Dive into the archives.
- Guess who’s not coming to dinner.
Well, Pres O is in Beijing now, and I have confirmation that he will not be attending the dinner party that I had planned in his honor and about which I email and facebook messaged him several times. I guess he’s busy or something. Anyway, amongst the dozen or so articles that China Daily has published in relation to Obama’s first PRC visit, I found this image of a Barack egg etching. It’s done by Kang Yongguo, a craftsman from Liaoning Province and is pretty goddamn amazing imo.
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- Launch Sequence
Shameless plug time again…
This Sunday my friend Jiang Jun and I are presenting the book we made earlier this year. It’s called Urban China: Work in Progress, and it is making it rain on you hoes. Check out some more info on it in this post here. Better yet buy it from the publisher here. If you’re in the Beijing area, come through, it’ll be fun.
Date: Sunday, November 15, 2009
Time: 16:30-17:30
Venue: Timezone 8 (798), No 4 Jiu Xian Qiao Rd
时间：2009年11月15日周日16:30-17:30
地点：北京798东八时区（酒仙桥路4号）Meanwhile, my friends at JDS are releasing a book of their own in the next few weeks.
From the press release:
AGENDA is an architecture book that occupies the territory between a monograph, a diary, and a collection of essays, interviews, and conversations. At its most harmless AGENDA is a catalog of 365 days, like a diary or journal: a collective narrative, personal and subjective. It documents the work and thinking of JDS Architects over a specific year marked by crisis, beginning on September 15th, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The form of the book exploits the double meaning of its title, presenting the absurdities of day-to-day architectural practice while also staking our intent.
I contributed a couple things to the book and, although I haven’t seen it completed yet, I know it’s an ambitious project and I’m sure it’s worth picking up.
There will be book launch parties in the following cities:
ROTTERDAM | Friday, 20 November 2009 from 17.00-22.00 / invite only
OSLO | Saturday, 28 November 2009 from 14.00-16.00
@ Holmenkollen Ski Jump - Visitor’s Centre [map] / RSVPBRUSSELS | Thursday, 3 December 2009 - TBA / check back soon…
NEW YORK CITY | Thursday, 10 December 2009 from 18.00 - 21.00
@ Storefront for Art and Architecture [map] / open to publicLaunches in Copenhagen, Paris, Barcelona, and London will follow in early 2010.
For more info, click here.
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- Adventures in Globalization: Chiney Vibes
A while ago I posted an interview I did with Robin Liao, proprietor of Together Bar, Beijing’s #1 (and only) reggae spot. That conversation focused mainly on the influence of reggae on China, but it’s a little known fact that Chinese people have played a central role as recorders, players, producers, and distributors of reggae music from its earliest days. Here’s some background, swiped from an interesting little piece in China Daily called “Reggae’s Chinese Progenitors” :
The first Chinese reached Jamaica in 1854, when 472 laborers who had been working in appalling conditions on the Panama Canal petitioned the British government to be returned to China, only to find a selected coterie shipped to Jamaica, the closest British colony, where they were contracted to construct a railway line.
In the 20th century, the Chinese Jamaican community was sizeable, but at its peak still made up less than 1 percent of the island’s population.
Nevertheless, Chinese Jamaicans soon formed a mercantile class of shopkeepers, becoming a well-established facet of Jamaican commercial life in the years following World War II, the same period in which a handful of pioneering entrepreneurs changed Jamaica’s musical landscape through sound systems.
These sets of heavily-powered sound equipment would blast American rhythm and blues, Latin tunes and local forms, such as calypso and mento at open-air dance events; one of the first and most popular to emerge in the late 1940s was Tom the Great Sebastian, run by a hardware store proprietor named Tom Wong, whose father was of Chinese origin.
Then, in the mid-1950s, other forward-thinking entrepreneurs, such as Stanley Chin, owner of a radio repair service, kick-started a proper Jamaican music industry by beginning to record local mento and calypso performers.
Among the most important to begin producing then was Vincent “Randy” Chin, a record shop owner whose carpenter father had left Chinese mainland in the 1920s to settle in Jamaica.
Assisted by his wife Patricia, a woman of mixed Chinese and Indian origin, Chin enjoyed spectacular success during the early 1960s with artists such as Lord Creator.
Following from Vincent Chin’s early lead, several other Chinese Jamaicans became prominent figures on the music scene.
During the early 1960s, Leslie Kong and his three brothers operated an ice cream parlor and record shop called Beverley’s, which also had real estate offices attached, but after being approached by singer Jimmy Cliff, Leslie decided to enter record production, scoring instantly with hit recordings by Cliff and Desmond Dekker, though Bob Marley’s debut effort made little impact.
