
The CPAC will also hold an open session to receive comments from the
public. Dealers, auctioneers and museum officials are expected to
testify. CPAC chairman Jay Kislak told The Art Newspaper that a second
meeting will take place before a decision is reached.

According to the 1987 US law implementing the Unesco accord, to approve
the request the CPAC must determine not only that China’s cultural
heritage is in jeopardy from the looting of archaeological sites, but
also that China has already taken measures consistent with the
convention to protect its own cultural patrimony.

Opponents argue that China has a deplorable record of protecting its
cultural patrimony and does not effectively enforce its own export
restrictions. They further argue that the US is being singled out among
many countries that have large markets in Chinese cultural goods.

James F. Fitzpatrick, an attorney with Arnold & Porter in Washington,
DC, who serves as counsel to antiquities dealers and has been retained
to work on the China issue, told The Art Newspaper, “one of the
statutory standards requires that the requesting party be responsible
stewards of their own cultural heritage. The Chinese have a deplorable
record in that regard, inundating thousands of sites with the Three
Gorges Dam, and desecrating Tibetan culture”.

James Lally, a New York dealer in Asian art, also questions the
legitimacy of the request at a time when the Chinese are rapidly
building up a large internal auction market. Experts say the most
important sales in the field are taking place at China Guardian in
Beijing and other auction houses. New pools of wealth in the country are
creating a flow of material back into China (see p.41). The Chinese
appear to be cornering that market: on 1 January, China permitted
foreign auction houses to do business in China, but 10 days later
stipulated that they not deal in Chinese art.

“You don’t impose an import ban in this country to help another country
enforce its export control system”, says Mr Fitzpatrick. Mr Lally says
that “with regard to looting, this will have no impact as long as there
continues to be a growing market inside China, and strong markets for
Chinese material, such as in Japan, which dwarfs the one in the US. No
other country is going to engage on this task”, he says.

Robert Mowry, curator of Asian art at Harvard University, feels the
restrictions are a form of “isolationism” that would chill cultural
exchange. Permitting export of works vetted by a cultural commission
“would allow free, if regulated, international exchange that would
foster world understanding of China. A blanket freeze could lead to a de
facto embargo”.

However, not everyone is opposed to the proposed ban. Gwen Bennett,
professor of Chinese archaeology at Washington University in St Louis,
says, “I’m an archaeologist who has worked on the ground in China and I
have seen the damage done by the looters first-hand. I believe that the
ban will put a small dent in the overall export of illicit antiquities
from China. It will help somewhat to curb the illicit trade if one of
the major art markets is taken away”.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11710

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NYT, February 8, 2005
In Modern Dance, Reflections of a Restless China in Flux
By ANNA KISSELGOFF

In a country where the arts are expected to support government policy
rather than exist primarily as independent forms, China's still-young
and rapidly expanding modern dance has a distinct advantage. It is a
wordless means of individual expression, especially open to ambiguity
and interpretation.

When the Beijing Modern Dance Company, founded in 1995, makes its New
York debut tonight at the Joyce Theater, with "Rear Light," a piece
choreographed to music from "The Wall," the 1979 rock album by Pink
Floyd, viewers will certainly spot the general aura of alienation. It
may be less easy to agree about specifics.

The sight of young people placed "up against the wall" and of
crime-scene body silhouettes painted on the floor as well as dancing
that veers between turbulence and regimentation may all evoke the 1989
repression of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Yet there is also an intimate male-female duet and a wild disco scene,
usually with audience participation onstage. For Willy Tsao, the
company's Hong Kong-born artistic director, this disco episode is not
just a release but also a critique of mindless youth. "It shows a wild
bunch of kids enjoying themselves," Mr. Tsao said. "They don't know
what's going on around them. They hide from the truth."

Any recent visitor to China who has run into the night life in Shanghai
and Beijing or seen the pop art in official museums that portrays
Maoists and punk rockers side by side will understand that artists who
do not want a return to the past may also be unhappy with China's
rediscovery of materialist values.

