Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 4, 2005
Asian games at Smithsonian show
By CARL HARTMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- People who like a bit of poker or backgammon yet yearn for
something more subtle might consider a Japanese game that pays off to
the player who most accurately identifies different kinds of incense.

Or another Japanese pastime that requires matching pictures and lines of
poetry inscribed on large clam shells.

Those who want something more active can try kemari, an ancient form of
kickball played by Japanese nobility. It may be an ancestor of today's
soccer.

All are part of an exhibit called "Asian Games: The Art of Contest" at
the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which
specializes in Asian art.

The show traces the history of games back more than 6,000 years to a die
found in Syria. The marks on the opposite faces of the cube add up to
seven - as they have on dice ever since.

But not all dice are cubes. A two-player board game called liubo, wildly
popular in China between 200 B.C. and A.D. 220, used dice with 18 sides.
On some of the examples that archaeologists have dug up, one side is
inscribed "Wine has arrived (for you)." The popularity of liubo declined
suddenly and now no one even knows how it was played.

Anne Gunter, Smithsonian curator of ancient Near Eastern art, likes to
tell an Iranian story, stretching back 1,100 years, about how chess
originated in India and moved westward. A ruler in northern India sent a
set, made of emeralds and rubies, to the Iranian king, challenging him
and his wise men to figure out the rules for themselves or start paying
tribute and taxes.

The Iranian king asked for four days. On the third day one of his
advisers came up with the solution, won three games against the Indian
who had brought the set, invented a new game - much like today's
backgammon - and sent it back to India as a counter-challenge. It
worked, according to legend, and the Indian ruler had to go on paying
taxes to Iran.

Gunter says chess reached Europe through Spain in the 800s and 900s. Its
rising popularity marked a shift from games of chance to games of skill.

The Smithsonian exhibit includes a variety of chess sets. One,
painstakingly carved in India, has kings mounted on elephants and
bishops on camels.

The exhibit makes the point that the game known in the west by its
Japanese name of "go" - like chess, a kind of war game - had its origin
in China. At one time, Gunter says, skill at weiqi, the Chinese version,
was considered an essential talent of the cultivated gentleman.

Confucius, though, didn't think much of weiqi - he allowed only
grudgingly that playing such games was better than being idle.

The exhibit, put together in New York by the Asia Society, will be on
display through May 15. Admission is free.

On the Net:
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery: http://www.asia.si.edu

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Asian%20Games

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www.chinaview.cn, 2005-03-04 22:35:18
HK artists to participate in 51st Venice Biennale

HONG KONG, March 4 (Xinhuanet) -- The Hong Kong Arts Development Council
announced here Friday that an exhibition by Hong Kong visual artists
will be featured in the 51st Venice Biennale in the coming June.

This is the third time for Hong Kong to introduce the work of its visual
artists to the international art arena.

The theme of this year's exhibition is Investigation of a Journey to the
West by Micro+Polo. The exhibition is a marvelous and imaginative
investigation of travel west in the computer age by two local visual
artists anothermountainman (Micro) and Chan Yuk-keung (Polo).

The exhibition investigates and explores the blending and divergence of
the societies through the microcosmic vision of artists. It reflects
parallels and differences between Hong Kong and Venice. Both cities are
surrounded by water, but one lives on its history while the other is
continually striding into the future.

The Venice Biennale, a world-renowned visual arts exhibition, was first
held in 1895. The exhibition attracts participants from around 50 cities
and countries.

This year, the exhibition will be held from June 12 to Nov. 6 in Venice.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/04/content_2651142.htm

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NYT, March 3, 2005
The Musical Odyssey of Min Xiao-Fen
By JOSEPH HOROWITZ

In his well-known Norton lectures at Harvard in 1973, "The Unanswered
Question," Leonard Bernstein asked, "Whither music in our time?" The
influences of Schoenberg and Stravinsky were duly pondered; the question
remained unanswered. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the
answer is all around us. The future is global. Non-European and popular
music, not 12-tone rows and Neo-Classicism, are what have refreshed and
expanded the musical traditions Bernstein held dear.

Composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams, none of whom
can be called classical musicians, are one part of "postclassical"
music. And legions of young conductors and instrumentalists have
broader, less Eurocentric worldviews than their elders.

The Chinese, whose Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 sent Westernized
musicians into the countryside, have carved a special place in this
transitional moment. Steeped in their own traditional and folk music and
equally schooled in Western practice, composers like Zhou Long and
Bright Sheng have forged a hybrid idiom remarkable in expressive range
and sophistication of timbre. And by finding new ways to write for pipa,
erhu and zheng, they have catalyzed a generation of Chinese
instrumentalists scarcely less remarkable.

Min Xiao-Fen, who performs at the BAM Cafe tomorrow, is a pipa player
like no other. When she speaks the language of Thelonious Monk, Duke
Ellington or Miles Davis, the results are not ersatz but
transformational. In her trio, Blue Pipa, with guitar and double bass,
the lutelike pipa becomes a super-banjo. With orchestra, she performs
concertos by Zhou Long, Tan Dun and Bun-Ching Lam in which a Western
concert genre acquires new foreign accents.

Ms. Min's fretted string instrument is itself unusually versatile. Its
four strings and heavy rosewood body traditionally invite sharply
contrasted "martial" and "lyric" performing styles. The martial,
connecting with depictions of battle, is harsh, noisy and percussive.
The lyric, connecting with nature, is fragrant: with quivering vibrato,
the pipa here imitates the human voice.

Ms. Min's rendition of Monk's "Ask Me Now" is a cross-cultural tour de
force. The skittery repeated notes that bind and shape the long lines,
the twanging sustained tones, the interpolated pentatonic riffs, the dry
precision of every sound, all intended to connect equally with Monk's
quirkiness and with centuries-old Chinese practice. The bent notes Monk
idiosyncratically simulated on his piano are, on the pipa, truly and
idiomatically bent. If jazz is America's most influential "classical
music," the Monk-Min idiom is a postclassical signpost to the future.

Ms. Min also sings. In her performances, the cool, sauntering thirds of
Miles Davis's "All Blues" are a pipa accompaniment to a breathy
vocalise. Her "Satin Doll/Shanghai Doll" bilingually combines Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's "Satin Doll" with the 1930's Chinese pop
song "Night of Shanghai"; here the vocal embellishments variously derive
from scat singing and Beijing opera. (This number, Ms. Min says, is
especially appreciated in Taiwan, where audiences know both tunes.)

Her bluegrass style, as in "The Red-Haired Boy," incorporates flicked
inflections of timbre and melody that banjos, with their lower frets,
cannot manage.

At 43, Ms. Min has traversed a sweeping musical odyssey. She comes from
a family of musicians and visual artists. Her father, a pipa master in
Nanjing, was her first teacher. Her sister is a prominent virtuoso on
the erhu (a two-stringed fiddle). Her brother conducts an orchestra in
southeast China.

"Of course we heard Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, all the famous European
composers," she said in a recent interview. "Our neighbors played
violin, cello, piano. Every day after dinner we all made music. The
Cultural Revolution was not yet over. Everyone was a little afraid of
being called to the countryside, and if you could play music, you could
get a better job."

Chinese universities were still closed - a legacy of the Cultural
Revolution - when Ms. Min graduated from high school in 1979. At 18, she
auditioned successfully for the Nanjing Traditional Music Orchestra,
with which she performed as a soloist for more than a decade. The
orchestra gave about 80 concerts a year and toured widely in Europe.

Meanwhile, Ms. Min began singing in Chinese clubs, backed by saxophone,
electric guitar and drums. Sudden exposure to Michael Jackson, Whitney
Houston and other American pop stars was ear-opening. Though Ms. Min had
been trained by her father to sing Beijing opera, her voice proved
adaptable to cooler Western styles. Some of her father's colleagues were
not pleased.

