Greetings from Asia - 22 January 2011

A Brief Note on Western Painting by Chinese Hands

Since the focus of this blog is cross-cultural issues, I thought that readers might be interested in this issue from the perspective of the visual arts...

I used to dislike Western painting that was done by Chinese artists. The works bothered me because they seemed fake somehow, being in my mind both an abandonment of thousands of years of perfectly good Chinese painting, and an attempt at Western styles, but without Western emotion. But over the years, I’ve found painters whose work has changed my mind.

The term “Chinese painting” covers a broad range of styles and themes, but here I refer to what might be most familiar to readers: the vast watercolor-and-ink landscapes typical of the Song and Yuan Dynasty period (A. D. 960 -1368) and the traditional paintings of nature in the latter history of imperial China (A.D. 1368 - 1895). Typical paintings of these periods include “A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks” by Li Cheng (李成) (919 - 967) and “Mountain on the Other Side of the River”, 1703 by the Qing Dynasty Chinese painter Shitao (石濤) (1641 - 1707). As for “Western painting”, in this case, I mean scenes of people and places that that are found in nineteenth and early twentieth century art, particularly among the Romantic painters and the Impressionists. Many Chinese have studied these styles (as well as Cubism and other movements), and have become adept at them, but I think only a few have done anything really interesting in Western-style painting.

A colleague of mine, Prof. Tsai Minghsun (蔡明勳), is a Taiwanese painter who studied Western-style oil painting in the U.S., at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. He is a good painter, and likes to do scenes of Taiwanese life from the old days. I asked Tsai why he chooses to paint in the Western style, and he told me that Western painting allows him to engage in themes that Chinese art doesn’t normally investigate in any depth — the emotions of childhood: joy, nostalgia, loneliness and longing...

Many of his paintings portray puppets and other toys, objects not unknown to traditional Chinese painting, but not at the scale or in the mood that one finds in Tsai’s work.

Tsai studied in the U.S., but in the old days, to study Western art one went — oddly, perhaps — to Japan. Japan, of course, had opened up to the West in terms of industrialization and modernization at least a century before Chinese culture did. Japanese artists had studied Impression, Cubism, and other trends in European art almost as soon as those trends came on the scene. Taiwan was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945, and many young Taiwanese men studied in Japan during this period — indeed, Japan was their primary access to the outside world. One famous Taiwanese painter, Li Meishu (李梅樹) (1902 - 1983), studied Western painting, with a focus on Classicism and Romanticism, at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1934. He particularly enjoyed rendering realist paintings of the Taiwan landscapes, although he was also very skilled in portraiture. Li worked to adapt Western romantic notions in the portrayal of a traditional way of life in Taiwan that he knew to be rapidly disappearing. He was interested in and skilled at Western theories of perspective — something certainly rare in traditional Chinese painting — and the figures in his paintings seem to “reach out” to the viewer.

The reasons that Chinese painting itself never underwent the radical transformation that Western art did — Cubism, Impression, Fauvism, and subsequent modern and post-modern trends — must be the subject of a separate discussion. In addition, there are complex reasons that artists in both Mainland China and Taiwan felt a need to look to overseas techniques and styles in the first place.

Obviously, the embracing of something from a foreign culture entails a rejection of something in one’s own culture. It is the rare artist who can somehow embrace both, and I was intrigued when I stumbled upon the work of the artist Ma Paisui (馬白水) (1909 - 2003). Ma was born in Mainland China and worked for many years as an art teacher. Although his studies were in China, and his later adult years were spent in Taiwan, he beautifully combined traditional Chinese styles with Western techniques and themes.

This is not easy feat — the results can often seem awkward or tacky. Ma spent some time in Europe and the U.S., and did a series of beautiful paintings of New York City and its environs, rendering the modern Western landscape and its tropes (for example, suspension bridges and skyscrapers) with Chinese traditional brush called a mao bi (毛筆) and gouache colors. The results are splendid, with vivid colors and bold line-work. Even his painting of the Guggenheim Museum, although at first glance seeming to be completely Western in style, subtly employs Chinese ink to create profound contrasts of light and dark not normally encountered in Western watercolor work.

