Chinese Art in Kansas City

A new exhibit of centuries-old paintings stored in Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas are now on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

From The Kansas City Star:

 

The most enchanting show of the summer is tucked away in the Chinese paintings gallery at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. 

“Faces From China’s Past” is a walk-in album of charming portraits from the 16th to the 19th centuries. 

Their subjects — imposing matrons and fetching young women, stately ancestors and learned men — seem remote from us in customs and dress, yet seeing them enjoy their pets and favorite pastimes in lovely gardens and elegant interiors, one immediately feels a sense of kinship. 

And there’s just enough of a “boy meets girl” theme to keep things interesting. 

That notion gets quite an airing in a series of exquisite illustrations for an erotic novel, “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” chronicling the amorous adventures of a rich merchant, Master Ximen. He’s a randy and at times cruel character, not above climbing a garden wall to have a tryst with his brother’s wife or punishing a wayward concubine with a whip. 

Nearby, “Listening to the Qin by Candlelight,” a 17th-century piece showing a man playing the ancient stringed instrument for a female companion, presents a much more civilized approach to romance. 

Drawn from the collections of the Nelson and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, the artworks in this show were made for enjoyment and commemoration by mostly unknown artists. And many of the works have languished in storage for years. 

“Scholars weren’t interested in this type of painting; it’s not what Chinese consider mainstream,” said Colin Mackenzie, the Nelson’s senior curator of Chinese painting. The mainstream is landscape painting, he said, “created by the educated elite to express a philosophical view of art.” 

 

Read On  

The Nelson-Atkins Museum has one of the finest collections of Chinese art in the world. Here is a summary of the Nelson-Atkins' permanent Chinese collection:

Since it opened in 1933, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has actively collected, preserved, studied and exhibited works of Chinese art. Even before the Museum was built, its benefactors planned to include in it the first major gallery in America devoted solely to Chinese art. As early as 1930, the focus was to build a collection that would represent China’s highest achievements in every medium and from every historical period. As a result, the Chinese collection is one of the finest in the world. 

With more than 7,500 works of high quality, the Chinese collection comprises masterpieces from every historical stage and in every medium of China’s artistic activity – from Neolithic times to the 20th century. 

The collection of Chinese paintings is one of the best outside Asia particularly in the rarest and desirable period of early Chinese landscapes, the 10th through 13th centuries C.E. The richness of nature’s nuances can be seen in Xu Daoning’s Fisherman’s Evening Song, arguably the greatest surviving Northern Song landscape handscroll. Later period works include exceptional Ming and Qing paintings, such as Shitao’s A Landscape Album for Liu Shitou (K'u-kua miao-t'i). 

As a pioneer in collecting Ming furniture, the Museum’s collection is virtually unrivaled outside of China. The comprehensive ceramics collection spans 5,000 years and includes both sculptures and wares that chronicle the great epochs of Chinese ceramic innovations. 

Buddhist sculpture and wall paintings range from the Northern Dynasties to the Qing period and offer some of the best examples of Buddhist art in the west. A jewel of the Museum is the Chinese Temple Gallery (Gallery 230). Among Buddhist statues exhibited here is an 11th/12th-century C.E. polychrome wooden Avalokiteshvara, Seated Guanyin Bodhisattva, internationally heralded as the finest sculpture of its kind outside China.

Qian and I have been to the Nelson, which has free admission, several times in the three years we've been in Kansas City. The whole museum, on top of the Chinese collection, is just an awesome display.


The Nelson-Atkins Museum

The Chinese works of art are far superior to anything I ever saw in China. I haven't spent a lifetime checking out other cities' museums' Chinese collections, but I have to believe that the Nelson's is up there with any collection in the world.

If you ever find yourself in Kansas City, be sure to check out the Nelson-Atkins Museum's Chinese collection. Send me an email and I'll go with you. We can catch some BBQ after we see the museum too. Kansas City's BBQ, my favorites being Oklahoma Joe's and Jack Stack, is as good as it gets.

Invisible China

Invisible China: A Journey Through Ethnic Borderlands by Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson is a really pleasant book. I randomly found it on Amazon. I'd never heard about it from the Chinese blogosphere or anywhere else.



The two authors - Legerton and Rawson - went on two epic backpacking trips in the summer of 2006 and spring of 2007 that covered a ridiculously large swath of China's territory:



Legerton and Rawson, who were already proficient with Mandarin before their big trips, studied up on Korean and Uyghur before they embarked on their gargantuan journeys.

Their rigorous study of minority languages says a lot about the duo. They have immense respect for the cultures that they saw and made the most of their great opportunity to see cultures that, for many of them, are on the brink of extinction. The authors handled the people and situations they encountered with great care and painted very delicate pictures of the individuals and landscapes they witnessed.

