Author: davesgonechina

Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy and Square Word Calligraphy Classroom. Britta Erickson: “Square Word Calligraphy is a new kind of writing, almost a code, designed by Xu Bing. At first glance it appears to be Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read it but cannot. Western viewers, however, are surprised to find that they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.”



A Book From the Sky by Xu Bing (徐冰), 1987-1991. “An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ”false” Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.”

United Nations – China Monument: Temple of Heaven, 1998, by Gu Wenda (谷文达). “a site-specific installation commissioned by the asia society for “inside out“, PS1 contemporary art center, new york city, usa, 1998 . an entirely human hair made temple of pseudo-chinese, english, hindi, arabic and synthesized english-chinese, chinese ming dynasty’s furniture tv monitors, a video film heaven.”

DD, Confucius (2005) and O, Lao Tzu (2004) by Roman Verostko, from the Pearl Park Scriptures. Sections of the Legge translations of The Analects and the Tao Te Ching. “Each work presents a colorful drawing accompanied with lines of glyphs that read from left to right. An “alphabet” of glyphs was generated for each text in this exhibition.” The texts are converted into algorithms and a computer guided pen plotter draws the image and glyphs.

Tsang Tsou-Chio (曾灶财) died last July. He spread calligraphy graffiti across Hong Kong, and was dubbed the “King of Kowloon”.

A grubby man who looked like a tramp and who many thought barking mad, Tsang spent five decades roaming the metropolis — often shirtless and on crutches — scrawling his idiosyncratic calligraphy on lamp-posts, walls, phone boxes, pedestrian underpasses and electrical boxes.

“To some extent he’s quite cuckoo,” said leading Hong Kong fashion designer William Tang, a longtime admirer of Tsang who used the graffiti as a motif for several clothing ranges.

“I started to look at the calligraphy carefully and found it’s not just a joke. It has some kind of power, which is very raw, very original,” Tang added

Some say Tsang’s Chinese-style calligraphy, peppered with obscenities and abuse toward Britain’s Queen Elizabeth — is naive and an eyesore. But its quintessential Hong Kong symbolism has inspired other artists, including local film-maker Fruit Chan, and has drawn international acclaim.

Tsang was often at odds with police, and most of his city work has been erased. But by 2003 he was at the Venice Biennale.

Laura Ling’s profile and work at Current TV.

The Financial Times reports on a Chinese executive skipping bail and returning to his home in Hunan province:

The City of Westminster magistrates’ court said it had issued a warrant for the arrest of Yuan Hongwei, chairman of Chinese glue-maker MagPow Adhesive Industries, and seized his £100,000 ($196,000, €133,000) bail after he failed to appear for his extradition hearing.

MagPow (also known as Hunan Magic in a different translation of 湖南神力公司) has been fighting an international legal battle with American ABRO Industries for a few years now. MagPow has allegedly been selling counterfeit ABRO products, down to identical packaging and design, in various countries. According to the Wall Street Journal in 2004:

The Chinese company, based in the city of Liuyang in Hunan province, now advertises and ships around the world more than 40 “Abro” products, from super glue to silicon sealant, in exact replicas of Abro’s packaging. Hunan Magic’s owner, Yuan Hongwei, has Abro’s logo on his business card. He touts his firm as the real Abro, and warns customers away from impostors.

Abro Industries, with just 24 employees and no U.S. sales, has shown more mettle than many other U.S. companies that have railed about piracy in China. It has hired dozens of lawyers and investigators, sued Hunan Magic, and gotten raids conducted in the United Arab Emirates and other countries, at a cost to Abro so far this year of more than $600,000, Mr. Baranay says. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office has been championing Abro’s cause in Beijing. Yet its Chinese nemesis keeps on selling Abro products.

In October 2003, Mr. Maranais flew to China to poke around the Canton Trade Fair. “So I walk up to Hunan Magic’s booth and my eyes bug out,” he recalls. There was a huge sign overhead that said “Abro,” and stacks of catalogs filled with Abro products. Dozens of buyers crowded around, “including many of my own customers,” he says.

