See China » Jessica

Chu Yan: fashion that borders on calligraphy

Jessica — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:42:48 +0000

Jason Wu, Sue Wong, Vera Wang, Anna Sui, Alexander Wang, Peter Som, Derek Lam, Vivienne Tam… if you’re already familiar with those Chinese American designer names closely attached with New York fashion show or American dignitary weddings and ceremonies, you may easily find a clue linking them to their home base, China, where inspirations for visual creations abound and can take you back several thousand years, that is, if you have ready ears and eyes.

The 2012 China International Fashion Week is now being held from October 24 to November 2 inD.PARK in Beijing, located in the famous (or even infamous) 798 Art Zone (since it’s getting so commercial that many original artists have to move out to remoter regions). Among those bustling meetings and shoulder-rubbing receptions one can still find something quite peculiar, like Chu Yan (楚艳).

Her show is named Ting Xiang (listening to fragrance), which resonates with an ancient Chinese poem “one is not worried by the disappearance of the bright moon, for the hidden fragrance still pervades”, suggesting the existence of flowers not necessarily calling to be seen.

In Chu Yan’s words, “listening to fragrance” is to listen “not to the noises outside of me, but to find the truth within one’s soul, cultivate an innate universe of fragrance, and bring out its ultimate strength and confidence. ”

Chu Yanis a teacher with Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and has won many awards such as the Beijing Olympics and UNESCO Design 21 Gold Prize. In her career of designing sometimes really extravagant nightgowns for singers on TV galas, she has never forgotten her deep root in traditional Chinese visual legacies.

Her inspiration for this fashion week is, for example, drawn from Zhu Da (朱耷，八大山人), a maverick painter and calligrapher who lived 300 years ago. In Zhu Da’s paintings filled with solitude, disobedience and free spirit, emptiness itself often speaks more than brush and ink. In Chu Yan’s show, a series of 39 costumes are divided into three series, heavy color, light color and ink, representing her salute to the spirit of Zhu Da featured by prudent minimalism and philosophical skepticism. Materials of these works include silk, linen, cotton and wool, rendered with many traditional Chinese clothing technologies such as batik, embroidery, lining and folding. And the motif throughout the show is lotus leaf, as ancient painters believe “each lotus leaf has a rich life”. “Pure, colorful, quiet and lively”, such is Chu Yan’score concept for this show. No doubt, there is more to be expected from Chu Yan and her fellow Chinese designers in the future, if they continue to feel the pulse both in the west and in the east.

This series of Chu Yan’s fashion show can be seen on her sina blog:

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_8f95eb5d0100yaqd.html

Daily exercise of primary school students in Biru County, Tibet

Jessica — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:55:01 +0000

In all primary and secondary schools of China, students are required to take part in a 15-minute kejiancao (课间操，intermission exercise) everyday for body fitness. When this practice goes to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, age-old Tibetan dances instead of westernized gymnastics become the norm. This video is taken by an amateur Tibetan in Biru County（比如县） of Naqu （那曲）region of TAR.

The Second Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Prints

Jessica — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:03:08 +0000

On August 6, 2011, an opening ceremony for the Second Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Prints was held in the Today Art Museum in Beijing. The biennial exhibition was first held in 2009 and was intended to serve as a review of the development and evolution of Chinese contemporary print art. The exhibition is composed of two parts—a group exhibition whose theme is Print·Concept and a specially invited exhibition of woodcut prints by Gu Yuan (古元) in Yan’an. As a specially invited artist, contemporary artist Fang Lijun (方力钧) also has his print works on the group exhibition.

The comparison between works and concepts of Mr. Gu Yuan (古元), who is a celebrated print artist and art educator, and Mr. Fang Lijun (方力钧), who represents the new artistic trend in China, has initiated a genuine discussion on “revolution” and “avant-garde” spirit.

As one of the representative artists from the Yan’an period, Gu Yuan’s (古元) works not only reproduce a revolutionary course, but have become the classic of contemporary Chinese art with their fresh bucolic atmosphere, unique local characteristics and innovated artistic discourse.

Fang Lijun (方力钧) is one of the most representative contemporary artists in China. On exhibition are his print works selected from his most representative works. The purpose is to enable more people who work on print to feel the combination of value rationality and instrumental rationality and the reason why print discourse and contemporariness are inseparable. It is arguable that this is the first time his print works have been exhibited collectively in China. It is commonly known that Fang Lijun (方力钧) has a halo with a huge radius. But we would like to only take part of it to make more people feel that how valuable a certain point of this part is.

Su Xinping, head of the department of printmaking of Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in an interview, “I was pretty much surprised by Fang Lijun (方力钧), too. Even though I am one of his classmates, I have never seen the complete works of his, either. I used to see pieces of his work in fragmentation. This time I was quite shocked. It is true that the prints exhibited today have enabled him to rise to a higher level. I believe that people after seeing his works will no longer cast any doubt on Fang Lijun’s (方力钧) artistic achievement as a master.”

