3_6_5_PQ365

Chen Lihua (L), president of China Red Sandalwood Museum and
French Minister for Culture and Communications Renaud Donnedieu de
Vabres attend the opening ceremony of the model of the Temple of
Heaven at Chateau de Chambord in Loire Valley, France on March 9,
2007. The model of the Temple of Heaven which is made from red
sandalwood by 100 skillful craftsmen in 2 years was presented to
Chateau de Chambord by China Red Sandalwood Museum.

 

 

People visit the model of the Temple of Heaven at Chateau de
Chambord in Loire Valley, France on March 9, 2007. The model of the
Temple of Heaven which is made from red sandalwood by 100 skillful
craftsmen in 2 years was presented to Chateau de Chambord by China
Red Sandalwood Museum. 

 

(Xinhua News Agency March 12, 2007)

Ruth Shany searches for traces of her home in
the Hongkou District of Shanghai where her family took refuge from
Nazi persecution nearly 70 years ago.

 

Ruth Shany, a renowned Israeli painter, greeted every Shanghai
friend with “Nong hao va?” (”How are you?” in Shanghai dialect)
after returning to the city that was a haven for her family nearly
70 years ago.

At the renovated building in Hongkou District where Shany used
to live, the 84-year-old painter found an 87-year-old Shanghai lady
who has been living there for many years.

She held the granny’s hands for a long time, tears brimming in
her eyes.

“I am so grateful to the city, the only place which opened its
arms to the Jewish refugees during World War II,” said Shany.

While holding her solo exhibition in Beijing’s XYZ Gallery,
Shany spared three days from her China tour to travel around
Shanghai.

She said that the city held a number of wonderful memories for
her and used the word “unbelievable” to describe the refuge her
family found here.

Shany was born to a Jewish mother in Berlin, Germany. When the
Nazis headed by Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933, Shany’s family
left Germany and moved to Prague, in former Czechoslovakia.

A year later, Hitler announced that the Jews were welcome to
return to Germany where they could live in peace. Shany’s father, a
soldier who served in the German Army, took his family back. But
after five years, the family could no longer take life under the
Nazis.

In February 1939, the Shany family boarded an Italian ship and
landed in Shanghai after three weeks. Starting their life in a new
country was not easy. All their properties were gone and they lived
in Heim (temporary lounge) with other refugees.

In 1941, after they found a small room to live in, Shany’s
mother became sick with a tropical disease and died.

“Although our lives were full of hardships, we were treated in a
friendly way in the neighborhood,” Shany recalled.

She supported herself as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant in
the now Nanjing Donglu street.

The owner of the restaurant was a kind soul and Shany even
started learning Chinese silk painting under Japanese art professor
Taishi Nishio.

While learning Chinese, she visited galleries, went to concerts
and cinemas and began appreciating the beauty of Shanghai.

May the Earth Bear Living Creatures, one of
the eight paintings of Ruth Shany’s My Creation
series.

 

Nanjing Lu, Babbling-well Street (now Nanjing Xilu near the Jing’an
Temple which was called the Babbling-well Temple) and other
beautiful sights would always stay in her memories, she said.

When the state of Israel was established, Shany, then 26, moved
to Israel and settled down.

Shany said her family is inexplicably tied to Shanghai.

Her son Daniel Wachsmann, who would grow up to become a
film-maker, was born in the Wardwall Hospital which was on today’s
Changyang Lu.

“I wish I can show him the place where he was born the next time
I come to Shanghai,” she said.

Incidentally, her son’s film The Chosen was screened at the
first Shanghai International Film Festival in 1993.

During her three-day stay in Shanghai, Shany travelled mainly in
Hongkou District where most of the 20,000 Jewish people stayed
during World War II.

When Shany tried to find the restaurant where she once worked,
she learned it had closed  down in 1943, a year before she got
married.

Shany has a studio in the city of Safed, which is situated in
the beautiful Galilee area. She continues to paint using her
special style-rich colors on silk, which she learnt in China.

Her Beijing exhibition includes 56 paintings, including her
favorite series My Creation and other pieces on flowers, plants and
scenery.

Several years ago, she and her husband spent two weeks on the
shores of the Dead Sea. One night, she woke up and could not fall
asleep again. She sat down at the window and looked out into the
night.

There were millions of stars illuminating the dark blue, almost
black, sky. Shany was struck by the fantastic sight amid the total
silence of the night.

“I do not know how long I sat there until I noticed the
appearance over the Moab mountains of a reddish stripe that
gradually became larger and brighter. Breathless, I watched the
wonderful display of colors and the thought came to me that
creation must have begun this way,” she said.

She took out her Bible and re-read the chapter on the creation
of the world in seven days. “Moved by an inner urge, I painted My
Creation, reflecting the wonder I had experienced.”

She did not sleep for days until she had completed the eight
paintings.

Her exhibition entitled Back to China with Love will continue at
XYZ Gallery in Dashanzi of northeastern Beijing until Saturday.

“I regard it as a return to where my artistic journey began and
I am honored to show my work to the Chinese people,” she said.