Mr. Maranais complained to the fair’s trademark police. A group of local officials, several in uniform, charged up to Hunan Magic’s booth, led by Mr. Maranais. “I went right up and said, ‘The party’s over — meet Mr. Abro,’ ” he says.

Undaunted, a Hunan Magic salesman produced a catalog displaying Abro products he said the company had a right to sell. One was an epoxy whose packaging for years had featured a photo of Mr. Maranais’s wife fixing a bicycle. Hunan Magic’s version was identical. “There I was staring at my wife’s face,” Mr. Maranais says. “And this guy claimed to own her.”

In the following couple of years, though, ABRO felt it was well treated in China. In February of 2007, Mr. Baranay testified:

ABRO has received fair hearings in China at the Trademark Office, and on the Federal level we are prevailing in China. We have conducted a series of raids against Hunan Magic’s manufacturing operations, during which ABRO’s counterfeit products were seized. We aggressively pursued Hunan Magic within China’s legal system, and the case was ultimately decided in our favor in December of 2006 with damages of $64,000 awarded to ABRO, a small fraction, of course, but a start.

Again, at the Federal level, ABRO registered the ABRO mark with Chinese customs, and a significant number of export containers from Hunan Magic and others have been seized, with the goods ultimately destroyed and fines levied against the exporters and Hunan Magic. We have been extremely satisfied with the cooperation we received from Chinese customs.

Regrettably, business is ultimately local in nature, and Hunan Magic operates openly within Hunan Province as they employ individuals and pay taxes.

In China, most people know the words to that song: “but local officials arrest people in other places/openly beat people/otherwise defy the law and behave like petty warlords”. Seems like ABRO might find Chinese courtrooms a bit chillier after this, though.

But this case gets kinda weird. First off, the nature of Yuan’s arrest makes me want to consult a lawyer on exactly what constitutes entrapment:

CARPENTER: “From what I gather, the majority of the stuff he was selling overseas was sold on the overseas market and through undercover methods we were able to get him to ship stuff here to us, trying to expand his market to come into the United States and not just being in the European market or other places around the world.”

RODGERS: “So in effect you conducted a sting?”

CARPENTER: “Yes, sir, basically so. That’s pretty much what it was. It was something to get him to send his product over here, because he was trying to get into the U.S. market.”

Carpenter said the case was referred to the U.S. Justice Department to seek Yuan’s extradition. He said when U.S. federal authorities learned Yuan was traveling to London, they asked British authorities to arrest him.

OK, maybe that’s an above the board move. I’m no lawyer. But consider this:

Brad Huther, who handles intellectual property issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says extraditing Yuan would be significant. “The fact that you can manufacture, export and distribute to countries everywhere, and now face the risk that you won’t be treated within your own system of law but rather in more advanced systems that really apply the rule of law, I think could very well have at least a near term, not a chilling, but certainly a dampening effect on counterfeiters’ bravado.”

Ooookay… just out of curiosity, what would happen if the roles were reversed? Let’s say Uzbek officials arrest a Chinese dissident with a foreign passport for extradition back to China based on a warrant issued in Kashgar? Oh wait, that’s been done. It seems to me that once you open the door to saying “we’re gonna arrest your guy in any country we can, cuz our legal system is more just than yours”, you’re asking for a fight. It’s also interesting in light of the World Customs Organizations recent announcement that they will press charges against any Olympic tourists returning to their home nations with counterfeit Olympics goods.

And then there’s the little tidbits the FT throws in, namely that “Although the court confiscated two passports from him, Chinese media quoted Mr Yuan as saying he had escaped from Britain using another passport. Yuan Suzhen, his sister and an executive at MagPow, told the FT the Chinese government was very helpful in getting him out of the country.”

FT says Yuan is being hailed as a hero in state media. I found an article headline that says he was “ensnared” by British authorities, but not much in the way of fanfare. Interestingly enough, in the open letter reputedly released by Yuan just days before his flight back to China, he argues that th
e British warrant was issued for a “Yaun Hongwei”. I wonder if FT asked about that.

