Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Tao Na is aggressively trying to create a name for herself in the world of design. She is famous for using bricks, lights and pixel designs to craft outstanding mosaics.

Since finishing her degree in architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004, Tao has won a number of international design contests.

Her walls are decorated with celebrity portraits created in ceramic tile mosaic. Among the famous faces are Elizabeth Taylor, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

Tao focuses on scenes of life, such as family gatherings and lovers sharing a kiss. At the opening of her solo exhibition, she used laser lights to create a giant diamond in the space of the exhibition hall.

Her artistic language is one that will be familiar to many young Chinese, and much of the context comes from a careful understanding of visitor traffic through the exhibition space.

In the painting section, her series titled “Beautiful World” interacts with viewers using abstract and concrete language. The solo exhibition also includes “Tian Jue,” one of her works exhibited at the Venice Biennale to much acclaim.

Tao labels herself as a “sincere visual art worker.” Like Wang Yin, she is trying to create beautiful worlds in her mind.

In preparing for this exhibition, Tao and her curator Zhao Li collected her thoughts from 2008 to 2014 and selected works to best represent the time span. Arranged thusly, viewers can get some clue what Tao Na might be planning next.

The exhibition at SZ Art Center is Tao’s third solo display since 2000. Her work has appeared in more than 60 group exhibitions around the world, won seven domestic awards and 13 Chinese patents. Her work has been displayed at the Contemporary Art Center of Europe, Chinese Contemporary Art Center, Museum in Taizhong (Taiwan Island), the Venice Biennale, MOMA in Moscow and Asia Art Museum in Paris.

SZ Art Center

798 Art Zone, Jiuxianqiao Lu, No2-4, Chaoyang District
Through July 5
(010) 5978 9213
szartcenter.com

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

As the first Chinese artist to capture the dimensional style of Paul Cézanne (1839-1909), Pan Hao uses planes of color and small brushstrokes to build exceedingly complex images.

Pan began his art education at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1987. He spent the next decade continuing his studies at Tama Art University in Japan.

After a year of studying oil painting in Europe, Pan returned to China. In 2003, he enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Central Academy of Fine Arts and stayed on at the academy to teach after graduating.

Drawing on his years abroad, Pan has created a number of oil paintings describing daily life in the urban cities of Japan and Europe. Most of his paintings are held by local museums and foundations.

Early in his career, Pan painted spring, summer and autumn scenery that was free of people. But as the years went on, he began adding crowds, sharp lines and sketches of bus or subway stations.

Soon after, Pan turned his attention to individual shoppers or workers: their families, their joy and their happiness. His most successful works include “Mother and Her Children,” “Naughty Boys” and “Seeking Happiness.”

“Pan Hao has clear control over the three-dimensional character of his work,” said Jia Fangzhou, curator of Pan’s solo exhibition. “He is a painter who pays careful attention to the shape and appearance of the characters in his works.”

Q&A with Pan Hao

What helps you give your characters such rich texture?

I used to paint the seasons, but gradually I felt that approach would lead me to a dead end in oil painting. In Japan, we had strict classes and learned the style of impressionist artist Paul Cézanne.

So that’s the approach I still follow today, and it’s the style I will teach my students since it is so good for creating detailed characters.

Do you reject other painting styles?

I wouldn’t say that. I’ve learned many different styles and am always prepared to try more.

How can you spare time to paint while teaching?

You can always make time for anything you truly enjoy: time management is an essential life skill. That’s something I always try to tell my students.

Art Bridge Gallery

D09-1, 78 Art District, Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District
Through June 20
(010) 6433 1798 or 13701085886

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

For his first solo exhibition on the Chinese mainland, Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei is transforming his childhood memories into a personal performance at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

Sonic Blossom, the New York-based artist’s new participatory installation, brings together a team of classically trained opera singers to serenade unsuspecting visitors with Franz Schubert’s Lieder.

Lee conceived of the exhibition while caring for his mother when she was recovering from surgery. As classical music enthusiasts, the pair found solace in listening to Schubert’s Lieder arranged for piano and voice. At a moment when mortality was all too immediate, the song offered a chance at tranquility.Lee’s art takes the form of participatory installations in which strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy and self-awareness, as well as one-on-one events where visitors can meditate on these concepts.

