China Daily, 2005-04-28
Theatre popularity all a show

With the largest number of theatrical troupes, directors and actors in
China, Beijing is undoubtedly the centre of Chinese theatre.
[image] Sorrowful love: The multimedia play "Amber" stars Yuan Quan as a
reflective girl and actor Liu Ye as a sexy and volcanic playboy with a
look of perplexity in his eyes. [file photo]

Some of the plays ongoing or set to premiere this week in Beijing
include "Student Zhao Ping" and "Red Dust" by the National Theatre
Company, "I Love Peach Blossom" by Beijing People's Art Theatre,
"Beginning of Autumn" by Shanxi Drama Theatre, "The Game of Love and
Chance" by Lin Zhaohua Drama Studio, and an independent production
entitled "Death in 1942."

In addition, the third Beijing International Drama Festival, which
opened on April 8 and will last until the end of this month, is bringing
more than 20 shows to the capital's theatre venues.

From musicals, to ballet, to spoken plays, local opera to Western
opera, the festival features a diversity of programmes, including last
year's top 10 plays awarded by the Ministry of Culture and some
extremely expensive productions like the ballet "Casablanca," in which
Warner Brothers invested US$6 million and the musical "Jin Sha" in which
the Chengdu Perform & Art Group Co Ltd invested some 16 million yuan
(US$1.9 million).

But, under this apparent prosperity there is actually much to be
concerned about. At least that was the shared viewpoint of a number of
people at a seminar held by the Drama Research Institute of Peking
University last week.

There are many festivals every year, but few of them have attracted much
attention from ordinary theatre-goers.

Lin Zhaohua, arguably the most established theatre director in China,
said: "Many of today's plays are produced for government-sponsored
awards, which have become some prerequisite for managers or even local
cultural officials in their achievement tallies." Exaggerated alarmist
talk? Middle-aged director Li Liuyi thinks not, as he concurred with
Lin's slating indictment.

Li speaks from experience - companies purely seeking awards or as a
means of attracting tourists and boosting local tourism - have often
sought to commission him to direct plays. Such plays have little to do
with theatric art itself, but are just for investment or political
achievement, says Li.

"China's theatre industry is inflated today and the booming market may
be a beautiful soap bubble," said Lin.

The on-going festival is testimony to this. For most shows, less than 30
per cent of the audience buy tickets themselves. Some one third enter
the theatre with free tickets from various sources, while another third
have been given tickets as a bonus by their employers, according to Wu
Chunyan, a box-office manager with the Poly Theatre.

An optimistic figure puts the number of regular theatre-goers in Beijing
at 10,000, most of whom are students and people from theatrical circles,
says Yuan Hong, producer and managing director of Beibingmasi Theatre,
the only privately-run drama venue in Beijing and a well-known venue
among theatre-lovers for its unique productions.

High prices

Why does such a huge metropolis have so small a group of theatre-goers?
Why do people so seldom buy tickets themselves?

One reason is that complementary tickets are always to be had since
every show has to set aside a number for officials, VIPs, the press and
employees. Another reason is that ticket prices in Beijing are far too
high for the average man and woman.

For Beijing People's Art Theatre's new rendition of the classic play
"Thunderstorm," which was staged on April 18 and 19 at the Poly Theatre,
tickets ranged in price from 200 yuan to 1,200 yuan (US$24 to US$145).

Yang Yang, a 24-year-old who works in the finance department of a
Beijing company, said he accepts paying 180 yuan (US$22) for an ordinary
show, although for a really good production he would be willing to pay
as much as 480 yuan (US$58).

Yang said that for a trendy play like Meng Jinghui's "Amber," he and his
colleagues would not baulk at paying 200-300 yuan (US$24-US$36), but for
his uncle, a fan of the Beijing People's Art Theatre, only tickets below
100 yuan (US$12) are realistic or acceptable.

Yang's level of acceptance clearly puts him among the upper echelons of
theatre-goers, whereas his uncle typifies the majority. Mo Lan, a
25-year-old saleswoman says 40 to 80 yuan (US$ 4.8-US$9.6) is for her a
reasonable price to pay.

