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2010.06 P49-52 A&C.Indd ARTS+CULTURE SNAPSHOTS ART Stay up! It’s too hot to sleep and galleries and museums around town are staging White Nights. Check out the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC); Beijing Center for the Arts; the Beijing World, Today Art and CAFA Art Museums, UCCA and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre after the sun goes down. Ask at the latter for details of when and how. Meanwhile, Australia opens their Year of Culture in China with a bang: Papunya Tula at NAMOC (see p50) and a positively Spring-Festival- Gala-like array of talent at the NCPA on June 10. But wait! No sign of Kylie! www.imagineaustralia.net CINEMA The Fourth Beijing International Movie Festival (Jun 7-30) will be presenting a dizzying spectacle of independent films and film- makers from around the globe. It’s an Olympiad of film: Knowledge is the Beginning from Israel/Palestine (Jun 7, 26), Silent Shame from Japan (Jun 10), Die Entebehrlichen from Germany (Jun 11), not to mention a series of Irish film shorts (Jun 9). On the local scene, Channel Zero will screen a documentary titled 65 Red Roses about a young woman’s struggle with cystic fibrosis (Jun 15). As far as Hollywood output, Meg Ryan and Antonio Banderas couple up in My Mom’s New Boyfriend – a pairing so bizarre it may just need to be viewed on pirated DVD. IN PRINT QIU ZHEN'S "SATAN'S WEDDING" On June 15, Deborah Fallows XXXXXXXX visits The Bookworm to promote her second book, Dreaming in Chinese. Fallows, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics, provides a charming analysis of how language study helps unlock cul- ART ATTACK tural doors. As far as June releases go, we greet the arrival of Pulitzer- CHRISTINE LASKOWSKI BELIEVES GRASS IS NOT FOR GAZING winning writer Oscar Hijuelos. Proving that it’s never too late to extend the nner Mongolia is a moonscape York City, you know exactly what I’m of others congregating on a rectangle story of a character, in Beautiful dust bowl while grass in Beijing talking about. A weekly ritual of lawn, of lawn. Surrounded by the imposing Maria of My Soul (Hyperion), Hijuelos Iparks is sacrosanct. I don’t get it. a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi wine and skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan, revisits the protagonist of his novel, For those of us holed up in Beijing’s free films outdoors. Every Monday I when we weren’t gazing at the screen, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. concrete kingdom, we take nature would slink out of my summer intern- we were gazing up at the stars. when we can get it (if we can get ship to stake our claim in Bryant Park We might not have stars here, but STAGE ChopSchticks returns early this it). Meaning, when I go to the park, I with my Minnie Mouse bedsheet. Beijing could do this. We have parks month to present the Chicago feel entitled to enjoying a bit of lawn Dmitri would bring the bread and and a populace that would certainly Improv All-Stars on June 5 – these with my book or my friends without hummus, Jim the wine, and Miranda embrace such an idea, not only in comedians also moonlight in the getting yelled at by some skinny, would supply the surprise (sometimes terms of attendance but the exchange, corporate realm for an innovative carbuncular guard. Grass is for a cantelope, sometimes chili). Sure, I the cross-cultural education. I can see improv business called Spark Creative (see p52). Moving along throwing a blanket on and lounging, was interested in a free screening of it now: Roman Polanski’s Knife in the gracefully to the dance scene, and during the recent Ditan Folk Ghostbusters and Who’s Afraid of Water, followed by Jiang Wen’s Devils Beijing Contemporary Dance Festival, I got a reminder of just how Virginia Woolf, but in most instances, on the Doorstep. If music festivals can Theater presents Martlet (Jun 19- fine it is to be able to fondle blades the wine buzz, close company and make it happen, then why not film 20). Choreographed by its young of grass between my toes. It was then gentle temperatures left me so festivals? It’s time that Beijing expanded. dancers, it uses a “footless” bird that it hit me – wouldn’t it be glorious cozy and drowsy, I was usually fast I’d even pay a little money so long as as a metaphor for navigating hec- tic Beijing life. For something a to have an outdoor summer film asleep before the films ended. The real organizers turned a blind eye to the six little more conventional, the NCPA series? For anyone who’s had the good appeal lay in the extraordinary sum- Yanjings in my bag and let me have my will present the classic opera L’Elisir fortune to spend a summer in New mer circumstances: you and hundreds little patch of grass in peace. d’Amore (Jun 25-28). PHOTO: COURTESY