In 1992 she felt the need for something new and moved to San Francisco.
It was in the Bay Area that she first encountered nontonal concert works
by immigrant Chinese composers. "That was challenging," she said, "all
kinds of new rhythms and meters. I had to practice a lot, sometimes
eight hours on a couple of measures."

Ms. Min moved to New York in 1996. (She now lives in Forest Hills.)
Months after arriving, she played at the Knitting Factory. The
composer-saxophonist John Zorn was there, and he invited her to make a
recording with the guitarist Derek Bailey. The entire CD, produced by
Mr. Zorn, was to be improvised.

"I said, 'I don't know how to do it,' " she recalled. "In China that
kind of individualism was not encouraged. I always needed someone to
tell me what to do. In traditional music you could improvise some
ornaments, and that was it. John said I should listen to Derek's
recordings and decide.

"Derek made guitar sounds I had never imagined. I felt sparks and colors
- like a Dalí or Picasso painting. I even practiced by improvising along
with his CD's. A week later I phoned John and said, 'O.K., I can do it.' "

In 2003, Ms. Min was invited by Jazz at Lincoln Center to perform a
30-minute solo set of Thelonious Monk compositions.

"At first, I thought he was actually a monk," she said. "Little by
little, I started to like his music. It reminded me of different styles
of Chinese calligraphy: standard script, clerical script, seal script
and especially the running script, a very fast, very free style with a
little improvisation involved. And my contact with his music felt
physical. Even though I had a year to prepare, I honestly wasn't ready
for this engagement. But the feedback was so positive that I wanted to
continue."

Moving on to works by Davis and Ellington, Ms. Min conceived a mission
to build a bridge between American jazz classics and Chinese tradition.
She also wants to explore the music of Mr. Zorn and of the venerable
pianist and composer Randy Weston, whose explorations of African music
she finds inspirational. And she is eager to expand the range of Blue
Pipa, whose other members, the guitarist Stephen Salerno and the bassist
Mark Helias, are practiced jazz and classical musicians.

The variety of settings in which Ms. Min has performed, from clubs to
concert halls, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and other American
orchestras, tells the story of her versatility. Her repertory with
orchestra includes "Two Poems From Tang" by Zhou Long, whose unsurpassed
gift for combining Chinese and Western instruments parallels Ms. Min's
intermingling of Chinese and Western genres. She also toured Europe in
Peter Sellars's version of the Chinese opera "The Peony Pavilion," with
music by Tan Dun.

Her concert tomorrow, with the cellist Okkyung Lee and the drummer Susie
Ibarra, will include solo and ensemble versions of various Monk, Davis
and bluegrass numbers.

Central to all these activities is the pipa itself, which originated
2,000 years ago. The body acquired its present pear shape in the fifth
century, influenced by the Middle Eastern oud. Partly because of its
considerable weight, it gradually evolved from a horizontally held
instrument to one held vertically. Today, there are more than 70 playing
techniques, many of which were devised only over the last century.

"I want to show that this instrument, which so far not too many people
know, has no limit," Ms. Min said. "I want to tell the world that there
are no boundaries. I can say I'm an avant-garde musician, right? I'd
like to go in this direction. I like this kind of feeling. I feel free."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/arts/music/03pipa.html

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NYT, March 3, 2005
Sometimes Blood Really Isn't Indelible
By MANOHLA DARGIS

When the Korean director Park Chan-wook walked away with the second-most
prestigious prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it did more
than raise a few eyebrows and critical hackles. It signaled that this
wasn't your father's hoity-toity snooze-fest; this was the new, improved
Cannes, baby - fast and furious and genre-friendly. Mr. Park's
award-winning "Oldboy," a blood-splattered revenge movie that features
death by hammer and other such tasty sport, might have been an
exploitation flick, but it was an arty exploitation flick.