A total of 24 contemporary artists have their works on exhibition, including Fang Lijun (方力钧), Xu Bing (徐冰), Liu Ye (刘野), Zhang Qikai (张琪凯), Chen Qi (陈琦)and etc.

Not all the artists major in print and they have different backgrounds. Artists extract from things the “cogitating units” that reflect characteristics shared by print works and ignore the distinction between happenings and objects in the extension of “concept”. Such development is an expansion and progression of the traditional print and a valuable reflection on the alternation and transformation between new concepts and old ones. “The exhibition has various media on display such as painting, video, sound art, digital print and etc together with print. It is not that we are trying to do the most creative exhibition; it is that we would like our audience to spend more time than they spend at other print exhibitions to think about “print””, said the curator Li Fan (李帆).

Mr. Zhang Zikang (张子康), director of the Today Art Museum, said, the exhibition “has chosen to exhibit the works of Mr. Gu Yuan (古元) together with those of 24 contemporary artists in the hope that it might create an opportunity for discourse on such a huge disparity in terms of both time and space. We also hope to find some shared spiritual elements of print art over a span of decades from Lu Xun’s (鲁迅) ‘woodcut movement’ to ‘contemporary print’ and to find an open way to carry on the heritage.” It is one way to improve the current rigid print situation and shed light upon the future direction of print art.

The exhibition will run through August 19 at Today Art Museum.

The little economist, the map, and others

Jessica — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:56:07 +0000

Some recent jokes from the Courtyard Ally (胡同) columns of Beijing Daily (京华时报), submitted by readers as real life stories, translated and slightly re-adapted by SeeChina only:

1. The Little Economist (by Guo Qijian)

Not long ago, I bought a new mobile phone, which used up the last section of my monthly income, so I had to borrow 500 RMB from a colleague for daily meals.

On a Saturday, I naturally thought about visiting my brother and saving, if things went alright, some budget for meals. But as the Chinese saying goes, before I could “fully warm up the chair” of my brother’s home, my 5-year nephew showed up and asked me to take him to a toy shop, with a note of 100 RMB in his hand.

After a good round of searching and testing, the boy finally decided to buy an electric toy car, with an ostantious price tag of 160 RMB (and this is already the cheapest one out there). Biting my teeth, I took out 100 RMB from my very thin wallet and went to the cashier, when I suddenly hit upon a very brilliant idea on some basic economic education.

“Boy, I have a great idea for you. You see, you’ve already got several electric cars, why don’t you learn to make some money from your 100 RMB? If you deposit it in a bank, it will give birth to more money. And you’ll become even richer.”

“How could money give birth to more money?” My nephew seemed to be intrigued.

“Sounds fascinating, right?” My dramatic flair finally found a stage, “If you deposit your money into a bank, they will become Money Dads and Money Moms, and together they will breed new Money Babies, just wait and you’ll see that!”

“How fanastic!” Apparently fully convinced, my nephew quickly snatched the sweat-soaked 100 RMB from my hand and seriously declared, “So I decide! My note will be Money Dad, and your note will be Money Mom, and I’ll deposit them in a bank and wait till they get a Money Baby, and then we’ll come back for this electric car, OK?”

2. The Map (Xiao Mei)

While I was trying to find a place in Beijing to travel for weekend, I asked a classmate for a map. Searching over it, I realized that many bus lines and locations were absent. So I looked at the printing date of the map: 2001. Did I read this number wrong? I looked closer again, and yes, it was a map more than 10 years old.

“But we entered the university in 2008, how could you have a map of 2001?” I couldn’t help but puzzle.

“Well, this map was given to me as a gift by my uncle. He traveled in Beijing in 2001 and took this home. When I told him I was going to university in Beijing in 2008, he made a special favor of giving this to me, in a quite solumn occasion. And he made a solumn wish, too, that I MUST bring this map back home every year during vacations. This is definitely not to be lost, said he.”　　

3. Home Swap (Jia Jun)

I was in the zoo together with my niece. Upon leaving the monkeys’ mountain, my niece would say: “Oh, how I wish I could have two lovely and naughty monkeys at home!” While feeding cabbages to the zebras, she would say: “Dear zebra, come to my home and I still have more vegetable for you!” Approaching the Tigers’ and Lions’ Den, she would say again: “Come on, tigers, don’t sleep here, come and sleep at my home!”

“Now that all these animals are coming to your home, do you think you still have enough place to live for yourself?” I challenged her.

“Good question,” she thought for a while, “then let me live in the zoo instead!”