Why are theatre tickets so expensive? The answer given by Chen Jing,
manager of a Beijing-based performance agency, sounds ridiculous, but
reflects the reality.

"To some extent, the higher the price is, the easier we sell the
tickets," she said.

This leads to another problem in Beijing's theatre market. Many
presenters do not target individual audiences, but companies who buy
tickets as PR gifts for their clients. And naturally, they want
expensive gifts.

Yang said his boss had bought 10 tickets for the up-coming dance drama
"Dynamic Yunnan," each costing 980 yuan (US$118) to give to clients.

If the price was not high, the buyer would be ashamed to give the ticket
to his VIP client and the one who gets the ticket would not consider it
a worthy gift, said Chen.

But corporate driven theatre and ticket pricing can backfire. Take
"Casablanca" for example, the production met its Waterloo in box-office
terms and the sponsor even had to cancel two of the planned five shows.
An insider with the China Arts and Entertainment Group, which
co-invested in the show with Warner Brothers, blamed the cancellations
not only on the show's so-so quality, but the fact that some expected
"group bookings" never materialized.

The losers in all this are ordinary theatre-goers who really love such
shows, but can not afford them.

Troupes' challenges

Besides the artificially inflated and distorted ticket market, theatre
is facing challenges from the instant entertainment forms of the
fast-changing society.

In the 1980s, almost every province and big city had its own drama
troupes, and quite a few of them, such as the Sichuan People's Art
Theatre and the Harbin Drama Troupe, enjoyed great fame across the country.

But now, except for a few national theatres, the Beijing People's Art
Theatre and Shanghai's several theatrical companies, many others in
China have died or are in terminal decline.

According to veteran drama critic Lin Kehuan, the Dalian Drama Theatre
has closed down, while performers with the Wuhan Drama Theatre are
facing the chop this year and the salary of actors and actresses with
the Chongqing Drama Theatre are struggling on monthly salaries of just
500 yuan (US$60). Lin garnered the information during a national meeting
of leaders of drama troupes late last year.

Li Liuyi is greatly concerned that most of his classmates from the
directing department of the Central Academy of Drama have quit the
theatre and gone into other professions.

"With both the drama companies and audiences becoming less and less,
where will the directors and performers go, and what shall they do?"

Fortunately there are still plays that have held the public's interest
and make a hit at the box-office. Meng Jinghui's multi-media play
"Amber," the Hong Kong production "18 Springs," and the "Thunderstorm"
which starred Pan Hong and Pu Cunxin and produced by the Beijing
People's Art theatre, made it.

All these productions had one important thing in common - star-studded
casts and crews. In addition, "Thunderstorm" tells a classical
intriguing story.

In "Amber," apart from stars Liu Ye and Yuan Quan, director Meng was a
main attraction to audiences. Indeed, Meng is almost the only stage
director in China today to have balanced art and commerce well in one
production. His fans expect much from every new production he brings to
the stage.

Some critics point out that the Chinese theatre scene badly needs good
scripts and talented playwrights.

"In the history of Western drama in the 19th and 20th century, there
were Alexandre Dumas, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. In
Chinese modern drama, we have Cao Yu, Lao She and Guo Moruo. But why is
it now only the names of star actors and actresses come to mind whenever
we talk about a play," said He Lulu, senior theatrical correspondent of
the Beijing Morning Post.

A number of independent directors and playwrights often come up with
creative works, but it is usually hard for them to find financial
backers. "Only national companies or big theatres can get sponsors,
investment and a star crew and cast. But they are not all of Chinese
drama," said Yuan Hong. "In the last several years the works of some
non-professional directors and producers, such as 'Celestial Human
World' and 'The Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter of Chou'er' won
acclaim from both professional circles and theatre-goers. They are an
important force in Chinese drama who offer a variety for the audience."

Yin Tao can be regarded a successful independent drama director compared
to most of his colleagues. His first work "Celestial Human World" has
had 52 performances in several cities around China, but made only around
20,000 yuan (US$2,416) in profit after all the costs were covered.