Invisible China introduced me to a wide range of ethnic minorities in China I wasn't familiar with before: the rustic hunting cultures of the Ewenki, Oroqen, and Daur of the northeast, the fishermen Kinh of the southwest, and the central Asian-influenced Tajiks of the far west.

I particularly liked that two-thirds of the book is focused on China's southwest and far west. I've said it many times, but for me, China gets more interesting the further west one goes. The jungles and Himalayas of the southwest and the deserts and plateaus of the far west made for great settings.

My only real complaint about the book is that it is too short. There is so much covered in only about 230 pages. I wish that the authors had laid out more facts and history about each ethnic minority they were profiling. Brief histories of each group were given, but not much more than the basics and then the duo's experiences visiting their homelands. Seeing that they profiled fifteen different peoples and had thirteen different chapters, 230 pages felt squeezed. It easily could've been twice as long and I'd have been happy.

Invisible China is a great primer to the surprisingly diverse peoples on the fringes of the People's Republic.

Americans in China

I don't think This American Life is going to have to have to issue a retraction for their most recent expedition in to China.

The radio program, produced by WBEZ in Chicago and distributed by Public Radio International, caused a huge stir this spring when it had to retract its program - Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory - by performer, Mike Daisey. It turned out that Daisey had made up many of the key points of his hugely popular monologue about witnessing abuses at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Watching the truth come to the surface was a wild thing to witness. I get a sick sense of enjoyment watching people get called out on lying and experienced a great deal of schadenfreude hearing Daisey taken to task as hard as he was by Rob Schmitz and Ira Glass.

Following up their piece from a pathological liar who admitted he knew "fuck-all about Chinese culture," This American Life redeemed itself this week by featuring a line-up of some of the most influential and knowledgeable foreigners living in China. This week's episode, Americans in China, is one of the better This American Life episodes I've heard (although I have to say that my favorite episode is still Somewhere Out There... do yourself a favor and listen to this one that's also China-related).

Kaiser Kuo is the main character in the most recent "Americans in China" episode. He's the host of the Sinica Podcast, a program I've touted numerous times on my blog. His story of being a Chinese American who completely fell for the land his parents came from, moving to China and literally becoming a rock star, having his Chinese band mates turn their backs on him after the Chinese embassy was bombed in Belgrade in 1999 because he's American, and ultimately raising his family in Beijing and working for Baidu is fascinating. I was quite moved by his passion for both China and the US.

The second act of the "Americans in China" episode is from Michael Meyer. His piece is about living in his wife's village in rural northeast China.

I read Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed last year, actually, but never got around to writing anything about it on my blog. I didn't really have anything to say about it. There was nothing overtly wrong or bad about Meyer's book, but I was just, for lack of a better word, bored by it.

My reaction to Meyer's book reminds me of my brother's reaction to Peter Hessler. After a huge amount of hype from me, I convinced my brother to read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones a couple years ago. Oracle Bones is one of my all-time favorite books. I was so surprised when, a few weeks after he had started it, he told me that he couldn't finish the book. He said that Hessler's seriousness and humorlessness just got to him and that he couldn't continue reading.

I feel that way about Meyer's book and his piece on This American Life. I can't put my finger on it, but I haven't enjoyed his work as much as I have a lot of other prolific China hands'.

Despite not being enthralled with Meyer's piece, it was good to hear such quality programming on Americans in China. Kuo's story, framed by the excellent Evan Osnos, alone is worth listening to. This American Life has gone a long way in making up for whatever it egg it still had on its face from when it featured Mike Daisey.

Wild China

I LOL'd a few weeks ago when I saw this video - China, China:



I didn't really think twice about the clip until I started the TV series Wild China on Netflix. After a few minutes of Wild China, I realized that it was the British-accented source of the viral China, China compilation.



Wild China is a six-part 2008 BBC documentary on the rugged geography and exotic peoples and animals of China. The series is broken in to six episodes:

1. Heart of the Dragon
2. Shangri-La
3. Tibet
4. Beyond the Great Wall
5. Land of the Panda
6. Tides of Change

Heart of the Dragon is mostly about the wondrous karst areas of Guangxi Province and southern China. Shangri-La is all about the intense diversity of Yunnan Province. Tibet takes place in Tibet. Beyond the Great Wall is all about the Inner Mongolian and Xinjiang Autonomous Regions. Land of the Panda focuses mostly on central China from the Qinling Mounatins to the east. And Tides of Change looks at the humongous coast line from North Korea to Vietnam through the prism of China's rapid development.

I liked this entire series. It is top-notch videography of the incredibly diverse wildlife and terrain of China. I repeatedly thought to myself, "I can't believe that still exists. I thought China had killed off every animal like that!" Wild China proves that there's still a whole lot of beauty to be found in China.