During the late 1960s, Kong enjoyed more hits than any other producer on the island, and after recording an album by Bob Marley and the Wailers was poised to achieve greater glory in 1971 when he unfortunately suffered a fatal heart attack.
Meanwhile, producer and bass player Byron Lee was making waves with a rival recording studio, Dynamic Sounds.
During the early 1970s, Dynamics was the best-equipped recording facility in the Caribbean, leading Paul Simon and the Rolling Stones to record there; like Tom Wong, Lee’s mother was a black Jamaican, but his father came to Jamaica from Hong Kong.
Although many Chinese Jamaicans are only vaguely aware of their cultural roots, session musicians Geoffrey and Mikey Chung, whose Now Generation band were one of the most popular 1970s outfits, managed to maintain direct links with their Chinese heritage, thanks largely to the efforts of their father.
“My father came to Jamaica in the 1930s and took over his brother’s shop; then, in 1959, I went to Hong Kong for a year and a half with my father and brothers, as it was a Chinese custom that the father bring the children back to the homeland to pick up the Chinese heritage,” Mikey Chung says.
As reggae gained international acclaim during the late 1970s, Herman Chin-Loy’s Aquarius became one of Jamaica’s top studios, but this politically turbulent era had drastic repercussions for the music industry: the 1976 and 1980 general elections involved shocking levels of politically motivated violence, as the socialist-leaning People’s National Party fought pitched battles against the right-wing Jamaica Labor Party.
The result was an exodus of Jamaican businessmen, which saw a gradual curtailment of Chinese Jamaican influence in the island’s music industry. However, the Chinese link to reggae remained strong.
The photo above features Patricia and Randy Chin, owners of VP, a dancehall record label started in Jamaica but now located in the US. The importance of that label of popularizing dancehall is almost impossible to overstate. Luckily, I don’t have to bother, because I found a documentary about it:
The aforementioned, super rockin Leslie Kong makes an unexpected little cameo in this clip of a Toots and the Maytals recording session from The Harder They Come:
It wasn’t all love though down there though. For a while, Kong was at the center of a feud between Prince Buster and Derrick Morgan over Morgan’s decision to leave Buster’s studio for Leslie’s. One artifact of that conflict is this ignorant little song, recorded by Buster in 1963 and ripped from the original 7 inch by Dave of the glorious Dave’s Jukebox blog.
Prince Buster - Black Head Chinee Man
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right-click + ’save link as’ (mac) / ’save target as’ (windows)Hate to end this positive post on that sour note though, so here’s a small piece of Leslie Kong’s more important legacy:
The Melodians - By the Rivers of Babylon (produced by Leslie Kong)
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- Props to Prop I: PRC
I think it’s ironic that so many of my designy Western friends are so admiring of the propaganda of the past century (Soviet film, Czech posters, American cartoons, Nazi set design…), while being so critical of the propaganda of today. The PRC’s latest exhibition of muscle flexing on the its 60th birthday seemed to freak them out universally. But my feeling is that if it’s OK to separate aesthetics from ideology once a regime has collapsed, we, in our Twitterfied 24-hour news cycle world, should be able to make that cut in real time. Besides, one’s anxiety is another’s pride and my feeling is that all the festively painted weaponry is meant to reassure, not threaten. Here is a collection of beautiful contemporary propaganda from China.
First, the parade in Tiananmen Square to mark the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China - as seen in timelapse and slow-motion. Created by Dan Chung:
The Big Picture also has an amazing feature on the 60th anniversary festivities. Here’s a couple of examples:
You can see the rest here.
Next, another very stylish cliche parade. CCTV Ink TV Commercial - Directed by Niko Tziopanos
Last here are some (sorta) oldie by goodies - Paralympic posters from the Beijing games. Art directed by Zhao Meng:
See the full set here.
Thanks to Dan & Jeru for forwarding the Party line.
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- Surfing in the world’s biggest kiddie pool
Image: Next Generation OnlineBack in Beijing after a long hiatus in the morally corrupt, ideologically impure West and, as ever, I am extremely unhappy with the state of the Chinese Internet. Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter were blocked even before I left, but since Blogspot and almost all webhosts have been shut down, depriving me of much music among other things. I made a few posts about online censorship when I was working here in 2007*, so I won’t retread that ground. But I think it’s worth sharing the image above, a kind of snap shot of the Great Firewall of China. (Click here to enlarge at the source…) Also, if you’re elsewhere, wish to share our pain, and use Firefox you might want to check out this plug-in that allows you to simulate the Chinese web experience.
