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China news tagged with: exhibitions (12)

• Atheist China Allows Buddhist Relics Exhibition

  

  The Times of India reports that the Chinese government has returned two Buddhist relics to the Beijing Yunju Temple for display. The relics, believed to be from the body of the Sakyamuni, have been kept in an underground vault in the Capital Museum:

  Chinese authorities have taken several other measures of similar nature in recent months. In early June, it ordered restoration of a thousand-year-old site called the “Caves of a Thousand Buddhas”, near the city of Turpan in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. This is the biggest effort to renovate the site since 1949 when the atheist state of the People’s Republic of China was established

  Communist leaders have also promoted a World Buddhism Conference for two successive years with the dual purpose to attracting the attention of Buddhists across the world to China while trying to establish that Tibetan Buddhism can stand on its own without the need of the Dalai Lama. This is why it has been encouraging the Panchan Lama, who was handpicked by China, to play an important role in these conferences.

  “I hope the traditional culture can be passed on through viewing the Buddha relics. I hope people’s hearts can be purified,” the official media quoted Master Chuan Yin, a senior monk at the Beijing Yunju Temple as saying after performing the ceremony for receiving the relics from the government-run museum.

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  • June 25, 2009 1:08 PM

• The Art of Individualism

  

  Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and reporter for the Wall Street Journal, writes on Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie (邱志傑). Qiu is known for incorporating video and traditional Chinese media in his artwork. From the Wall Street Journal:

  Last November, Qiu Zhijie endured a series of personal crises that left him elated and exhausted. The result was another of the mercurial Chinese artist’s bursts of creativity—and a cycle of work that tackles some of the most sensitive aspects of modern China.

  [...] Once a 1990s radical who put on underground shows designed to shock, Mr. Qiu is now considered one of China’s greatest contemporary artists. Unlike his forerunners, who completely broke with Chinese tradition by painting in oil and creating repetitive motifs, Mr. Qiu is more comfortable with Chinese themes and uses calligraphy in many of his works.

  I met Mr. Qiu in Beijing this month, and after a few hours with him, it’s clear how he acquired his reputation. A gregarious, funny man, the 40-year-old talks about philanthropy, political control of art, the strange history of contemporary Chinese art, General Motors, the Nanjing massacre and the green tea market. “His mind,” says University of Chicago art historian and curator Wu Hung, is “very fast-moving; it’s like a fireworks of the mind.”

  More of Qiu’s art can be seen in the Wall Street Journal’s featured slideshow and at his website’s portfolio page.

  The following video (in Chinese with Italian subtitles) covers a day in the life of the artist:
  

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  • April 23, 2009 10:13 PM

• John ‘China’ Thomson Exhibition Shows Life in China in 1870s

  

  An exhibition of John ‘China’ Thomson’s photographs will go public for the first time next week. From Telegraph:

  Taken between 1870 and 1871 by the Scottish photographer John “China” Thomson, the images reveal with often startling intimacy a cast of characters from orphans and street gamblers, to beautiful peasant girls and their high-born ladies.

  [...]As well as shooting traditional, stiff-backed portraits of Manchu noblemen, Thomson plied the streets in search of scenes that would bring the exotic world of China to life for a curious public back in England.

  “These pictures are fascinating because they reveal a world that most artists of that period ignored,” said Betty Yao, who has organised the exhibition that opens in Beijing next week. “Most material from this late Qing era is stuffy, formal and posed, but Thomson’s work is full of life.” [Photo from the National Library of Scotland]

  From the Independent:

  Edinburgh-born Thomson was a pioneer of social documentary photography, fascinated by China and South-east Asia. Such was his expertise on China that he became known as “China Thomson”. He was not the first Western photographer to document China in the 19th century, but he was the first to document the country so extensively, travelling from Formosa (Taiwan) to Fujian and along the Yangtze.

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  • April 11, 2009 5:27 PM

• China Won’t Lend Artworks to Asia Society Exhibition

  

  The New York Times reports on the Chinese government’s refusal to provide artwork for an Asia Society show on art in the revolutionary period:

  The Chinese Ministry of Culture had originally agreed to allow the society to borrow works for the show, “Art and China’s Revolution,” promoted as among the first comprehensive exhibitions devoted to that era and one that will examine the effects of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution on artists and art production in China.

  Despite the Chinese government’s decision, Asia Society has decided to proceed with the show by seeking loans from private collectors.

  [...] Ms. Chiu organized the exhibition with Zheng Shengtian, who was an artist and teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) during the period covered by the show. Critical of the Red Guards for their violence and destruction of cultural artifacts in 1966, Mr. Zheng was imprisoned in a detention center on campus, called a cowshed, where he and other established artists and teachers were forced to participate in self-criticism sessions.