You can get a sense of just how arty and exploitative Mr. Park's oeuvre
is in the mini-retrospective of his work that begins today and runs
through Sunday at BAMcinématek. Included in the series is "Oldboy,"
which I will review when it opens in theaters a couple of weeks from
now; the omnibus feature "If You Were Me," which includes Mr. Park's
short film "N.E.P.A.L. (Never Ending Peace and Love)"; the director's
box-office smash "Joint Security Area," a surprisingly moving, tightly
wound thriller about unlikely friendships among North and South Korean
border guards; and his principal claim to cult auteur status, "Sympathy
for Mr. Vengeance," a hyper-violent film about organ theft, kidnapping
and all manner of heartache.

To dispense with the obvious: the ascendancy of Mr. Park in the last few
years is partly a testament to his talent. He knows where to put the
camera, how to build tension inside the frame and through editing, and
he has an eye for how striking fake blood can look pooling over the
ground or blooming underwater. But the filmmaker's success in the
international arena, his integration into the upper tier of the festival
circuit and his embrace by some cinephiles also reflect a dubious
development in recent cinema: the mainstreaming of exploitation. Movies
that were once relegated to midnight screenings at festivals - and, in
an earlier age, grindhouses like those that once enlivened Times Square
- are now part of the main event.

Of course, one critic's exploitative slop is another critic's film of
the year. And in 2002 Harry Knowles, from aint-it-cool-news.com, made
Mr. Park's "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" his No. 1 pick. Before the film
degenerates into senseless shocks and sadism, I am with Mr. Knowles: it
is pretty terrific. Initially there isn't much of a plot, just a handful
of characters, some dramatic situations (somebody needs a kidney,
somebody loses one) and Mr. Park's striking mise-en-scène. The lead
character is a deaf mute (played by Shin Ha-kyun, who appears in "Joint
Security Area"), whose most important connections are with his diabetic
sister (Lim Ji-eun), his conscience-impaired girlfriend (Bae Doo-na) and
his former boss (the excellent Song Kang-ho, also from "Joint Security
Area").

At the 45-minute mark, however, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" transforms
from a beautifully shot character study with glimmerings of political
and social insight into a cavalcade of cruelty, yet another iteration of
"Death Wish." Among the atrocities are a few gory baseball-bat murders;
a would-be suicide via a knife to the belly; an extended torture scene
involving electricity; and the lovingly photographed death of a child.
The death is followed by the child's autopsy, a scene that includes
unpleasant sights and crunching sounds.

And to what end? Mr. Park may be trying to say something about the
futility of violence, but as with most films of this type, any meaning
that might be derived from the onscreen carnage is canceled out by the
filmmaker's obvious pleasure in its representation.

"Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" certainly has its admirers beyond fan boys
and cult-movie enthusiasts. The film screened at two of the most
prestigious festivals in the world, Berlin and Toronto, as well as at a
handful of other minor such events. Along with "Oldboy," it will be
released by the American division of the British-based Tartan Films,
which puts out works of undisputed artistic worth, genre classics and
pure schlock under the rubric Asia Extreme. The same company also
distributed Catherine Breillat's art-house shocker "Anatomy of Hell," a
recent example of what the critic James Quandt calls the New French
Extremity. Among two of the most acclaimed practitioners of the new
extreme cinema are festival darlings like Japan's Takeshi Miike
("Audition") and France's Gaspar Noé ("Irréversible").