*I have to give Net Nanny some props though, she’s vigilant. The post I made when I was here a couple years ago giving tips on how to get around the firewall is now almost totally useless.
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- DON’T SLEEP: The Urban China book is coming
Urban China: Work in Progress, a book I worked on last year, is finally coming out. It’s based on 5 issues of 城市中国, an incredible archi-socio-historico-cultural magazine made by my friend Jiang Jun, among many others. I made several posts previewing the material when I was working on it. Check them out here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I probably shouldn’t be ‘publishing’ it before its official release, but for the past half year the book has been caught up in an excruciating limbo as various parties argued about money. But it’s finally printed now, and I cannot contain my relief, happiness, pride. Matter of fact, let’s have a song…
In all honesty, this book is very good and you should buy it. It’ll be in stores in about a month. There are photos and my intro after the break.
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- The Helmsman Sound
Well, I’m finally in the home stretch of this Urban China book. It’s been months, but the edit and design are done and I’m mostly working on details now. This week I’m just doing research to fill in some gaps and explain some references that us foreigners might not get. One of the things I worked on today was a reference to a song called “Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman.” It’s one of those feel good orchestra jams that were so popular during Mao’s time. There’s been a lot of attention paid to Chinese revolutionary posters in the past few years, but not much on music. So here’s the song…
Yu Wen (lyrics) & Wang Shuangyin (music) - Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman
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right-click + ’save link as’ (mac) / ’save target as’ (windows)Here’s the lyrics…
大海航行靠舵手，
Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman,万物生长靠太阳。
The growth of all living beings depends on the sun.雨露滋润禾苗壮，
Rain and dew nourish young seedlings,干革命靠的是毛泽东思想。
Conducting revolution depends on Mao Zedong Thought.鱼儿离不开水呀，
Fish cannot leave the water,瓜儿离不开秧。
Melons cannot leave the vine.革命群众离不开共产党。
The revolutionary masses cannot do without the Communist Party.毛泽东思想是不落的太阳。
Mao Zedong Thought is a sun that never sets.Both the mp3 and translation are from the recently emboldened proletarians at marxists.org
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- Urban China Source Material 05: Blind School
I had my morning rocked by these images today. They were taken by Nan Li in 1989 during a trip to a school for the blind, deaf, and mute. Unfortunately that’s all I know. Click to enlarge.
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- Urban China Matrial 04: Peasant Mansions
Well, I am still working on a book with my friends at Urban China magazine. And after a month spent in fearsome battle, I’ve finally managed to slay the Chinglish Dragon and have officially moved on from editing to design. So I’m gonna put up a few more things as the process goes along.
Here’s a page I laid out today dissecting changes to housing in the Chinese countryside. The introduction of free market money has done wild things to village life, particularly from an architectural standpoint. The houses of the most affluent farmers are often similar to the one above, Frankenstein hybrids that mix materials and styles in a way that would even give a cartoonish post-modernist like Michael Graves pause.
I wrote about this phenomenon in an article for Architecture Digest last year. (The original piece was about the new campus for China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. That’s a pretty interesting architectural spectacle in itself. Click here to see some beautiful photos of the campus by very friend Iwan Baan.)
To fully appreciate Wang Shu’s new campus for the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, it’s useful to travel to the city by bus. For much of the trip, your view is dominated by the unindustrialized agriculture that occupies so much of the Chinese countryside. You will see very little nature, and a great deal of mud, divided into tiny, meticulously parceled plots, some of which extend to within centimeters of the expressway. Small clusters of buildings appear every few hundred meters. They are mostly constructed of locally-produced brick and mirror the ruddy brownness of the earth from which they came, giving the scene a tranquilizing color consistency.
As you get nearer to the city, things begin to change. The foreground of farm life is compressed by a backdrop of cooling towers and smoke stacks. The air perceptibly grays. The images of rustic toil - elderly women bent over rice fields, teens transporting pigs by motorcycle, middle aged men hauling hay bales… - assume an ominous aura. There are glints of promise in the gloom, though. As if to compensate for the worsening atmosphere, the living conditions noticeably improve. The houses look sturdier, many are covered in a protective layer of plaster, some have multiple floors. An exceptional few are covered in rectangular tiles of white, pink, or lime green. Against the dreary surroundings, these unexpected bursts of color appear almost fluorescent.