He said he did not expect to make any money out of his plays. For his
second work, "Death in 1942," he chose the much heavier theme of the
anti-Japanese war, which has a cast of 22 actors, adding heavily to the
budget.

"I believe as long as we do our work well, 'Death in 1942' can also
attract enough audience numbers to cover the cost," he said. "This play
is not only about the war, but also discusses the conflicts between
cultures."

Not as lucky as Yin, Yang Ting and her classmates produced the play with
their own money but failed to attract large audience numbers.

How to pull in audiences remains a challenging question. Apart from more
professional marketing and promotion work, what theatre people need most
to do, perhaps, is listen to the voice of the audience.

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-04/28/content_438232.htm

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Poet to live in bird's nest
www.chinaview.cn 2005-04-27 13:26:06

[image] A man-made nest has been placed on a 10-meter steel shelf on the
Jianwai SOHO Plaza, the most prosperous business area in Beijing.
(Photo: stardaily.com.cn)

BEIJING, April 27 -- A man-made nest has been placed on a 10-meter
steel shelf on the Jianwai SOHO Plaza, the most prosperous business area
in Beijing. Chinese poet Yefu moved into the nest yesterday, where he
will experience a bird's life for one-month.

Yefu took only a few necessary things with him, including a cup, a
mobile phone, and bedding. Except for perhaps meeting some unsolvable
problems, the poet will not leave the 4-square-meter space for the whole
month.

However, he will report his condition to the organizers by cell
phone messages three times a day. The organizers will prepare dinners
for him. Yefu hopes the nest life experience could help him write a new
book.

Organizer of the activity, the China Art Institute, says that they
hope to use this alternative way to inform people that loneliness has
become another major challenge for people in big cities nowadays.

The organizers are still looking for volunteers. Anyone who wants
to take part can log on to a website: sohu.com and take a look.
(Source: CRIENGLISH.com)

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-04/27/content_2884159.htm

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sina.com.cn 2005/04/26
A Tale of Two Museums
Examining the efforts of the Shanghai Museum and Beijing's Millenium
Art Museum
By Kevin Holden

China's top art centers are now competing to rival those in Paris,
Berlin or New York in attracting globally mobile art aficionados. The
Millennium Art Museum (MAM) in Beijing is fast-forwarding into the
digital future, while in the southeast, the Shanghai Museum is rewinding
into China's imperial past.

Visitors to MAM's new underground art center on western Beijing's
Chang'an Avenue, might be startled the first time the framed
"still-lifes" on display start magically moving, speaking, and even
swapping positions with other artworks meters away. In some cases, the
near-instantaneous exchange might involve works from museums that are
continents away. These "moving pictures" are not an illusion, nor are
they something out of Harry Potter books. They're part of the Millennium
Art Museum's wide-ranging plan "to make art more accessible to the
public, more interactive, and more universal in appeal," says Chaos
Chen, one of the dynamic young curators behind the venue's
transformation into a global art space.

Part of the Millennium's new art center, the digital gallery
resembles the web-wired art tableaux scattered through the hyper-hi-tech
home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Giant plasma screens display
impressionist images that morph into surrealist sculptures or futuristic
films in an endlessly changing digital montage. The museum has also
added a state-of-the-art theater and four smaller exhibition halls - all
wired to the World Wide Web - to make the e-arts center the most
advanced in China.

The digital gallery's 20 computer-controlled screens, which form a
vast ring around the core of the circular art center, were unveiled on
January 1, featuring a collection of modern artworks from the Orsay
Museum in Paris. Artworks on each screen are rotated every one to 10
minutes, so museumgoers can view up to 1200 works per hour across the
framed displays, says MAM Vice Director Wang Yudong. In the future, the
digital display space will showcase everything from "paintings to new
media artworks from all over the world," he adds.

Wang says the Orsay exhibition will be followed by a Pompidou Center
show this spring that similarly circumvents the need to transport a
traditional collection by displaying each work's digitally cloned twin.
The Millennium's exhibits will increasingly focus on works in new media,
which cover the spectrum of "digital videos, internet art/tech, digital
photography, and other forms of digital imagery, including animations
and virtual reality," says Wang.