OF 798 PHOTO GALLERY JUNE 2010 49 ART FEATURE painting.” The children used patterns that they knew from spiritual ceremonies, and their motifs embodied the creation stories (or Dreamings) of their people, as well as totems that they knew from their elders. Seeing their Dreamings and totems on the wall of the school inspired the local men; they felt that if such images were to be preserved, it was their responsibility to ensure accurate portrayal and protection of the most secret aspects of their heritage. Papunya was the home of the Honey Ant Dreaming and it was this story that the men began to record, not just on the walls of the school but on any hard surface available, from car bonnets to matchboxes. In 1972, they formed the Papunya Tula collective, and although the white Australian authorities later cavalierly painted over the first murals, the Western Desert Art Movement flourished. By the late 1980s it had transformed the landscape of Australian art and was beginning its conquest of world markets. By the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, aboriginal paintings from the Papunya Tula movement had been enshrined as a national cultural treasure, and were celebrated in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, “Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius.” IT WAS THIS STORY THAT THE MEN BEGAN TO RECORD ON ANY HARD SURFACE AVAILABLE, FROM CAR BONNETS TO MATCHBOXES In 2006-2007 the National Museum of Australia created an exhibition of works from the earliest days of Papunya Tula. Many of these pieces by the most senior members of the collective (which had come to include women among its most important practitioners) had never been publicly exhibited before. It is this exhibition that STORM AT CAMPS ON THE RAIN DREAMING TRAIL, KAAPA TJAMPITJINPA, 1978 is coming to the National Art Museum of China this month. To many in the art world, price is the ultimate accolade. For them, it may be worth noting that in 2007 a painting by leading Papunya artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri sold at Sotheby’s for the equivalent of USD 1.9 million. Despite his place in one of the most extra- ordinary stories in the history of contemporary AUSTRALIA DREAMING art, Bardon himself had a sad life. He suffered a nervous breakdown upon his return from ABORIGINAL LEGACY Papunya, falling into the care of the notorious by Madeleine O’Dea quack psychiatrist Dr. Harry Bailey, whose “deep sleep therapy” was found by a subsequent Royal Commission to have caused the deaths of 24 patients. Bardon survived, but Bailey’s n 1971 an idealistic young teacher named Bardon, an art teacher, was fascinated to discover “treatment” did nothing to heal the scars inflicted Geoffrey Bardon was posted to one of the that his pupils had never created a Western-style by the early indifference and disdain of Australian remotest places on earth. Papunya was an painting; their rich artistic culture recorded its world authorities for his efforts on behalf of the Papunya Australian Aboriginal settlement whose residents in sand paintings and body decorations. He showed community. Although he received an Order of Ihad been forced from their traditional lands by his young students his acrylic paints, and turned them Australia in 1988 for his achievements, he never cattle farming, and now lived in a lonely outpost in loose on the best hard surface available, the walls of quite recovered from the official contempt that the heart of the Western Desert some 240 kilometers the local school. he first experienced when he brought the Western IMAGE: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST from Alice Springs. The resulting mural was the first such painting Desert art movement to the world. Bardon stayed only 18 months at Papunya’s the people of those lands had ever done, and its primary school, but the artistic movement he helped fusion of ancient motifs with modern materials was “Papunya: Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Deserts” to inspire would galvanize the art world in Australia to spark a revolution in art, leading to an artistic runs from Jun 10-Aug 20 at the National Art and around the globe. movement that came to be known popularly as “dot Museum of China. 50 JUNE 2010 REVIEWS CINEMA FEATURE ART: “EYES TALK” ZHANG JIE AND HU KE Since Yoko and John, the idea of artist couples as collaborators has tended to trigger one’s gag reflex. Fortunately, the Beijing art scene has taught me this need not always be the case. Last month, photo- grapher H.S. Liu and curator Karen Smith’s brought out their Shanghai monograph; this month, artists Zhang Jie and Hu Ke present their joint exhibition, “Eyes Talk.” Through sculpture and oil paintings, they articulate an evocative, visual dialogue between partners.
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