Like the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, perhaps best known for
"Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring," Mr. Takeshi, Mr. Noé and Mr.
Park have earned critical and institutional recognition, partly because
of their ability to invent ever-more visually arresting ways to turn
violence into entertainment. Unlike the great cultural provocations,
like the French theater director Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty,
most of what falls under the aegis of extreme cinema is devised just to
distract and reaffirm the audience's existing worldview: an eye for an
eye, it's a dog-eat-dog world, ad nauseam. The violence in films like
"Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" doesn't challenge the status quo; it just
affirms it by flattering paying customers for whom the movie screen will
never be anything more than a reassuring mirror.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/movies/03darg.html

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newsday.com, March 3, 2005, 4:40 PM EST
New exhibition details re-examination of ancient Chinese shrines
By KRISTA LARSON
Associated Press Writer

PRINCETON, N.J. -- For centuries the remains of the Wu Family Shrines
have fascinated researchers as some of the earliest surviving examples
of Chinese art.

Now a new exhibition is questioning whether the Wu family had anything
to do with the creation of the Han Dynasty-era structures in
northeastern China and whether they were even originally used as
ancestral shrines.

The exhibition opening Saturday at Princeton University's art museum is
the result of an effort that scholars began in 1999 to re-examine one of
the most studied works in Chinese art history.

They suspect the now-dull stone slabs originally were painted _ and they
also question whether some of their inscriptions and elaborate pictorial
carvings may have been added or redone since the mid-second century
A.D., when the structures are thought to have been created.

"In leading this project, we intend to reopen discussion about what has
been taken for granted over nearly a thousand years of study and create
the possibility to reconsider and re-imagine some of the most
fundamental assertions about China's cultural, archaeological and
artistic past," said Cary Liu, curator of Asian Art at the museum and
team leader for the project.

Researchers spent several years working on the project at Princeton and
also traveled several times to China, where they met with Chinese
scholars to discuss their work.

They also studied the site's first records _ which date to the mid-11th
century _ and found no mention of the Wu family and inscriptions that
were only 10 to 20 percent legible.

"By the 12th century, all of a sudden 60, 70 percent of the inscriptions
are legible. All of a sudden the Wu family name has been attached," he
said Thursday.

The structures were gradually buried under centuries of silt resulting
from flooding of the Yellow River, only to be rediscovered and excavated
by an amateur archaeologist in 1786. At the time there were very few
examples of Han archaeology, and so the Wu site has been used to date
other sites.

"What we're questioning is if the Wu family shrine inscriptions are
suspect. If they need to be questioned, then every other inscription
from the Han dynasty has to be questioned. We have to start off with
this basic question about these things are not set in stone," Liu said.

Another subject of contention is whether the stone chambers were
actually shrines.

"In the Han period, the ancestral shrine from expert descriptions
doesn't really fit with what we find here," Liu said.

The exhibit displays the university's collection of rare ink-on-paper
rubbings from the site, one of the first national landmarks in China,
along with Han-era sculptures, bronzes, ceramics, glass and jade artifacts.

It gathers work from museums in the United States, Canada, Europe and
China, including a carved pictorial column from the site on loan from a
Berlin museum, and what organizers have touted as the first American
showing of carved pictorial stones borrowed from museums in the Shandong
province.

And researchers have put together computer models to reconstruct the
site as scholars believe it originally looked, giving museum-goers a
three-dimensional tour of the original site.

While the exhibit questions many long-held assumptions about the famous
Chinese landmark, Liu said it is only a start.

"We're not actually presenting any solutions with this exhibition, what
we're really saying is that we have to question all this material," he said.

And Liu believes the new theories about the landmark don't detract from
the site's historical significance.

"There is one thousand years of scholarship here, and that in itself is
a monument that we're looking at," he said.

___P>

Princeton Art Museum: http://www.princetonartmuseum.org

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj-- wufamilyshrines0303mar03,0,6919426.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey

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Kunstmarkt.com/Peter A. Süß, 03.03.2005
Chinesische Reflektionen in der L. A. Galerie

