www.chinaview.cn 2005-04-12 01:57:18
Dead Chinese artist remembered with artistic achievements
by Sun Liping, Zhao Wei

SHANGHAI, April 11 (Xinhuanet) -- Chen Yifei, a well-known Chinese
painter, fashion designer and film director, died at age 59 on Sunday
morning in Shanghai.

He is remembered nationwide as not only an active
artist-entrepreneur but also as a special witness to the friendly
relationship between China and the United States.

Chen was admitted by the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai on April 6
for stomach pains and died four days later from upper-digestive-tract
hemorrhage. Doctors with the hospital said exhaustion led to his
illness. Prior to the hospitalization, Chen was filming a new movie
named "the Barber" in Fuyang, a city of the neighboring Zhejiang Province.

Shooting of the film was almost completed. The movie's crew said
they will work even harder to complete the last production of the artist
who just passed away.

Born in 1946 in Zhenhai of Zhejiang, Chen Yifei graduated from the
Shanghai Fine Art School in 1965. He went to the United States to attend
university in 1980, leaving behind the security of his position as head
of the Oil Painting Department at the Shanghai Painting Academy. He got
a masters degree in art in 1984 when he rose to stardom.

During his years in the United States, Chen painted elegant
American and Chinese musicians as well as the countryside scenery of
south Yangtze River. In October 1983, his first one-man exhibition was
held at New York's Hammer Galleries. The art show created a sensation
and sent what some US art critics said a clear message to the New York
art arena: classical realism was back against the blatant modernism.

In November that year, Armand Hammer, the owner of the Hammer
Galleries and then the chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corp. bought
one piece of Chen's work -- Twin Bridge (Shuangqiao)-- Memory of My
Country, and presented it to China's late paramount leader Deng
Xiaoping, when they met in Beijing. Thus Chen became a special witness
of friendship between China and the United States through his artistic
production. The story was much told in both artistic and diplomatic circles.

Art critics said Chen Yifei's work does not fit easily into a
"Chinese" or "Western" mold. His art can be described as
"multi-cultural" in the sense of combining the best of several cultures,
in particular the western oil paintings and traditional Chinese
paintings, according to the critics.

Chen painted realistic portraits and impressionistic scenery. His
portraits included Western musicians, Chinese musicians playing
traditional instruments such as the pipa, minstrels in medieval garb,
Tibetan villagers and ballet dancers. His landscapes extend from Venice
to the canals of his native Zhejiang Province. The critics said whatever
the theme and style, the common aesthetic link behind all of Chen
Yifei's work is a commitment to beauty.

"I have eyes of a painter, and I always cherish the curiosity of a
child for any beauty in life," Chen Yifei said.

In 1991, Chen's work -- Lingering Melodies at Xunyang or Farewell
at Xunyang, was auctioned in Hong Kong at 1.37 million HK dollars
(162,000 US dollars), at the time the highest price ever received for a
contemporary Chinese painting. The auction gained him an
artistic-entrepreneur status. He has since witnessed many of his work
sell record high prices at Christie's, Sotheby's and other auctions in
New York and Hong Kong.

Chen began to film in 1993. In 1995, his movie -- "A Date at Dusk"
-- was entered at the Festival De Cannes.

In 1999 Chen produced two artistic documentaries named "Escape to
Shanghai" and "Ark of Shanghai" to depict experience of the Jews who
came to Shanghai from Europe during the World War II.

Chen Yifei's turn to the fashion industry aroused some disputes in
China's artistic circle. Traditionally, Chinese people see a painter as
aloof from petty politics and material pursuits and faraway from
commerce and business. But Chen said, "I'd like to make my own choice
for way of life. I love paintings, clothing and films. In my point of
view, they are all beautiful."

In 1999 Chen started a fashion business named Layefe. One year
later, he established two homeware outlets in Shanghai. All the while,
he acted as the agent of several successful art designer for China's
premier fashion magazine -- Yifei Vision -- sponsored by China Youth
Magazine under the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.

