Romain Rolland/Jean Christophe in China

Need to be in office early and have been up too late tinkering with mixing software, but I am in the middle of trying to crack this mystery.
That is, not really any mystery, but the seeming centrality of Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe to a generation of Chinese intellectuals that came to age in the 60s and 70s.
Above,  RR chilling with Gandhi. Word.

Jia Zhangke - Beijing BC MOMA Speech Translation

While sick and dazed I read through the last few months of the Modern Chinese Language and Culture (MCLC) emails and found a Chinese transcript for a speech Jia Zhangke had delivered mid-July in Beijing, detailing some of his feelings about the Sixth Generation of filmmakers. An abridged version appears here in Chinese [Southern Weekly] and dGenerate films had translated excerpts here. I took a quick stab at translating the full speech, though it's a bit patchy and enigmatic at various parts. With The World, these were the precise sentiments that I think many saw him wrestling with - juggling multiple audiences, and the prerequisites for commercial appeal. There it was implicit in his stylistic transitions - here its quite explicit.

I Wish I Knew will be showing at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival on October 29 and 31st. 

I Don’t Believe You’ll Predict Our Ending
Jia Zhangke
July 21, 2010

Personally, I hadn’t known what the category of “Sixth Generation” really marked, what it meant. Speaking purely in terms of age, I’m 7 years younger than Zhang Yuan, who released Mama in 1990. And I’m half a year older than Lu Chuan, who self identifies as a “Seventh Generation” director. It was after I directed Xiao Wu at the age of 28 that people gave me the tag “6th Generation,” and that was in 1998.

I’ve always thought that fervent emphasis on this generational affiliation and fevered opposition to it were in some ways one in the same. At core, its about wanting to avoid being labelled into a certain set, and of course to some degree, its about retaining your sense of individuality, or avoiding the negative connotations or what-naught carried by having such and such label. For instance, to be “Sixth Generation” was basically synonymous with having awful box office sales. But, I thought, if other people were willing to have that tag, I may as well too.

[FULL TRANSLATION AFTER THE JUMP]

Lu Xun X Jules Verne

Here's a link to a fab. piece at the China Beat - a group of academically minded wonks blogging on China coverage in US media, and nearly always fab. - on science fiction in the Chinese imaginary! A choice tidbit:

"A young Lu Xun, later the greatest writer of 20th century China, translated Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, and wrote an unforgettable slogan in his preface, “Leading the Chinese people forward begins with science fiction!” (导中国人群以进行，必自科学小说始)."

This is a pretty great Wikipedia entry on science fiction in China to accompany your thoughts. One of the first early 20th C. pieces was a vision of settlement on the moon colony...written in 1904. Illustration from the piece above.

Little Reunion (小团圆) - Eileen Chang

Roland Soong's amazing blog EastSouthWestNorth has recently been jammed up due to a considerably large event - the publication of a posthumous, autobiographical manuscript of Eileen Chang's. (Free international shipping of the volume on YesAsia - what YesAsia is, I'm not quite sure. )

According to his recent post, it's already gone through FIVE PRINTINGS in the last month since its release in HK and Taiwan. 

I first discovered Soong was the executer of her literary estate when I came across these archives of letters, commentary, and other resources when I was doing dinky research for my dinky project on Ang Lee. It seemed like a funny venue to be discovering these (I wondered why I wasn't stumbling into NTU or HKU's websites), and the rich and luminous commentary was a welcome medium of transfer.  A sort of sad and hilarious passage he's recently translated on Lust, Caution (which apparently contains a number of factual mistakes, esp - the story was shipped to Roland Soong's father, not the poor publishing house manager described.)

At the cocktail party for the Taipei premiere of . I saw my old friend Kao Hsin-chiang come in. I asked him what he came. He said that his son Kao Ying-hsien had a role in the film (as the chauffeur and landlord) and therefore he came from Beijing to attend this premiers. I told him that I have a series of essays critical of which United Daily published without my permission. He said that his wife showed him the clippings as soon as he came back. His wife is a devout Christian who read the essays and she "promised to close her eyes and pray whenever there is any sexy scene during the movie."