(China Daily March 27, 2007)

Chinese artist Pei Jing’s oil painting
featuring both lead actor Chow Yun-fat and actress Siqin Gaowa in
the movie The Postmodern Life of My Aunt displayed on
Thursday, March 1, 2007.

Twelve oil paintings depicting the Chinese movie The
Postmodern Life of My Aunt are unveiled on Thursday in
Beijing.

These works are created by 12 renowned Chinese contemporary
artists, including Liu Dahong, Huang Qihou, Pei Jing, Wu Yiming and
Gao Bo.

The official released poster of the movie is inspired by two of
the oil paintings.

Directed by Ann Hui from Hong Kong, the movie The Postmodern
Life of My Aunt has a star-studded lineup, including veteran
Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat and Chinese actresses Siqin Gaowa and
Zhao Wei. It will open in cinemas across the nation on March 6.

According to Variety’s film review, the movie, which is based on
a popular novel, turns its affectionate gaze on a woman of humble
origins from the provinces struggling to carve out a dignified life
in the unaccommodating urban tangle of Shanghai, where seemingly
everyone is focused on personal profit.

These paintings will be auctioned in Beijing or Shanghai after
the movie opens in China later this month. It is said that Chow
Yun-fat himself will purchase some of them.

(CRIENGLISH.com March 2, 2007)

The Forbidden City, once off-limits to ordinary
citizens and foreigners, will host a British history exhibition
starting Friday.

The exhibition, named “Britain Meets the World 1714-1830,” will
be held at the Palace Museum in Beijing from March 9 to June
10.

The exhibition will explore Britain’s engagement with the world
during the Georgian period when the nation was emerging as an
international power.

The three-month exhibition will showcase 111 artifacts from the
British Museum, including paintings by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and
Raphael, many of which have never been exhibited outside of the
British islands.

The Palace Museum will also display 13 of its own collections
during the exhibition.

It is the first time the Palace Museum and the British Museum
have co-curated an exhibition.

The Forbidden City, which became a museum in 1925, houses a
collection of over 1.5 million artifacts, mainly from the ancient
imperial court.

The labyrinthine complex, home to 24 emperors, their families
and courtesans, and reputed to have 9,999 rooms, is one of China’s
best known icons and most popular tourist attractions. It is
visited by 7 to 8 million tourists every year.

UNESCO listed the Forbidden City as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1987.

(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2007)

Guo Yun at his Tokyo
apartment.

In 1914, the poet Guo Moruo (1892-1978) arrived in Japan a
refugee of sorts. Five days after being forced by his parents to
wed a woman whose looks left much to be desired, Guo Moruo, then
just 20 years old, fled his native Sichuan Province.

He eventually made his way to Kyushu University where while
studying medicine and later Spinoza, Goethe and Walt Whitman he
fell in love with a Japanese woman. Together, they would raise five
children, and Guo Moruo would not see his hometown or his parents
for 26 years.

In 1981, nearly 70 years later, Guo Yun, Guo Moruo’s
Shanghai-born grandson, would repeat the journey, study at a
Japanese university, and fall in love.

Although in the interview at his Tokyo apartment, Guo Yun
insisted that he did not “come back to Japan” rather he “went to
Japan”, the voyage was in many ways as much a homecoming as it was
an arrival in an alien land.

A stranger in mother’s land

Guo Yun’s longing for home
is most evident in his photography as in the picture taken during
his 1,300-mile journey across northern China. 

Guo Yun came to Japan almost by accident. One day, a Japanese
friend of his father’s offered Guo Yun an opportunity to attend
university without taking an entrance exam. Not the most stellar
student, Guo Yun jumped at the chance. And besides, Shanghai in the
late 1970s and early 1980s was hardly an ideal place for a young
man with a Japanese background to find his place in the world.

Japan could have been considered home. Guo Yun’s mother is,
after all, Japanese and his half Japanese, half Chinese father grew
up in Japan. But Guo Yun was born in Shanghai in 1956, just two
years before the Great Leap Forward, and came of age during the
“cultural revolution” (1966-76) history that has profoundly shaped
modern China. Despite his ancestry and fluent Japanese, he has
never felt completely welcome in Japan.

After spending 25 years working in Tokyo as a photographer for
the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Guo Yun longs for what he
considers his real home.

“Once you are a part of this culture, although people have
absolutely no ill intentions, you still sense very strongly and
unexpectedly a certain loneliness.”

“My parents, even now, still don’t speak very good Chinese. In
Shanghai, when I go out with my father, many people won’t be able
to understand him. But they won’t think he’s a foreigner. They’ll
think he’s from some faraway province,” Guo Yun said.

“Japan isn’t the same. All you need is a slightly different
accent and they’ll say ‘A foreigner? You’re a foreigner.’”

Feeling different has made Guo’s years in Japan lonely ones. Guo
Yun explained that in Japan, to use a Chinese expression, “Talk
between gentleman is as light as water.”

