LinkChinese UK News

From Eastern Art Report Online:

The work of New York-based artist Xu Bing, highly regarded because of his innovative and playful use of Chinese and English calligraphy, or what appears to be akin to it, will be on show in London at the Albion Gallery. This is Xu Bing’s largest and most comprehensive gallery show to date and will bring together nearly 40 works as well as the more recent Book from the Ground, shown at MoMA, New York, in 2007.

The exhibition is held at

Albion Gallery
8 Hester Road
Battersea, London SW11 4AX
Tel: 020 7801 2480

until 23 June 2008.

 

Chinatown Arts Space presents
Classic Film, Contemporary Score (UK/China)
In partnership with ROH2 at the Royal Opera House

This classic silent movie from China, Song of the Fishermen (Yuquang qu, Shanghai, 1934) has inspired four of the most exciting British Chinese composer/musicians in the UK: Chi2 (Liz and Sarah Liew), Jiang Li and Kimho Ip, to compose and perform together the world premiere of a new contemporary score accompanying a special screening of the film.

Song of the Fishermen enjoyed success as the first social-realist film in the history of Chinese cinema, and won the first international prize for a Chinese film at the 1935 Moscow Film Festival. The film is an emotional story of social injustice full of action and melodrama, offering an exciting challenge to the contemporary interpretative vibrancy of British Chinese musicians.

The four British Chinese composers have independently explored the fusion of contemporary music with traditional Chinese instruments. This dialogue between past and present, between East and West, provides a fascinating insight for London audiences.

Produced in Shanghai by the Lianhua Film Company, 1934

Tickets: £12, £5 standing (£8 students and ROH Access List)

 

Dong Yi, the young Zheng player, gave a sole concert to the audiences at British Museum on 27 March as part of the China Now programme. The pieces played were classic works rooted from folk traditions of various regions and ethnic groups in China. Dong Yi, who started Zheng playing as a child, has given performance in many occassions. She is currently a postgraduate student of London School of Economics.

 

The Scotsman’s Jim Gilchrist reports:

Next Monday, Xiang Silou, professor at the Fine Arts Institute of Sichuan Normal University and an outstanding woodblock art-ist, will take up a month-long residency at Glasgow’s Burrell Collection, where several of his large-format woodblock prints will go on display. While there, he will create a new print inspired by the collection, which includes one of the most important assemblies of Chinese art and artefacts in Britain.

His visit, during which he will give work-shops and lectures, is organised in conjunction with the Ricefield Arts Centre in Glasgow, where he exhibited two years ago, and which is involved in promoting exchanges between Scottish and Chinese artists.

Read the full story.

 

To welcome the beginning of spring, MBL in co-operation with Friends of Streatham Common, is celebrating a Kite Festival on Sunday the 13th April 2008. Continuing with MBL’s mission of providing cultural supports for Chinese children living abroad, we take the Kite Festival as a unique opportunity for Chinese Children to experience Chinese culture through a fun and outdoor activity. This will also be a special occasion for families with Chinese children to converge together to make friends and enjoy family harmonies.

(more…)

 

China Design Now exhibition is held at Victoria & Albert Museum from Saturday 15 March until 13 July.

Guardian’s Tim Adams previews of the exhibition.

 

BFI Southbank Jia Zhangke Season is showing four features and two documentaries made by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. The Golden Lion-winning Still Life (三峡好人 2006) is released in the UK this month. Also in Jia Zhangke Season are Dong (东 2006), a companion documentary of Still Life, a new documentary Wu Yong (无用 2007) about Chinese fashion industry, and Jia’s early works including Unknown Pleasures (任逍遥 2002), The World (世界 2004), and Xiao Wu (小武 1997).

 

The new Saatchi Gallery in the Duke of York’s HQ will open with a contemporary Chinese art exhibition The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art.

Jane Macartney from the Times interviewed Zhang Xiaogang, a leading Chinese artist, whose works are in the new exhibition.

Zhang Xiaogang seems almost untouched by his rise to fame and fortune. An unassuming, bespectacled man of nearly 50, he is unimpressed that his paintings can now command between $500,000 and $1 million per canvas. And several times that at auction.

But he is excited that several of his paintings will be on show soon at the Saatchi collection in London as part of the China Now festival.

Read the full article.

 

Anna May Wong (黄柳霜), a thrid generation Chinese-Amercian, was the most admired Asian actor in western cinema, starring in a number of films both in Hollywood and Europe, from 1920s to 1960s. A new documentary about her, Frosted Yellow Willows - Anna May Wong, Her Life, Times and Legend, made by Elaine Mae Woo (胡美金), will be shown at National Portrait Gallery on Friday 8th Feb (020-7312 2463) and at BFI Southbank on Saturday 9th Feb (020-7928 3232).

Mattew Sweet writes about Anna Way Wong’s life on the Guardian: Snakes, salves and seduction:

In 1933, Doris Mackie of Film Weekly magazine visited Ealing studios to observe the shooting of a sweaty tropical melodrama called Tiger Bay, and found its star railing against cinema in general and Hollywood in particular. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain?” asked Wong. “And so crude a villain. Murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the west?”

 

Michael Church meets Chinese pipa player Wu Man (吴蛮) and introduces her instrument and music on the Guardian:

An eighth-century Chinese poet likened the sound of the pipa, the leaf-shaped Chinese lute, to that of pearls falling on a jade plate. That may be accurate, but it’s only one of the effects the world’s leading player can extract from it: Wu Man’s pipa can crack jokes, sing sweetly, caress, howl or roar - sounds you’d scarcely dream it was possible to produce with 10 fingernails and four strings over a shallow rosewood box.

Read the full report.

Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic, with the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, is relasesed on February 4 by Nonesuch.