As you approach the city limits, the proximity of money and opportunity grows more apparent and the decorative flourishes more dramatic. Colored tiles become commonplace. All houses now have glass windows and some are tinted blue. A few megastructures - a convention center, a long distance bus depot, one or two under-construction, already-populated housing complexes - mark the transition from rural to urban. They raise the bar for ornamentation and initiate an open competition of architectural showmanship which quickly drowns out the landscape.
The homes of the most affluent farmers - many of whom now work in the city as builders or businessmen - shoot up to three or four stories. Though the basic plan remains the same, the houses suddenly sprout absurd additions - Greek columns, Dutch gables, emerald curtain wall from an office building, granite stairs from a hotel. On nearly every corner sit mounds of broken bricks covered in a thin layer of white dust like loaves of ciabatta bread. Now that everyone can afford tiles, their size, color, and arrangement becomes the focus. Some use tiny, multi-colored squares to create a kind of pixelated static; others create simple, bold gestures like candy cane swirls; others eschew tiles altogether and create elaborate patterns of alternating vertical and horizontal brick. The result is the architectural equivalent of a car show. Riding past feels like being lost in gingerbread land.
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- Urban China Source Material 03: Bare Life
Man alive, it’s colder than the 9th Circle of Hell in Beijing these days. It’s enough to make this winter-coat-less dummie long for the sweat-soaked smog-choked days of summer. Luckily I’ve spent most of this morning laying out images like the one above. It’s from a series called ‘Bare Life’ that was created by an artist named Wang Zi (王子). He took them in the summers of 04 and 05 in an area called Qianmen, a hutong not far from Tian An Men Square. Wang Zi grew up in a hutong nearby that has since been demolished. Here’s a selection from a text he wrote about the neighborhood (translated by Wang Ruocheng):
Before 1949, Qianmen was the busiest commercial area in the city, with the best courtyards and the most flourishing shops. Nowadays, however, this area has declined to a slum. The dilapidated single-story houses and the embarrassing lives within contrast sharply with the modern skyscrapers that surround them.
Qianmen is located close to Tian An Men Square. In every corner there are symbols and characters from different historical periods. They have been changing along with the developing city and include political slogans from the Mao Zedong period and the advocacy of economic development from the late 1980s, as well as small pieces of paper that advertise, declare of building soon-to-be demolished, celebrate the Olympics, etc. These symbols and Chinese characters have no value themselves; their original meanings may have been forgotten by their writers. Their meanings are confused, the accumulated results of mistakes.
For the poor residents, several families live together in one courtyard, sharing the same water tap. Under that tap there is a cesspool made of bricks, into which all the liquid waste and urine are poured. Insects will settle down here in summer, making it unclean. However, it is the squalor that brings people together, making the area around the tap in the courtyard an important public space. Residents used to clean vegetables and wash clothes here. Passersby even drank the water. All the above are not so common nowadays.
Without fine waste pipes, residents could not have toilets in the courtyard. Instead, they need to walk several minutes to the public toilets in the hutong, where queues can be seen at “rush hour” in the morning. In order to take a shower, people have to walk several kilometers away to a public bathroom. This happened in nearly all of the hutongs and courtyards downtown. Although some families can have simple shower facilities, most people can not afford facilities in their courtyard because they have less than five square meters of housing area. So wiping the body with a wet cloth becomes the most convenient way of taking a bath.
The plight of Beijing’s hutongs triggers strong feelings of nostalgia and righteous indignation on the part of locals and foreigners. These images and text I think capture a slice of that radically diminished aspect of the city without the usual melodrama. They also provide an interesting overview of Chinese male body typologies, but that’s a bonus. More images after the jump. Click to enlarge…
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- Urban China Source Material 02: Red Scarf
As I mentioned last time, for the next few weeks I’m going to be posting material from a book I’m putting together based on the work of Urban China magazine. These photos are taken from Issue 22 which dealt with the topic of Chinese Education. They were taken by Du Yingnan (杜英男), a photographer from Manchuria who’s currently based in Shanghai. Du took these photos during a visit to an elementary school in a small village in Fujian Province, and they pretty much speak for themselves. The red scarfs that kids wear are generally associated with the Young Pioneers, a kind of Socialist Boy Scouts, but also serve as a overall symbol of primary education.
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- Urban China Source Material 01
These days I’m working on a book with Urban China (城市中国), an often amazing magazine about China’s ever-changing/never-changing urban culture. Up until now it’s only been available in Chinese, but the book will be in English. I’m psyched about it, but at this point I’m just praying that too much won’t be lost in translation. I’m also pulling double duty editing and designing it, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for this blog in the next month or so.
