The Search for the One Who Knows Everyone
Historical China Category
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.
Propagating the Mandate
King Wen’s Example
Inspired by the stories of the founding of China in the Zhou Dynasty, the people of peaceful dynasties set themselves to the serious work of imitating King Wen’s lifestyle in the minutest detail. Zhou Wen’s reproductive prowess was legendary, fathering 100 sons in his long lifetime. Even after the Chinese forgot to worship Wen as an emperor, they continued to venerate him as the “God of Sons” or “Bed God”. The Chinese were inspired by the idea of the “Round Family” that Wen presented in the Book of Changes, and aspired through his lifestyle and theory of life to the ideal of the “Big House” and the “Full Gate”, where the maxim “the more the merrier” was literally the only rule.
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.
From “Zhong” to “Hua” and Back
Square Within and Round Without
The Chinese have historically obsessed over being the center of the universe. This “totem of centrality” started in the Zhou dynasty, and is still important to the Chinese, much like the American concept of “freedom”. It eventually became the axis for all social and philosophical justification (The Chinese believed that man’s basic nature was a search for balance, rather than a search for liberation; a search for a central axis). The character for “Center” represented the importance of centrality and timeliness in an agrarian society, and the first sage king, Zhou Wen, was believed to have established the moral as well as calendrical mean in the setting up of a giant sundial pole in the center of his kingdom. The metaphor for centrality in a natural lifecycle eventually became the philosophical concept of “Zhong Yong” (中庸) or “The Way of Moderation”. This is misunderstood by the West as a way of non-religious morality, or situational ethics, in which all things are equal and empowered with the ability to create imbalances (which are thought of by humans as evil because of their negative repercussions). But this Chinese concept is different to the Platonic situation of a virtue between to vices of extreme; instead this standard is always thought to be flowing, moving, escaping definition through any means other than intuition. In reality, this is a commitment to the due course of nature, and not doing what is unnatural in order to insure survival and the blessing of life.
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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