The museum began etching out a place on the international art map
with a 2002 exhibition titled "Salvador Dali - A Journey Into Fantasy,"
which was jointly staged with the Danish United Exhibits Group. Danish
Ambassador Ole Lonsmann Poulsen called the surrealist show "a true
European exhibition" embedded with "the newest interactive technologies
developed in Denmark." The ambassador said the event was not only a
showcase on Dali's life and art, but also "a journey into new ways of
making museum exhibitions on art and culture."

The first exhibition of Dali's dream-inspired artworks in China,
with a multi-media set-up that encouraged fans to experiment with their
own surrealist creations, drew countless youths who have grown up with
satellite television, Sony play-stations, and Web cafes, and who might
shy away from more conventional museum events.

Curator Chen says that besides attracting spectators from every
circle of China's increasingly diverse society, the museum aims "to keep
the Chinese audience aware of the most extraordinary developments in art
worldwide - the greatest achievements of humanity."

Chen, who frequently shuttles between Beijing, Paris, Berlin and New
York to keep up with art trends, says that during the close of the last
century, "The Museum of Modern Art [in New York City] organized the
best-ever symposium on how to make art more interactive and accessible,
and that started a whole new discourse on modern art museums." The
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has since started using the Web to reach out
to the young and old, the city and the world. MoMA's website
(www.moma.org/), for example, uses a green alien in a Macromedia Flash
animation to attract youngsters. This cartoon extraterrestrial
encourages kids not only to view paintings like Vincent van Gogh's
Starry Night, but also to write poetry about the stars. They are invited
to run their cursors along Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity
in Space as the sculpture emits music ranging from techno to chill out
to neo-classical.

Chen says that in the Age of the Internet, "perhaps hundreds or
thousands of people explore a museum's website for every one person who
visits the museum itself," and adds she has been prodding MAM to quickly
improve its presence in cyberspace. The Millennium Art Museum currently
hosts only rudimentary sites (www.mam.gov.cn in Chinese and
www.bj2000.org.cn in English) that do not even have cross-links or info
on upcoming exhibitions.

The Web-savvy Chen says her personal favorite museum website,
operated by the Netherlands Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art at
www.wdw.nl, "is extremely interactive and shows how successful a virtual
museum could become."

Synchronized with its top exhibits, the Rotterdam museum operates
public and online dialogues that invite the world to take part.
Throughout 2004, the Witte de With Center brought together a group of
Western and Islamic scholars and artists to hold a running on-site and
online discourse on the causes of and potential solutions to terrorism
and war in the Middle East. Chen says "the entire Witte de With museum
has been digitalized and entered the virtual world."

Zhu Jun, chief technical supervisor at the Millennium Art Museum,
says, "Many of China's leading museums have started creating digital
versions of their collections or designing websites as part of China's
'digital museum project.'"

Zhu says the project has three aims: to create a digital library of
each museum's collection, to utilize digital technology to help preserve
or restore artworks, and to post some collections on the Web. But art
industry insiders say that government funding has been tight for the
digital museum project, which in turn has slowed down the building of
websites or digitalized collections. "We are just starting to lay the
bottom bricks in the pyramid of technology needed to create digital
museums," says Zhu.

Wang Yudong says the Millennium wants to step up "cooperation with
the world's emerging scholars and artists" in the area. According to
Wang, the museum is currently holding talks with an American arts
foundation to use its digital museum technology as part of larger steps
"to import digital artworks and export digital versions of Chinese works
via the Internet." The museum is now working on an exhibition, to be
held in May, which focuses on the neo-century's convergence of art and
technology in new media artworks with two of China's top colleges,
Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, along with the
Boston-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Dutch V2
Institute For Unstable Media (based in Rotterdam and partner in the
Witte de With digital museum).

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, says that with
parallel developments in digital technology, the Web and hi-speed
globalization, artists for the first time in history are being given the
chance to present their works to and interact with a potentially
global-wide audience. In his book, Being Digital, Negroponte says, "We
have the opportunity to distribute and experience rich sensory signals
that are different from looking at the page of a book and more
accessible than traveling to the Louvre. Artists will come to see the
Internet as the world's largest gallery for their expressions."

