China, google, art & politics

tremors

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Cultural Dictionary:
totalitarianism [(toh-tal-uh- tair -ee-uh-niz-uhm)]
Domination by a government of all political, social, and economic activities in a nation. Totalitarianism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century.

[to which I would add domination of all media]
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- '♫ ♪♪ ♫ WE have all the time in the world....♪♫' -

Any PJ fans in China? ☼
京 仅 尽 径 惊 琎 痉 紧 经 警 谨 鲸



Wu Guanzhong obituary

Chinese artist who emerged from a cultural straitjacket as a modern master




* Michael Sullivan
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 July 2010 18.42 BST
* Article history

Scenery of GuilinView larger picture Scenery of Guilin, above, painted by Wu Guanzhong, below, in 1973, the year he returned from working as a farm labourer Photograph: Christie's Images

In the summer of 1950, soon after Mao Zedong had proclaimed the founding of the people's republic, Wu Guanzhong, happily studying painting in Paris, made the fateful decision to return to China. Appointed to teach in the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, his head full of Cézanne and Van Gogh, he soon found that he was forbidden to mention those names, and felt unable to face his radical students until he could talk about socialist realism in the Soviet Union, and its foreshadowing in the art of Ilya Repin. This was the beginning of almost three decades of harassment and victimisation that, for him and countless others, ended only after the death of Mao in 1976.
Wu Guanzhong



One of modern China's leading artists, Wu, who has died aged 90, was born into a peasant family in a village near Yixing, in the east-coast province of Jiangsu, where his father was head of the primary school. In his teens he was training to be an electrical engineer when he met Chu Teh Chun, then studying art under Lin Fengmian at the Academy of Art in Hangzhou, to the south. He transferred to that delectable lakeside institution, where his talent blossomed under Lin's guidance.

When war came in 1937, Wu moved with the school to the far west – first to Yunnan, then to Chongqing, the wartime capital, where Lin, who had spent several years in France, fired his most gifted students with a longing to go there. Wu, Chu and the equally gifted Zhao Wuji set about learning French, and by 1948 they were settled in Paris. Wu, a favourite student of Jean Souverbie, felt increasingly cut off from his roots until, after agonising heart-searching, he returned to Beijing, leaving Chu and Zhao to flourish as major figures in the art world of Paris.

Exiled from the Central Academy, Wu took a job in the architecture department at Qinghua University, Beijing, and later at the Academy of Decorative Arts, founded by Pang Xunqin in 1953 with the support of the premier, Zhou Enlai. Thereafter, he held several teaching posts until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in August 1966, when he was forbidden to teach, write or paint.



Eventually he was sent to the country to work as a farm labourer. After two years of backbreaking work, he was permitted to paint, on any bit of board he could find, on Sundays. He remarked later that he had become a member of the dung basket school of painting.

Gradually, things got better. In 1973 Wu was one of the leading artists brought back from the countryside – on the initiative of Zhou – to decorate hotels and public buildings. He was painting again, travelling around China, writing articles. His rehabilitation was marked by an exhibition of his work in 1978 at the Central Academy. From that moment, he never looked back. Major exhibitions of his work were held in the British Museum in 1988, in the US in 1988-89, in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore, and today he is recognised around the world as one of the masters of modern Chinese painting.

Wu was trained as an oil painter, chiefly of the human figure. When his nudes were condemned in the early 1950s, he destroyed them all and did not paint another until 1990, after a longed-for return visit to Paris. Unwilling to paint heroic workers, peasants and soldiers, he had turned to landscape, painted both in oils and in ink on paper.


http://images.china.cn/site1000/20070428/0011432109c4079d075207.jpg

Unlike some other modern Chinese artists, he never found the choice of styles a problem. Asked whether he preferred the Chinese or the western style, he said: "When I take up a brush to paint, I paint a Chinese picture."