But I think one of the best ways to keep VERY FEEL alive and maybe generate a little advance interest in the project is to put up some of the material. Urban China has an absolutely incredible archive of images from past and present China and going through it has been my arduous pleasure for the past few days. Anyway, I’ll put up some examples every few days. In honor of Thanksgiving, here’s a couple of images from Urban China #19: The Chinese Family. [click to enlarge]
Spinners breast feeding at a cotton mill in Beijing, 1978
New fathers feeding their children, 1993Popularity: 4% [?]
- Beijing Rising
Through a miracle of Facebook, I just became aware of this beautiful/bleak video made by Neville Mars of Dynamic City Foundation. Neville strapped a camera to a helium baloon and flew it over Wang Jing, a neighborhood in northern Beijing. During the Olympic viewing frenzy, some people asked me to explain what Beijing was like before the Games. I wish I’d had this clip then, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary waffle.
Check out more DCF projects at the bURB site.
Also, buy their book The Chinese Dream.Popularity: 4% [?]
- A handshake from Lok
My friend Lok Jansen is an architect, illustrator, and all around awesome person. He lives in Tokyo with his equally awesome wife Naoko and I don’t see them enough. Fortunately, Lok occasionally hits me off with some of his latest work, and somehow the space between here and there feels smaller. Yesterday was such a day - in my inbox, amongst the boring work shit and junk mail, I found a glowing orb of flavor in a the form of email from Lok with 4 sketches attached. The sketches are inspired by the urban villages around southern China. (I wrote a little bit about a visit I made to one in this post from a while ago.)
Anyway, these sketches are great. Here’s what Lok said about them:
I’m doing these for a new cityscape or two about the Urban Villages. Went and spent time in a couple of them in Shenzhen and in Guangzhou. Places like the Handshake Apartments (Wo Shou Lau) in Shenzhen, and Ba Deng Cun (巴登村). After the mostly Japanese cityscapes I was looking for something new and was of course struck by the very high density, the amount of life, activity, struggle and joy. Which is why I added people to these for the first time - to have them contrast with the wild machine-like surroundings, and have the environment stand for the overwhelming situation the people are trying to overcome. I was impressed by peoples ‘let’s make some money’ attitude, but also struck by the vulnerability of each individual. And of course I wanted to do tribute to the pajama stylo.
Here they are (click to enlarge highly recommended):
And as an extra bonus, here’s a short film Lok made while walking through the “handshake apartments” (握手楼, so named because the buildings are packed in so tight that neighbors can shake hands out of their windows) in Shenzhen. I think a lot of what Lok mentioned is evident here and it makes the sketches that much more beautiful.
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- Mo’lympics
I realize that I’m in danger of turning this into some sort of Olympic blog, but fuck it, you can’t fight the zeitgeist. Anyway, I just wrote a little account of my trip to the Bird’s Nest for Art Review’s site. It’s a lot like something I would put on here, but this time I got paid. ((Michael Phelps fist pump))
Intro:
What can be said at this point about the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games? They are awesome. They are big and pretty and well organized. Zhang Yimou’s shock-and-awe opening and the physical domination that followed slammed the door on 100 years of humiliation for the Chinese and signalled to the rest of us the passing of the torch (!) from the old superpower to a much older one.For years now, the Chinese media have presented the Olympics as a kind of referendum on the nation’s status in the world. Now, based on the montages of awe-struck visitors and the gold medal count that scrolls triumphantly along the bottom of nearly every TV channel here, it is clear that the results are in: China in a landslide.
The Beijing Olympics’ televised image (provided by American network NBC) has been as slick and selective as Zhang’s intro. The viewer, here and everywhere, is exposed to majestic shots of the National Stadium (aka the Bird’s Nest) and National Aquatics Center (AKA Water Cube) detached from their surroundings, their neighours cropped out, either by camera angle or cloak of darkness. A jump cut brings you suddenly inside the stadium, where the world’s greatest athletes are busy straining themselves within some sort of rectangular shape, surrounded by thousands of flag-waving fans. Knowing the great lengths to which Beijing has gone to disguise its blemishes – a cluster of dilapidated buildings next to my apartment was walled off from public view a few weeks before the opening – and knowing that the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube are anomalies in Chinese architecture, I was curious to see what else is going on at the Olympic venues. What is there beyond the edge of our TV screens? I travelled to the Olympic Green a couple days ago. Here’s what I found:
Read the rest here.Popularity: 3% [?]
