Record crowds for China art show of Saatchi gallery

The record for the number of visitors to a contemporary art exhibition, set in 1997 by the groundbreaking Sensation BritArt show at the Royal Academy, has been broken by the inaugural show at Charles Saatchi's new London gallery in Chelsea.

The Revolution Continues, which showcased new art from China, was visited by an average of 5,200 people a day and, it has been announced this weekend, will now be followed by Unveiled, another free show, this time featuring new work from the Middle East.

By the time the exhibition of Chinese work closes, it will have attracted around 525,000 people, soundly beating Sensation which was seen by 300,000 and duly anointed the most popular contemporary art show in the world at the time. Curiosity about Chinese contemporary work reached fever pitch this year. Many of the most financially successful artists in the world are working in or come from China, including Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi. Of the 20 top-selling 20 international artists, 11 are Chinese.

Building on the impact of the Chinese show, Saatchi, who was born in Iraq, now hopes to surprise his audience with unexpected work from an artistic community that the British public rarely has the chance to see. The former advertising guru, who is now one of the world's richest art collectors, concedes that the unknown work of Middle Eastern artists may not compete as a popular attraction with pieces from the booming Chinese art scene, but he argues that it is an increasingly important region.

'I can't see our next exhibition of new Middle Eastern art being as much of a draw, but you never know,' he said. 'The work itself is breathtaking - new Arabian artists are about to take centre stage in the art world.'

The geographical area has been overlooked due to the fraught political situation, but the cities of Tehran, Cairo, Beirut and Dubai have all blossomed artistically, a gallery spokeswoman said.

The Chinese show has been visited by 200 schools since it opened on 9 October in the 15-room gallery. Spread over three floors and covering 4,500 square metres, Saatchi opened the site in partnership with auctioneers and art dealers Phillips de Pury. Phillips subsidises the entrance price and Saatchi shows and sells through Phillips.

Saatchi initially set a target of attracting a million visitors a year, compared with the total of 600,000 who came during the three years that his gallery was in London's County Hall building, opposite the Houses of Parliament. Tate Modern, Saatchi's main rival in scale and content, attracts around four million a year.

The stars of the new Middle Eastern show include two brothers, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, from Tehran. They are part of a generation of Iranian artists who are producing work which is distinctive of the region but not limited by it. Rokni, one of the most widely recognised talents working in Iran, makes elongated figures that 'look like a bit like cushions or oriental ballerinas en route to a ball', the gallery promises.

Another highlight will be the work of Diana al-Hadid, a Syrian-American artist who works in New York. Her sculptures take 'towers' as their central theme. The work of Ahmed Alsoudani - who was born, like Saatchi, in Baghdad - will also be on show. Alsoudani left Iraq after the first Gulf War for America, where he was granted political asylum. His violent canvases appear to be about Iraq, but are said to have a wider resonance.

(The Observer)

Venezuela's ‘rock star' conductor brings China to its feet

When he was 6 or 7 years old, Gustavo Dudamel used to set up an imaginary symphony made up of toy figures, put Tchaikovsky on the family stereo, pump up the volume and swing an imaginary baton, conducting with childhood abandon.

"Those toy figures that I played with and dreamt about as a boy have now become flesh-and-blood musicians," recalled Dudamel, 27.

The frizzy-haired Dudamel has turned into one of the world's brightest up-and-coming symphony conductors, capturing the job of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic (starting next year) and grabbing the attention of music critics far and wide who laud him as possibly a once-in-a-generation maestro.

It's been a dizzying ride for a modest Venezuelan who came out of nowhere. Jay Leno and David Letterman are calling, and everybody else wants a piece of him. His schedule is already booked well into the next decade. The press has dubbed the hoopla as "Duda-mania."

And here he is, traveling across Asia with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and he couldn't be more joyous. That's because the orchestra was his ladder to success. Dudamel spent 22 years with the "musical miracle" system supporting the orchestra. Without the system, Dudamel knows he might be another trombonist pumping out salsa riffs with a band in Barquisimeto, his Venezuelan hometown, just as his father did.

The visit of Dudamel and the youth symphony has special resonance in China, a nation that prides itself as a rising musical power, where some 38 million students are believed to be studying piano and tens of millions practicing other instruments. China and Venezuela are linked by a bond - and perhaps a bit of a rivalry - over their musical gift. While China's musicians are renowned for technical proficiency, the Venezuelans are all passion.

"Could a country best known for corn, petroleum and revolutionary rhetoric dethrone the Middle Kingdom as classical music's heir apparent?" asked the Time Out Beijing magazine.