Wu's style, or rather styles, are unmistakable. His landscapes in oils are marked by a delicacy of touch and colour, a purity and fluidity of line, that are very seductive. He also liked to work in the traditional Chinese medium of ink on paper, and his studies of trees and plants have a vitality and freedom that sometimes verges on abstract expressionism, although Wu always denied that abstraction was an issue.

Indeed, perhaps his chief contribution to the development of Chinese painting since 1950 was his defence of abstraction. "Don't be afraid of it," he insisted, "because it is all around us in nature – in the design of the trellis in a garden pavilion, in the shadow of the bamboo leaves on a white wall... The line that connects the painted image to the real thing can never be broken." He would even say that the compositions of Piet Mondrian were not pure abstractions, because they obeyed the laws of harmony in nature. To the Chinese artist, there is no art that does not have a reference in nature.

Wu was a remarkable man, not only for his prodigious talent, but for the courage with which he stood up to the Maoist ideologues – unlike his teacher Lin, who was crushed by them – for the lucidity of his writings about art, and for the demands he made upon himself. He was a prolific painter, perhaps excessively so, and not all his work, in particular in the too-fluid Chinese medium of brush and ink, is up to his best standard. Realising this, in 1991 he destroyed several hundred of his paintings. He died a much-admired "old master", survived by his wife, Zhu Biqin, two sons and a daughter, and many young artists who had felt his inspiring influence in stressful times.

• Wu Guanzhong, artist, born 29 August 1919; died 25 June 2010


(google image search gstatic link)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... g-obituary




http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/arts/ ... -obit.html

http://billycreek.blogspot.com/2010/06/ ... g-rip.html

tremors

http://www.bigissue.co.uk

Great Issue this week - essential.

Includes a piece about China, Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse education, cynical 'charity', getting into bed with the enemy, brainwashing children, exploitation and the potential to do much greater good - written by Big Issue founder John Bird.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/201 ... sh-schools




This weeks cover star, UK rapper professor green sounds pretty decent also (and tough), may check him out when possible. A lot in the issue about knifecrime UK. Something we have to worry about more than guns here.

tremors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/au ... -wikipedia

MIA takes on Google, YouTube and Wikipedia

Sri Lankan military take down my videos and bully my fans, says the controversial star on a trawl through her web profile. But she's fighting back by communicating in characters




"Mathangi 'Maya' Arulpragasam (born 18 July 1975), better known by her stage name MIA, is a Sri Lankan/British songwriter, record producer, singer, rapper, fashion designer, visual artist, and political activist." And right now, perched on a sofa at the XL Records office in west London, staring into her gold Apple MacBook, MIA is reading the above words on her Wikipedia entry. Seven years after her first single Galang spread across the web like an art-school-incubated virus – confirming her status as one of the first pop stars of the digital age – she's back with /\/\/\Y/\ (or Maya, for those who can decipher the slashes), and the Guardian has asked her to talk us through her online presence in an attempt to sort fact from fiction. On paper this sounds like a straightforward process. In reality though, as with MIA's music, a single answer can see her head off across continents on dizzying tangents, and encompass pop references, multi-layered political rants, occasional bouts of paranoia, identity politics, and what was the question again?

We meet 10 days after the music blogs have gone into meltdown following her "trufflegate" feud with the New York Times after its writer Lynn Hirschberg suggested MIA wasn't as 4REAL as she claims. MIA responded by posting the writer's mobile number on Twitter and uploading a clip of the interview online. "This is the new shit," she says unabashedly. "This is the new way to interpret the news for artists because we have got the internet, we have got Twitter, we have got all our fans right there. So why do you have to let someone like Lynn shit on you?"

A prolific web user, she says she doesn't really have a favourite go-to website or music blog because she doesn't trust many of them. "I do go on my Twitter [@_M_I_A_] and look at what my fans say though," she admits. "If my fans are funny then I'll retweet and read what they're saying about other shit." Other than that she says she spends a lot of time looking at "stoopid shit", Mexican gangs, Islamic art, images of "3D mosques", and web art, which is where she discovered the photo illusions of Jaime Martinez and signed him to her label NEET.