His 10 open-ended scenarios of everyday interaction take on different forms depending on the participant. These experimental pieces allow the viewer’s own history to occupy Lee’s thematic framework, speaking to the communal nature of memory and emotion.

Past projects have asked museum-goers to give a flower to a stranger on the street (The Moving Garden); withdraw into a booth and write a letter to a deceased or absent loved one (The Letter Writing Project); or sleep over at the museum alongside the artist (The Sleeping Project).

Many of Lee’s works reflect the emotional and psychological effects of migration and cross-cultural identity: homelessness, isolation and loss, and heightened awareness of one’s ties to the world.

Lee was born in 1964. As a youth, he spent six summers studying Buddhism at a Zen monastery before enrolling in a Benedictine high school in San Francisco. He completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the US.

Lee’s works embody a hybrid sensibility that bends to today’s mobile world, especially as cross-cultural artists contemplate their practice with an eye on global consciousness.

His works have been exhibited in solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester and the Peranakan Museum in Singapore.

Lee is currently preparing for his mid-career exhibition, which will open at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on September 20.

UCCA’s presentation of Sonic Blossom is the piece’s second performance worldwide after being unveiled at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul last year.

(Beijing Today Intern Yang Xin contributed to this story)

Q&A With Lee Mingwei

BT: Your past works all show similar styles of imagination. What do you consider to be the common thread that ties together your creations?

Lee: All of my works are heavily inspired by Zen Buddhism. I believe fate plays an important part in our lives. If I had to name a specific theme, it would be karma.

BT: What is the origin of your Zen influence?

Lee: I learned the basics of Zen while studying in San Francisco. It’s something which has stuck with me.

BT: Many art critics have noted foreign creations seem similarly inspired by Zen. Do you see Zen bringing together Chinese and foreign art?

Lee: Yes, I believe it is part of a trend. Zen allows us to infuse our work with a deeper meaning. Critics have lent their skill to defining the meaning of centuries of art, but what is the ultimate meaning of our world? The answer is Zen.

BT: Would you encourage modern artists to study Zen?

Lee: No. what is more important is karma. Different people have different karma. Zen is always Zen.

BT: What is your work “blossom” about?

Lee: I was surrounded by the music of Schubert when I was young. It enriched my understanding of what music can bring us. This time, I wanted my understanding to resonate with more people.

BT: How did you pick singers for “sonic blossom”?

Lee: The six singers I picked were talented students from the Central Conservatory of Music. Students don’t have perfect voice skills, but they have a pure understanding of the music, which inspires people to search inner beauty.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

In a war zone of artists vying for visitors’ attention, Yuan Zuo’s solo exhibition at 798 Art Bridge Gallery is a breath of fresh air.

Born in 1957, Yuan is a highly productive artist more concerned with his craft than fame. He graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1981 and continued his studies abroad at the Massachusetts College of Arts under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Through the works at “Light, Color and Space,” his new exhibition, Yuan shares numerous creations based on his tours of Huangshan and the Yellow River. His vibrant colors give a fresh impression of natural beauty.

Although his creations are made with foreign pigments and brush techniques, the way he describes the relationship between man and nature relies on line, color and light to convey a sense of emotion – the approach for which Chinese ink painting is most famous.

Many have called Yuan’s art an extension of impressionism, but Yuan rejects the classification.

“My trips to Huangshan changed me. She introduced me to the world of light, color, beauty and passion,” Yuan wrote in his foreword to the exhibition.

“Yuan Zuo shows a reverence for traditional Chinese painting and philosophy,” said Ni Jun, an artist and producer at CCTV-10.

Yuan’s past stateside exhibitions include “The Vision of China” in 1982, “Garden, Mountains, Confusion” in 2002, and “Rethinking Tradition” in 2011 at the Harvard Neighbors Art Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts College of Arts and assistant professor at the Tsinghua University College of Arts.

798 Art Bridge Gallery

D09-1 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
April 19 to May 21
(010) 6433 1798, 13701085886

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

After a decade abroad in the New York art scene, painter Zhao Gang is back to exhibit his last decade of creations.

The exhibition, which opened April 13 in Yonghe Community, has attracted art market observers, commentators, reporters, and general art lovers.

Titled “The Emperor and His…,” the paintings capture Zhao’s impressions about people around the world.

