Wang Qingsong's "Dormitory"

The browser cannot contain its fully glory in this form. See Dormitory here   lso see his triptych  "Past, Present and Future" and  China Mansion - all bizarre and somewhat mesmerizing panoramic, staged tableaus. 

The movement of these from his earlier work is pretty phenomenal. See Adam and Eve (97?) left: 

From a 2004 NYT article, The Venus de China: 

"Mr. Wang has turned his own case of cultural whiplash into very large-scale photographs of dazzling beauty, present-day equivalents of history paintings packed with whimsical details and dramatic effects. ''Romantique'' (2003), measuring 4 feet by 21 feet, presents a garden of earthly delights -- orange groves, lush green grass, cobalt-blue sky -- filled with more than 50 live models, all Asian, re-enacting poses found in Western art history. On the far left are Michelangelo's Adam and Eve and the quartet from Manet's ''Déjeuner sur l'Herbe.'' In the center, Botticelli's Venus rises from her clamshell, surrounded by voluptuous bathers and lounging maidens reminiscent of paintings by Ingres, Velásquez, Matisse and Gauguin.

But off on her own at the far right, a nude woman sits in a rickshaw. She is a concoction not found in the Western canon, yet she stares directly at the audience with all the forcefulness of a modern-day Olympia. Her presence adds a cautionary note to this otherwise bucolic scene, a warning that the new China might not be simply a picturesque paradise ripe for exploitation by foreign investors or for total immersion in Western influences."

Book Review Binge This Week

IN THE NYRB:
The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City, Richard J. Bernstein

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, by Michael Meyer. Walker, 355 pp., $25.99
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, by
Philip P. Pan. Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $28.00

Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, by Jen Lin-Liu. Harcourt, 341 pp., $24.00

IN THE NYTIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

'Brothers'

By YU HUA, Reviewed by JESS ROW
A popular Chinese epic about growing up during the Cultural Revolution and chasing love and fortune in the new market economy.
First Chapter Sunday Magazine: A Profile of Yu Hua

'The Vagrants'
By YIYUN LI, Reviewed by PICO IYER
Centered on the aftermath of a young woman’s execution in a desolate part of China in 1979, Yiyun Li’s grieving and unremitting first novel examines the costs and consequences of a society gone mad.
First Chapter

'China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation'

By XINRAN, Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER
A Chinese journalist coaxes reminiscences out of Cultural Revolution survivors.

ALSO

Gish Jen, Yu Hua, Ha Jin, and some prominent translators will be talking in Cambridge Thrusday at 5:30, at the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street, B103.

The Black Book on Red China, and the Origins of Brainwashing

Picked up a few books in front of the Cambridge post office today, including a copy of Sade's Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man that turned out to be worth a bit - [my amateur antiquarian book hunting continues!] - but more directly relevant to the blog, there was a review copy of The Black Book on Red China, written in 1958 by Edward Hunter for The Committee of One Million, which protested the admission of China into the UN quite successfully for nearly two decades.

Turns out Edward Hunter [all the while a CIA operative. Manchurian Candidate indeed.] was the first person (as credited in the OED) to introduce the term "brainwashing" into the US. From Wikipedia:

"The term xǐ năo (洗腦, the Chinese term literally translated as "to wash the brain") originally referred to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the "reconstruction" (改造 gǎi zào) of the so-called feudal (封建 fēng jiàn) thought-patterns of Chinese citizens raised under pre-revolutionary régimes; the term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing/washing the heart" (洗心 xǐ xīn) prior to conducting certain ceremonies or entering certain holy places, and in Chinese, the word "心" xīn also refers to the soul or the mind, contrasting with the brain. The term first came into general use in the United States in the 1950s during the Korean War (1950–1953) to describe those same methods as applied by the Chinese communists to attempt deep and permanent behavioral changes in foreign prisoners, and especially during the Korean War to disrupt the ability of captured United Nations troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment. The word brainwashing consequently came into use in the United States of America to explain why, unlike in earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the enemy side after becoming prisoners-of-war in Korea."

Will dig around for the article in 'The New Leader" mentioned - and will be trouncing through this book in the coming week. Also, in another post [trying to establish mini-research projects for myself], will blog up some of this moment of UN representation changing hands from the Republic to the People's Republic, with a focus on the trauma to the Isle Formosa.

Reconstruction, the Mississippi, and the Orient

I: Missouri and China

Came across a fun article - "From the Midwest to the Far East" - tracing early connections between my homestead, Missouri, and the happy Orient. Connections range from exceptionally sad (The "New Shanghai Theater" in Branson) to ambiguously "good" (MO Born Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China.)

Excerpt of interest: 

"The originator of the lineage can even be said to be none other than Mark Twain,

the first Show Me State citizen to gain global renown as an author. Though he

never made it to China on his travels, Twain was fascinated by the country, and

he wrote everything from an epistolary tale about a Chinese immigrant

(“Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again”), to a newspaper editorial denouncing the

“unequal treaties” that the West had forced upon the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in

the mid-1800s, to essays sympathetic to the anti-Christian Boxer insurgents

(since, in his mind, any foes of missionaries couldn't be all bad).

I hadn't been familiar with any of these pieces, and will be digging through soon. 

I add one, the newest development - the midwestern hub for Chinese airlines will be, yes, drumroll, St. Louis! Who knows what the long term economic consequences of this corn-field diplomacy will be - for now, I expect the plans to create a veritable Chinatown on Olive will get fast tracked. Also, please imagine Chinese Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, Kit Bond, and Claire McCaskill on the BEIJING-ST.LOUIS Hub Commission. 

II. EQUAL TREATIES

Just got this in the mail, will try to go.

"For the Equality of Men---For the Equality of Nations": Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States John Schrecker, Professor of History Emeritus, Brandeis University, and Associate in Research, Fairbank CenterIn 1861,

President Lincoln appointed Anson Burlingame, an anti-slavery leader, minister to China. After Burlingame had served in the post forsix years, Beijing selected him as its first ambassador to the Westernpowers. The Burlingame Mission came to America in 1868. The talk willfocus on (1) how the politics of reconstruction determined attitudestoward the mission; (2) Burlingame's presentation of China as a nationthat wished to be treated equally, was modernizing, and could both learn from and teach the West; and (3) the famous Burlingame Treaty with America---the first equal treaty between China and a Western power since the Opium War."

III. TWAIN AGAIN

Twain to Burlingame in 1868 [Citation and more on the friendship here]

"Don't neglect or refuse to keep a gorgeous secretaryship or a high interpretership for me in your great embassy... I would like to go with your embassy as a dignitary of some kind or other... I want to be a mild sort of dignitary... Pray save me a place."

III. FINAL WORD
"....with God's help we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.” -Attributed to Senator Kenneth Wherry (R-Nebraska) 1940, though reliable citations seem yet to be found.

"You commie homo-loving sons of guns"

So, this is a bit late to count as Oscars coverage, but CCTV's translation of Sean Penn's acceptance rant was quite funny. "You commie homo-loving sons of guns" went through the Chinese Room (take that Searle) to become a "You guys are TOOOO generous!"

One blogger imagines the sad plight of the employee charged with the task of translation: 

It’s quite possible that the subtitler didn’t understand what Sean Penn had said and didn’t have time to find out. But supposing he/she did understand. Imagine you’re this poor CCTV employee and your ultimate boss is a senior member of the politburo. You’ve got very little time to decide what to do with a phrase that links communism with “homo-loving.” Your decision may not be appreciated by the leaders. OK, just make something up. [via Black and White Cat]

Left is a picture from a gay pride parade on Qianmen Ave. in Beijing this last Valentines Day, covered in (surprisingly, the WSJ). As far as I've read (which is admittedly very little), public attitudes have been a mingling of passive distaste and active neutrality, with few hate crimes reported, and with sodomy decriminalized in 1997 and homosexuality removed from the rolls of "psychological disorders" in 2001. The media censuring would likely be cited not as active homophobia, but processed merely an attempt to "not encourage" gayness (a tangled cognitive position I've heard echoed by one a many Asian parent too). I haven't read much at all on how gay rights movements are progressing in HK/Taiwan, or even Japan and Korea - is the coalition building at all analogous to US movements? Are they part of a new "left" (though left and right are fairly useless in the Chinese context) harboring purportedly cosmopolitan values, including democratization and visions of ethnic pluralism? (These somewhat asinine thoughts emerged when I was about to title the post something like "Human Rights Incursion/Hilarity", but realized I hadn't a single clue whether the rights movements there situated themselves in a human rights discourse at all.)

In any case,  HuffPo and Shanghaiist describe some other censured caesuras in previous Oscar runs. Obviously, previous news bulletin titles have failed to hit the screen, eg: "Homosexual film fest to open in Beijing" (Xinhua covering PKU's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2005)?