I said: "You're the one who created the problem." I object to because of the story. It is based upon an Eileen Chang novel published while Kao Hsin-chiang was the chief editor of the China Times supplement section.

Kao Hsin-chiang said: "Chang's story was turned over to me in 1978 by the Hong Kong literary expert Tang Wen-piao. Tang is the initiator of the Eileen Chang craze and edited the published by China Times. When Eileen Chang saw the book in the United States, she was very angry because she felt that Tang had violated her intellectual property rights. So China Times had to stop distribution. In June 1985, the China Times Publishing House general manager called Tang Wen-piao in Taichung and told him that there were 400 more copies of the book in the warehouse. 'If you like, I will rent a van and shipped them over to you; if not, I will destroy them.' Tang said that he wanted them. So the driver brought the books over to the door of his house, and Tang had to carry them to his first-floor apartment by himself. Tang had nasopharyngeal cancer for years already, and the effort caused him to bleed to death. A friend in the Taipei literary circle cried when he learned the news: 'Sigh, Tang Wen-piao, you loved Eileen Chang to death!' In modern literary history, Tang is the only person who died as a result of loving Eileen Chang."

Of those I have read, one of my favorite posts on his Eileen Chang blog is on her bilingualism, with one tracing a discovered English language version of her essay, "A Return to the Frontier", chronicling a trip to Taiwan in 1961, and an expanded Chinese version, and another English story "Stale Mates." A second contains three English to Chinese translations of Thoreau poems, and a Chinese version of an introduction she wrote on Thoreau in a compilation of American poetry translations. 

And a last treat I found last night was a flash feature in Tofu Magazine ("mini-tofu no. 6") that plays with Eileen Chang's drawings. 

And above, a painting by Chinese artist Liu Ye, of the writer ("Zhang Ailing"), which auctioned off at $34 USD.

Wang Ningde （王宁德）- Interview Part I

Wang Ningde is one of my favorite contemporary photographers in China - perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of his time as a photojournalist.

These are from his "Somedays" series, which has gotten play abroad - see the Goedhuis Contemporary on him, and this SF Camerawork piece. Taking a stab at translating sources on him - below is a choppy first take at the first portion of an interview with Chinese blogger Li Nan.

It's quite a bit longer - will upload the rest soon.

Wang Ningde’s Influences: My understanding of photography, from my contempt of it.
Guest: Wang Ningde
Moderator: Li Nan
Piece: Photographic Reproductions of The Mona Lisa

When I asked Wang Ningde “What differences do you sense, visually and in meaning, between the original and the reproductions of the image?” the photographer replied slyly: “ You’re analysis is quite adept - the question you’ve asked is the question I’d like to ask. You’d surely answer this question better than I might.” Of course, I wasn’t about to fall for that answer – what I was interested in, really, was the fact that this particular memory of a budding interest in photography is shared by many. I, for example, immediately think of the many beautiful hanging wall calendars I saw as a child, all reproducing famous works of art from the West. Photography is its own form of expression, yet at the same time, can serve merely as the medium for other forms, and in the process of pervasive transmission, the medium of representation becomes a part of the artwork itself.

Within the lively contemporary art scene, re-performance of classic works is a standard. In choosing to revisit such a masterpiece, Wang Ningde’s sensibilities seem “modernized” as well.

WANG NING DE

To be honest, it’s been something like five years since I read up on/studied any image. So, I can only revisit my childhood. Of course, I have to think about how to make this all sound a bit more exciting – I’ll be speaking of a photographer whose name I don’t even know.

I was born in 1972, and it would have been around the early 80s – I wasn’t even old enough to be in school yet. One afternoon, at my grandmother’s house, I found a stack of magazines in the corner by the wall. It probably was the Liaoning Youth , and on the back cover was a print of the Mona Lisa. The Cultural Revolution hadn’t ended too long ago, and famous art from around the world, particularly Renaissance works, were being printed en masse. My feeling is that monumental changes happened earlier in this arena than any other realm of sentiments or attitudes.


It was this reproduction – this “photograph” – that sparked my deep interest in photography, planting the seeds of art in my young soul, moving me to where I am today. (Laughs).

[con't]