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Milk
Art+Culture / Cinema
Written by : Han Mingjie
Dec 4, 2008
Tags :
Milk
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| After exploring
the experimental
film seas for half a
decade, director Gus
Van Sant returns to
mainstream waters with
Milk, a tenderly realized
and immensely pleasing
biopic of Harvey
Milk, the first openly
gay American politician
to be elected into public office (only to be assassinated
by another politico at the height of
his success in San Francisco in 1978).
Boasting a monumental performance by
Sean Penn as the inspirational gay activist, the
film is surprisingly conventional and melodramatic
considering its subject matter, but Van
Sant tells the tale with such vigor and vim that
Milk's specialized target audience (liberals,
the gay community, university students) could
easily be expanded, as Brokeback Mountain's
was, into a larger pool of moviegoers who enjoy
watching a good yarn well told. In a word, Milk
has "crossover" written all over it.Instead of the usual womb-to-the-tomb
treatment, screenwriter Dustin Lance Blac ... ... |
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Last Night I Dreamt Of China
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Dec 4, 2008
Tags :
Last Night I Dreamt Of China
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| Author: W. Somerset Maugham ★★★★
Following in the footsteps
of literary giants isn't always
easy. In the case of William
S o m e r s e t Maugham and
his 1919–1920 voyage to China,
it is almost impossible, as the
Englishman's On a Chinese Screen
contains none of the specifics usually
seen in travelogues. Instead it is made
up of 58 sketches: self-contained vignettes
which deftly outline whole
lives, locations and digressions on art
and travel in just a few sentences.
In some respects, On a Chinese
Screen seems remarkably progressive
for its time. When the bamboo-clad
hills, serene pagodas and richly-garbed
Chinese figures evoked by the book's
title appear, it is with self-conscious
reference to the Western imagination's
preoccupation with such images of the
"mysterious" East. When Maugham
uses the word "inscrutable" it is generally
to undermine rather than perpetuate
Orientalist stereotypes. And ... ... |
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The true vision
Art+Culture / Arts
Written by : Shane Qin
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
The true vision
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In the digital era of today, anyone can take photos with a pocketsized
camera or even a cell phone. Artificial pictures can easily
be created with the help of Photoshop. It seems that messages
behind the pictures, preciseness of traditional techniques and the aesthetic
values are being gradually forgotten.
This is the very thing that the Lianzhou International Photo Festival
(LIPF) is fighting against. The annual LIPF aims to become a worldclass
photo gala, with the mission of maintaining the professionalism
of photography.
The idea of holding an international photo festival in Lianzhou, a
hinterland city on the edge of Guangdong Province, became reality in
2005 with a strong push from experienced photo editor Duan Yuting
and Lianzhou's ambitious mayor Lin Wenzhao. Over the years, the LIPF
has received worldwide recognition from an array of domestic and foreign
photographic professionals. With its burgeoning profile, it has also
founded partnerships ... ... |
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Beautiful accents
Art+Culture / Arts
Written by : Shane Qin
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
Beautiful accents
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The development of art in Asia has usually been in parallel with
Europe and America, reflecting the general conception that art,
no matter where in the world, follows the same development pattern
and shares a similar history.
However, Asian artists tend to disagree. "The process of creating
international art does not end with western aesthetic theories and concepts.
The most important part of its formation that has been blatantly
overlooked is non-Western art," says independent curator Jim Supangkat
from Indonesia. For his expertise in Asian contemporary art and his
endeavor in promoting it to the world, Supangkat was made chief curator
of the upcoming "2008 A-one – China/Japan/Korea/Indonesia
Exchange Group Exhibition."
Advocated by the Sino-Japanese Friendly Association, A-one, short for
The Artistic Exchange Association of Asia, was established in Fukuoka,
Japan in 2003, consisting of some prominent artists from China, Japa ... ... |
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Black sheep brings the edge
Art+Culture / Arts
Written by : Shane Qin
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
Black sheep brings the edge
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| While high-profile exhibitions such as the Guangzhou
Triennial have opened Chinese audiences' eyes to avantgarde
contemporary art, they have little to do with the PRD
art scene, which needs a more accessible, grass-roots platform for
local independent artists to emerge from the underground.
Fortunately, some concerned organizations and individuals
are already working on that, and among them, Guangzhou-based
American sculptor and art teacher Daniel. M. Krause is certainly
worth giving credit to for his effort in making the "Karakul
– Guangzhou's Contemporary Arts Festival" happen. "No matter
where you come from, as long as you're living and making art in
Guangzhou, Karakul is a way letting everybody see these original
works produced here," claims Krause.