“Friendship isn’t just about talking to waste time. I challenge
you, you challenge me,” he said. “On the whole, Japanese people do
not like to debate with you until everyone’s red in the face. That
would be considered almost shameful.”

“I have a friend of mine who, like me, is interested in
philosophy. I once discussed the works of Miki Kiyoshi and Hegel.
He is Japanese, I am Chinese. Our countries have a similar history,
but they also have a history rife with conflict. Because of
differences in our points of view, it becomes impossible to
continue the discussion.”

So, then, it’s easier with Chinese people?

“Of course, it’s easier with Chinese people. Japanese people are
always” Guo Yun suddenly stood up from his chair and kotowed
profusely six times in apologetic Japanese “but in Beijing it’s
always..” Guo Yun sits down, leans back in chair, brings one hand
to his mouth, as though drinking a beer, uses the other to give a
friendly pat on the back to an imaginary buddy. “So in this
respect, then yes, eating dinner in Shanghai with Chinese friends
is much more relaxed.”

What Guo Yun misses most a sense of community he’s known only in
Shanghai. He frequently returns to visit his aging parents who live
in an apartment as old as they are and in constant need of
repair.

“Today the water stops running, tomorrow the power goes out, the
day after that it’s something else. What do I do if the water isn’t
working? I call some friends and they’re over in an instant. In
China, everyone needs to care for each other and help each other
out.”

Chinese people are also just be more fun. “The Japanese are a
melancholy people. The weather outside can be beautiful, but they
are still in a bad state of mind.”

“Aren’t you talking about yourself?” said Nana Endo, his wife,
laughing.

“Maybe a little bit!”

Guo’s wife is an advertising executive from a similarly
cosmopolitan family. Half Taiwanese, half Japanese, Nana grew up in
Beijing. Her parents met while her father was studying abroad in
Japan.

Nana is a tempering influence on her husband’s headstrong
personality, challenging him, coaxing him, and reminding him not to
take himself so seriously.

Nationalisms

At a certain point in our conversation, we got to talking about
history. Like his grandfather, Guo Yun is suspicious of convention
and harbors a feeling of never fully belonging to the world into
which he was born.

I wondered if his background gave him a unique perspective on
China and Japan’s sometimes challenging relationship.

A lot of Chinese people, he explained, have negative or
prejudiced opinions of Japan that are based on ignorance, “but I
have been here for 25 years. I understand Japan. But in my 25 years
of living here, my view has not changed. If there is a conflict
between China and Japan, Japan is 100 percent in the wrong.”

But of course, it’s not really so black and white. Guo Yun, for
all his criticisms of Japan, is never bitter. His words are heavy
with regret and disappointment.

“Maybe my mind is not open enough. When I first came to Japan, I
had absolutely no preconceptions or prejudices. My mother is
Japanese. When I was young, I would look at my mother and think of
my own roots. Sometimes I would even cry by myself, thinking of
it.”

“I came to Japan in a very positive state of mind. Now I have
become a little cynical. Everyone needs to have something to
believe in a philosophy.”

Photographs that dream of home

Guo Yun’s longing for home is nowhere more evident than in his
photography. He finds little to inspire him in Japan, which for him
offers only drab shades of gray. But China? China he sees in
brilliant, living color.

Taken during a 1,300-mile walk across northern China, his
photographs rural landscapes of farmers spread against sprawling
canvases of green rice paddies and amber wheat fields are lyrical
in their simplicity. Arrestingly beautiful, they suggest nostalgia
for a life that for Guo Yun is quickly receding into memory.

The artist had a somewhat different take on his work.

“There was an article in a science magazine about an Orangutan.
This Orangutan was holding a camera and was clicking the shutter. I
thought, Oh wow! Even an Orangutan can take pictures.”

I insist his photos are quite amazing.

“Really?” he said coyly, his eyes betraying the fatherly pride
artists feel only toward their favorite work.

Whatever their similarities, Guo Yun has inherited none of Guo
Moruo’s wild ambition.

I asked Guo Yun what it was like growing up with a grandfather
who was the first president of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, a celebrated poet, an author, a historian and a
playwright

“Back in Shanghai, some people were overly nice to me because of
my grandfather. Others were mean. Perhaps they were jealous. But I
knew that their treatment had nothing to do with me, but with my
grandfather.”

“I think if I had stayed in China, I probably would have grown
up arrogant. In Japan, I am just another Chinese man.”

Guo will always be, first and foremost, a Chinese man.

“Maybe if I were to relax a little bit, I could also consider
Japan my country. But I am still a Chinese citizen. When it comes
down to it, this still isn’t really my country.”

At dinner, Guo admonished me not to take anything he said during
the interview too seriously.

“I’m also a little bit, how shall I say it? A little bit…”

“To put it a nice way, you’re ‘principled’,” Nana offered,
laughing. In plain speak?”You’re stubborn.”

I ask Guo and Nana what language they use to speak to each
other.

“Half the time we speak in Japanese,” Yun replied. “The other
half”

Nana interrupted: “We fight in Chinese. We make up in
Japanese.”

(China Daily March 1, 2007)