The Internet is also allowing digital art museums like the
Millennium to communicate with and display the works of techno-artists
located anywhere in the Web-connected world. The May media exhibition at
the Millennium, titled "In the Line of Flight," will cover artworks
"selected by a [global] group of distinguished curators, with
representative works of telematic art, virtual reality, Net art, robotic
art, interactive TV/cinema, software art, biotech art, data
visualization and game art," according to the show's outline, developed
with New York's Parsons School of Design.

Wang Limei, MAM's forward-looking director, says that "Art
exhibitions in the Millennium Art Museum have become an important part
of life in Beijing and an important window through which governments,
organizations and artists from all over the world communicate with each
other."

Wang says the venue's unique features, a primarily digital
collection and global collaboration, will help it "emphasize art as a
cultural phenomenon shared by all humanity." Wang, writing in a
catalogue titled "World Art Museum" - a show scheduled for 2006 that
will focus on the museum's own future - adds that "our attention to
world art is not a focus on the Other, but rather is an observation of
ourselves as members of world culture."

Meanwhile, art experts in China's rival cultural center - Shanghai -
have taken a very different route in the race to create a global art
showcase.
As scholars, researchers and archeologists at the Shanghai Museum slowly
reconstruct fragments of ancient hand scroll paintings and stone
Buddhist sculptures, they are simultaneously trying to piece together a
massive puzzle - one that stretches out in four dimensions. And when
these "art detectives" focus on the fourth, or time, element of the
puzzle, which includes millennia of Chinese civilization, they find that
many pieces of the past have been lost or shattered through war and
revolution.

While great swaths of China's imperial-era culture have been looted
or destroyed by foreign invaders or Chinese combatants over the past 150
years, the country has now embarked on a great restoration project, says
Shanghai Museum curator Li Chaoyuan."The more deeply we understand
ancient Chinese civilization, the better we can construct an enlightened
future," says Li.

The Shanghai Museum's design, which features a circular roof above a
rectangular base, is at the cutting edge of Chinese architecture, but
also symbolizes the union of Heaven and Earth in a modern echo of
centuries old Chinese temples. Beneath a vast crystalline dome, middle
school students gather around a touch-screen display panel to digitally
surf the museum's exhibits, which cover the evolution of Chinese
civilization over the course of four thousand years.

Nearby, the museum's ancient bronze gallery - one of the world's
best - traces the origins of not only Chinese art, but also the
country's social structure and political hierarchy. Among the earliest
exhibits are 3500-year-old turquoise-embedded halberds and bronze ritual
vessels that are etched with the images of mythical animals. The bronze
weapons were used in battles to create China's earliest kingdoms, and
the vessels were employed by shaman-leaders to legitimize their rule
through ritual sacrifices to their ancestors.

Curator Li, an expert on bronze antiquities, says "more than half of
the museum's collection has come from recent excavations of royal tombs
and temples" because of the massive pillaging of art that occurred at
the hands of foreign invaders as China's last dynasty crumbled. Some of
the Buddhist relics and traditional Chinese paintings that survived
those assaults were destroyed during the Chinese civil war or the
"Cultural Revolution," he adds.

But now, the Shanghai Museum's ongoing effort to help shape China's
21st-century culture by recombining remnants of history is being echoed
across the nation. From southern Guangdong, where new Buddhist temples
are spreading across the province, to Beijing, where traditional
festivals and music are being revived, China seems to be racing ahead
into the past. Yet Shanghai seems to be pouring the most money into
building a world-class mecca for Chinese culture, says David Shambaugh,
who heads an Asian studies center at George Washington University in
Washington, DC.

"Shanghai was long known as the cosmopolitan capital of Greater
China," which includes not only the People's Republic, but also the tens
of millions of ethnic Chinese who live outside the Chinese mainland,
says Professor Shambaugh, a widely respected China scholar. With its new
museum, opera house and high-tech library, "Shanghai may also be trying
to become the cultural capital of Greater China," he adds.