Recently, MIA also warned fans that Google was developed with the help of CIA seed money. And her new album opens with The Message, a robotic skit that goes: "iPhone's connected to the internet connected to the Google connected to the government." Still, she's game for our Google challenge. Let the digital dissection begin ...
MIA on her Wikipedia entry
MIA1-Ravi Thiagaraja

Firstly, we ask her to pull up her Wikipedia entry. It's fairly generic, detailing everything from her name in Tamil script to her love of Harmony Korine and radical cinema. "I hate my Wikipedia page," she announces as soon as it loads up. "It's really boring to look at. I'd get rid of all this white space. And I'd make the font a bit more interesting." If you've ever seen the fluoro overload of her own website or Twitter page this should come as no surprise. As Wikipedia is notorious for its user-generated inaccuracies and also prone to sabotage, has she – as someone with form in using the net to set the record straight – ever doctored her own entry? "No," she insists. "I really don't know how to do that."

We scroll through the page. In the "Art and Film" sub-section it says, "Jude Law was among early buyers of artwork" after her stint at St Martins. That's a lie, surely?

"It's true, actually. He said that his house got burgled and someone took it, though." So, somewhere in London a burglar is sitting on an original MIA print? "Yeah and he's probably, like, peed on it or something and couldn't give a shit," she jokes. We whizz through the sections on her time working with Elastica and meeting electro sex pest Peaches who encouraged her to make music – all true. Is there anything on here that is incorrect? "Are you working for Wikipedia?" she laughs. "I haven't actually read it in detail but … I thought it was interesting that the section on Diplo got removed when we stopped working together. He emailed me about that; that's why I know that section's missing."

Does she know who removed it? "I have no idea."
MIA on why her new album is un-Googleable
MIA2-Ravi Thiagaraja

MIA often tweets using nothing but keystrokes and punctuation. So it's hardly surprising that she used the outer reaches of the keyboard to spell out the title of new album, /\/\/\Y/\. Why? "I know it's hard," she says sarcastically, "but once we get there it's gonna be OK. You're learning to use keys that are not letters …" She instructs me to type: "Forward strike, backwards strike, forward strike, backwards strike and so on, then Y for 'Why are we doing this?' [laughs] Then we go back to forward strike ..."

So we put /\/\/\Y/\ into Google, hit return and – drum roll, please! – no matches are returned (possibly because Google doesn't recognise slashes as characters). "OK, it doesn't come up, yeah, but one day that'll be coded and take you somewhere amazing." Ask her why she didn't choose something more Google-friendly and her response is another declaration of war on The Man: "To resist the internet is really difficult to do. I mean, there are so many cunts on there. Loads of Wall Street dudes are stepping on to the internet and seeing it as the gold rush and I think it's [about] not wanting to be used for that reason …"
MIA on the music blogs
MIA3-Ravi Thiagaraja

On the day of our interview, the music blogs are running a story about the appearance of a new MIA vocal on a track called Toldya by British outfit Sali. It rates highly when we first Google "MIA" (alongside the Born Free video and, unexpectedly, her version of The Wire theme with Baltimore's Blaqstarr). NME.com, meanwhile, runs the story as "MIA lends her vocals to new underground track Toldya." So, how did the track come about? "That's not me," she quickly corrects. "It's somebody that's taken a bit of my song and now they're saying that I worked with them. They asked for permission but I didn't write back so they put it out anyway." She sighs: "I already have to deal with being misrepresented all the fucking time but when it's people you know adding to it, then it gets really hard."