Chen gave much of the money earned from the sale of his paintings
to Project Hope, a charity that benefits the underprivileged, and
established an arts foundation, according a Beijing-based newspaper.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-04/12/content_2816479.htm

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artdaily.com, April 11, 2005
Everyone's Life is an Epic: New Work by Qu Lei Lei

[image] Qu Lei Lei, Asha - A Girl of Yi Nationality form Sichuan.
OXFORD, UK.- The Ashmolean Museum presents Everyone's Life is an Epic:
New Work by Qu Lei Lei, on view through July 17, 2005. For the first
time in the Ashmolean's series of Chinese exhibitions, a show will be
devoted to the paintings of a living artist, Qu Lei Lei. Renowned
worldwide, Lei Lei will display a series of portraits depicting the very
different lives of people living in different countries. From the
paintings of a Tibetan peasant, a Chelsea pensioner and a young girl
killed in Cambodia under Pol Pot's regime, this exhibition tells the
story of people.

Since his move from Beijing to London in 1986, Lei Lei has become well
known to British audiences as a teacher and author of Chinese brush
painting. He has lectured extensively and has been a visiting tutor at
the Ruskin School of Drawing and the V&A. Born in 1951, in northern
China, he studied Chinese painting and calligraphy, followed by Western
drawing and painting. He continued his education in anatomy at the
Beijing Medical University and after his move to London; he spent two
years at the Central School of Art and Design.

Lei Lei's fame as an artist comes from his association with the Stars
Art Movement. In 1976 after the death of Chairman Mao and the Cultural
Revolution, he became a leading member of the Stars (Xingxing), a
Beijing based group of twenty-three artists who ardently campaigned for
greater freedom of expression within the arts. In September 1979 they
were refused an official exhibition at the National Art Gallery. As a
result they hung their work on the railings outside. This caused a
political outcry and the authorities removed their paintings within
twenty-four hours. Two months later, the exhibition was staged at a
nearby studio and was attended by a total of 200,000 people in over a
week. The art critic, Li Xianting applauded the movement as 'The first
truly iconoclastic avant-garde group'.

During the early 80s several of the artists left China for Japan, Europe
or the United States. In 1989 the Stars launched their 10th anniversary
in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and exhibitions were held at the Centre
Pompidou, Paris. Their contribution to the democracy movement helped to
liberate and energise the art scene in China's major cities. Interest in
their exhibitions led to the production of overtly political works by
younger artists in the 1980s -90s. Moving on from his artistic response
to social politics, Qu Lei Lei currently pursues the theme of humanity
itself.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=13296

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IHT, Saturday, April 9, 2005
Yongle art: Outside impacts
By Souren Melikian, International Herald Tribune

Mysteries of 15th-century China on exhibit in New York

NEW YORK One of the most enduring myths about China is that of a
continuous evolution through time, impervious to outside influence.
Historically, the opposite was true. The show "Defining Yongle: Imperial
Art in Early 15th-Century China," on view at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art until July 10 and focusing on the last of the cultural revolutions
that changed the face of China before its encounter with the West,
leaves no doubt about that.

The break with the past that followed the Mongol conquest of much of
northern Asia completed by the mid-13th century radically altered most
material aspects of court life. But it was a slow process spread over
150 years.

Sadly, we lack the sequences of datable pottery vessels, lacquer
objects, metal implements for the Buddhist ritual or textiles that might
tell us precisely what happened immediately before and during the rule
of the first Mongol dynasty called Yuan (1279-1368). Where and when the
transition was made from the dainty porcelain of the preceding Song
period to the large, heavy vessels of the Yuan and the first Ming
emperors escapes us.

What is evident is the aesthetic shift that came about as a result of
the inclusion of the Iranian world within the Mongol empire. Its
conquest, accompanied by the first great holocaust in history, began in
1217 and was completed by the 1230s. Having devastated the land, the
Mongols paradoxically adopted many of Iran's court traditions, starting
with the Iranian royal banquet held outdoors when the season permitted,
and introduced them to China.

The process probably started in the capital erected at Qaraqurum in
Mongolia. The Iranian historian Ala ad-Din Ata Malek Joveyni, who
traveled six times to Qaraqurum, mentions two palaces, one built by the
"Muslims" (meaning Iranians), and the other by the "Northern Chinese."
The site, which might yield vital information on the interaction between
the two great cultures of the Orient, has yet to be excavated.

Large trays and platters, deep basins with everted lips, pear-shaped
wine decanters and ewers made their appearance. The decorative patterns
changed as radically as sizes and shapes.

The emergence of blue and white porcelain under the Yuan remains
shrouded in mystery. James Watt and Denise Patry Leidy, who organized
the show, write that "porcelains painted with cobalt blue under the
glaze developed around 1325." The importation of cobalt blue from Iran,
they say, made it possible. This, however, does not explain how new
aesthetics came about, negating the principles of Song art. They did so
evermore under the first emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) even
though they rejected the Mongol rule.

