井底之蛙

Via BibliOdyssey an exhibition of the prints of the 1911 revolution from Princeton.

The prints are great, if a little small. One thing that struck me was the disclaimer at the bottom of the first page. “The Princeton East Asian Library in no way supports the rhetoric or depictions that are presented on the prints.”

What is that supposed to mean? I can think of two possibilites.

1. As a notoriously conservative institution¹ Princeton is opposed to the overthrow  of the Qing dynasty and is still hoping for the return of the Manchus.

2. Something other reason. But what could it be?

1. How many Princeton alums does it take to change a lightbulb?

   Four. One to change the bulb and three to point out how much better the old bulb was. [↩]

Some time ago Stefan Landsberger¹ sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a couple are very appropriate as classes wind down.

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1. This is one of the advantages of having a blog. Cool people with all sorts of interesting stuff send it to you. If you have not been to Stefan’s Chinese Propaganda Poster site you really should [↩]

China Beat has a nice post up linking to some teaching resources. Although they list some really good resources that you should all go look at they leave out the the best part of the Asia Society page, which is AsiaFood. Besides being a good on-line cookbook it lets you search based on what ingredients you happen to have on hand and recommends things.

If you have not seen it already, UCSD has put a lot of reviews of classic works on Chinese history on-line. They look to me like the type of things grad students in a reading circle for their comps would be passing around, which makes them handy if you are studying for yours or if you just want to know more about Chinese history. They are more useful that reviews from journals, particularly for the older books, as they tend to try and figure how how valuable some of these things are given developments in scholarship since they were written.

http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/chinesehistory/pgp/index.html

I just found the wonderful open access journal Museum Anthropology Review. There are a few reviews available there that will be of interest to Frog readers.

See for example this review of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas.

It looks like the museum raises some interesting questions about the material objects on display, for example:

As you begin a clockwise tour of the room, the introduction on the wall asks, “When Does an Object Become an Artifact?,” beginning a passage that is unfortunately obscured by the very artifacts that it goes on to describe. For those who succeed in reading between the legs of a wooden stool, however, a series of questions challenge their understanding of everyday objects: “Why are certain objects selected and labeled as meaningful? What do the objects say about their owners, their abandoners, their salvagers? Do they merely fulfill a useful function or do they also contain our longings, our identities, our imagination?” These rhetorical questions linger in viewers’ minds as they begin their round.

Via Easternity and Danwei, Cao Fei’s Second Life RMB City. If you want a nice view of what China is today, this is it. You would of course get a better view if you went on Second Life¹ and looked yourself, but apparently it is not done yet.

1. Even the guys from Danwei, who think Second Life is for wankers, think this is cool [↩]

If so this may be for you. I did a talk about my book for our library and they have taped it and put it on-line.

I’ve posted links to interesting recent articles on Tibet on a blog for my teachers’ workshop, ASIA: LEARNING FROM, TEACHING ABOUT.

If you will forgive the promotion, this may be of interest to other Frogs…

Cambridge University’s humanities centre (CRASSH) recently received funding for a two-year network on China, on the theme of modernity. Most of the scholars involved are approaching this from the field of comparative literature, but also there are historians and translation scholars. There will be conferences in Cambridge (this May), Yale (later this year) and Tsinghua (2009).

Some information is online here about the May conference http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/chinaconference.html.

Several generations later, in Zhao Mengfu’s “Twin Pines, Level Distance,” something new appears. No more realism; no more romanticism; in a sense, no more painting. Now the landscape image is an extension of writing, a form of embodied thought, an essence of landscapeness, a text to be read. In the contemporary West we have a term for this: conceptual art.

With Asia Week in New York the NYT has a review of a show called “Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings” There is a slide-show too! It looks like a nice show and a good book. Given some of the interest in connecting Chinese art to western traditions in the last post and the comments I thought I would post this.

Via HNN