Ma’s work has an almost transcendent quality, reminiscent of the later work of the Canadian “Group of Seven” artist Lawren Harris.

The artist’s role is to transcend culture, and even time and place (Harris was a Theosophist), to reach some abstract truth or vision of the world. Indeed, as different as Chinese and Western cultures can be, this role of the artist often appears in both places. Why is an artist like Ma Paisui so important? In part, it’s because he breaks a very common stereotype — that Asians are good imitators but not good originators. We’ve heard it said that the Curtis Institute of Music is filled with Asians who play beautifully but with no feeling. I’ve also heard it said that Chinese people can crank out Western landscapes but with an equal lack of passion. In Ma’s case, though, we see an artist who truly has taken something Western and made it his own. This is important because in an age of globalization, there is a great risk at homogenization, with everyone becoming superficially “Western”. Ma shows that a painter can bring his own cultural tools to bear, and create a true — and original — synthesis.

At the same time, artists like Tsai have consciously embraced Western styles as the Chinese themselves have become increasingly subject to Western emotions — or more exactly, the emotional states, such as anomie, that have been brought on by the Chinese people’s rush into modernity.


Li Cheng (李成)
“A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks” (晴峦萧寺)
ink and slight color on silk
Northern Song Dynasty (A.D. 960 - 1127)
111.76 x 55.88 cm


Shi Tao (石濤)
“Mountain on the Other Side of the River”
ink and slight color on paper
1703
57.79 x 35.56 cm


Tsai Minghsun (蔡明勳)
“Flying” (飛揚)
oil on canvas
2002
103 x 139 cm


Li Meishu (李梅樹)
“Washing Clothes by the Clear Stream” (清溪浣衣)
oil on canvas
1981
116.5 x 80 cm


Li Meishu (李梅樹)
“Dressing” (梳妝)
oil on canvas
1971
116.5 x 91 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Yehliu” (野柳)
ink and color on paper
1972
66 x 33 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Hudson River in Autumn” (哈河之秋)
ink and color on paper
1975
51 × 61.5 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Central Park, New York” (紐約中央公園)
ink and color on paper
1981
38.1 × 50.8 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Red Maple Leaves near George Washington Bridge” (紐約GW橋楓葉紅美)
watercolor on paper
1984
45.5 × 61 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
ink and color on paper
“Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.” (古根漢美術館(紐約))
1974
40 x 50 cm

Greetings from Asia - 26 December 2010

Some More Thoughts on Asian Success...

As noted in our last comments here, we are currently writing about the so-called "Asian success story". Again, we are posting these thoughts in several parts, linking to an article we wrote for the online publication Broad Street Review. This article provides another personal perspective on "Asian success", with a particular focus on China:

"How Chinese is China’s Success Story?: China vs. the West: Who has Conquered Whom?", Broad Street Review (25 December 2010)

Enjoy!

Greetings from Asia - 23 December 2010

Some Thoughts on Asian Success...

Well, while Europe and North America are having a nice cold winter holiday, here in semi-tropical Taiwan, the sun is shining and Santa could go out in no more than a red hat if he wanted to...

Our current entry concerns the so-called "Asian success story". We are posting these thoughts in several parts, and due to copyright agreements, our first entry on this subject is a link to an article we wrote some weeks ago on a few aspects of the strong economy in Taiwan. Taiwan, where this author is currently posted, has weathered the recent economic crisis relatively well. The following article provides some a personal perspective:

"Economic Lessons from the Far East: I Have Seen the Future, and It’s in the Far East", Broad Street Review (4 November 2010)

Stay tuned for more...

Greetings from Asia - 23 November 2010

Tutto il mondo è un cheesesteak / 世界很小

There’s been no entry here in this blog for about a month, and the reader has my apologies. Too much going on: life never stops in Asia. Well, it was that, and then weeks of depressing rain. There is a fall and a spring rainy season here, and both are irritating. Yes, they do, however, lead to wonderful semi-tropical foliage, so one shouldn’t complain. Also, unlike in our dear old U.S.A., there is no Thanksgiving break, nor even Halloween (although they do celebrate the latter here a bit in the local schools, just for fun). Otherwise, it’s work, work, work...