Li says most of the funding for Shanghai's new museum and nearby
concert hall came from the government, with part contributed by Chinese
scattered across the globe. City and central authorities all threw their
support into building the museum at the center of Shanghai's People's
Square - once the stage of massive Red Guard rallies to smash all traces
of tradition. During the "Cultural Revolution " (1966-76), countless
centuries old Chinese writings, bronze Buddhist icons and ink-and-color
paintings were destroyed in a drive to erase the country's "feudal" history.

But the decade-long "Cultural Revolution" paradoxically helped the
Shanghai Museum expand its collection of ancient paintings and ceramics.
When the zealots began house-to-house searches for remnants of China's
pre-revolutionary past, "sometimes private collectors would call the
museum and say 'the Red Guards are on their way - please take away my
collection'," says museum official Li. "After the 'Cultural Revolution'
ended," he adds, "many collectors opted to donate their works to the
museum." Since then, citizens across Greater China have contributed
artworks or cash to the Shanghai Museum to boost efforts to resurrect
Chinese culture, say many experts on Chinese art.

Wang Qingzheng, vice-director of the Shanghai Museum, says overseas
Chinese have donated more than US$10 million and hundreds of artworks in
the last several years. Wang, also the museum's chief fundraiser, says
he has "met many potential donors at international auctions over the
years," and adds that they are bound by a common link.

"People in Taiwan and Hong Kong and overseas Chinese have a common
education and are steeped in common traditions ... we are united in our
love for traditional Chinese culture," he says.

The Shanghai Museum has been so successful in piecing together the
4-D puzzle of China's cultural past that its praises are being sung
across the country and the planet. Back in Beijing, the Millennium Art
Museum's Chen says the Shanghai Museum heads the race to compete for
connoisseurs willing to crisscross the globe for the best shows.
Professor Shambaugh says, "the recreation of a global Cultural China is
a huge joint venture between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland, and the
Shanghai Museum is a microcosm of that process."

Chen says that in terms of engaging everyone from ordinary Chinese
citizens to global art tourists in an increasingly interactive exchange,
"the Shanghai Museum has become China's first world-class art museum."

Chinese museums: Find them on the net
Millennium Art Museum (Beijing)
www.bj2000.org.cn/english/artmuseum.htm

National Art Museum of China (Beijing)
Chinese (with English forthcoming):
www.namoc.org/

Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong)
English and Chinese:
www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/englishintroeintro.html

The Palace Museum (Beijing)
Chinese, English and Japanese
www.dpm.org.cn/english/default.asp

The National Museum of Chinese History (Beijing)
Chinese with some English
www.nmch.gov.cn/en/index.jsp

The Terracotta Museum (Xian)
English, Japanese and Chinese
www.bmy.com.cn/

The Shanghai Museum (Shanghai)
English and Chinese
www.shanghaimuseum.net/

http://edu.sina.com.cn/en/2005-04-26/191232973.html

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asahi, 04/22/2005
IN SIGHT/ ACCESSIBLE ART: Older talent flowers in Ginza gallery
By EDAN CORKILL, Contributing Writer

Had your fill of idiosyncratic installation pieces, unfathomable video
art, superficial photographs and cartoonlike paintings?

Yearning for the days when galleries were filled with serious paintings
and sculptures that you could just look at rather than have to crawl
inside, watch for hours on end, or, in extreme cases, help make?

Relax. There is still art for you. The generation of Japanese artists in
their late 40s and 50s almost all work in conventional media, and, with
some notable exceptions (Tadashi Kawamata, to name one), they are much
more conservative than the now in-vogue artists 10 years their junior.

The only problem: Where to see their work? It's long been a flaw in the
Japanese art world that few support mechanisms exist for mid-career artists.

Young artists--the ones currently kicking up an animation-inspired storm
that's reaching across the Pacific--have at their disposal an array of
corporate- and government-funded awards and scholarships. They also
have, for a few years at least, the attention of commercial art dealers
on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. Midcareer artists, by contrast,
have only a few scholarships, a handful of less fickle, well-established
galleries and teaching positions.