Krause, who came to Guangzhou in 1988 for his MFA at the
Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, was supposed to go back to the
States and work in special effects in Hollywood. However, t ... ... |
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DECEMBER FILM HIGHLIGHTS
Art+Culture / Cinema
Written by : Han Mingjie
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
DECEMBER FILM HIGHLIGHTS
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| Australia
Dec 3 ★★★
After a seven-year hiatus,
Baz Luhrmann is back
with his fourth directorial
effort, re-teaming with his
Moulin Rouge star Nicole
Kidman for an epic WWII
period piece set in the
Outback. No singing in this
one, but plenty of high-energy
spasmodic action.
Hugh Jackman rounds
out the Aussie authenticity; a US$130 million
budget helps too.
Cadillac Records
Dec 10 ★★★
Beyonce as Etta
James, Mos Def as
Chuck Berry, Cedric the
Entertainer as Big Willie
Dixon, and Jeffrey Wright
(the only serious actor
of the bunch) as Muddy
Waters. Adrien Brody
stars as the obscure white
guy behind them all, label
owner Leonard Chess, who
began by selling records out of – you guessed it
– his Cadillac. Call it this year's Dreamgirls, and
expect the same marketing ploy for awards.
Frost/Nixon
Dec 10 ★★★★
A political footnote, in
which Britis ... ... |
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Global Shanghai
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : JFK Miller
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
Global Shanghai
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| Author: Jeffrey Wasserstrom ★★★★★
rofessor Jeff Was ser s t rom has written the most
enthralling history of modern Shanghai
there is. Global Shanghai, 1850-
2010: A History in Fragments does not
claim to be a definitive history (it focuses
on seven pivotal years set a quarter
of a century apart – 1850, 1875, 1900,
1925, 1950, 1975, 2000 – hence the
"fragments" of the title), nor does it claim to
provide definitive answers to the intriguing
questions it raises. Instead,
the University of California history
professor seeks to frame those questions
in a meaningful historical context.
The result is a meticulously researched,
cornucopic splendiferous
wonder. Yes, we did say history book.
Wasserstrom debunks more than a
few myths as he traverses 160 years
of modern Shanghai history. The
greatest of these is what he calls
"The Shanghai Illusion" – namely that
the city has been represented and
... ... |
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What Next?
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : JFK Miller
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
What Next
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| Author: Chris Patten ★★★
Former Hong Kong supremo Chris Patten describes
himself in the opening pages of What Next? Surviving the
Twenty-First Century as "not a particularly angry old man."
Perhaps, but he makes an excellent case for sounding just
like your dad – censorious, sometimes erudite, sometimes
rambling, often insightful, often tangential, occasionally
humorous, and regularly
wearisome. In this 500-page prospectus for world
change, the ex-Thatcher government minister and
European commissioner traverses all the big global
issues of our time - climate change, weapons proliferation,
epidemic disease, drug trafficking, energy
poverty and abuse, water shortages, international
crime, China, India, Russia, you name it. This isn't
so much a book of answers but a book of one big,
fat question: How the hell did we get into such a
mess? Patten blames the current economic meltdown
on the US and China (Chinese bankrolling of ... ... |
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The China Lover
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Nov 5, 2008
Tags :
The China Lover
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Author: Ian Buruma ★★★
Don't be fooled by The China Lover's
title – it's not really about the Middle
Kingdom at all. Instead, this novel's
main concern is Japan, and its changing
attitudes towards China, the
West, and itself. This shifting focus,
together with academic and author
Ian Buruma's polymath intelligence,
means that very little about The China
Lover is straightforward. Its central
character is an enigma: Yoshiko
Yamaguchi, the Sino-Japanese actress
who, as "Ri Koran", was used as a
propaganda tool by the Japanese during
their occupation of China, before
she metamorphosed into Hollywood's "Shirley Yamaguchi" and
later a member of Japan's parliament. To complicate matters
further, her story is told by not one, but three male narrators,
who have little in common other than their outsider status. The
China Lover covers an awful lot of intellectual ground, exploring
not just gender, national ident ... ... |
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Missy's China
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Nov 5, 2008
Tags :
Missy’s China
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Author: Doris ("Missy") Arnold ★★★
If today's China sometimes feels like
another planet to new arrivals, what
must it have been like for expats living
here 60 or 70 years ago? That's where
two new books edited by Shanghaibased
writer Tess Johnston come in.
The slimmer of the pair, Peking Sun,
Shanghai Moon is a memoir by socialite
Diana Hutchins Angulo, who
grew up in Beijing and then become a
young woman in Shanghai. Sweeping
generalisations about Chinese culture
aside, the book's accounts (and nostalgic
photographs) of the privileged
lifestyles of Shanghai's rich and famous
as they party like it's 1939 are a
window onto a world which is gone forever. Missy's China, meanwhile,
is a collection of the letters sent home by a wife and mother
from small town America who spent several years in Hangzhou
during the thirties. Many of Missy's experiences and observations
wouldn't sound out of place in an expat e-mail today, bu ... ... |
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