On blue and white porcelain made under Yongle (1403-1424), large-size,
clear-cut motifs of a type not seen under the Song contrast with the
quickly sketched (or carved) motifs of Song porcelain. Symmetry now
prevailed. On a deep basin that reproduces a 14th-century brass model
from Iran (not the Egyptian model cited by the authors), rhythmical
repetition again breaks with Song art. Symmetry and rhythm are both
characteristic of Iranian art.

Under whose impulse these were adopted by Chinese artists is unclear,
nor has anyone explained why Yongle, who loathed the Mongols and kept
leading expeditions into Mongolia, never attempted to revive old Song
aesthetics.

Another enigma is the emergence of cloisonné enamels, that is, objects
covered with patterns in colored glass paste contained by copper or
bronze wires. The writers state that the technique "was imported to
China during [sic] the Yuan dynasty, via the southwestwern province of
Yunnan which, under the control of a Muslim governor, received an influx
of people from Central Asia."

Alas, only one cloisonné enamel objet d'art from the entire Middle East
is so far known, a footed dish with the name and titles of a 12th
century sultan from the Artukid dynasty, which ruled historic Jazira now
straddling parts of Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The fact that the technique
and colors are those of French cloisonné enamels from Limoges has been
ignored. It suggests two possible provenances.

The Artukid dish could have been made in the kingdom of Cilicia, then
ruled by a dynasty of Armeno-French descent and exposed to significant
French influence, reflected in the illuminating technique and color
scheme of Armenian manuscripts in Cilicia. Alternatively, the dish could
have been made in the kingdom of Jerusalem, where French craftsmen were
at work until its fall in 1187 to the armies of Salah ad-Din.

Either provenance would account for the mediocrity of the Arabic
calligraphy, which is never discussed. Passable in the border naming the
Sultan in Arabic, it is atrocious in the Persian inscription on the
underside, thus precluding a "Muslim" provenance; royal objects display
impeccable calligraphy.

True, there is an additional twist to the conundrum. The origins of
French cloisonné enamels are unknown and their color scheme looks
remarkably Iranian. But that is another story altogether.

That China should owe the cloisonné enamel technique to a Western
source, as I am convinced is the case, is no more surprising than the
borrowing of gunpowder by the West from China around that time. What is
astounding is the favor it gained and the mastery achieved by Chinese
artists under Yongle. A small dish with eight cusped lobes and a floral
decoration in bold contrasted polychromy in red, lapis blue, yellow and
pale green (very Iranian-looking colors, it must be admitted) ranks
among its masterpieces, and so does the circular base for a mandala.

Another art form that sprang up under the late Yuan is intriguing. While
lacquer as a medium was used in China since about the 6th century B.C.,
nothing resembling the red dishes, trays or boxes with deeply carved
compact motifs had yet seen the light of day.

A quasi trompe l'oeil effect is achieved on a box carved on top with
three peony blossoms amidst leafy twigs. Equally alien to the Song world
is the idea of an outdoor scene carved in relief on another box. The
theme is Chinese, not the handling. The figures, the trees, the rocks
are strongly delineated by grooves, and well spaced. Chinese in their
detail, they are organized into a composition that fits Iranian rather
than Chinese rules, leading one to wonder where a fusion of the two
traditions might have occurred. At Qaraqurum, perhaps?

The Mongol conquest did not just usher in Iranian influence. Tibet left
a deep imprint on the metaphysics and iconography of Buddhism. The
Mongols espoused the Buddhist faith in its Tibetan version. A grandson
of Chingiz Khan (Genghis Khan) had persuaded the head of the Sakya sect
to come to Liangzhou, his capital in the Gansu Province. The head's
nephew, Phakpa, devised a Mongol alphabet based on the Tibetan one. When
Kubilai became the supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, he was appointed
the state preceptor. In 1268 Buddhism, with its Tibetan overtones, was
proclaimed the state religion. The fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 did
not weaken it.

Under Yongle, who became a fervent follower of Tibetan Buddhism at age
20, its influence deepened. The emperor showered Tibetan temples with
gifts. He commissioned footed bowls with calligraphic bands in blue on
white repeating Tibetan mantras. Gilt bronze figures of Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas were cast in a style called in art history "Sino-Tibetan."
Ritual instruments reproducing Tibetan models were executed in gold and
silver inlaid iron - a technique introduced from Iran.

