The Search for the One Who Knows Everyone
The Cult of Prosperity
A Goddess of Mercy becomes a Goddess of Fortune
I wandered into a Buddhist Temple in the famous water town Zhujiajiao in the Qingpu district of Shanghai municipality. People were charged admission to the main temple grounds, a fee of 10Y, but in the annex worshippers got a freebe. Before paying the fee, one could kneel on a padded bench before a glass-encased Laughing Buddha (Maitreya Buddha) covered in gold paint, with a mischievous-looking Haibao peeking around the corner of the case. The little blue mascot for the Shanghai World Expo and the golden Buddha are emblems of the same aspiration among the Chinese: conspicuous wealth and a global showcase of modernization.
Mahjong
The New Faith of the Chinese Elite
In the past, the peasants looked to the fate of the fortune-inscribed stick to communicate the will of Buddha; now, the Chinese businessman looks to another inscribed stick to divine the sacred will of the Party. It is the classic scene from the Joy Luck Club; white tiles, clicking and clacking together, as the women gossip about their families, cementing the bonds of a lifetime friendship that would tie the fates of generations together. This ritual has replaced the similar ritual that used to obsess the more religious generations of China – the fortune telling joss sticks and the mysterious predictions of the Book of Changes. No one believes in these superstitions anymore, but they certainly believe in the use and necessity of playing Mahjong with the leaders!
What the Chinese Want
What do the Chinese people want out of life? Many have tried to determine this, but no pattern has immediately appeared from the mass of contemporary literature or from the key phrases in the public forum that sufficiently defines the Chinese desire for a lifestyle direction in Chinese terms, apart from those without context, like “Modern” and “Contemporary”, which are derived more from China looking at other nations than looking at itself. The concept itself seems so abstract that many on the outside have been daunted by the possibility of finding it, but the tendency towards high abstraction is a characteristic of the Chinese people as a whole, and something to be admired rather than scorned. Like the figures in a painting, which suggest nature but retain their unnatural proportions, or like the meaning of a Chinese character, which is only a suggestion of a previous hieroglyph, so the abstractions of the Chinese dream cannot take form by compiling lists of contemporary manifestations. It is a compound idea that can only be grasped by those who can hold the qualities of Chinese philosophy on one hand, and balance the realities of an economically charged and internationalized China on the other. It is far subtler and more rewarding for those who find the silken strands of the Chinese cultural pact between man and nature pulled through two thousand years of literature, and tangled in the free-form bonsai trees of great philosophers’ thoughts, like strings that lead to the tales of shattered kites. When these strands are followed to the end, they lead to their source in an otherworldly paradise in an immortal’s peach garden.
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.
The Power of Poverty
A little-known jewel of Chinese wisdom that is opening doors to great opportunity
China has a historical tradition of great old sages. However, they generally weren’t characterized by the flowing silk robes and serene walled gardens that the Western mind imagines. Instead, art and history always depict them as wearing tattered rags and living in mountain caves, cold and poor. Lao Zi, Ji Gong, Zhuang Zi, and the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove are all models for this stereotype. They were men who “Saw the Tao,” and realized that because entropy was inherent in all things, poverty was the only “sustainable” lifestyle that could be proposed. In this philosophy, therefore, the building of palaces and the ruling of nations was pointless – unless one realized that they are pointless, at which point they become great fun! Read the rest of this entry »
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