So when Dudamel took the podium at the National Grand Theater, one of China's new architectural jewels, Chinese officials, diplomats and other music aficionados eagerly awaited a chance to witness a conductor wearing the mantle as the new Leonard Bernstein or Carlos Kleiber. Some had questions, wondering if Dudamel had been overhyped.

The performance was electric as Dudamel led his youth symphony through Ravel, Castellano and Tchaikovsky, ending with a trademark encore from "West Side Story" that had musicians leaping from their seats, twirling instruments in the air and shouting "Bravo!" (Check it out on YouTube.)

"He's everybody's hope for the next generation of conductors - blazing energy, connects with audiences, down to earth. He puts on a hell of a show, which classical music needs," said David Stabler, classical music critic for The Oregonian, a newspaper in Portland, Ore.

Many countries, including China, voice interest in Venezuela's "musical miracle," seeking to learn from it or even replicate it. Already, young Chinese musicians are winning acclaim, most notably pianists Lang Lang and Yundi Li, and China wants to deepen its youth music system.

"We can learn much from our Venezuelan colleagues," said Chen Zuohuang, artistic director of the National Center for the Performing Arts.

Offstage, Dudamel still struggles a bit with English rather than his native Spanish. Nearly every professional musician he directs, however, enthuses over his ability to express himself from the podium, using hands, face and baton.

"It's very difficult to put into words. It's a confidence and a body language that very few conductors achieve," said Ernest Fleischman, retired manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was on the jury that selected Dudamel and offered him the job to lead the symphony. "The musicians trust him from the first moment."

(McClatchy Newspapers)

the Poem of Kung Fu Nine Scrolls stages in Sydney

Martial arts meets dance, meets poetry in Poem of Kungfu: Nine Scrolls, an award-winning dance theatre production from renowned Chinese body-art master Liu Zhen. Fusing the ancient art of kung fu with traditional Chinese dance, the colourful piece moves through a variety of scenes, each with a different theme, tone and tempo.

Director Zhen explains the connection between kung fu and poetry: "We have chosen to call this Poem of Kungfu: Nine Scrolls because poetry is like Kung Fu ... it can be abstract and real at the same time."

Making up the Nine Scrolls are purity, sutra, diligence, intelligence, listening, shape, calmness, devotion and paradise which, according to Zhen, "are presented like a poem of prose from joy, sadness, anger to euphoria; one moment mystical, full of grace and whimsy, the next powerful and dramatic."

On top of the 27 performers featured (including the scarily talented 10-year-old Miao Shuaifeng), actor Tony Barry narrates the piece, bridging the cultural gap between East and West. Musical accompaniment comes from singer Cherlie Valaray and pianist Ester Balasch Lozano, who helps to highlight the beauty and fluidity of the performer's movements.

This is the first time that this multi-award-winning production has somersaulted onto our shores, coming directly from Beijing.

(BBC)

Saatchi Gallery in London puts China's artists on show

London - A model of a Western city made from dog chews and a room full of once powerful men moving about in wheelchairs are among the most eye-catching exhibits of contemporary Chinese art at London's new Saatchi Gallery, opening this Thursday.

The inaugural show The Revolution Continues: New Art From China, brings together works by 24 of China's leading artists exhibited by Charles Saatchi, the veteran British collector and multi-millionaire sponsor of contemporary art.

Saatchi, who opened his first gallery in London more than 20 years ago, acquired the former Duke of York's army barracks in the heart of fashionable Chelsea to present the daunting, often satirical and also depressing art works in spacious and light surroundings.

His partnership with leading contemporary auction house Phillips de Pury & Company has meant an injection of extra funds that guarantees free admission to one of the biggest contemporary art galleries in the world, and provides an automatic link to the lucrative market for Chinese art.

'Saatchi has always been a step ahead of his game on the international art market,' said Simon de Pury about the new venture. 'You don't need a crystal ball to know that, in the long term, art is the only asset class not affected by debt.'

Among the most striking works is Love It! Bite It!, a model city of Western culture's 'tastiest bits,' including the Colosseum, The US Capitol and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, built from dog chews, by Liu Wei.

'The piece obliquely hints at the fragility of our civilization in the aftermath of 9/11,' the Daily Telegraph's art critic commented.

Old Persons Home, co-authored by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu presents satirical life-sized sculptures of pensioners - easily recognizable as aeging world leaders - in wheelchairs rolling around aimlessly in a vast room in the gallery basement.

Among the more disturbing works is Chinese Offspring, by Zhang Dali, consisting of 15 life-sized figures suspended upside down from the ceiling, representing modern China's immigrant underclass.