Since it’s been rather dreary here, and we don’t feel like writing about existentialism or other philosophical topics, we shall turn to lighter subjects... Well, not really that much lighter, since we are going to talk about cheesesteaks.

Cheesesteaks in Taiwan? No way!

But yes.

It was all very odd. A fellow teacher here, from Michigan, had his father visiting. We were heading into Taipei for a day of sightseeing, and as we were sitting there on the bus, the gentleman was talking to me, and heard that I was from Philadelphia. “Hey,” he said, “Isn’t that where they have all those cheesesteak places?” “Yup,” I answered, and I began to explain to him the subtle rivalries and differences between the various cheesesteak places in Philadelphia — Pat’s Gino’s, Jim’s, and so on. All this talk was making me hungry, but before you knew, they we were in Taipei. No cheesesteaks, just noodles and tofu.

We split up, with me heading through the west side of the city to do some errands. But having gotten off the bus, I hadn’t gone more than four blocks, when there it was, as if posited by some Jungian synchronicity, from my consciousness to hard-and-fast culinary reality: a cheesesteak place...











The people working there, though all Taiwanese, wore that same vivid, horrid orange that is the color of one of those cheesesteak places in Philly. It was as if a piece of South Philadelphia had been ripped out and transplanted — through a strange Asian inversion — into Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Inside, there was even a mural of the city of Philadelphia, complete with the Ben Franklin Bridge, Liberty Place, and that awful building next to 30th Street Station.

I went in and tried the cheesesteaks. And you know what? They were pretty good... In fact, they were less greasy than most of the cheesesteaks in Philly, and the french fries were not bad either.

So, what about the title of this entry, “Tutto il mondo è un cheesesteak / 世界很小”? Well, the first part is a riff on the Italian expression, “tutto il mondo è un paese” — that is, “the whole world is one country”. It’s their way of saying, “It’s a small world”, or as we say in Chinese, “/ 世界很小”. Indeed, it’s a very small world, if I can talk about Philly cheesesteaks miles away from Philly, and then somehow they magically appear...

Greetings from Asia - 15 October 2010

High-Speed Bullshit
Even far away here in the “mysterious East”, I find myself missing Philadelphia. I am one of those expatriates who, believe it or not, does indeed admire the country I was born in, even though I find myself consistently disappointed in the direction it has decided to head. Former President Jimmy Carter correctly called it a “crisis of confidence” in a famous speech he gave during his presidency.

Particularly when one is overseas, it is easy to spot the foibles, if not out-and-out absurdities of one’s own country. At this point in U.S. history, it has become outright embarrassing at times. Without even trying, one finds such news reports as this:



A close examination of the piece reveals how stupid this issue is in the U.S. Indeed, even reader comments on the piece were quick to point this out:



And yes, from an overseas perspective, it’s easy to see how crazy the ideas presented in the article are. In France, Germany, Japan... hell, even in Taiwan, there is high-speed rail. Real high-speed rail, not the ridiculous “Acela” nor the “somewhere in the distant future” high-speed trains that may — may — be built some time in the coming decades. What is ridiculous, too, is that people in the U.S. are subjected to this strange kind of propaganda that somehow, someday, we are going to have what is considered “normal” in other countries. If you want to see real rail systems, take a look:

The European TVG: http://www.raileurope.co.uk/tgv.aspx
The Japanese Shinkansen: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/about/index.html
The Taiwanese HSR: http://www.thsrc.com.tw/en

Now, I’ve heard one of the key counter-arguments: that countries like France, Germany, Japan, and so on can afford these systems because we bear so much of the burden of military defense. But if we wanted to, we could also have afforded to build a proper rail system decades ago — indeed, we had a good rail system — but we decided to let it go to ruin. And all the pronouncements in the world will never bring it back.