For some, there is also Shiseido. In 2001, on the reopening of the
cosmetics giant's art gallery in its new Ginza building, Shiseido dusted
off its old Tsubaki-kai program, and, with it, threw out a lifeline to
nine of the country's most talented established artists.

Tsubaki-kai, which literally means camellia club (the camellia is
featured in the company symbol) was first established in 1947 and is one
of the earliest examples of corporate support of the arts in postwar
Japan. At the time of its founding, its aim was the creation of a
French-style art salon. The first group consisted of 17 artists, and
Shiseido staged annual exhibitions for them through 1954.

Over the years, more Tsubaki-kai were convened. The fourth came to an
end in 1997.

When Shiseido's new Ricardo Bofill-designed building opened with a
spacious new gallery in its basement, a new five-year Tsubaki-kai was
launched.

In an interview, Shiseido Gallery curator Masaki Higuchi explained that
the selection of artists for the fifth Tsubaki-kai was governed only by
the need to exhibit and purchase one or more works from each member each
year. In other words, the artists had to be capable of producing
collectible works for at least five years. It was this factor that led
to the focus on midcareer artists, although Higuchi acknowledged that
providing support for this forgotten generation was also a factor.

Seven women--Yuumi Domoto, Toeko Tatsuno, Mitsuko Miwa, Yasue Kodama,
Kyoko Sera, Ruri Iwata and Noe Aoki--and two men-Naoaki Yamamoto and
Wakiro Sumi-were chosen. The oldest are Tatsuno, Yamamoto and Sumi (all
born in 1950), and the youngest is Kodama (born in 1961). Three of the
group are sculptors; the rest, painters.

The fifth and final exhibition for this Tsubaki-kai is now under way at
Shiseido Gallery. With its surfeit of luscious oil paintings and finely
wrought sculptures, the show provides a welcome respite from the usual
fare of younger artists' all-too-often slipshod or derivative offerings
in newer media.

Kodama's set of three large oil paintings, ``air-sakura,'' show
delicately rendered cherry blossoms against a mauve-streaked sky.
Following on from her willow series last year, they indicate her
interest in naturally occurring patterns and the subtle hues of the sky.

The two sculptures Iwata assembled from rectangular shafts of casting
glass present her material in a new light. The cloudy, roughly cut glass
is made to look earthy, as though excavated from the site of an ancient
asteroid collision.

Tatsuno is known for richly colored, abstract canvases that explore
shape and form. This year's work, ``Velvet Zone,'' continues the same
theme, with delicious purple and maroon forms on an uneven yellow framework.

Sumi has created a gracefully curving hornlike sculpture that seems to
defy gravity. Perhaps the smooth finish of the protrusions and rough
finish of the base indicate hollow and solid volumes respectively.

Miwa has produced a set of six conceptual paintings featuring objects
such as a car engine, a statue and a stack of books on aquamarine
colored backgrounds. Each is named after a place--Torino, Bangkok and
Siberia, respectively--although Miwa doesn't let on what the undoubtedly
personal connection is.

Higuchi says that of all the artists, Aoki has changed the most over the
five years. While she used to create elegant structures consisting of
squares, circles and other geometric shapes that seemed to dance in
midair, this year she has made small ground-hugging objects in bronze.
``Where Water Remains'' is almost a matrix of her old work: a kind of
anvil from which her earlier, more lively forms might have been struck.

Higuchi said that next year the Tsubaki-kai formula would be revamped
considerably before the sixth group is convened. Let's hope that it
stays focused on artists in their middle age-a generation that, in more
ways than the obvious, needs this cosmetics maker's assistance the most.

* * *

``Tsubaki-kai Exhibition 2005'' runs through May 29 at Tokyo's Shiseido
Gallery (03-3572-3901), near Ginza subway station. Admission free. 11
a.m.-7 p.m. (until 6 p.m. on Sundays and national holidays). Closed
Mondays.(IHT/Asahi: April 22,2005)

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200504220109.html

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

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

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