Zhang Meng: The piano in a factory

Jessica — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:48:55 +0000

A new indie film named “The Piano in a Factory” (钢的琴) is now gaining word-of-mouth across China. Directed by newcomer Zhang Meng (张猛) with a background of stage-design and scriptwriting, this 5 million RMB film (of which most money came in the difficult way) brings people back to the special milieu of 1990s, when the then shinning “heroes” of industrial workers in big factories of Northeast China found themselves suddenly made redundant and replaced by the rising class of commercial opportunists.

If the story of a desperate father ingenious and brave enough (with the support of his folk band friends) to hammer out a hand-made piano to win his daughter from his divorcee is not touching enough, the remniscent socialist music, collective warmth and the strong smell of the sweat and soot felt throught the film will perhaps capture you, and the absurd optimism of the heroes will also bring out a good laugh from most audiences, no matter they prefer Italian New Realism or Kustunica (again!).

Zhang Meng’s previous work include Lucky Dog (耳朵大有福), also set in Northeast China big factories and featuring grassroot yet immensely optimistic people. That film sold 200000 for Internet distribution, holding high hope for indie filmmakers today.

To learn more about this film, please refer to the trailer here:

Director Zhang Meng and several leading Chinese critics had a talk transcripted by mtime.com.

Ha Hui’s new court music

Jessica — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:23:26 +0000

A rising star to fully enlive traditional Chinese court music in full costume, Ha Hui (哈辉). Her songs in this concert are mostly compiled by Confucius himself. With English subtitles. 50 min. in length.

Paoxiaoti, the roaring mode of writing

Jessica — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:31:20 +0000

Ma Jingtao, “lord of the roaring mode”…

Ever since the invention of that omnipresent (some say omnipotent) thing named Internet, humanity seems to have embarked on a new age of “collective creativity”, resulting in millions of new “modes of writing” in the virtual space. By blending written vernacular with local dialects, homonyms, puns and exaggerated punctuation, the Chinese “netizens” have now turned out a universal mode of writing suited to all who are not contented with their major, profession or life in general (but who on earth is?).

This mode of writing is called paoxiaoti (咆哮体), or “the roaring mode of writing”. The gist of it is to follow every sentence with at least 5 exclamation remarks, and use extraordinarily angry hallmark expressions. It is believed that this style of writing started with a group on douban.com featuring a melodramatic actor named Ma Jingtao (马景涛), who often plays the role of distressed heroes shouting out his anger with distorted facial expressions. After this group became famous for using excessive exclamation remarks, someone on renren.com started to complain about the difficulty of studying French in the university using not only exclamation remarks but also many hilarious hallmark words, and the tread immediately got viral and triggered a whole series of immitators complaining about the difficulty of English study, anthropology, arts, law, film studies, computer language, etc. Such writing soon spilled over to traditional media and even formal college notices, and culminated in a video made by a group of students in Westerminster University in which a “big-eyed British girl and a handsome British guy” shouted out “We who live in the UK can’t afford too much hurt either!”

The video is here:

For those who don’t understand Chinese in the video, before seechina could provide an English version, one of the jokes is: “Everybody thinks we Brits like to read books in the tube, actually that’s because we don’t have mobile signals down there!”

For those who are interested in further studies, some notes of the hallmark expressions:

youmuyou （有木有）,meaning “isn’t it so?” when spelled in a local Chinese dialect, it gives an explosive effect as if shouting piercing questions in the face of a large audience.

nima (尼玛), it looks like a Tibetan word, but actually is the homonym of “your mother”, a well-disguised curse now open to everyone.

beicui(悲催),pathetic.

kengdie (坑爹), intentionally misleading.

haizhi (孩纸), the Yunnan dialect for “kid”, reminiscent of those who really wanted to pronounce northern Chinese dialect with a curled tongue but just tragically overdid it. Now “haizhi” can refer to anybody, such as “kid who studies French”.

shangbuqi (伤不起), ”can’t afford too much hurt”, widely used in paoxiaoti to describe the pathetic nature of a certain kind of people, as if arguing: “we are more hurt than you are”. Imagine a group of losers competing who has more scars…

nimei (你妹), “your sister”, samewise, it’s a curse in a brief and civilized way.

laoniang (老娘), “me your old mother”, a vulgar way to address oneself, mostly used by girls who don’t have a boyfriend, happen to have chosen a difficult major, hard to find a job, feel desperate because she has to pretend to be sweet and helpful to people’s incessant plead for free help etc.

For clues of other representative paoxiaoti stories (in Chinese), see here: http://www.douban.com/group/topic/18130042/

Bob Dylan in China

Jessica — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:41:09 +0000

Bob Dylan’s long-waited appearance on the stage of the Worker’s Gymnasium, Beijing in front of tens of thousands of enthusiastic audiences surely had a religious halo around it, at least to those really misty eyes and thumping hearts, yet it may also feel just like a piece of strange antique for some younger flashy souls who are accustomed to fancy lighting and dramatic costumes and can hardly detect any “entertaining value” from such a “low-fi” event.