Eventually, the foreign influences were absorbed into Chinese culture.
Islam donned a Chinese garb as it had donned an Iranian garb in Iran.

Two features endured, however. Arabic remained as the liturgical
language and Persian as the language of secular culture among Muslim
literati. Quotes from Persian poetry were calligraphed in blue on white.
On a jardiniere dated 1457 that surfaced at Sotheby's in 1974, six lines
running around the flaring sides reproduce couplets by Saadi of Shiraz.
Earlier examples may lie underground, somewhere in Mongolia. China's
Iranian connection is only beginning to unravel.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/08/features/melik9.html

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Asbury Park Press 04/8/05
Shrines of the ancients
New exhibit at Princeton University spotlights rare Chinese artifacts
By KRISTA LARSON, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

[image] (ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS)
Cary Liu shows an ink rubbing from the Wu Family Shrines artifacts on
display at Princeton University's art museum. The shrines contain some
of the earliest surviving examples of Chinese art.
[image] Cary Liu, curator of Asian Art at Princeton University's art
museum, stands near artifacts at the museum.

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, "Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology and
Architecture of the Wu Family Shrines," 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 that the now-dull stone slabs originally were painted. They
also question whether some of their inscriptions and elaborate pictorial
carvings may have been added or redone since the mid-second century,
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
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.

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," Liu said.

Three-dimensional tour

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 visitors a
three-dimensional tour of the original site.

Just the beginning

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.

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.

IF YOU GO: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
EXHIBIT: "Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology and Architecture of
the Wu Family Shrines"
DETAILS The exhibit is on display through June 26 at the museum in the
center of Princeton University campus. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m Tuesdays
through Saturdays; 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: free.
INFO: Call (609) 258-3788. Visit our Web site, www.app.com, and click on
the Web Extras button for a link to the art museum.

http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050408/LIFE/504080329/1006/OPINION

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The Daily Yomiuri, 2005-04-07
East Asia's art scene moves to the sound of 'Silence'
Robert Reed / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

Among the many treasures of Chinese art in the collection of Taiwan's
National Palace Museum in Taipei is a hanging scroll painting titled
Travelers by Streams and Mountains (ca. 1000). It is the sole extant
work of one of the legendary landscape painters of a period of Chinese
history known as the Northern Song dynasty. The reuniting of China under
the first Song emperor in 960 brought peace to the nation after half a
century of civil war, and the flowering of culture and the arts that
occurred in this period is widely considered the greatest in China's
3,000-year history.

Fan Kuan was a Taoist, and unlike the literati painters of the
aristocracy who liked to call themselves "mountain recluses" even as
they enjoyed the comforts of life in the capital, he actually lived the
rustic life of a Taoist mountain man far from the cities. That is surely
why the mountains in his painting stand so imposingly before the
viewer--not a distant view to enjoy, but a veritable challenge. Climb me
if you have the courage and the heart to encounter true nature, they
seem to say.

You will not see Fan Kuan's painting in the exhibition The Elegance of
Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia now on view at the Mori Art
Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, but you will see an elegant homage to it by
South Korean contemporary artist Yoo Seung Ho.

Like Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Fan's Travelers by Streams and
Mountains is an icon that has been copied many times by other artists
over the centuries. And, whereas many Western contemporary artists have
used the Mona Lisa as a subject for parody, it is hard to believe that
anything but a deep respect for Fan's masterpiece--or perhaps a later
copy--could have inspired Yoo to re-create so painstakingly the critical
upper mountain portion of the painting.

A closer look at Yoo's work, however, reveals that his "painting" is in
fact a matrix of minute characters from the Korean alphabet. But even
when we learn that the characters spell out the onomatopoetic "shooooo"
sound that the artist found as the sound of a rocket taking off in a
Japanese comic book, it still does not cheapen the image or turn it into
parody.

The Mori Art Museum's Korean curator, Kim Sun Hee, has organized this
show of works by 26 contemporary artists from East Asia in the belief
that even if contemporary art in today's world is a borderless,
universal language, it is a language that has at least two very distinct
dialects--one Eastern and the other Western.

In her essay for the show catalogue, Kim maintains that two of the most
fundamental elements that the cultures of China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan
have in common are the Chinese written language and Confucian thought.
She also says that these two elements permeate the art of the region, in
that written characters and paintings are closely interrelated and the
traditional San Sui landscape paintings are in part expressions of
Confucian thought--and in that sense very different from Western
landscape painting.