Greetings from Asia - 4 October 2010

The subject of safety is a complicated one here in Taiwan... On the one hand, this is one of the most dangerous places you could imagine... that is, in terms of traffic. Drivers here are, for the most part, impatient and reckless. This is odd in that it runs counter to the generally low-key attitude of the people here. But there are cultural reasons why the driving here and in places like Cairo, and so on is like this, and I can provide that explanation if readers are interested.

In Taiwan, although the driving habits present significant danger, this is one of the safest places in the world, with very little street crime. It is a particularly safe place in terms of the kind of crime one finds in the U.S.: gun crime. It disturbs me that in the U.S., we have become inured almost to the point of ignorance about how unusual our situation is in terms of shootings and violent crime. In Philadelphia, there is some kind of gun crime virtually every single day of the year. When you live in a place like Taiwan, you suddenly see how aberrant this is. My favorite such story is how, a few weeks ago, after I had dropped our child at preschool, I came home and saw this news report from my hometown:

One could not even imagine such an incident here. But even back in Philadelphia, for the most part we don't even really care — after all, the shooting wasn't in OUR neighborhood...

People in the U.S. have questioned my critique of the violence in the U.S., noting that place like Brazil have much higher crime rates. But this misses the point in several respects; for one, another country having a higher crime rate does not somehow "forgive" us for being so prone to violence in our country. But more profoundly, it is interesting to look at the nature of crime and violence in a place like Brazil versus a place like the U.S. In Brazil, much of the violence can be directly tied to enormous class tensions in the society. There is violent crime connected to the drug trade (as in the U.S.), but also propensities to violence from an underclass which is clearly marginalized in the society. By contrast, in the U.S., although one could argue that the same dynamic exists, one also finds very bizarre crimes, violence that seems to spring from nowhere, or from some kind of "mass psychosis". As violent as Brazil is, one does not find so often what one finds more and more frequently in the U.S.: reports of shootings on university campuses, shootings in the workplace, and so on.

Finally, it should be noted that all societies have to reckon with violence, but it is worth comparing where the violence springs from in each culture. Resorting to violence because of social class or political frustration may be repugnant, but at least it fits in the framework of human nature. Shootings in the workplace in the U.S. may fit into that category, but the figures involved are usually quickly marginalized as unrepresentative of anything but a personality disorder.

Greetings from Asia - 26 September 2010

More cultural observations... For readers who don't know: I have lived in Taiwan before, from 1993 to 1996. The place has changed a lot, but much has stayed the same, particularly the peculiarities and peccadilloes of the place. In terms of what — to an American — is peculiar, one place to start is the schooling here. On a previous visit here with a friend of mine, he was shocked to see some elementary school students cleaning the school. In fact, in Taiwan and Japan, there are no school janitors; the children clean their own school. Even here at the university, the other day I noticed a team of students who were repainting the main gate. Students are asked to do this not as a form of free labor for the school but because the students are imbued with a feeling that the school belongs to them.

I noticed another peculiarity the other day when we enrolled our daughter in a local preschool. On one of the forms we had to fill out, my wife pointed out that the school gave families three options for their children to return home at the end of the school day: (a) the school bus; (b) parents coming to pick up their children; (c) relatives coming to pick up their children; or (d) children returning home by themselves. That's right: kindergarten-age children can walk home themselves here. That certainly tells you something about the state of the society here...

In terms of peccadilloes in Taiwan, I'll leave the reader with a simple one: "Copyright 個屁!" I won't translate that at the moment, but it basically means that for all the tortuous negotiating the U.S. has done with other countries, one can still find copyright violations all over. It's not as egregious in Taiwan as it used to be, but one still finds (sometimes humorous) examples. Not far from where we live, I found this great place that serves quite delicious fried chicken:


The place is called "KLG"... Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Looks kind of familiar, too... But let's take a look at their packing:


Totally original? No. Good fried chicken? You bet...

If some of you are still uncertain about where this cool KLG restaurant might have found its "inspiration", we can provide a quick comparison:





















Check out how much the KLG chicken looks like the good old KFC colonel; they even have the same bow tie!