绿茶拿铁 Green Tea Latte

[China Oddities] Crazy English

zhangxiaomin — Fri, 03 October 2008 10:05:36 -0400

Accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant, Li Yang stepped into a Beijing classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English, wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a black car coat. His hair was set off by a faint silver streak. It was January, and Day Five of China’s first official English-language intensive-training camp for volunteers to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Li was making the rounds. The classes were part of a campaign that is more ambitious than anything previous Olympic host cities have attempted. China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”
Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, handpicked by the city’s hospitals to work at the Games. If foreign fans and coaches get sick, these are the doctors they will see. But, like millions of English learners in China, the doctors have little confidence speaking this language that they have spent years studying by textbook. Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.
Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.
“Would!”
“Would!”
“Like!”
“Like!”
“To!”
“To!”
“Take!”
“Take!”
“Your!”
“Your!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before. (How a patient might react to such bluster was anyone’s guess.)

[Continue here]

[Sharing] Beijing’s New Plan to Reduce the Number of Cars

zhangxiaomin — Fri, 03 October 2008 00:28:39 -0400

Blog Link

The Beijing Municipal Government has announced a series of post-Olympics car restrictions that will take effect next month. According to the English-language report, under the new rules, 30 percent of government vehicles will be taken off the roadand as of Oct 11, the remaining 70 percent of government vehicles, along withcorporate and private cars, will be banned from driving one day during the five-day-working week. Cars ending with either a one or a six will be banned onMondays; those ending with a two or a seven will be banned on Tuesdays, and so on.

The article goes on to clarify that:

The ban will be applicable within the Fifth Ring Road inclusive,from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for private cars and round the clock for government and corporate vehicles. It will take effect on a trial basis on October 11 for six months until April 10, but does not apply to police wagons, ambulances, fire and corporate vehicles.

Aside from this new rule forcing cars to spend one of the five working days off the road, the city government has also drafted a few other measures to discourage Beijing residents from driving:

Limiting the issue of registration plates
Only 100 thousand plates will be issued each year from now on. Considering 400 thousand new cars appear on Beijing streets every year at present, this measure will efficiently reduce the total amount of cars in the Capital.

Increasing the cost of parking
Raising the parking charges is another measure. The price of the downtown parking lots might be 5 or 6 times higher than the current standard. The government hopes the economic level principle can improve the city’s central part’s traffic.

Developing public transport system and facilities
The government is going to further strengthen the construction of the city transport system by the implementing a traffic network plan. The plan involves the construction of three more subway lines (14, 7 and 15), which will increase the total amount of and distance covered by subway lines to 270 km. The goal is to have one new line running every year and to achieve a comprehensive transportation system that is aimed at integrating the urban center with the rural area as well as speed up the parking and transferring facility construction of public transport

Links and Sources
Xinhua: Post-Olympics Beijing car restrictions to take effect next month
Beijing Times: 北京市人民政府关于实施交通管理措施的通告

Dayoo.com: 北京停车费近期不会上涨

New Chief Curator Appointed at MoMA

zhangxiaomin — Thu, 04 September 2008 12:41:57 -0400

After a six-month search, the Museum of Modern Art has chosen one of its own curators, Ann Temkin, to succeed John Elderfield, who retired as chief curator of painting and sculpture in July.

Ms. Temkin assumes the curatorial post, considered the most prestigious in the field of Modern art, as MoMA gears up for its second growth spurt in less than a decade. After an $858 million expansion completed in 2004, the museum plans to extend its galleries further in a tower that is being built next door on West 54th Street in Manhattan. The museum is also in the midst of rethinking how it presents the history of Modern art through its world-class collection.

(Source: New York Times)

In addition to the display of paintings and sculptures, Ms. Temkin’s top responsibilities will include planning special exhibitions and advising the museum on acquisitions.

“I plan to take a broader, more international view than we did in the past,” said Ms. Temkin, 48, who arrived at MoMA in 2003 after 13 years as a curator at thePhiladelphia Museum of Art.

Since the era of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s legendary founding director, the museum has played a greater role than any other institution in carving out a canon of Modern movements under curators like William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe and Mr. Elderfield, who is now the museum’s chief curator emeritus. Yet in recent years some art-world critics have felt that the museum should have been more on top of what was happening in contemporary art. Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities was to ensure that MoMA’s collection of contemporary art is unrivaled.

“That’s who we are,” she said.

In seeking a successor to Mr. Elderfield, said Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern’s director, the museum interviewed “a considerable number of people from many points of the world.”