Zhao was born in 1961 in Beijing. Like many children born into the Cultural Revolution, he was politically active during his childhood.

By the 1970s, Zhao was deeply concerned about the future of his country. He joined the Star Art Exhibition, an event widely regarded as the beginning of China’s “new art” movement, and learned from catalogues of impressionist paintings at a friend’s home.

Inspired by French Impressionist painters of the 19th century, Zhao sent many of his inspired worked to the exhibition. He believed that “after the failure of the Culture Revolution,” artists should create something different.

The move got his family denounced as an enemy of the people and all its property confiscated.

As China rolled into the 1980s, Zhao became torn between Mao Zedong’s call for class warfare and Deng Xiaoping’s call for the pursuit of profit.

Zhao, unable to adapt to the changing times, moved first to Europe and then to the US. He studied new schools of painting before eventually settling in New York, where he worked as a painter, publisher, and art broker.

“I’ve learned that everyone is his own emperor, and the only emperor in his world,” Zhao said. “We live in a world of many emperors, no matter whether you agree or not.”

Zhao moved back to China in 2007 and has mostly been working as an oil painter. “Zhao Gang’s works are a personal breakthrough,” said Zhou Yang, a professor at the Central Academy of Contemporary Arts.” Today he is fully immersed in the creative process.”

Q&A

Q: Your oil paintings seem deliberately unclear, either fuzzing the face or the whole image. What are you trying to convey in your work?

A: I try to avoid condemning or criticizing a group of people. I just record the impression something gives me by using colors and shapes that stress their character.

Q: Are you worried about the recent turmoil in the art market or driving potential buyers away?

A: Artists don’t create to meet the demands of the market: they create the market. That’s the part I’ve enjoyed the most.

Q: Where do you see your art going next?

A: After two decades abroad, I’ve learned an awful lot about the world of art. I’ve found that painting is still what I love the most after trying my hand at a great many things. I consider it a blessing and my good fortune.

Aye Gallery

Room 601, Unit3, Yonghe Garden, Yard 3, Dong Binhe Lu, Andingmen, Dongcheng District
10 am-6 pm (appointment required)
8422 1726 / 1030
aye@ayegallery.com
ayegallery.com

Take Exit D at Yonghegong Station, cross the street on the northeast side and enter the nearest community

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

A receptionist at the Wangfujing Branch of China’s Commercial Publishing House got the surprise of her life when an old man walked in with a several-thousand-page handwritten manuscript.

At 76-years-old, Che Hongcai had only one thing to say: “I’m finished.”

In his hands was the first ever Pashto-Chinese dictionary, a project commissioned, re-commissioned and eventually lost by the State Council.

It all began in 1975. Although Mao Zedong was still alive, Deng Xiaoping had effectively gained control of the government, the Party and the military.

In a moment foreshadowing Deng’s famous reforms of the 1980s, the State Council called a national meeting in Guangzhou to discuss the creation of 160 foreign-language dictionaries that would serve the nation during its coming decades of expansion.

At the time, dictionaries between Chinese and the world’s languages were very few, and many languages had no competent speakers in China.

After polling several schools, Che Hongcai was found to be the only professor especially skilled at the Pashto language of Afghanistan.

Ultimately, only 70 percent of the dictionaries ordered ever saw publication during the 1980s. Most simply fell through the cracks and were forgotten as roles changed and professors passed away.

That Che persevered – unsupervised – for 34 years stunned Zhang Wenying, editor-in-chief of the Commercial Publishing House. It took Zhang two years of research to unearth the forgotten dictionary program and arrange for the publication of Che’s work.

Road to Afghanistan

“I enrolled at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages, now the Beijing University of Foreign Culture and Studies, in 1957 to study English,” Che said

During his third year at the school, Che and his classmates were reassigned to study less spoken languages that would enrich the cultural capacity of the school’s language department.

Che was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan for a four-year exchange program at the Cultural Institute of Kabul University.

His task, the Pashto language, was exceptionally complicated.

Its speakers, the Pashtun people, trace their origin to the ancient region of Bactria, a land influenced by diverse faiths such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and modern-day Islam. Furthermore, the language was a frequent target of radical reform under the country’s unstable political leadership.