An allegorical transposition of the original tale about an alienated
rock star in the 1982 movie version of "The Wall," "Rear Light" is at a
far remove from a realistic dance about peasants in the fields that was
included in the 1991 United States debut of the Guangdong Modern Dance
Company, the seedbed of Chinese contemporary dance.

Reflecting a society in flux, professional modern dance has spread
beyond Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai to attract budding choreographers
in universities in other provinces. True to the essence of modern dance
anywhere, it is no longer limited to one kind of movement idiom or
aesthetic.

Interviewed by phone during the company's current United States tour,
Mr. Tsao said that Li Han-zhong and Ma Bo, the husband-and-wife team who
choreographed "Rear Light," tend toward "very angry pieces." But "Rear
Light," he insisted, is one of those works whose meaning changes with
its viewer.

He agreed that the body silhouettes refer to people who have been
killed. "But these things happen anywhere," he said. "People were killed
in Yugoslavia and are killed in Iraq."

Mr. Tsao is aware that not all, especially in the West, will accept this
wider view. The point he wishes to make is that it would be right to
read "a yearning for individuality and free expression" into such works.
"Dancers are not afraid to say that they are not satisfied," he added,
"and they say it through the body."

For Ralph Samuelson, director of the New York-based Asian Cultural
Council, which has helped finance training and teaching for Chinese
modern dancers and choreographers both in the United States and in
China, "China is very different from what it was." Yet, he added, there
are three subjects that are taboo there in modern dance: sex, attacks on
political leaders and violence.

Mr. Tsao said that the line was drawn at nudity and direct criticism of
Chinese leaders. But like Mr. Samuelson, he notes that much has changed
since the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China's first professional
modern-dance company, was formed in 1990.

It was a carefully prepared birth, sparked by the 1986 visit of Yang
Mei-qi, head of the Guangdong Dance Academy, to the American Dance
Festival at its summer home at Duke University in Durham, N.C. The
festival, through its International Choreographers Workshop, played a
major role in helping Ms. Yang organize a three-year program (1987-90)
to train dancers and nurture new choreographers.

Mr. Tsao, who advised the Guangdong company until 1998 and is now its
overall director, said the training struck local cultural officials as
too American. Looking back on these beginnings, Charles Reinhart, the
American Dance Festival's director, remains adamant about the project's
goal. "Our whole point was not to come in like the Soviet balletmasters
did in China and say, this is our 'Swan Lake,' copy it," he said. "The
idea was to provide them with modern dance training and let them run
with it to develop their own genius."

The first generation in the Guangdong troupe spawned China's leading
modern-dance choreographers in a remarkably short time. They include
Shen Wei, highly acclaimed on the international festival circuit and
based in New York.

"The seeds in modern dance creativity have grown so fast in China that
we have come full circle," Mr. Reinhart said, referring to Mr. Shen.
"You could say that one of the most talented choreographers in America
today is Chinese."

Mr. Samuelson said that in the 1980's Chinese choreographers didn't want
to go home but "now mostly they do."

Guangdong alumni include Wang Mei, who heads the modern dance program at
the Beijing Dance Academy, and Jin Xing, who showed indisputable talent
when he choreographed for American Dance Festival students in the 1980's
and early 90's. In 1995 the Beijing Cultural Bureau asked him to become
the Beijing Modern Dance Company's first artistic director - just after
he underwent a sex change to become China's most publicized transsexual.
Retaining the same name as a woman, Ms. Jin now choreographs for her own
company in Shanghai.

A major figure in fostering interest in modern dance is Mr. Tsao, who is
choreographer for his City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong and
who is credited by American observers with donating his own money to the
Guangdong and Beijing companies.

"Willy saved the companies," Mr. Samuelson said. "They couldn't sustain
themselves." Whether Mr. Tsao's taste influences these companies is open
to debate. Americans can judge for themselves when the Kennedy Center
presents the Guangdong, Beijing and Hong Kong companies on the same
program in October.

"I have apartments in three cities," Mr. Tsao said. There is no question
that he has fostered the growth of different choreographers both in the
companies and in the annual dance festival he established in Beijing in
1999 and moved to Guangzhou last year.