On April 6, after years of negotiation and hardwork by Gehua Live Nation Entertainment and Sports, a joint venture famous for touring such big shots as Michael Bolton and the Eagles in China, 70-year-old Bob Dylan eventually held his successful concert in Beijing, to be followed by another in Shanghai. For three decades before this night, the Chinese people had learned his name by heart and admired him as a cultural hero even though they may not have more knowledge of his songs than the most catchy “Blow’n in the wind”. (Same emotions can be found on Michael Jackson, who were also the dream hero of many boys in the 1980s.)

By custom, most Beijing concerts would have a “yellow-bull market” in front of the venue, as laid-off worker peddlers trade tickets for high prices and sell horns and glow sticks, but this time, most audiences, about 1/3 of them middle age expats, didn’t seem to want the sticks and no one seemed to have the intention of selling any ticket. Inside the stadium, which seemed to have some sound problems in the beginning, even some most notorious “microblog” (Chinese version of Twitter) journalists seemed to have stopped texting messages due to the intensity of the performance. It seems that they were quite “captured” and would prefer not to be “disturbed”. Nevertheless, some young critics like Leizi of a music website admitted that this concert was “just like going out for vinegar”, there was “nothing moving and nothing visual at all”.

According to those lucky audiences who recorded their experiences in excited words, Bob Dylan sang the whole night away amidst his modest band members, he improvised a lot (as usual) and gave two encores, the last one being very suitable for Chinese mid-age and to-be-mid-age white collars: ”May you grow up to be righteous, May you grow up to be true, May you always know the truth, And see the lights surrounding you”.

Among the audience were also a great number of A-list singers and artists whose presence mark the importance of the event: Cui Jian, He Yong, Zhang Chu, Zheng Jun, Yue Minjun etc.. When asked about their impressions of this concert, Zhang Chu said it was just what he had expected and some of Bob Dylan’s readaptations gave him real pleasant surprises, Zheng Jun said he had expected to see a music “fossil” but he was astonished to see so much passion in Bob and was led to reexamine his own “direction of life”. And one of the most maverick young singers of China named Zuoxiaozuzhou (literally meaning “small leftist curse”) cheekily admitted that “with no flattery, no thanking and bowing, no solicitation for applauses, he made me sleep for four times, and that’s what a dignified poet is supposed to do.”

From various sources including an interview.

Last hermits: Dr. Wang and his family

Jessica — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:53:21 +0000

Looking at this picture, one can hardly recognize that this pair of farmers were actually Peking University Ph. D. Wang Qingsong and his wife, the then quite-envied English teacher of the same prestigious campus.

They left the city since the end of 1980s and lived a life of real hermits for more than two decades. Wang and his wife supported themselves by tilling lands, herding animals and using their deposit money earned from teaching before. They even delivered their own baby boy by themselves.

In a blog written by Wang’s classmate, journalist and photographer Tang Shizeng (peace duck), Dr. Wang and his wife had seldom left the mountains that they live in (they rented 2500 acres of untilled mountains since 1999), and their child grew up reading classic books and herding goats.

Dr. Wang used to practice Kungfu and once served as civil servant in a local county. But after seeing chimneys and automobiles taking over urban surroundings they decided to leave them for good. “We’re not annihists, nor immortals living outside this world. We just want to be normal humans, eating things that are supposed to be eaten by humans, working as the sun rises and sleeping as the sun sets. And after we worked hard for a whole day, we as husband and wife can lay below the moonlight and enjoy a moment of peace.”

Some of their old photos:

Source from Tang Shizeng’s blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1253531973

Young Jazz band from PKU: Mr. Miss (0)

women of yunnan, 2008

Jessica — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:32:13 +0000

A tasty piece of animation made by Seen Studio, a group of young people born in the 1980s. Inspired by Yunnan ethnic music, dance and indegenious lifestyle. Winner of many prizes including Best Direction at 2008 Asian Youth Animation Festival.

See China » Jessica

Chu Yan: fashion that borders on calligraphy

Related Posts

Daily exercise of primary school students in Biru County, Tibet

Related Posts

The Second Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Prints

Related Posts

The little economist, the map, and others

Most Commented Posts

Zhang Meng: The piano in a factory

Most Commented Posts

Ha Hui’s new court music

Related Posts

Paoxiaoti, the roaring mode of writing

Related Posts

Bob Dylan in China

Related Posts

Last hermits: Dr. Wang and his family

Related Posts

women of yunnan, 2008

Related Posts