“When I returned, I was assigned to teach Pashto at the newly founded Beijing Broadcasting Institute. Today it’s known as Communication University of China,” Che said. Like many of his classmates, he was called to attend the 1975 meeting in Guangzhou.

Che returned to the school with instructions to work on a Pashto dictionary. Although he worked seriously on the task for the next two years, he eventually left the school to begin a career at China Radio International after Mao Zedong’s death.

Seeing the Pashto-Chinese dictionary project unattended and the school without any Pashto speakers, the Commercial Publishing House asked CRI’s Pashto “division” for help – a move that put them back in contact with Che, the division’s only member.

After some urging, Che accepted the project a second time and was assigned back to the school. The institute provided him two assistants: Zhang Min, his roommate from Kabul, and Song Qiangmin, a former student.

Che, Zhang and Song worked hard to create more than 100,000 index cards containing Chinese and Pashto terms sorted by topic. However, their work was repeatedly interrupted by other reassignments.

In 1980, Che was moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an analyst of Middle East policy. Four years later, he was pulled back to the university to compile textbooks for the school’s new Department of International Media.

Song ultimately moved abroad to the US, leaving Che and Zhang to work on the dictionary through the 1990s.

Che retired in the mid-1990s and spent much of the last decade revising drafts of his dictionary with the aid of modern Pashto translation software.

Reflecting on a life of service

“In my generation, we were never free to choose our own profession. Our tasks were assigned entirely at the whim of the government,” Che said.

After the arrival of the 1990s, most of the old government-assigned tasks were abandoned.

“Everyone was busy with their own work, and our assignments were forgotten by all,” Zhang said.

Cui Yan, chief of the Commercial Publish House’s Foreign Language Section, blames the neglect on the size of the team.

“With only several professors assigned to the task, it was easy to forget about the group,” Cui said. “The story of this dictionary is really the story of China’s political changes and its shift toward self-determination.”

For their work, Cui and Zhang will be paid 80 yuan per 1,000 words. Their 2-million-word Pashto dictionary is due out during the second half of 2014.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Using simple lines and traditional ink, Xu Li brings ancient ghosts and ladies to life on xuan paper.

Xu is a representative of China’s “grassroots” artist movement, a group of classically educated artists who have given up on academics to focus on creating art that is closer to everyday life.

Born in 1961 in Fujian province, Xu is the vice chairman of the province’s Association of Artists and an active figure in its literary association.

Xu brings his classical training into each of his pieces, using confident lines and powerful manipulation of ink to instill Zhong Kui, Laodao and other popular symbols with life. In his landscapes, the lines becoming flowing rivers and strong trees.

His ancient ladies are composed of complicated lines that, while mysterious up close, come together to create beautiful images when viewed from a distance.

“Xu Li’s work has been a turning point in the modern history of Chinese ink painting,” said Yan Tan, curator of the solo exhibition.

Since the late 1980s, he has been donating his works to museums around the world. His creations are currently exhibited in the Museum of Macao, the US Oriental Museum, Helsingor Museum and Wellington Museum.

Art Bridge Gallery

D09-1, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
Through April 28
(010) 6433 1798
798artbridge.sina.net

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Zhang Botao searches for remnants of ancient tradition in China’s modern women. Since 2010, he has been working on oil paintings inspired by ancient beauties at his studio in the Songzhuang artist colony.

His paintings blend modern figures with ancient oriental traits. Each of the women in his works show eyes full of desperation and sorrow.

As an oil painter, Zhang continues a tradition that began with ink paintings. In the distant past, scholar artists enjoyed painting portraits of sorrow-filled beauties. In Zhang’s work, these women are updated with classical European dress, a hint at Westernization.

Zhang’s work has been commercially successful, with most of his portraits fetching 30,000 yuan online.

Born in 1970 in the mountains of northeast China’s Da Hinggan Ling, Zhang studied traditional painting at Harbin Normal University and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004 with a degree in oil painting.

“It’s no easy feat for a boy from the mountains to enter one of the nation’s most prestigious art schools, but it was one I was determined to achieve,” Zhang said at the opening of his latest exhibition.

“I paint girls to show that I still have beautiful hope of life,” he said. “I am following in the footsteps of the Ming Dynasty painter Tang Ying and 19th-century Britain’s Bern Johns [Edward] Burne-Jones.”