The show is divided into two sections. The first is titled San Sui
(Landscape), and contains works like Yoo's that deal with nature and the
traditional landscape art of East Asia. The second section is titled
Feng Shui (Wind, Water), which is also the name of the Chinese system of
positioning things within the proper flows of wind and water, or energy
in general.

Feng shui is not a science but the collected wisdom of the ancients from
a time when people lived in harmony with nature. And, as people in
modern society once again try to live in greater harmony with nature,
feng shui is enjoying a worldwide boom in popularity. As you tour the
works of painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video art and
craft in the Mori Art Museum's show, it is interesting to keep in mind
that their layout was decided in consultation with a feng shui
specialist in order to be sure that all is in harmony with the flow of
energy in and around the galleries, as prescribed by the ancient practice.

As for the art itself, there is great diversity despite the overall
thematic structure of the show. The beautiful photographs of Chinese
artist Zhan Wang appear at first glance to be computer-manipulated
images of an ancient Chinese fantasy world above the clouds. When you
ask how the images were created, Zhan points to the mirrorlike surface
of the chrome-plated artificial "rock" hanging nearby.

The rock is also his creation, made by hammering sheet metal around the
contorted surface of a Chinese garden rock and welding the sheets
together to form a hollow duplicate of the rock's shape, which is then
chrome plated.

The rock was then taken to a temple courtyard where male and female
models in ancient costume awaited, with the photos capturing the
distorted images caught on the curved reflective surfaces of the rock.
In this, Zhan is not making a statement about the artificiality of
modern life, however. As he points out, the traditional Chinese garden
with its interestingly shaped rocks and plants brought from the
mountains into the city were themselves artificial creations.

Taiwanese artist Lin Shumin is interested in states of mind, and
particularly hypnosis, which he has studied extensively. For this show
he has created an installation titled Hypnosis Project No. 1, which is a
small, high-ceilinged room with a padded floor where you can lie on your
back and look up at an upside-down room of furnishings attached to the
ceiling.

This effectively frees the viewer from the effects of gravity. And, to
further blur the border between imagination and reality, he projects
images of goldfish "swimming" through the white walls of the room. Your
consciousness can't help but be altered, but in a peaceful and
nonintrusive way that leaves the quality of the experience up to the viewer.

There are many more works to explore, and you might want a catalog as a
guide, considering the complexity of elements underlying the simplicity
and silence of many of the works. It may also take more than one viewing
to decide whether you agree with the show's premise that "a reverence
for nature, an inner calm, a sense of harmony, a delicate aesthetic
balance--qualities that uniquely define the traditional arts of Japan,
Korea, China and Taiwan--are still very much evident in the work of
contemporary artists."

===

The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia

Through June 19. Open: 10 a.m.-10 p.m. on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays
and Thursdays, until midnight on Fridays, Saturdays and days preceding
national holidays, and until 5 p.m. on Tuesdays. Mori Art Museum, 53rd
floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, a short walk from Roppongi
subway station.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20050407woac.htm

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ft, April 4 2005
Treasures in cultural crossfire
By Sue Morrow Flanagan

[Image] New York's newest museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, is the latest
venue to host a highly controversial exhibition of Tibetan art.

Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World was a coup for the museum
world. The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art of Santa Ana, California,
worked with Tibet's Bureau of Cultural Relics and the staff of Lhasa's
three central cultural institutions to bring to the US more than 100
Chinese, Indian, Nepalese, Mongolian and Tibetan sacred and ritual
objects. The exhibition spent the early part of 2004 at the Bowers, then
moved to the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

For the first time, treasures from Lhasa's Potala Palace, the
300-year-old Vatican of Tibetan Buddhism, from the Norbulinka Summer
Palace and the six-year-old Tibet Museum are being seen outside Tibet.
And although it is just a glimpse of Lhasa's remaining glory, this
exhibition dazzles the viewer with gold, silver, rubies, pearls,
turquoise, jade, red coral, rare silks and paintings swirling with
kings, gods and demons; even a bejewelled, golden cup made from a human
skull.

Everywhere, the exhibition has been greeted with protests and
demonstrations. On this third leg of the tour, an alliance of the
Students for a Free Tibet, the Tibetan Women's Association and the
Tibetan Youth Congress has denounced the exhibits as stolen "art from
Chinese-occupied Tibet".