"If it is only one type of modern dance, it will be a failure," he said.
"Chinese modern dancers are finding a new language. I don't see that in
Europe and America.

"In the second year of our festival, students from seven colleges asked
to present their choreography. It was amateurish, but it opened a door.
In 2003 we had 18 universities participating, with many painting and
literature students. A computer science student formed a company, the
Young Crops Society, after he choreographed for the festival. His works
were very calm and quiet, like a computer."

Mr. Tsao sees greater freedom in the fact that arts financing is being
cut back on the provincial and municipal levels. The Beijing troupe is
mainly underwritten by corporations, he said.

Mr. Tsao said the company's status as an independent group without
subsidy left it free of censorship. "No government official came to see
the work we are presenting now in the United States," he said.

After Mr. Tsao succeeded Ms. Jin as artistic director in Beijing in
1999, he said, "I had to spend time on radio talk shows, explaining
modern dance." Government officials suggested he present works that were
"traditional and Chinese."

"My response," he said, "is that modern dance is not a cultural trait.
If you have a sense of freedom, Chinese modern dance can come of age. If
the perception is that you have only to create something different from
the West, that is a limitation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/arts/dance/08joyc.html

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xinhua
"Messenger of culture" between China and Latin America
www.chinaview.cn 2005-02-02 18:50:33

BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- "If President Toledo can keep his
promise, he will become the second head of state from the Latin American
region to personally unveil my work," said Yuan Xikun, a Beijing-based
Chinese artist and sculptor who recently completed a bronze statue of
Tupac Amaru, the last emperor of the Inca Empire.

The new statue is expected to be put on exhibition in the Jintai
Art Museum in the Chaoyang Park in eastern Beijing as "a symbol of the
vicissitudes the South America Continent had undergone", said Yuan.

According to the 61-year-old artist, Peruvian President Alejandro
Toledo had agreed to unveil the statue during his scheduled visit to
China this year, something his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez had
done in 2004.

During his yearend visit to China, President Chavez went to
theJintai Art Museum to unveil and present flowers to a bust statue Yuan
had sculpted for Simon Bolivar, known as the liberator and founding
father of the Latin American nations.

"President Chavez was deeply impressed by my work, which he said
not only made a lifelike presentation of Bolivar's appearance,but also
revealed the hero's inner spirit," recalled Yuan. "The president also
asked me to make another statue featuring Bolivar holding a sword on
horseback."

Born in 1944 in southwest China's Yunnan Province, Yuan used tobe a
successful painter and was reputed as a "portrait messenger" for the
more than 160 portraits he had painted for political VIPs and social
celebrities worldwide since 1991. The big names he painted for in the
past 14 years included former president of the International Olympic
Committee Juan Antonie Samaranch, Cuban President Fidel Castro, US
President Bill Clinton, former UN Secretary General Butros Brtros-Ghali
and South African President Nelson Mandela.

Starting from 2002, Yuan has engaged himself in the making of
statues of important historical figures, taking a special interestin the
national heroes of the Latin America region.

"I admire these Latin American heroes from the bottom of my heart.
They had dedicated their lives to the freedom and welfare of the Latin
American people, and they possessed the virtues long respected in the
Chinese culture," explained Yuan.

Apart from the statues of Simon Bolivar and Tupac Amaru, Yuan also
sculpted Cuban national hero Jose Marti. He also accepted therequest of
the Argentine Embassy in China to sculpt a statue of General San Martin.

In recent years, Yuan had picked the Jintai Art Museum as the main
site to display his works. For him, the museum was also a perfect place
to facilitate cultural exchanges between China and Latin America.

Thanks to the joint efforts of Yuan and diplomatic envoys from the
Latin American countries, the museum played host to a "Colombian
cultural week" in December 2002. In December 2004, an exhibition of
Peruvian photography named "The road to Inca" was again held here.

In honor of Yuan's contributions, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
and the Cuban Ministry of Culture respectively awarded him anational
medal in 2004.

"I will continue to make more statues of those great people I
admire with my artistic talent and limited financial resources", Yuan said.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-02/02/content_2540105.htm

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