The artifacts were part of “Secrets of the Silk Road,” which is scheduled to open Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. The exhibit has already traveled to museums in California and Texas without issue. Visitors to the Philadelphia museum will see a pared-down exhibit.

Penn museum spokeswoman Pam Kosty said she could not offer any more information beyond a statement saying Chinese officials had requested the items not be shown. She declined to identify the officials.

Attempts to reach the Chinese consulate for comment were unsuccessful because of the Chinese New Year holiday.

The exhibit’s main attraction is a nearly 4,000-year-old, pristinely preserved mummy from far western China, whose flaxen hair and eyelashes are still intact. A well-preserved mummy of a baby, along with vibrantly colored burial trappings of a third mummy, was among more than 100 ancient objects featured.

Read more about the so-called Tarim mummies via CDT. See also “Charlie Sheen, the Lady of Loulan, and Alternative Pasts in the PRC today” from Jottings from the Granite Studio.

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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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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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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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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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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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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.

(...)
Read the rest of China Threatens to Sue over Fake Terracotta Warriors – Spiegel (133 words)

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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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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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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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