Art Gallery

East Block, Songzhuang Art Zone 101118
Through May 10 (Monday closed)
(010) 5128 2297
ccartd.com

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

A new exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, curated by Karen Archery and Robin Peckham, is exploring the character of new art whose concepts, ideas, dissemination and reception are defined by a post-Internet world.

Titled “Art Post-Internet,” the collection includes works by artists based in New York, London and Berlin.

“Share Health” is a group of soap dispensers on a wall, made by Jose Kline. The work is symbolic of the segmented nature of modern life.

Another photo series, “Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” shows a collection of photos from Google’s Street View project that reflects how the stories happening around us every minute are recorded today.

Other pieces, such as a collection of billboards on ATMs and an abstract series of images taken on a table, are interpreted as a commentary about how modern life is being sliced up into picture or video moments rather than being taken as a whole as it was in the past.

The character of the Internet era is a severely decreased expectation of privacy and a crashing down of traditional interpersonal barriers.

The exhibition includes two pre-recorded lectures: “Thinking Post-Internet,” by Karen Archery and Robin Peckham, and another on the history of UCCA.

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
Through May 11
(010) 5780 0202 / 0203

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Flowers Talk, Kho Sangwoo, photography

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Judging by the latest collection at Asian Art Works, the life of the modern artist is world-weary and pessimistic.

The new exhibition, titled Collections of Asian Art Works, reflects the personal attitudes of the gallery’s collected artists. Those attitudes may be a symptom of China’s general outlook on prosperity.

Aya Kakeda’s “Search for New World” paints society as a pool of small cats swimming in an endless ocean to reach an imaginary shore.

In “Lover,” Ding Xiaoqing tells us how isolated from the world we become when we fall in love.

Guo Lina’s “Yoga Retreat Barbell” is a bitter commentary on the modern woman’s obsession with personal image.

The modern world offers no shortage of creature comforts, but these artists say they are all distractions from matters of the heart.

Korean artist Koh Sangwoo uses negative photos in her “Lady in Amazon” to render her model’s attractive figures and faces as something horrible and unclear. The theme continues in her series “Flower Talk.”

A hard paper Bodhisattva is the contribution of artist Hoyoon Shin. The flat image is symbolic of how from the right angle everything can look beautiful and solid but when viewed from another angle it will vanish.

Aside from its criticism of materialism, the exhibition offers basic truths about daily life.

Aiyung Yun’s “Unknown Space” creates a field of twinkling stars as a reminder that space is a place rather than pure emptiness. In “Package,” Sun Wenyi displays a wonderful, colorful box with nothing inside.

Asian Art Works is jointly organized by Chinese and Korean artists. Most exhibitions focus on the conflict between worldly and spiritual issues.

Search for New World, Aya Kakeda, hand printed five-color silkscreen

Asian Art Works

 D-09-2, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
Through March 31
(010) 5762 6338
info@asianartworks.net

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

If you only gave Yang Shufeng’s engraving prints a short glance, his work would come off as a confused mess.

The chaotic lines and objects seem to purposefully confound whatever message Yang hopes to send. But in that confusion lies the real message: one of depression, anger, disappointment, and rebellion.

Yang came of age during the 1980s, an era much removed from the misery of the 1960s and 1970s, when the decade-long Cultural Revolution smashed the institutions that glued society together. Yang graduated from Northwest Teachers’ University in 1982 with a degree in oil painting. But unlike most of his peers, Yang never lost his hope.

Looking at his work it may appear a contradictory mess, but the bright colors in a gray atmosphere represent a kernel of aspiration and positivity in an otherwise gray world.

“Only after looking back on the old days can we continue to strive for the future,” Yang said at the ceremony of his solo exhibition. “If a person and a nation do not look back to the road they came, neither has any future.”

Yang’s art is an abstract about the promise of hope and how it is essential for a future.

The solo exhibition also displays some of Yang’s other works, such as his oil paintings and pottery in the same theme.

Yang is considered a member of the ’85 Pioneering Arts movement, a contemporary wave that prioritized representational expressionism in oil, lacquer, paper, woodcarving, and pottery.

During his first five years as an artist he created 200 works, including his Person series, Body series, Intertwisted Body series and Red and Black Abstract series.