In der Frankfurter Galerie Lothar Albrecht ist ab dem 5. März der zweite
Teil der Präsentation zeitgenössischer Kunst aus China zu sehen. Thema
der Ausstellung sind „Reflektionen des Alltäglichen“ in China, des
Lebens in einem über Jahrzehnte sozialistisch geprägten Land, das sich
in den letzten Jahren immer mehr der kapitalistischen Marktwirtschaft
öffnet und damit vieles Hergebrachte in Frage stellt. Wie reagieren
junge Künstler auf die ökonomischen, historisch-religiösen und sozial
einschneidenden Wandlungen, die das moderne „Reich der Mitte“ derzeit
beeinflussen? Den Landschaften von Ren Xiaolin (geb. 1963), den
Plastiken von Liu Ding (geb. 1976), den Interieurs von Zeng Hao (geb.
1963) oder den Beijing-Opern Szenen von Shen Liang (geb. 1976) ist vor
allem der Blick auf die Diskrepanz zwischen den sozioökonomischen
Bedingungen und den Gebräuchen des sozialistischen China zueigen.

Ähnlich präsentieren auch Wang Jinsong (geb. 1963) in seinen
Tuschezeichnungen, Wei Guangqing (geb. 1963) mit seinen Siebdrucken oder
der Videokünstler Zhao Liang (geb. 1971) die Zerrissenheit des heutigen
China, wo durch die sich ausbreitende materialistische Orientierung der
Gesellschaft alte Werte und Traditionen immer mehr verblassen und
schließlich verschwinden. Die Bedrohung klassischer chinesischer
Tugenden und Lebensweisen, die auf Dauer, Beständigkeit und Einmaligkeit
angelegt waren, durch Flüchtigkeit, Oberflächlichkeit und
Gleichgültigkeit arbeiten die jungen chinesischen Künstler in ihren
Werken deutlich heraus. Melancholisch bis aggressiv gehen sie der Frage
nach, wieviel von jenem China, in dem sie groß geworden sind, unter dem
Einfluss der westlichen Waren-, Konsum- und Werbewelt noch übrig bleiben
wird.

Die Ausstellung „China: Reflektionen des Alltäglichen“ zeigt die L. A.
Galerie bis zum 16. April. Sie ist dienstags bis freitags von 12 bis 19
Uhr und an den Samstagen von 11 bis 16 Uhr geöffnet.

L.A. Galerie Lothar Albrecht
Domstraße 6
D-60311 Frankfurt

http://www.kunstmarkt.com/pagesmag/kunst/_id75302-/news_detail.html

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www.gov.tw, 2005/03/03 16:25:46
Taipei art exhibit highlights primal power of line, form
SOURCE: Taiwan Journal

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is holding an exhibition titled
"Depictions in Line and Form" from Feb. 5 to May 1 in one of its
first-floor galleries, featuring some 50-odd pieces selected from among
the 3,878 in its permanent collection. They comprise paintings,
sketches, prints, ceramics and sculptures by 45 artists from home and
abroad, dating from the 1960s to recent years.

Designed by Taiwanese oil painter Liu Yung-jen, born in 1958, the
exhibition is divided into four parts: Tumultuous Worlds, Primal Nature,
Urban Energy, and Traces in Time and Space. It's main purpose is to open
the visitor's eye to the all-important role that line and form play in
artistic creation.

Liu explained that the exhibition was in part inspired by the fact that,
typically, children's first step in artistic exploration and creation is
the scribbling of lines, and, like innocent children, artists freely
ramble and make discoveries in the realm of line and form. Lines,
therefore, may be regarded as the most fundamental element in art, no
matter what new medium of artistic expression may emerge, he said.

He also explained that the exhibition is intended to highlight the great
variety of ways in which different people at different times and places
see and use lines to produce an inexhaustible variety of forms.
Conversely, the endless variety of feelings evoked by different forms
demonstrates the magical potency of the simpler lines from which they
are built up.

Tumultuous Worlds is the first section one sees upon entering the
exhibition gallery. For the most part, the works in this group convey
the sense of an originally formless but living space just beginning to
explore its infinite form-creation possibilities. This may also be taken
to symbolize the boundless inner space of the artist, which can be
explored eternally with no limit to what can emerge.

