The Search for the One Who Knows Everyone
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.
Chinese Attitudes on Work
A Buddhist priest once told me that there was two parts to any doctrine: belief and attitude. You could truly believe, and yet your false attitudes could undo all your grand beliefs. You could disbelieve, and yet your attitudes could reflect all the faithfulness and simplicity of a true believer, and in this way compensate for wrong belief, at least with the friends and family that surround you. I see this same truth in culture, as the beliefs of the Chinese have reached a crisis point, their attitudes are even more important, and yet the cultivation of positive attitudes has some how become less important and practical to what the Chinese call the “reality of consuming.” Many things that would otherwise be impossible have been accomplished through the shear force of will that a properly honed attitude releases in the world, and this becomes increasingly evident as attitudes of work mold society in ways exciting and strange. An interesting phenomenon that we see played out in the West just as it is constant in the East is that contemporary attitudes are based on the beliefs of the past, whether or not those beliefs are still a functional part of the culture.
The Leaping Carp Becomes a Dragon
An Omen of the Middle Kingdom’s Rise in Middle America
In the last few years, fishermen in the United States have started to notice that the old bluegill, sunfish, bass, and catfish of the Illinois, Mississippi and the Ohio rivers have been disappearing. In their place a new kind of fish is gobbling up resources, feeding on the other species, and reproducing at an astonishing rate. The problem has become so intense that officials are now afraid that the Great Lakes are doomed to fall in the onslaught. They call these ferocious invaders “Asian carp”. The Chinese call them “Li Yu” (鲤鱼), “Black” or “Silver” carp, and have cultivated these breeds for their amazing reproductive vitality and hardiness for thousands of years. Read the rest of this entry »
All the Tea in China
As I sat backstage discussing tea with two Chinese opera singers at the television studio yesterday, I thought about tea and its unique impact on Chinese culture and guanxi…
This is the season that all Chinese anticipate with rapture. The year’s best tea, in its “new” and “white” varieties, is coming out in the next few weeks, and the expectation has been a nagging thought in the minds of tea fanatics all over China. We have been looking forward to this moment since last year’s crop ran out in October, and cannot wait for the arrival of a new harvest of China’s finest beverage.
The reason for the excitement is because the best tea leaves are those harvested from the earliest spring growth. They must be picked by hand when only a day old, and then processed immediately the same day. Each tea plant will only give about five pickings of these delicate leaves, yet they yield the freshest and most fragrant tea known to man. Read the rest of this entry »
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