From 1985 to 1989 his work was continually exhibited. Since then, he has moved into new representational expressionism and begun providing detailed notes about his creations and their artistic goals.

This exhibition marks the first time Yang’s post-1989 creations have ever appeared in public.

New Sun Art Museum

Through February 20
D10, East Road, 798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District
(010) 5978 9497, (010) 5978 9847

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Via Beijing Today: “Malipo County in Yunnan Province has been on the poverty list for decades. The county spent 300 million yuan building a university campus in the valley to attract students. But none have ever attended.”

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

The China Dream is in trouble according to a recent report by The Mirror. The investigative report, published on February 7, said the number of impoverished counties in China rose from 331 in 1985 to 592 in 2012.

This purported slide into poverty runs contrary to three decades of explosive economic growth and seriously clashes with the government’s official reporting of 98.9 million people in poverty nationwide.

But rather than unmasking a hidden class of impoverished citizens, The Mirror’s reporters may have stumbled up one of the nation’s most audacious channels for corruption.

In 1985, the central government put forward a policy that would replace handouts with generous funding for projects intended to “develop the local economy” in China’s poorest counties. The incentive was designed to bring the countryside in line with the nation’s greater market reforms.

Initially, “poor counties” were defined as those where the average annual household income was less than 150 yuan: $51 at the time, or $110 in today’s money.

The nationwide average, by comparison, was 858 yuan per household.

The number of listed counties has grown slowly in the years since. In most years, about 30 counties graduate from the list to be replaced by new developing regions.

On the surface, the policy appeared to be working. In 2012, the government revised the policy and bumped the baseline average household income to less than 2,300 yuan per year.

But the poverty list is based on self-reporting rather than census data, and local officials have a strong incentive to present their communities as ailing to tap into the vast cash reserves of the central government.

Many “poor counties,” especially those along the eastern coast, applied for poverty status to win subsidy money for bogus projects.

An increasing trend in corruption over the last decade resulted in billions of yuan earmarked for good causes to pour into the pockets of county officials.

Hailun County in Heilongjiang province, Lixin County in Anhui province, and Taiqian County and Fengqiu County in Henan province are among the most heinous examples of fund abuse, having directly used poverty relief funds to purchase promotions, erect gaudy government offices and construct lavish homes for local officials.

Little evidence exists that any subsidy money was used as intended.

Taiqian County was awarded an annual budget of more than 80 million yuan in 2011 – a year when its average annual income was 7,200 yuan in the cities and 2,650 yuan in the countryside.

As government officials built themselves luxury apartments and a new massive administrative complex, more than 600 students were left packed into one small dormitory. Their classrooms had no windows to shield them from the elements.

When reporters asked school officials why the classrooms did not have windows, they were told the school could not afford them.

The school was located next to the new government complex.

Wang Jingbo, deputy director of the Chinese Law School, said that the central government is revising its poverty targets to move more wealthy counties off the list in hopes that the funds go where they are truly needed.

“We have to focus our spending on real projects that push development in the right direction,” he said. “This phenomenon can’t be allowed to persist.”

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

No one can doubt Ma Haifang’s Beijing credentials.

Born in the city in 1956, Ma studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 1981 with a degree in traditional painting. Like many masters in his field, he has spent the years since working at People’s Art Publishing House as a supervisor.

Ma obsesses about Beijing life. Each of his works capture daily life in Old Beijing and festival celebrations.

His art captures the spirit of a different, simpler time that has been lost from the modern city’s memory.

Ma specializes in the boneless painting style, using moderate lines and highlighting the shapes of his figures for modest exaggeration.

Almost all of his works include traditional couplets with proverbs or introspective warnings, messages such as, “You don’t drink tea to kill your thirst or play chess to win,” or, “Modesty brings good luck as virtue brings fortune.”

Ma’s subjects go about their daily lives seeking shade in the summer under the city’s old big trees. The Beijingers seem optimistic about life and enjoy playing with their birds and goldfish, appreciating trees and flowers or chatting.

Even people who have never experienced Old Beijing can sense his profound nostalgia for the city’s vanishing cultural spirit.