Works in the Tumultuous Worlds section include Taiwanese artist Lu
Kuen-her's 1992 ink-and-color image "Form and Formless," Belgian artist
Pierre Alechinsky's 1977 lithograph "Window" and French artist Hans
Arp's 1965 bronze sculpture "Yawning Mussel." "Form and Formless"
pictures a fuzzy sun-like yellow ball seeming to take form amid a wild
tangle of dark energy currents. "Window" features what appears to be
swirling dark and light clouds in a spiral pattern reminiscent of the
Taoist t'ai chi mandala symbolizing interacting yin and yang creative
energies. True to its name, Arp's work has the semblance of a clam with
the lid of its shell ajar, though some might say that it looks more like
pursed lips.

The Primal Nature section of the exhibition includes Taiwanese Lu
Ming-te's 1986 work "Tatu Mountain" and Frenchman Pierre Szekely's 1993
sculpture "Female Lion." Lu's creation, employing strings, ink and
natural pigments on fabric, features mostly straight-line combinations
of geometric figures in five groupings with the feeling of structured
energy fields emerging mysteriously out of chaos.

"Female Lion" is a marble sculpture of a lion standing upright on its
hind legs, with human female breasts and outstretched arms, bared rows
of pyramidal teeth sandwiched between a rounded snout and square chin,
and attached sea-shell eyes, nipples, navel and vulva. Looking at it,
one can almost hear its roar resounding throughout infinite space. With
a combination of straight lines and gently curving contours, its simple,
blunt beauty exudes life force. One is reminded of the line in "Born
Free," the theme song of the movie by the same name about a lioness
named Elsa, that goes "You're free as the roaring tide, so there's no
need to hide!" According to Liu, the choice of pieces in the Urban
Energy section is meant to express the complexity of story plots of
people interacting with each other and their self-created environments.
In constructing cities and acting out stories in them, human beings
imbue them with an organismic life of their own.

Included in this section are the works of Taiwanese artists Michell
Hwang and Lin Hooi-hwa. Liu remarked that Hwang's "Dignity"--a painting
executed in acrylic on wooden board over the period 1993 to 1994--is
probably the only work in the special exhibition connected specifically
with Taipei City. It was inspired by the city's eastern district, known
for its bustling commercial activity, nightlife, restaurants, coffee
shops and boutiques. The abstract painting's wavy lines, semblances of
human silhouettes and elongated cells suggestive of automobiles, in
combination with warm, earthy hues intermingled with shades of green,
picture a strange and wonderful organism pulsating with vitality.

Lin's "Good Night IV," created in 1994, is a black cloth imprinted with
a barely visible umber-colored schematic of a jet fighter, overlain with
the dim grayish-white letters of the English alphabet paired with hand
signs corresponding with them. It gives an overall impression of ghostly
outlines of sophisticated symbolic logic and intellectual order
suspended in the fathomless void.

In contrast with the thematic Tumultuous Worlds, Primal Nature and Urban
Energy sections of the exhibition--whose respective groups of images and
sculptures evoke a sense of evolutionary progression from wild energy to
the emergence of ordered organic forms to complex, human-created
forms--the section called Line Traces in Time and Space celebrates the
beauty of line patterns and juxtaposed forms in and of themselves, with
no particular connective theme in mind.

One of the works in this section is Taiwanese artist Lee Shi-chi's 1983
serigraph "Tie." Picturing what appears to be a dancing multihued
ribbon, it was inspired by so-called grass calligraphy--a style of
writing Chinese characters using unbroken, fluid movement of the
calligraphy brush.