The best episodes are the first two - on the Guangxi Autonomous Region and Yunnan Provice. These two episodes will make you want to get on a plane, put on a backpack, and go explore remote parts of China. My personal favorites from this part are the features on monkeys, ethnic minorities crossing raging rivers using rope zip lines, and fly-over videography of karst mountains.

Here is a clip of the Nu Jiang rope crossing from the Shangri-La episode:



(There are several more clips from Wild China on YouTube if you search for "wild china")

The last four episodes were interesting to me, but a let down compared to the beginning of the series.

The episode on Tibet didn't feature as many towering, snow-covered Himalayan peaks as it did barren plateau. Vast lifeless expanses of land are certainly a big part of Tibet and its topography, but it didn't make for the most interesting viewing. The same is true of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia and the deserts of Xinjiang in episode four (and I say that as a huge Xinjiang nerd). Nothing really stands out from episodes five and six in my mind a few weeks after having watched it either.

I enjoyed Wild China a lot. I'd recommend it to someone wanting to learn a thing or two while killing time on Netflix.

God is Red

Seeing that I'm not a religious person, I wasn't sure whether I would like Liao Yiwu's new book - God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China. "Christianity in China" in my mind is synonymous with Mormon and Protestant born again Evangelical Americans teaching at Chinese universities who spend a great deal of their time prosthelytizing to eager Chinese undergrads. The topic is not something I'm particularly interested in.

I liked Liao's previously released book in English, though - The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up. Liao's story is most interesting too - he was a state-sponsored writer as a young man, wrote provocative poetry about the Tiananmen massacre in the late '80s and early '90s, spent years in prison for that work, developed his writing more and more, and has recently written books that have been translated into English.

While I had reservations about reading a book profiling Christians in China, I picked it up anyways knowing Liao's dissident and bohemian life story and liking his previous work.



God is Red is written in the same style as The Corpse Walker. Liao uses his friends and connections to meet people on the fringes of Chinese society. Much of the book is written in an interview Q&A format. It's broken into three sections:

1. The Trip to Dali
2. The Yi and Miao Villages
3. Beijing and Chengdu

Dali is a hippie outpost in Yunnan Province, an area in southwest China between the Himalayas and Myanmar. My strongest memory of Dali when I was there in 2006 is being offered marijuana from tiny, wrinkled old ladies in lavish ethnic garb. It's a very chill little tourist town dotted with coffee shops and cafes serving foreign food. It's surrounded by beautiful mountains and an idyllic lake.

The Yi are an ethnic group I've now seen profiled in several of the books I've read on China (River at the Center of the World is a book with one of those profiles). They are one of the most exotic ethnic groups in all of China. They mostly reside in the mountainous and undeveloped areas of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan Provinces.

And then Beijing and Chengdu are two of China's biggest and most progressive cities.

The interviews that Liao conducts with Christians throughout these areas highlight the edginess and rebellious nature that are required in being a Christian in China. Liao interviews old men and women who talk about picking up Christianity from missionaries during the 1940s before the founding of the People's Republic, people who somehow continued to practice their religion during Mao's reign of terror, and younger people who today are picking up Christianity during China's opening to the world. A full spectrum of people and stories are introduced to the reader.

Stories about Mao's persecution of Christians and destruction of churches during his never-ending political campaigns are featured in many people's stories. Liao conducted the interviews for this book around 2005 or so. Many of the people who suffered at that time are nearing the end of their lives. Liao's book is quite valuable in recording several instances of great abuse and sharing them with the world before those events fade into history and are forgotten.

I really enjoy books that go off-the-beaten-path, taking readers to parts of China that are hard to access. God is Red goes really deep into rugged parts of China. Liao takes the reader to some of the most scenic and inaccessible parts of China.

I liked the following passage from pages 143-44 where Liao has a feast with Yi Christians in Yunnan Province a lot:

There's so much passion and life in Liao's words here. This passage illustrates what is special about Liao and his books. He brings both a Chinese and outsider's perspective to the people and events he introduces. Both God in China and The Corpse Walker (a book I read last year but never got reviewed on this blog... hope to get something on here at some point about it) are excellent windows in to the underclass and people on the edges of Chinese society.

I, unfortunately, don't read enough books by Chinese authors. Looking at my bookshelf of Chinese books, there are a few Chinese authors' books, but I see mostly Anglo names there. Not reading many Chinese writers is, obviously, one of the drawbacks of not being able to read a book in Chinese. Liao Yiwu is a Chinese author writing captivating creative nonfiction about China, its history, and its people. And his books are being translated into English. He's worth checking out.

Sinocism

Bill Bishop's blog/newsletter Sinocism has become an absolute must-read for anyone wanting to keep up with these interesting times in China. I suggest going to his blog here and signing up for the daily email via Feed Burner. The daily email makes sure you get every post he makes.