Beijing Element Gallery

Address: East Street, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Bei Jie, Chaoyang District
Hours: 10 am – 6 pm, Tuesday-Sunday, through February 15
Phone: (010) 5762 6172
Website

“Old Injury, New Love” by Sheng Tianhong

Our friends at Beijing Today will sporadically swing by to introduce art and culture in the city. This week, a man who paints of and with love.

Sheng Tianhong’s heart is wholly devoted to painting. Born in Zhejiang Province in 1973 and a graduate from the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts, he moved to Dusseldorf, Germany at the age of 24 to travel and develop his career.

“This is an era of mass information,” Sheng says. “There are just too many pictures you can find online. Pictures taken by others have become the new reality, but they only capture as much of the experience as a quick sketch.”

Love in the Digital Age collects Sheng’s best works from the last 10 years in Germany, Northern Europe and China. The inspiration comes from his impossibly random encounters.

His Naughty Pipi painting is of a Swedish girl he met while traveling in that country. The surrounding childish toys and the gun in Pipi’s hands is Sheng’s of backhanded commentary on the mental health of modern women.

In Boy, he depicts a silent young man with sharp eyes, showing how modern society is changing men into monsters.

Lu Xun, the Chinese Communist Party’s beloved writer for the working class, is equally criticized. Sheng’s paintings depict Lu Xun as a smart octopus and a tool for avoiding evil spirits.

Canvas is the only consistent material in Sheng’s works: what he puts on it ranges from charcoal to oils, acrylics and more.

But there’s something more significant about Sheng’s solo exhibition.

Sheng represents a new wave of Chinese artists who have been “set free” by spending a decade abroad. The turmoil reflected in his paintings may be a sign that the honest artists are fed up with modern society and the wholly derailed art market.

These new artists are looking for liberation and a breath of air to blast out the waves of pretenders who still dominate China’s galleries and claim the lion’s share of sales.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Love in the Digital Age

Where: Room 601, Unit 3, Yonghe Garden, 3 Dong Binhe Road, Andingmenm, Dongcheng District
Tel: 8422 1726, 8422 1030
Open: 10 am – 6 pm, Tuesday to Sunday
Duration: Through February 15
Website: ayegallery.com

In 1935, cartoonist Zhang Leping created one of Asia’s most enduring characters: Sanmao. The emaciated boy, named for the three hairs on his head, lent a friendly face to Shanghai’s nameless street urchins and children orphaned by Japanese attacks.

But more importantly, Sanmao’s bitter adventures captured the spirit of social injustice in the city’s “golden era.”

Zhang’s earliest Sanmao comics are being shown this month in a special exhibit at the National Art Museum of China. The works are selected from 243 original strips donated to the museum in 1983.

Like the timeless commentary of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, the dark contrast between Sanmao and his rapidly modernizing surroundings rings true 80 years later.

Sanmao’s world is a Shanghai in which the rich are kicking the poor to the curb. The panels convey the bitter irony of a penniless country boy striving to integrate into the “Pearl of the Orient.”

The strip transformed as China entered a state of war, and Zhang produced a series of dark and bloody comics that depicted Sanmao joining the army to fight the Japanese.

After the civil war, Sanmao evolved into a political tool for condemning old society and was seen everywhere in daily life.

The earlier works remained the most popular and found fans throughout Southeast Asia.

Sanmao as drawn after the revolution of 1949

Zhang was born in 1910 in Haiyan County, Zhejiang province and grew up under the rule of the Beiyang Warlords.

He drew his first comics in 1927 to welcome the arrival of the Guomingdang army and satirize the warlords. Although Zhang never attended school, his father – an elementary school teacher – advised him to focus his art on the experiences of the common people to win readers.

In the early 1930s, Zhang moved to Shanghai and began drawing commercial advertisements and comics strips. Soon, most of his income came from the comics, which included Sanmao, Mengmeng Grows Up and Mustached Zhang’s Life.

His comics were published in the Shun Pao and Ta Kung Pao newspapers and were wildly popular with readers.

Zhang was eventually recruited to serve as the supervisor of the cartoon department at the People’s Pictorial Press. He became editor-in-chief of Cartoon World magazine and worked there until he died in 1992.

This post originally appeared on Beijing Today; there, you can see more sample comics from the exhibition, such as:

Sanmao’s Happy Life:

Survival of the Fittest:

Sanmao the Unwanted Newsie: