The Search for the One Who Knows Everyone
Media Category
Rediscovering a Forgotten Beauty
Appreciation of Chinese Traditional Music from a Western Perspective
In these days of increasing communication between our two perspectives, and the enormous social implications of these exchanges, music has become the most important ambassador between our cultures. Music holds the keys to the most effective cultural exchange and mutual understanding, since it truly is the universal language. It can help us to overcome our bias and dislike for one another, and replace them with feelings of beauty and appreciation readily available through the experience of listening. Understanding music’s functions within both cultures, its background philosophy, its theory, and its meaning as a representative outside of its native culture, has become an essential area of cross-cultural study for musicians and language learners on both sides of the Pacific.
Return to the Peach Blossom Spring
Jin stared at the motorcycle blankly, trying to think about what he was going to do… he needed to change the snapped drive chain, but he also didn’t want to touch the stupid machine. As he pretended to look at the parts, his mind wandered. He had heard that his friends who went to the city to get construction jobs were paid in a month what he was able to make in a year in the country. His mother needed medicine, coming home from her job in a factory when she couldn’t work the long hours that were required of her, but they were desperately short of cash. He wanted to see the world, too, to get out of this little farming hole and see how people lived, like in the Korean series where everyone wore white pants and colorful sweaters, drove nice cars, and lived in sparkling apartments. Visions of a misty, big-city skyline haunted his dreams and made it hard to focus on work at home, scraping a living out of the yellow earth, feeding the pigs, or working for his uncle in the tiny machine shop. As he eased into work, he set his cell-phone on an old tire, and pop music blared from its tiny speakers, helping him to loose his thoughts in a pink-haze of love lyrics sung in a monotone Taiwanese accent.
He was glad he had his phone. Since he didn’t have a girlfriend and had been left behind by all the older kids, who worked in coastal towns, his cell-phone was his only joy, his only connection… it was his life.
The Collapse of the Village Ethic
The cultural paradigm of a villager exists in every culture, creating a kind of universal archetype that fuels California shopping malls with courtyards and fortune five companies with “mixing areas for the open exchange of ideas”. Man does not like to be alone, and his best work is often accomplished communally. This does not begin to explain, however, the Chinese idea of the “Community Conscience”, which is so vital to the understanding of the concept of face, and is a phenomenon unique to the Chinese cultural evolution.
Shades of Gray
A Contrastive Look into the Meaning of North Korean Paintings
A few years ago, I remember looking on in anticipation as a batch of paintings from several North Korean “National Treasures” artists, slowly slid from their protective coverings to form a small pyramid of scrolls on a white sheet spread out on my apartment floor. My best friend from college, Mike, art dealer and media producer in China, brought them back to the US, partly as a gesture of good will and partly to show the American art community the unexpected serendipity of having a North Korean communicate over the gulf of ideology and politics that separates our two nations through the flimsy elements of water, soot, and rice paper. I don’t know what I was expecting, but as scroll after scroll was unfurled before me, the swirls of color and bold brush strokes seemed to catch me off balance and lodge in my mind’s eye in a profoundly simple expression of joy. A kind of joy unexpected from a land associated in the media with terror, famine, and deprivation. I had not expected to be moved by art from the most narrowly defined ideological genres in existence… instead I was overwhelmed.
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