There are daunting allusions to modern China's one-child policy and the 1989 massacre of Tiananmen Square. The figure of Mao Zedong dominates Zeng Fanzhi's painting Tiananmen 2004, a frenzied network of brush marks and blood-red colour.

Yalta No. 2 by Shi Xinning, seen as another dig at the 'western elite', is presented as an attempt to 'repaint history' by seating chairman Mao alongside victorious World War II leaders Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.

The oil painting A Holiday in Venice by Shi Xinning shows a decadent-looking Mao enjoying the views and the sunshine with the late Peggy Guggenheim on the balcony of her villa in Venice.

Another work by the same artist, entitled Royal Coach, sees Mao, feted by onlookers while travelling in an open carriage through London, inserted at the side of a smiling Queen Mother - and appearing to be given his rightful place among royalty.

(Monsters and Critics.com)

Bestseller "Wolf Totem" debuts in English

• The wolves are seen as team players, strategic thinkers. Wolves don't kill too many sheep, they don't kill too many people, they don't pillage the environment for short-term gains
• "When we talk about China and freedom, we talk about human rights. But in China, it can mean freedom from fashion and trends."
• the author spent 30 years thinking about it and six years writing it, which win him the Man Asian Literary Prize.

The English launch of China's latest literary sensation, a tale of freedom and self-discovery on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, could not have been better timed.

Jiang Rong's "Wolf Totem", an autobiographical novel about a Beijing student living with Mongolian nomads during the Cultural Revolution, is set to debut in English this month, just as the world's interest in all things Chinese is reaching fever pitch.

With the Beijing Olympics only a few months away and a controversy over censorship straining the Chinese government's relations with international artists, readers may be surprised by the novel's uncensored criticism of Chinese society.

But Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin China, which reportedly paid a record $100,000 for the English translation rights, says the novel reflects the complexities of modern China.

"It's read in many different ways in China. It's about freedom -- for us, it's a very loaded word. When we talk about China and freedom, we talk about human rights. But in China, it can mean freedom from fashion and trends," she told Reuters in a phone interview.

"It's surprising, reading it in English, how overt the messages on freedom are. But it's not advocating revolution."

Jiang Rong, a political scientist, writes under a pseudonym. He has said that he spent 30 years thinking about "Wolf Totem", his first novel, and six years writing it. More than 2 million official copies have been sold in China over the past three years -- not including the pirated versions sold on the street.

"Wolf Totem" examines the relationship between man and nature by tracing the story of Chen Zhen, a student sent to live with nomadic shepherds in the 1960s. As part of his spiritual journey, Chen Zhen tries to raise a wolf cub.

The novel's translator, Howard Goldblatt -- one of the most well-known translators of Chinese literature -- said he was fascinated by the novel's intellectual and philosophical depth and its moments of intense drama and passion.

"The episode of him raising the wolf cub -- parts of that almost had me in tears, it was so sad. And then, the sadness of the ecological disaster that ultimately and inevitably occurs," he said by phone from Beijing.

WOLVES AS TEAM PLAYERS

Instead of reading the whole novel and then translating it chapter by chapter, Goldblatt decided to translate it as he read it to experience the story the way any other reader would. But he said that at times he became so engrossed in the plot that he would read ahead, then go back and translate the section.

Lusby is cautious about the book's ability to replicate its success in China on a global scale, but she believes the spiritual theme will resonate with a Western readership.

"The wolves are seen as team players, strategic thinkers," she said. "Wolves don't kill too many sheep, they don't kill too many people, they live in harmony with the environment. They don't pillage the environment for short-term gains."

Little is known about the novel's author, who was born in 1946 and reportedly became a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.

A former lecturer at Beijing university, he is now retired and rarely appears in public. Last year, he won Asia's first major literary award, the Man Asian Literary Prize, for the book.

The prize is part of a wider literary resurgence in Asia. Long dominated by writers from the Indian subcontinent, Asia is increasingly producing authors that reflect the region's huge cultural diversity.

China has attracted particular attention because of its political situation and an ongoing debate over freedom of expression. Most recently, the government announced it would tighten controls over foreign performers after singer Bjork shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at a concert in Shanghai.

Lusby, whose latest project is to bring foreign classics to China through a partnership with a local publishing company, said they had not faced any censorship issues.

Goldblatt finds censors tend to be less worried by fiction since it targets a much smaller audience than movies, though the Chinese government has jailed dissident writers and banned certain books.

"What I run across is a sense of self-censorship -- I read things and think, has the author held back because he wants to get his work out there," he said.

"Once you've written something, it's always out there. You grow a tail, and if they want to go after you, they can always grab hold of that tail."

(Reuters)