“Sometimes you have to look way outside to realize what you have within,” he added. Among those who are said to have been considered are Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Philippe Vergne, the former deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the new director of the Dia Art Foundation; and Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of Ms. Temkin’s long-term challenges will be planning the reinstallation of the collection as the museum adds roughly 50,000 square feet of gallery space. Plans call for the Modern to extend its galleries on the second, fourth and fifth floors into a 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel that is to be completed in three or four years.

Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities would be to “change our viewers’ experience in many ways,” especially by integrating painting and sculpture with other mediums. The Modern and many other museums still have separate departments for painting and sculpture, film and video, and prints and drawings.

Ms. Temkin called that approach outdated. She said that she planned to “reflect the way artists work today, where these divisions are far less prevalent.”

She also intends to change the works in the permanent galleries more frequently. “I’d like to mix the foundation of the collection in new ways, to animate those galleries so they are constantly full of unexpected revelations,” she said.

Unlike Mr. Elderfield, whose chief scholarly interests ranged from artists like Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse to postwar artists like Bridget Riley and Richard Diebenkorn, Ms. Temkin is more firmly grounded in postwar and contemporary art, keeping up with many notable figures working today.

She earned her doctorate in art history at Yale and worked at the Modern from 1984 to 1987 as a curatorial assistant in the painting and sculpture department. Taking the job of curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, she organized exhibitions on artists including Barnett Newman, Alice Neel and Raymond Pettibon.

On Mr. Elderfield’s watch, the Modern hired Ms. Temkin in 2003 to work on a curatorial team in the painting and sculpture department. In addition to helping reinstall painting and sculpture galleries when the museum reopened in 2004, she organized shows like “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today,” which closed in May, and “Against the Grain: Contemporary Art From the Edward R. Broida Collection,” in 2006.

This spring and summer she rearranged several of the museum’s painting and sculpture collection galleries, including those devoted to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Postminimalism, and organized one of the museum’s “Focus” series installations, a gallery of work by Joseph Beuys.

She has also been responsible for important acquisitions of works by artists like Beuys, Donald Judd, Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. She will coordinate the New York version of “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” a show organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that arrives at MoMA in February. She is also at work on an exhibition of the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco that is expected to open in December 2009.

Among her publications are works on Newman, Neel, Beuys and Mr. Pettibon.

“One of the big advantages is that we’ve had the benefit of seeing how scholarly Ann is,” said Leon D. Black, a longtime MoMA board member who is chairman of the trustee’s painting and sculpture committee.

The Modern’s next hiring challenge is finding a replacement for Alanna Heiss, founding director of its P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, who retires at the end of the year.

Traveling Tips on Chile (via Wikitravel)

zhangxiaomin — Thu, 28 August 2008 16:32:45 -0400

Stay safe

As most big cities, Santiago suffers from a high rate of pickpocketing and muggings. It's advisable not to travel in the downtown area wearing expensive-looking jewelry or watches, even during the day. Stay alert and be especially careful in all crowded areas in Santiago.

For tourists or other "beginners" lacking experience in over-the-counter transactions with hard Chilean currency, you can reduce the chance of your wallet getting stolen by following some advice:

Separate coins and bills. Coins are frequently used when paying the (micro) bus and colectivo. Store them in a small handbag so that your bills will remain concealed.

1000-, 2000- and 5000-peso notes should be easily accessible. Bills with higher value should be stored in another, more secure place in your wallet so you don't accidently pay 10000 pesos instead of 1000, for example.

Do not reach for your wallet until the vendor tells you the price.

If a souvenir costs, for example, 1300 pesos, pay with a 2000-peso bill or two 1000-peso bills. Don't pay with, say, a 1000-peso bill and 300 pesos in loose change.

Chilean Carabineros (National Police) are very trustworthy--call 133 if you need assistance. If you have a GSM mobile phone, call 112. Some municipalities (such as Santiago or Las Condes) have private guards; however, they usually don't speak English. Do not try to bribe a carabinero--it will get you into serious trouble! Unlike other south american police corps, Chilean carabineros are very proud and honest, and bribery would be a serious offense against their creed.

Regarding driving conditions: Chilean drivers tend to be not as erratic and volatile as those in neighboring countries.

Since Chile is almost racially homogeneous, Chileans get curious and may stare at foreigners. If you are blonde, black or asian, be prepared. There have been reports of racist attacks, but they are infrequent, and the police (carabineros) have become better at handling such situations. If you are from the Middle East, it will be easier to blend in and will not get the same level of attention as a black or asian would, for instance.

Be careful if you are dressed like an emo. They are called "pokemons" because the haircuts reminds of the japanese animated series. Chileans may disapprove of the hairstyle and clothing. There have been an increase on attacks against them by skinheads and few chileans have sympathies for them. You will experience less problems if you embody some other genre like rock or hip-hop, for example.

Respect

Although modern in many ways Chile remains basically traditional. You will fare better if you do not openly denigrate or flout those traditions. Ladies wear dresses or skirts of modest design, and men wear long pants, at least in the cities. People speak in conversational tones.
Unlike other countries in Latin America, the Chilean police force is admired for its honesty and competence. Report any complaints to the police the moment you receive them, including criminal activity. Bribing is not acceptable in Chile, in comparison with the rest of the Latin America, and you'll likely get arrested for it.
Do not assume that your hosts in Chile will have the opinion that Pinochet is bad. He still has many supporters, so be careful when raising the issue. Even if you want to talk other political subjects than Pinochet, people can get very aggressive when it comes to politics. Depending on your opinions, they can either call you "communist" or "fascist."
Chileans are very friendly people. Use your common sense to avoid danger.
Be careful: many people can speak and understand English, even the lower class...be polite.
Chileans hate arrogance. Be arrogant and you will have problems; be kind and everyone will try to help you.
Chileans will know that you are a foreigner no matter how good your Spanish is. Don't get upset if they call you "gringo"-- all foreigners are called that.

[NYTimes] China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge

zhangxiaomin — Wed, 06 August 2008 11:42:32 -0400

July 30, 2008 [link]

By HOLLAND COTTER

BEIJING — On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde.” Police officers swarmed into the museum. The show, the country’s first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.

The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time. Why she did what she did was not immediately clear, but this didn’t matter.

She had set off a symbolic explosion.

The international press saw a rebellion story. China’s political and cultural vanguard claimed a hero. The government reacted as if attacked. The renowned art critic Li Xianting has described the incident as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square crackdown four months later. Whatever the truth, Ms. Xiao made the history books. She was a star.

She is the first and last Chinese female artist so far to achieve that status. Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.

Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long.

If any woman qualifies as a power artist on the current male model, Lin Tianmiao probably comes closest. She was born in 1961, and like many artists of her generation who were raised during the Cultural Revolution but came of age professionally in its rocky aftermath, she had a difficult start.

In the mid-1990s, with money scarce, censors watchful and no gallery or market structure in place, she and her husband, the conceptual artist Wang Gongxin, lived and worked in cramped Beijing apartments where they mounted one-night shows that doubled as rent parties.

Ms. Lin’s work reflected these hand-to-mouth conditions. It was made from used household utensils — teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers — that she laboriously wrapped in layers of cheap white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and precious.

With the market boom, her career took off, and her work grew in scale and formal polish. Her floor-to-ceiling installations of self-portrait photographs anchored by braids of white yarn are fixtures in international shows. She and Mr. Wang live in one of Beijing’s many gated high-rises designed for urban professionals; their joint studio is an antiques-filled farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, where, with a small staff of seamstresses, Ms. Lin produces ghostly — and expensive-looking — soft sculptures swelling with egg- and breast-shaped forms in pristine white silk.

Critics have noted affinities in her art to the “women’s work” aesthetic of certain Western feminists. Ms. Lin, who lived in New York City during the late 1980s, would not disagree. And she acknowledges that women are treated like second-class citizens in China — like “inactive thinkers,” as she puts it. Yet she is cautious about applying the term feminist to herself or her work. Why? The concept is too Western. It is too vague. China is not ready for feminism. China has its own brand of feminism. You hear variations on these reasons often, just as you do in the West.

Making the Past Portable

Yin Xuizhen is Ms. Lin’s near-contemporary. Both are of the “apartment art” generation and worked with homely, personal materials. For a 1995 installation, Ms. Yin unraveled the woolen yarn from secondhand men’s and women’s sweaters and used it to knit new sweaters that merged the genders. She sealed her own clothes, including items dating to childhood, in a suitcase, as if to preserve the past and make it portable. She also began gathering architectural scraps from the streets of her native Beijing, as if to document and memorialize a city being destroyed around her.

The threat of destruction pervades her recent large-scale work too, though now the implications are global. For a continuing piece called “Fashion Terrorism,” she created a miniature airport baggage claim with mysterious parcels stalled on a carousel. They may hold the possessions of immigrants in transit; they may hold weapons. We cannot know.

She, like Ms. Lin, is married to an artist, Song Dong, a video maker and conceptualist with a strong international reputation. In fact, a fair number of successful female artists in China are halves of art-world couples.

No artist in China has a more powerful spouse than Lu Qing does. She is married to the artist-architect Ai Weiwei, who was a consultant on the design for the 2008 Olympic Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest. Yet it’s hard to think of an artist whose work is more different from his.

Mr. Ai is a conceptualist who specializes in controversy and confrontation. For one piece he smashed ancient Chinese pots. For another he disassembled antique furniture to make it unusable. On the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he photographed a young woman standing in front of Mao’s portrait in the square and provocatively flipping up her skirt.

Ms. Lu was the woman in that picture. But her art is the opposite of exhibitionistic. Since 2000 she has made a single new work annually. At the beginning of each year she buys a bolt of fine silk 82 feet long. Over the next 12 months, using a brush and acrylic paint, she marks its surface with tight grid patterns. The results look like a cross between Agnes Martin’s grid drawings and traditional Chinese scroll painting, historically a man’s medium.

Some years she fills the cloth. Other years, when she can bring herself to work only sporadically, she leaves it half empty. At least one year, she painted nothing. But completion in any ordinary sense is not the goal. Whatever state the roll is in at year’s end, that is its finished state. She packs it away and buys a new bolt.

This is private, at-home work. “I don’t think what I’m doing is art,” Ms. Lu said. “In fact, it makes me forget what art is about.” Like Ms. Lin’s early wrappings and Ms. Yin’s knitting, this is art as performance and meditation.

Few if any of China’s lionized male artists are doing work as slow, private and hermetic. And by no means all women are.

In the 1990s the photographer Xing Danwen, born in 1967, documented the rough-and-tumble life of artists in the fringe squatter settlement here called the East Village. Her 1995 photographic series “Born With the Cultural Revolution” examined the status of her generation of women: heirs of a Maoist principle of gender equality now living in a market economy that undermines that equality. And the work did so with a complexity that makes Mr. Ai’s Tiananmen picture look like a one-liner.

Beyond Women’s Issues

What has been gained and lost in the transition between old and new ways of social thinking, between collectivism and individualism, is the subject of her recent “Urban Fiction” series. Here Ms. Xing digitally inserts miniature vignettes of domestic violence and isolation into photographs she has taken of tabletop models of Beijing high-rises. The original architectural models were made by real estate developers to sell new apartments like the spacious but unpalatial one that Ms. Xing lives in. Many of the tiny figures in her narratives have her face.

Clearly art by women in China is not confined to “women’s issues,” like family and home. Much of the art is about excavating a personal past and bringing it into the present, and about examining that present and how women are living it.

In 2000 Cui Xiuwen used a hidden camera to film a group of women, most of them prostitutes, talking, applying makeup, calling clients and counting cash in the bathroom of a Beijing karaoke bar. The video, titled “Lady’s Room,” was censored when it appeared in the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial, presumably because it presents realities — women as active agents in consumer eroticism — that contradict a spectrum of cultural ideals about gender, from a view of the sexes existing in harmonious balance to one of women as subservient. As the artist herself says of the video, “You can feel that it is a situation before a battle.”

More recently, Ms. Cui, who is in her late 30s, has produced highly finished photographs and paintings of adolescent girls dressed in uniforms of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization in China. Sometimes bruised and bloodied, the girls pose in what looks like the Forbidden City. And most recently, she has made pictures of older girls floating like somnambulant angels above Beijing rooftops. The theme of childhood and maternity recur almost obsessively, as they do in Ms. Lin’s new sculpture.

Xiong Wenyun, born in 1953, is on a different track. She has a cramped studio in the 798 District, a once-hot art neighborhood now overrun by second-tier galleries and tourists, but her best-known work, the 1998 photographic series “Moving Rainbow,” was shot far from Beijing and its art world.

For this project she traveled a bleak logging road that runs through westernmost China into Tibet. She photographed people she encountered, many of them residents of remote mountain villages, and talked to them about commercial development that threatened their way of life. She also took photographs of truck caravans and of shacklike truck stops that lined the route, after adorning both with fabric hangings keyed to the colors of Tibetan prayer flags.

A Different Role Model

Since Ms. Xiong finished her project, China has improved the trucking road and added a mountain tunnel to make Tibet more accessible to Chinese settlers and tourists. It has also prohibited logging in the region. As a result, the caravans and many of the truck stops that Ms. Xiong turned into temporary art installations are gone; her documents are what remains of them.

Ms. Xiong is well aware that “Moving Rainbow,” with its blend of activism, anthropology and abstraction, is an anomaly in new Chinese art, much of which, in addition to being only obliquely political, is product-oriented and studio-bound.

Not all of it is, though. A much-noticed young artist, Li Shurui, born in 1981, began her career while still an undergraduate with an ambitious outdoor installation. It consisted of a long line of fabric cubes that stretched across a lake in a remote part of Yunnan Province inhabited by a matriarchal ethnic minority.

Although she has since become best known for her paintings — air-brushed, semi-abstract images of music club interiors executed in a pleasing internationalist mode — she stood out in a recent gallery group show for an installation work that suggested a cross between a Minimalist environment illuminated by fluorescent lights and an open elevator stuck between floors. Some people spoke of savvy references to certain Western art; others noted a vague resemblance to the shot-up sculpture that caused so much fuss in 1989.

A few years ago Ms. Xiao revealed that the primary motivation behind the shooting had not been aesthetic or political, after all, but emotional. She was expressing anguish over her relationship with Mr. Tang, which was going sour. What she was firing at was not the sculpture per se, which was made from two telephone booths and titled “Dialogue,” but at her own image in its reflective surface.

For some people the significance of her action was diminished with that revelation, although to anyone viewing it through a Western feminist eye — meaning with the understanding that the personal is political — its significance increased.

As for feminism, Ms. Li, who is married to the painter Chen Jie, acknowledges the force of male chauvinism in the art world, both in China and elsewhere. But, she says, she is still too young, still too much in the stage of discovering herself, to figure out whether she considers herself a feminist or not.

It may say something about her present and future thinking, though, that when asked to name a cultural role model, she pointed neither to other artists nor to contemporary politics, but to the deep past: to the seventh-century ruler Wu Zetian, who through a combination of brains, beauty, unsparing ambition and tenacious hard work, became China’s first and only empress.

Interview with Chinese Art Collector Guan Yi

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 22 July 2008 15:49:06 -0400

From: The Art Newspaper; via: Danwei.org

"He says he is increasingly frustrated by the rampant speculation in the Chinese art market which is making it difficult for talented young artists to emerge today. He also sees the lack of professional art critics in China as another big problem. The tendency in China to equate high prices with art historical importance is hampering the development of significant work, he says."

"But to understand Chinese contemporary art, you must understand that its history is very short, it is hard for us to know what is good and what is bad. And with the [prices achieved at] auctions recently, this makes it even more difficult, as people use this as a way of judging art. So now it is very hard to write about Chinese art. There is no education, there is no tradition, no texts. How do you get an accurate answer to any question? Who can tell you? Chinese critics? There are far too many problems with them. Too many people have become business-oriented, so you have no idea if they are telling the truth or lying. In the west, critics are clearer on the work, so the price and critical meaning are quite separate, but in China critics aren’t clear. Can we trust the national art museums? The art museums are also not clear, the market has such an influence. So, I rely on myself."

TAN: So which contemporary artists do you think are important?

GY: The most recent period: Wang Xingwei, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Tiehai, Yan Lei, Liu Weihua, Cao Fei, Qiu Anxiong—they all represent this time.

Complete Article Here.

【转载】Modern Chinese art conquers the West

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 01 July 2008 17:08:10 -0400

International Herald Tribune

By Nazanin Lankarani

Friday, June 27, 2008

BASEL, Switzerland: First, Western art galleries turned east, moving into China to cash in on its booming contemporary art scene. Now, Chinese galleries are trekking west.

Seven Chinese galleries participated in the main fair of Art Basel and in its satellite events this year, showing some of the most spectacular works in Art Unlimited, the exhibition platform for large-scale projects, video installations and live performances aimed at the institutional art market.

The Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing, a first-timer at the fair, showed Qiu Anxiong's "Staring Into Amnesia" (2007), an authentic 1960s Chinese train car inside which black-and-white war footage was projected onto the windows.

"My work is not about ideology. It is about reviving the memory of China," Qiu said.

There were also works by a three-man collective, Yangjiang Group, presented by Vitamin Creative Space of Guangzhou, China, which were shown in both the Art Unlimited section and Art Statements, a section featuring emerging artists working with rising galleries.

In Art Unlimited, the group presented "Garden III (Pine Trees)," (2008), a faux Chinese garden installation with trees, a path onto a bridge and a paper pond moving to music. At Art Statements, they showed scenes from daily life, including gamblers socializing around a dinner table.

Moving in the opposite direction, two big New York art galleries are about to open satellites in China.

China's economic boom has produced a growing class of wealthy private collectors whose interest in the local art market is reinforcing demand from Western collectors.

"Powerful buying from the West has been reinforced recently by intensive interest from new buyers from Mainland China, some 30 to 50 of them, as well as from Singapore and Taiwan," said Michael Goedhuis, a New York art dealer and a veteran of the Chinese art scene since 1993.

In July, the James Cohan Gallery, from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, will be the first U.S. gallery to open in Shanghai, where its senior New York director, Arthur Solway, who is fluent in Mandarin, has already relocated.

"We want to address the second wave of collecting that will inevitably happen in China," James Cohan said from New York. "There is a certain maturity process in all collecting markets. Right now it is very focused on the domestic market, but we see mainlanders and Taiwanese focusing more on international collecting."

The PaceWildenstein Gallery, also in New York, will follow in August with a spectacular space in Dashanzi, the Beijing art district that has developed in and around Factory 798, a former munitions plant.

"China, Beijing specifically, is just emerging internationally as an art-making center," said Peter Boris, vice president of PaceWildenstein, who will be chairman of Pace Beijing.

"There are now only a few buyers in mainland China, but there will be more. Our target clientele are Asian collectors and the new wealth created there," Boris said in an interview at Art Basel.

The moves by PaceWildenstein and Cohan coincided with a new, more outward-looking wave of creativity sweeping over the Chinese contemporary art scene.

"We are starting to show the cosmopolitan, international attitude of the new generation of Chinese artists," said Primo Marella, owner of the Primo Marella Gallery in Milan who opened a gallery in Beijing in 2005. "There are only about a dozen."

"You cannot tell from their work that they are Chinese," he added. "They express strong ideas with a lot of freshness."

Marella showed new works by the painter and installation artist Chen Ke, the sculptor Liu Ding and the photographer Jiang Zhi at Scope Basel, a satellite fair of Art Basel.

"There is a huge explosion of creativity in China right now," said Goedhuis, the New York dealer. "Chinese artists, musicians, architects, film-makers, designers are creating a new language to express a totally new reality."

And the timing is not surprising. "It is happening that much more intensely in China because society has transformed in just 15 years."

This cultural revolution has flowered largely without Chinese institutional support. "There are virtually no contemporary art museums in China," Goedhuis said. "The government's claim to build 100 or 1,000 new museums has yet to become reality. There is very little state support of artists, if any."

In the absence of official support, private art centers like the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, funded by two Belgian collectors, Guy and Myriam Ullens, have opened to show private collections of Chinese art.

When not indifferent, official attitudes in China remain repressive, with government censors continuing to hunt down, albeit haphazardly, works deemed politically subversive, sexually explicit or culturally sensitive.

In 2006, the artists He An and Zhang Ding were imprisoned for taking part in a group show that included a work with peasants, colored gold but holding up blank placards, which was interpreted as a comment on the helplessness of the rural poor subjected to compulsory land seizures.

In February, a first exhibition of works by the Shanghai artist Zhang Huan was canceled at the Shanghai Art Museum. The authorities banned such works as giant sculptures of deformed bodies covered with cowhide, which they asserted were inappropriate Buddhist references.

Still, in the age of globalization, local censorship cannot stop work from being shown in the West.

Two of the "offensive" works by Zhang were reportedly bought by François Pinault, owner of Christie's. A third work, "Giant No. 3" (2008), a 15-foot-high, or 4.6-meter, installation made of cowhide, steel, wood and polystyrene foam, is on view at PaceWildenstein in New York through July 25.

"We are not overly concerned with censorship," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "It creates a tension in China that is absent in New York or London. It allows for heroic art to be made."

Matching the official indifference or hostility to the artists has been the government's indifference to the free-wheeling art market, where speculation and an absence of oversight and regulation have given rise to talk of price fixing that would be deemed impermissible in the West.

In December, the French auction house Artcurial and the privately owned Chinese group Sun Media created the first Western auction house to pioneer into mainland China. On Jan. 20, Artcurial China held its first auction, with Francis Briest, one of Artcurial's principal Paris auctioneers, symbolically holding the hammer for the first lot.

The auction was a big success, the company said, bringing in $8.3 million for 72 lots, nearly double the high estimate, with only one lot unsold. Dominated by local traditional and figurative painting, the lots included a sculpture by a contemporary French artist, Richard Texier, entitled "Mimesis Deus."

With an estimate between 120,000 yuan and 160,000 yuan, or $17,350 and $23,130, the Texier sculpture soared to a hammer price of 3.36 million yuan, many times higher than any other work sold by the artist, according to data available on Artprice, a leading provider of art information on the Web.

According to Briest, the price reflected the unpredictability of auctions. "The art market is inherently irrational," he said. "If the hammer price was high, it is because at least two bidders were seduced by the piece and fought for it."

Other observers had a different explanation.

"It is common practice in China for auction houses to have some kind of arrangement in regard to the bidding process, because there are no laws against it in China," said Li Liang, director of the Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai.

Such arrangements can be used to create "buzz" around an artist's work, said a person with knowledge of the Chinese auction scene who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.

"Auction houses in China enter into agreements with artists or consignors to sell works without an established market value," the person said. "The seller agrees to pay a 10 percent commission on the hammer price. In exchange, the house engages in 'fake' bidding to sell the piece. That helps create a baseline value for the piece.

"An inquiry into the auction house's account would show that the hammer price is not paid in, just the 10 percent commission."

Briest, responding to questions, dismissed Artcurial's responsibility in the Texier sale. "We are aware that transparency is a relative term in China, but we do not condone such practices," he said.

Artcurial was only a shareholder in Artcurial China, Briest added. Legal responsibility rested with Sun Media, the Chinese partner, "in whom we trust," he said. "They have certified the results of this auction."

Meanwhile, transparent or not, the China market increasingly is attracting not only Western galleries and auctioneers, but also organizers of art fairs.

Last month, the Paris fair ArtParis made its debut in Shenzhen, China. Meanwhile, the Shanghai ShContemporary fair is planning to hold its second edition in September, despite a heated dispute between one of its original organizers, Pierre Huber, a dealer in Geneva who was artistic director of the fair last year, and the Parisian dealer Enrico Navarra.

Navarra accused Huber of a conflict of interest between his position as director and his role as a dealer.

"In the West, you could not organize an international fair where the sole artistic director is an active dealer and uses his position within the fair to promote his own artists in competition with fair participants," Navarra said.

For this year's edition of ShContemporary, Huber - who was also under pressure after a French television program last year showed him apparently bullying Chinese artists into selling their work to him cheaply - has been replaced as artistic director of the fair by a 10-person committee.

In a telephone interview, Huber denied a conflict of interest and declined to discuss Navarra. "For me, ShContemporary was, first and foremost, a cultural project which was destroyed by the commercial interests of others," he said.

Amid the feeding frenzy of galleristas and auctioneers, the artists sometimes look like swimmers in a shark cage - wealthy swimmers, that is.

"Some of the artists, propelled by the attention and the intense demand, have become very rich by Chinese standards," Goedhuis said.

But, "there is no structure in China for artists to sell through dealers who set prices and a career path for the good artists to flourish," he added. "Artists are left floundering, trying to make a fast buck on the one hand, and do creative work on the other. Meantime, they are besieged by buyers, dealers and auction houses."

Goedhuis himself was at the center of a recent controversy when part of the Estella Collection of Chinese contemporary art, which he had amassed for a group of collectors, was auctioned at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April. Angered artists said they had been duped into selling, for low prices, pieces that fetched millions at the auction. Goedhuis has denied knowledge of the collectors' intent to sell.

Meanwhile, auction prices continue to soar, despite some fears that they may be due for a correction.

At the Christie's Hong Kong evening sale of Asian contemporary art on May 24, a new record was achieved for Yue Minjun, whose 1993 work "Gweong-Gweong" sold for 54 million Hong Kong dollars, or $7 million, more than 10 times the price it fetched when it went under the hammer in 2005.

"By just looking at auction prices, people assume that the Chinese market is a bubble, that there is no historical or intellectual grounding to the art, no gravity to the market," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "In reality, we are witnessing the birth of an emerging identity."

PaceWildenstein's move into Beijing reflects its commitment to a long term view, he said. "We are doing a job for Zhang Huan and other Chinese artists, to bring them into Western collections and museums. We are working to integrate them into world art history where they belong."

Goedhuis, too, says the Chinese market is no bubble, although his reasoning is more prosaic.

"There are over a billion people in China," he said. "If only a few more people enter the art market, prices will go even higher. There is enough wealth in China to make Chinese art extremely expensive.

"China is the dominant reality for the rest of history. There is nothing stopping China."

Lok was on Wall Street Journal!

zhangxiaomin — Wed, 25 June 2008 17:35:28 -0400

OMG, Lok really became a "renown scholar on internet in China!" I am heavily suspicious if the person in photo was him though...

蜘蛛人爬纽约时报大厦；劳森博格谈创作

zhangxiaomin — Fri, 06 June 2008 17:02:52 -0400

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand—I use those words interchangeably—another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody’s else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

-Robert Rauschenberg

引自纽约时报的报道：

Two men, one a practiced French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings, the other a New Yorker who said he wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of malaria, scaled the 52-story New York Times Building in Times Square on Thursday just hours apart. Each was arrested when he stepped safely onto the roof.

The first, Alain Robert, the Frenchman, went up the north face of the year-old skyscraper in the morning, unfurling a bright green banner near the top. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the message could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”

The other, identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke, 32, of Brooklyn, climbed the Eighth Avenue side starting about 6 p.m.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said that after the first climber was arrested, two additional building security guards were assigned to patrol the area outside, on 40th and 41st Streets.

Both climbers grabbed onto one of the building’s most distinctive features, the ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows. And then, in turn, they were off on a hand-over-hand trip up the face of a New York skyscraper, with no ropes or harnesses, a trip that left the cellphone-camera-snapping crowds that swirled below thinking of Spider-Man, or maybe King Kong.

。。。

昨日收到如下一封信

Dear Fellow Activist:

Today is World Environment Day.

Right now, Alain Robert, known as the French Spiderman, is risking his life in New York City climbing high into the skyline to raise awareness of the desperate need for real stewardship from world leaders on global warming ahead of next month's G8 meeting.

He says "The Solution Is Simple":

1 – Stop Cutting Down Trees. Plant More Trees.
2 – Make Everything Energy Efficient.
3 – Only Make Clean Energy.

The cost of action is a simple matter of math. The cost of acting NOW is far smaller than the cost of acting TOO LATE. But the time for action is running out, fast.

World leaders know this, but are still not acting fast or bravely enough. Last year in Bali, they failed to agree to ANY emissions reduction targets, but rather to two more years of more talk.
TALK is no longer cheap; but we can't afford any more of it instead of ACTION.

But there is hope in the changing of the guard among world leaders. America's next President could help lead the way.
There's reason for hope. We urgently need a global agreement for at least a 50 percent cut in emissions.

World leaders meet again next month at the G8 conference in Japan. YOU can help make sure they get the message. Go to http://www.thesolutionissimple.org and join your voice with ours.
Together we WILL be heard.

Together, millions of us can help make history on the most urgent and important issue of our lifetime. It's that simple.

Stay informed, stay inspired, stay active!

As always in solidarity,

Your friends at AnitaRoddick.com and IAmAnActivist.org

“Good News Is Not News”

zhangxiaomin — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:10:36 -0400

Chinese media reported the story of foreign volunteers helping kids in the diaster zone recover from PTSD through games, which showed that foreigners are not all "devils." (See photos--NOT taken by me) But of course, the New York Times' cover story was titled "Parents' Grief Turns to Rage at Chinese Officials," with a photo of an official kneeling down to beg parents of earthquake victims to stop their protest.

News are always selective in the sense that one paper cannot cover everything happening around the globe. But what standards of selection should be applied? I'm puzzled. "Newsworthy" is as vague as the "healthy and positive" propoganda standard (which is not valid anymore if only one surfs sohu or sina nowadays). Is the "most emailed" story the most newsworthy in the economic sense? Who said "good news is not news?" The improvement of the mainland-Taiwan relationship and the appreciation of Japanese rescue effort were headline news, despite the fact that some of them first appeared in online forums. So who is the executive chef to determine what to cook for the audience today? Should newspapers/press bear certain "social responsibility?" If "incitement" can be a crime, what about "imbalanced negative connotation?" Of course that's teasing. But it is also a reality that no newspaper can expect the audience to uphold their "independent judgment" and diverse resources. Shouldn't a few leading newspapers such as the New York Times be held to a higher standard then? Simply because they are often quoted as the authority?

Also on the cover of NYTimes, was the story of a female "holy warrior for Al Qaeda" who was portrated in the photo with an overall black gown covering all her body except for the eyes.

Not in the news: Tibetans residing in NJ and NYC held a ceremony to pray for earthquake victims on Union Square on Sunday.