Another work in the Line Traces group--one which many if not most
viewers will consider too simple to qualify as art--is Italian artist
Lucio Fontana's 1961 painting "Concetto Spaziale." It consists of a
uniform blue-gray oil on canvas with two curved slits cut through the
canvas and a black-cloth backing showing through the slits. It is an
example of Spatialism, a style of minimal art invented by Fontana in
1947. "Piercing, slashing and assaulting the surface of his works, he
challenged the traditional easel painting, forcing the viewer to contend
with the work of art as an object in real space rather than a
representation of illusionistic space," explains the Web site of the
Milwaukee Art Museum, which pictures an even simpler Fontana work--a
white oil on canvas with a single straight cut down the center.

The Italian word concetto means a conceit or affected wit. In titling
his work "Spatial Conceit," did the painter mean to attack the
dishonesty of conventional illusionistic 2-D images? Or might he have
been mocking himself for using the canvas-mutilation gimmick to draw
attention to the canvas as a 3-D thing? Regardless, it is interesting to
note that spatial being has evolved through stages of increasing
complexity of form, function and self-awareness, epitomized by human
beings, only for some artists to apparently reject that rich legacy in
favor of the poverty of formless space--artistic representations of
which nevertheless require a minimal line, such as Fontana's slits, to
be appreciated as such.

At the opening day reception, TFAM Director Huang Tsai-lang commented
that creative thematic exhibitions such as the one designed by Liu
demonstrate how, when utilized in association with each other, the works
in an art museum's collection have a collective value that exceeds their
values in isolation.

http://english.www.gov.tw/index.jsp?id=14&recid=104132&viewdate=0.com

*************************

www.chinaview.cn 2005-03-03 22:49:11
Research to protect terra-cotta figures

XI'AN, March 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese and American scientists Thursday
launched a cooperation research program on indoor pollution at the
museum of the terra-cotta army, a historic relic that once guarded the
tomb of China's first emperor, in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
[image]

The research on pollutants' impact on the terra-cotta warriors and
horses of Emperor Qinshihuang, the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty
(211BC-207BC), involves experts from the Institute of Earth Environment
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Emperor Qin's Terra-cotta
Museum, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University andthe Desert Research
Institute of the United States.

Representatives signed a cooperation contract Thursday at the
terra-cotta museum in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province.

Based on continuous observation of the pollution and studies onthe
change and chemical reaction mechanism of corrosive gas, aerated solids
and dust, researchers will work out an evaluation report on the
mechanism of pollutants' corrosion on the rare cultural relics.

The program is expected to last two years, according to the contract.

Experts said the research will help better protect the terra-cotta figures.

Tong Mingkang, deputy director of the State Bureau of Cultural Relics,
said that the herald research in China is expected to provide a basis
for the country's control and prevention of museumindoor pollution.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/03/content_2646235.htm

*************************

Yangzhou to build 10 museums
www.chinaview.cn 2005-03-02 15:19:19

NANJING, March 2 (Xinhuanet) -- The 2,500-year-old city of Yangzhou
in east China will build 10 museums and exhibition halls to "show off
its charm," an official of the municipal government said.

"The project plan has taken form after consultation attended
byrelevant officers and experts, and will be implemented soon," saidthe
official.

The 10 expected museums on basis of ancient architecture include a
folk collection exhibition hall, a traditional Chinese medical science
museum, a city industry museum, a Yangzhou-style potted landscape
exhibition hall, an animal specimens museum, a Yangzhou cuisine museum,
a canal culture museum, a Buddhism museum,a bridge museum and an art
exhibition center.

As one of the first group of 24 famous historic and cultural cities
of China announced by the State Council in 1982, Yangzhou boasts an
array of well-preserved ancient architecture, which the local government
considers has not displayed its value.

"The government spent three years renovating the old architecture,
such as temples and the ancients' former residences,which have not
opened to the public," said the official. "They caneasily become museums
as long as being remodeled a little, which is a good way of protection."

Yangzhou is located in the center of east China's Jiangsu Province,
about 80 kilometers away from Jiangsu's capital of Nanjing. It was the
largest city in east China during the flourishing Tang Dynasty (618-907).

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/02/content_2638490.htm

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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