One of the most politically significant items on display is the seal of
the fifth Dalai Lama. Caron Smith, the Rubin's chief curator, describes
the seal and two similar seals in the exhibit as "a transfer of respect
and power between China and Tibet". The seal is one of several objects
shown in films across China as evidence that Tibet was always an
integral part of China. In the past century, thousands have died over
how these sacred works of art have been interpreted, says Robert
Barnett, a lecturer in Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. It is
perhaps not surprising that museum staff have been obliged to ply their
diplomatic skills with Tibetan demonstrators on their doorstep. Peter
Keller, the Bowers president, shakes his head: "I've never seen
artifacts become this political, this sensitive."

The battle has intensified at the Rubin. Protesters have created a
parody website purporting to be the Rubin site and attacking the
interpretation of the collection as Chinese propaganda. Although the
site acknowledges that the Rubin's interpretations of sacred objects are
an improvement on earlier showings, Lhadon Tethong, executive director
of Students for a Free Tibet, sees collusion between the four museums
and China's government. "They know they are participating in a
propaganda exercise. They are allowing themselves to become a platform,
part of the Chinese strategy."

Lawyers representing the Rubin were at one time said to be investigating
unauthorised press releases on the museum's letterhead. But while
frowning on internet "trickery", Smith responds with a mix of
exasperation and humour: "We believe in free speech. Let barking dogs lie."

After watching the Bowers and Houston exhibitions draw fire, the Rubin
has tried to defuse tensions by leaving out the Chinese-prepared
catalogue and simplifying artifact interpretations. Smith sees the
exhibit as a chance for the Tibetan diaspora "to see parts of their
culture that, unless there were museums preserving it and museums
exhibiting, would be unavailable".

But for Tethong, the protest is a cry of rage. In a meeting before the
opening, Jeff Watt, another Rubin curator, urged protesters to set aside
their differences and simply feel proud of the display of their
heritage. Tethong responds angrily: "If Russia had won the cold war and
taken over your country, then took the Declaration of Independence on a
worldwide tour, how would he feel?"

Yet the protesters and Rubin officials are both eager for the public to
see the exhibition. "We are not telling people not to go and see the
exhibit," Tethong says. "But it is damaging if the average person sees
it with no mention of the problems. See it, but know what you are
seeing." Nor are the protesters critical of Tibetans in Tibet who are
working with the Chinese to see that their heritage is preserved. "Our
issue is not with them," Tethong says.

In a letter to the Bowers, the Dalai Lama welcomed the exhibition for
revealing the magnitude of Tibet's artistic traditions. "Despite the
wholesale destruction that has taken place in Tibet in recent decades,"
he wrote, "some works of art have survived. I hope that such efforts
will contribute to saving Tibetan culture from disappearing for ever."

In the late 1950s, more than 6,000 monasteries and temples with more
than 500,000 monks and nuns existed across Tibet. Some monasteries such
as Ganden were cities in themselves; some were more than 2,000 years
old. By the late 1970s, only eight monasteries were said to remain.
Since then, Barnett notes, more than 1,600 monasteries and sacred sites
have been rebuilt through Chinese government or private efforts. Dawa
Draba, vice-president of the Tibet Museum, claimed during his visit for
the exhibition's opening that: "The Chinese government has given
important attention to [restoring] the cultural relics that were
destroyed at that time." China claims to have spent $36m (£19m) on
renovations, with another $40m for further restoration of Potala Palace,
Norbulinka Palace and the Sakya Monastery. Yet the US State Department,
in its 2004 country report on human rights practices, says many
monasteries have never been rebuilt or repaired, while others have been
only partially repaired.

For the museum community, the exhibition tests the limits of the newest
code of ethics set by Unesco's International Council on Museums, which
discourages members from acquiring objects from an "occupied territory".
However, it has no specific guidance for materials on loan from such a
territory.

Despite the depredations of the past - what the Dalai Lama has called
"cultural genocide" - the thrust of China's strategy now appears to be
on bringing economic growth and trade to Tibet with expanded freedoms.
The focus is less on objects than on controlling the meaning behind the
objects. "It blurs the lines," Tethong maintains. "We believe the
Chinese occupation is going to end. The empire they are holding on to is
just not sustainable."