Last week I made a mock Mitt Romney campaign poster substituting him for Mao. I did it mainly because Mitt’s statement that our most important civil liberty is to be kept alive, just the sort of justification one hears from autocratic nations, particularly in the whole “Asian Values” debate of the nineties. But as far as personality cults go, Romney ain’t got nuthin’ on Obama. Don’t get me wrong; I like Obama. But just look at this cover image from Salon.com, where Gary Kamiya writes of Obama’s Double Magic. My poster was meant as a joke, though to make a point. This is apparently in earnest. It’s doubly ironic, considering Spike Lee’s term for the healing nice black man, the “super-duper magical negro” (A term Rush Limbaugh then gleefully used for a song), and that such imagery is precisely the sort of thing we find so abhorrent and mindless about the propaganda of Kim Jong Il, Mao and others.

Wired brings us a new word: Solastalgia.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastalgia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'”

Solastalgia is brand new idea, and Albrecht seems to be the only pioneer at the moment. He’s applying it to climate change (he seems a bit of a crusader on his blog), but it makes alot of sense for China. After all, cities have been transformed “overnight”, as we so often hear. Gone are the one story homes and courtyards, replaced by skyscrapers. The skies have darkened with pollution. And a couple of decades before that started, all the birds and insects disappeared.

It would certainly explain this study finding one in five adults in Shenzhen have, albeit vaguely, “mental problems”. Shenzhen was a fishing village twenty years ago – now its nearly a megacity. This is often explained as being a result of Chinese culture, such as face saving, suppressing or not communicating emotions, the pressures of collective obligations, etc. But isn’t Beijing psychologist Tian Guoyan describing something like solastalgia when he says “The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and that leaves a lot of people totally confused”?

Via the omnipotent BoingBoing, a vicious indictment of NBC from a former Dateline producer:

Six Sigma–the methodology for the improvement of business processes that strives for 3.4 defects or fewer per million opportunities–was a somewhat mysterious symbol of management authority at every GE division. Six Sigma messages popped up on the screens of computers or in e-mail in-boxes every day. Six Sigma was out there, coming, unstoppable, like a comet or rural electrification. It was going to make everything better, and slowly it would claim employees in glazed-eyed conversions. Suddenly in the office down the hall a coworker would no longer laugh at the same old jokes. A grim smile suggested that he was on the lookout for snarky critics of the company. It was better to talk about the weather.

While Six Sigma’s goal-oriented blather and obsession with measuring everything was jarring, it was also weirdly familiar, inasmuch as it was strikingly reminiscent of my college Maoism I class. Mao seemed to be a good model for Jack Welch and his Six Sigma foot soldiers; Six Sigma’s “Champions” and “Black Belts” were Mao’s “Cadres” and “Squad Leaders.”

Finding such comparisons was how I kept from slipping into a coma during dozens of NBC employee training sessions where we were told not to march in political demonstrations of any kind, not to take gifts from anyone, and not to give gifts to anyone. At mandatory, hours-long “ethics training” meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver’s-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of “shareholder value.”

To me, the term “shareholder value” sounded like Mao’s “right path,” although this was not something I shared at the employee reëducation meetings. As funny as it seemed to me, the idea that GE was a multinational corporate front for Maoism was not a very widespread or popular view around NBC.

Well, Jack Welch was big on China’s bestseller lists a couple of years ago (and is no doubt widely available in major Chinese airports even today). So I daresay its reciprocal. Especially considering China also has dinosaur network news, mind-numbing indoctrination (I’d point out alot of Six Sigma advocates actually call it, without shame, “indoctrination”) and bitter and snarky journalists.

Finally, it’s worth noting that GE was totally cool with Alec Baldwin playing Jack Donaghy, Vice President of NBC’s East Coast Television and Microwave Programming, on 30 Rock, talking about management training and NBC television being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Company. Just as long as it didn’t show up on NBC Nightly News, though. That sort of talk belongs only in comedy.