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  • August 19, 2008 9:44 PM

• Capturing a Frame of Mind – Zhu Linyong

  

  An exhibition at Peking University reveals the true colors of family snapshots, from China Daily:

  The exhibition features photographs of former staff that worked with, or fought battles with, Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi, and cultural icons.In addition there are poignant photos from the family albums of ordinary Chinese people, organizers say. The photos are accompanied by short essays, or captions, that are written by the providers….[Full Text]

  [Image: Beijing native Liu Huizhong's family members are shown in this group photo from the 1930s. Dramatic social changes eventually tore apart the family, which once owned a two-story teahouse near Di'anmen in downtown Beijing. Old photos courtesy of Bi Chunping, via China Daily]

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  • January 18, 2008 3:36 PM

• China Threatens to Sue over Fake Terracotta Warriors – Spiegel

  

  Chinese officials have threatened to sue after a German museum has acknowledged that terracotta soldiers in an exhibition are fakes. From Spiegel Online:

  What does it mean to be “authentic”? How is that different from “original”? And can a fake also be authentic? Such semantic hair-splitting is at the heart of a museum scandal about fake Chinese terracotta warrior statues that is causing friction between Germany and China.

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  • December 14, 2007 12:09 PM

• German Museum Warns Chinese Clay Soldiers Could be Fake – AFP

  

  From AFP:

  A German museum has issued a warning that eight statues in its crowd-pulling exhibition on China’s legendary “Terracotta Army” may be fake after an art dealer instigated a police probe into their provenance.

  “The exhibition continues but we have put up three notices at the entrance warning visitors that the pieces may not be authentic,” a spokeswoman for the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology, Marina Lifschitz, said this week….[Full Text]

  (Image: The leader of an cleans the head of a terracotta warrior sculpture, in Hamburg, via AFP)

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  • December 12, 2007 2:18 PM

• A Fusion of Cultures in a Family Affair – Holland Cotter

  

  The New York Times reviews the new exhibit at the Metropolitan, “Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Yutang“:

  The collection, acquired by the Met in 2005, is unostentatious, with some 40 examples of painting and calligraphy, all but two dating from the 20th century. Although it has fine things, it is not a masterpiece ensemble. A poem hand-copied by a father for his daughter in the 1960s, a letter proposing an exhibition of Chinese art in New York during World War II: such things are more memorabilia than art. But they are precious documents. And they fit right into a collection that exists between aesthetic lines like high and low, public and private.

  About a third of the work was originally owned by the Chinese writer and scholar Lin Yutang (1895-1976), who is best remembered, and was at one time widely known in the United States, for his 1937 book “The Importance of Living,” an early wisdom-of-the-East self-help guide aimed at a Western audience. [Full text]
  
  

  
  
  [Image: "Flying Magpie" (1942) a hanging scroll by Xu Beihong, via NYT.com]

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  • September 14, 2007 8:36 PM

• Ai Weiwei Gives a Street View of Beijing – David Ng

  

  The Los Angeles Times writes about Ai Weiwei’s video installation, “Beijing: Chang’an Boulevard,” which is going to make its U.S. premiere at Morono Kiang Gallery in LA:

  Traveling the entire length of this major east-west artery in Beijing, the artist stopped at 50-meter intervals (about 164 feet) to record minute-long takes on digital video. Each fixed shot captured a random aspect of daily street life — traffic jams, road construction, looming office towers and (this being China) bicycles galore. The result is a 10-hour-plus videologue that charts the blood flow of Beijing through its supermodern heart to its impoverished extremities. [Full text]
  
  

  
  
  [Image: Artist Ai Weiwei, via archinect.com]

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  • September 13, 2007 11:02 AM

• Art Boom in China Has Ripples Over Here – Holland Cotter

  

  Holland Cotter of the New York Times writes about several exhibits by contemporary Chinese artists slated to open in coming months:

  So far New Yorkers may wonder what all the fuss is about. Apart from a few major big-bang events, like “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” at the Asia Society and P.S. 1 in 1998 and a record-setting Sotheby’s auction in 2006, contemporary Chinese work has only had a spotty showing here. We don’t see a lot of it, and most of what we do see seems polished and clever but slight.

  If the only way to gain any real sense of what’s happening is to visit China itself, the coming art season does offer some at-home options. Several artists from that Asia Society-P.S. 1 show are now international stars, and they are being rewarded with midcareer museum surveys. [Full text]

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  • September 9, 2007 9:19 PM

• Terracotta Army’s New UK Formation – Penny Spiller

  

  BBC made a follow-up report on Terracotta army’s exhibition in UK and said that” the exhibition, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, looks set to become one of the most successful the museum has ever staged.”

  Nearly 100,000 tickets have already been sold for the six-month exhibition – and it still does not open for another week. Exhibition curator Jane Portal says the amount of interest is “fantastic, but not surprising”.

  “China has become such an important country to the rest of the world. It is growing so quickly, and of course it will be holding the Olympics next year. People are interested in it,” she said. And the China we see today, she says, can trace its roots back to around 220BC, and the reign of the First Emperor….[Full Text]

  [Image: The British Museum exhibition has been two years in the planning, via BBC]

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  • September 5, 2007 7:20 PM

• China’s Rogues Gallery of Graft – Michael Bristow

  

  From BBC News:

  At a new exhibition in Beijing, there are some handy hints for officials wanting to stay on the straight and narrow. Pictures of clinking wine glasses and a pair of shapely female legs shod in red, high-heeled shoes warn of experiences that ought to be avoided.

  The exhibition has been organised to showcase China’s battle against corruption. It gives details of several officials who have fallen from grace. The exhibition is being held just weeks before the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th congress, the ruling party’s main political gathering, held every five years….[Full Text]

  [Image: The exhibition lists details of China's fight against corruption, via BBC]

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  • September 4, 2007 7:15 PM

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