Smith agrees that "divisions between the Chinese and Tibetans are no
longer distinct". However, she says: "You're not going to undo Chinese
control in Tibet, but it's up to [the Tibetans] to perpetuate Tibetan
culture. It's very important for all Tibetans to espouse the culture, to
preserve and support it." She sees China and Tibet as part of a great
melting-pot created by centuries of war, with an assimilation beginning
to happen. That may be so. But the melting-pot in which Tibetans find
themselves is a crucible not of their own making.

'Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World' is at the Rubin Museum of
Art, New York, until June, then at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0e9e1b2c-a4a5-11d9-9778-00000e2511c8.html

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

The Seattle Times, April 02, 2005
Artist explores relentlessness of life in China
By Judy Chia Hui Hsu, Seattle Times staff reporter

Lin Tianmiao looks nothing like the ambiguous, monolithic self-portrait
that dominates Seattle Art Museum's second-floor gallery.

Rather than a literal depiction of her physical self, "Braiding" (1998),
a mixed-media installation, like much of her art, reflects Lin's inner
struggles. The huge photograph hangs in midair, trailed by twisting
coils of string that emerge from the back of her bald head. Lin's vision
draws from what she knows as a woman, a wife and a mother.

"A lot of her work deals with the relentless activity of women and their
daily lives," says Lisa Corrin, deputy director of art at SAM.

It's her exploration of those ideas that has made Lin one of the leading
contemporary artists in China.

The petite Lin, 43, came from Beijing to give a talk at the museum on
Thursday night in association with the exhibit "Between Past and Future:
New Photography and Video from China," which continues through May 8. In
contrast to her self-portrait, Lin wears her jet-black hair short.

"She was 10 years ahead of everybody else," says Corrin. "My director
had visited the artist in China; so did I. We had both seen her work in
this country and in Europe, and we felt she was one of the most
interesting artists to come out of China or anywhere."
From 1966 to 1976, under Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, only
photographs that supported the ideals of communism could be published or
exhibited in China. But an unofficial photo club and exhibition that
surfaced in Beijing three years later opened the door to more changes.
The past 25 years have been a revolutionary period for Chinese
experimental photographers, and Lin is at the vanguard of that
transformation.

One of very few women from China who work full time as modern artists,
Lin creates art as she juggles being a wife, and a mother to her
9-year-old son. She's known for working with everyday materials. They
are a metaphor for the conflict that she experiences personally, Lin
says in Mandarin. "You really like daily life, but you're also very
frustrated with it."

The absence of women in her field is also due to the newness of
contemporary art in China, Lin explains.

"You have to be an idealist. It's a hard living, so very few men are
doing it, and even fewer women," she says, adding that a couple of years
ago there were only about five female artists doing such work in China.
Today, there are at least 10.

Because SAM was so impressed with Lin's work, the museum purchased a
piece of her art last year, Corrin says. "Focus No. 37" (2004) looks
very much like "Braiding." The smaller version of the full-scale
installation shows the braid emerging from the front of the artist's face.

Although Lin became an artist in her mid-30s, it was as if she had
prepared for it all her life.

"My father's an artist, so, of course, it was a very natural
[transition]," she says. As a child, Lin remembers falling asleep every
time she watched her father paint. "He was so slow," she says.

Lin's father, Lin Fan, was a traditional Chinese ink painter of people
and landscapes. Her mother was an expert in traditional Chinese dance.

Lin can't remember a time when she wasn't interested in art, she says.
Growing up, she liked to draw everything.

Born in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, Lin moved with her family to Beijing
when she was attending junior-high school. "China was very chaotic
then," she says, "so I didn't receive a very good education."

But Lin treasures the education she got after moving to New York with
her husband in 1988. There, Lin worked as a freelance textile designer
to earn a living, but in her spare time she taught herself about a kind
of art that was nothing like what she was familiar with. "At that time,
Chinese art and Western art were so different," she recalls, but in New
York she found the answer to the question "What is contemporary art?"

"I really came to understand art in New York, what it means to be an
artist, what an artist's lifestyle is like," she says.

Lin observed and thought about art, but she never created anything while
living in the United States, she says. Only after she moved back to
Beijing's familiar surroundings in the mid-1990s did Lin begin to
produce her own art.

She is the only one of her parent's four children who became an artist,
Lin says. "My father has always really objected to my becoming an artist
because it's so difficult to do."

Today, Lin and her husband own a house in Beijing where she uses the
courtyard as an open-air studio.

"Art has become more and more global today, so it's impossible to escape
outside influences," she says. "But if you can find yourself [in this
environment], that's the most important thing."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002228536_lin02.html

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

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

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