And there's another misconception that she'd like to clear up: that former boyfriend and collaborator Diplo produced her first album. "That annoys the fuck out of me because I met him way after I finished it. Everyone is always [adopts mardy voice], 'The producer who made all the songs.' If you read the credits, he worked on one song and that's just putting somebody else's song next to my vocal. Diplo was the mediator with the phone numbers."
MIA on YouTube (and the Sri Lankan government)
MIA4-Ravi Thiagaraja

MIA's fraught relationship with the Sri Lankan government has been well documented. She named her first album after her father, Arular, a key member of the Tamil separatist movement, and his links to the Tamil Tigers have earned her a "terrorist sympathiser" tag. She has spoken out against the events which last year saw Tamil civilians rounded up and placed in prison camps after the defeat of Tamil Tigers; she says she agreed to perform at the Grammys with Jay-Z, Kanye and Lil Wayne to bring international attention to the cause. She's also tweeted links to executions carried out by the Sri Lankan government. But it's when we direct her to YouTube that she really begins to vent. Type "MIA" into the site and her Clash-sampling, film-soundtrack-bothering global hit Paper Planes is the first video up. But it's hosted by US video channel Vevo, not by her own channel, or any of her fans.

"They buried my Paper Planes, none of my fucking shit comes up," she says. "All my videos have been constantly pulled, the latest thing that's up there is from 11 months ago."

Who's pulling them? The record company?

"No, the Sri Lankan government is writing to them and saying, 'If you stick MIA videos up we're gonna take you to jail for supporting terrorism.'"

What follows is a convoluted, impassioned, 15-minute rant covering death squads, Californian internet servers and Sri Lanka's defence minister. In summary, here are the key points:

1) The Sri Lankan government bombarded fans who uploaded her videos, asking them to remove them: "They've Facebooked and MySpaced my fans saying, 'If you support this person you'll get done for terrorism because under the PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] you're supporting someone who supports a terrorist group and you're a terrorist because it covers anything to do with affiliation.'"

2) For a developing country, the government is also scarily clued-up when it comes to the internet, due to its IT links with the west: "They really fucking know what they're fucking doing and it's crazy fucked-up that I am the first artist on the internet who happened to be a Tamil. And the first government that took down the Tamils is the most internet-championing family of the third world. So it was a battle of the internet when we got on there."

3) Her track Sunshowers from 2004 is one of the oldest MIA videos on YouTube. It's hosted by someone called TubeyBooby and the user comments tell their own story. "He's the only fan that's got shit up," she says with pride. "Whoever he is and wherever he is, he doesn't give a fuck, I like him ... I have the Sunshowers comments printed out." There are 10,000 of them, she says, and if you look, you can see where "the military started going in and commenting".

4) By 2008, she says, the propaganda was kicking in and she was "getting boxed in by my own shit". But she doesn't regret anything she's done or said and puts it down to experience: "That's a great lesson to learn, like, this is how it can be manipulated."
MIA on internet skits
MIA5-Ravi Thiagaraja

As things are, unsurprisingly, getting a little heavy, the Guardian suggests we lighten the mood by searching for "MIA + comedy". "Didn't you find my Born Free video funny?" she jokes, about the Romain-Gavras video which comes with an age restriction on YouTube. "I try to be funny but it's always misconstrued." Although there's a great sketch in which comedian Aziz Ansari tells how he planned to employ his best Tamil chat-up line on MIA, little comes up. However, one site does: Amiright.com advertises itself as "making fun of music, one song at a time" and includes parody songs (All He Wants To Do Is Shoot And Kill Bugs Bunny to the tune of Paper Planes) and a section called "change a song letter in a song title" which sees MIA's Galang become Galant, a Mitsubishi car model. MIA stares at it blankly.

"What? That's meant to be funny? There's loads of fun stuff in my songs; you'll get it if you listen," she protests. "Anyway, I say jokes and people think it's the most fucking controversial thing anyone's ever said. The thing I said about Justin Bieber was a joke but no one got it ..." (She said she found his video "more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I've made.").

"So I'm not gonna say jokes any more," she jokes. "You can't trick me, I'm not gonna walk into that trap."