Bishop (aka. niubi on Twitter) is a fluent Mandarin speaking American who's lived in Beijing for years. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded CBS' Marketwatch. It's obvious from his work that he spends a great deal of time these days working on Sinocism.

Sinocism has been an excellent guide for the many recent controversies in China - Bo Xilai, Chen Guangchen, and the recent crackdowns on foreigners among others. His commentary and news curation is extremely wide-ranging, but I find his writing on China's economy and internet to be most enlightening.

There's no blog, Twitter feed, or news website out there better than Sinocism when it comes to China news and commentary.

Eating Bitterness

I told my brother the other day that I was reading a book about migrant workers living in Xi'an that just came out last month - Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration by Michelle Dammon Loyalka.

"Wow, that's esoteric," he said.

"Yeah," I responded, "I think the author wrote this book especially for me."

He laughed.

It's true, a book about migrant workers and China's rapidly developing economy set in my Chinese home city of Xi'an is right up my alley. When I heard of Eating Bitterness on Twitter a few weeks ago, I knew it was something I had to check out.

After having read the book, I don't think my brother's and my initial reactions were correct, though. The book is not esoteric. There's nothing technical about the sociology of urban migration or anything inside baseball about Xi'an in it. The book is about human beings trying to make their lives better. Anyone can relate with that.

Seeing that there are more than 100 million migrant workers in China right now taking part in the largest human migration in the history of the planet, this book is something anyone can and should read. It gives great insights into a truly massive demographic of the world's population.

 

Dammon Loyalka for her book embeded herself in the lives of migrant workers working and living in a city village (城中村) on the outskirts of Xi'an's High-Tech Zone. She shadowed a number of different types of migrant workers for weeks at a time. In her afterword, she said she spent upwards of three weeks, on and off, with each person she profiled. Because of her tireless shoe-leather journalism, an intimate portrait of each character's hopes, joys, and fears is painted for the reader.

The characters in her book are as follows:

1. The Veggie Vendors  

2. The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener 

3. The Teenage Beauty Queens 

4. The Ever-Floating Floater 

5. The Landless Landlords 

6. The Nowhere Nanny 

7. The Opportunity Spotter 

8. The Big Boss

Each one of these migrant workers with countryside roots living in the big city show a remarkable ability to "eat bitter" (吃苦). "Eating bitterness," the title of the book, is a phrase that Chinese people use to describe one's ability to deal with hardship.

A farmer toiling the fields during flood or drought in ancient China had to eat bitterness. A young girl sold to a warlord to be a concubine had to eat bitterness. Nearly everyone in every part of China had to eat bitterness under Mao.

Even today during China's economic miracle with all of its glitzy skyscrapers and black Audis, many in the bottom-rung of society have to eat more than their fair share of bitterness. China has come a long way in the past thirty years, but not everyone is enjoying the fruits of their hard labor equally. Dammon Loyalka's book shows how life is for those at the bottom of today's China trying to follow their dreams and trying to make life better for their families.

I really liked getting to know each one of these characters Dammon Loyalka introduced. Although I liked all of these stories, my favorites were #2, #3, and #6.

The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener was probably my favorite character in the book. Wang Quanxi is an illiterate old man trying to scrape by a living in Xi'an by riding his bike around advertising that he'll sharpen whatever knives you have for a couple yuan each. He lives in complete squalor so that his fixed costs are as low as possible and he can send back nearly everything he makes to his family living in Henan.

I particularly liked this passage where Quanxi spent hours sharpening knives for a restaurant:

An owner of a restaurant intentionally screwing over this old man, who broke his back making sure his knives are sharp enough, out of three yuan (or $.48) really hit me. There were plenty of times in Xi'an where I argued with a motorbike driver over two yuan or someone selling vegetables over .5 yuan. That's certainly different than reneging on an agreed upon price, but getting to know Quanxi makes me question some of the energy that I put into nickel-and-diming people with so much less than I have.

Despite any attempts to get good prices with the migrant workers I encountered while living in China, I was constantly taken aback by the migrant workers I saw everywhere when I lived in Xi'an. Whether it was a little old lady pulling a wheelbarrow down the bike path of a street or construction workers literally building the new China, I was always aware of that a great number of people in China have incredibly difficult lives.

Eating Bitterness gives me a lot more context for those images of migrant workers that I have in my mind. Knowing the stories behind at least a handful of those faces is really valuable, in my opinion.

I really liked Eating Bitterness. Much like Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, it really opened my eyes to a group of people in China that I was very aware of but didn't know with enough depth. Eating Bitterness is written beautifully and is full of great information. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to look beyond the gaudy GPD numbers and see the full picture of China's rapid development.