The first time I saw Ai Weiwei’s art, I was appalled. Almost twenty years ago, long before he became an internationally-known contemporary artist, one of my Chinese-language classmates at Qinghua University brought me to Ai’s studio on the outskirts of Beijing.
Read more at: https://chinachannel.org/2017/10/20/exhibition-as-theater/.
China’s Palace Museum has always been a symbol of political legitimacy, its art and artifacts a kind of currency. Making imperial treasures public to the new nation, it first opened its doors in the Forbidden City in 1925. But many of its finest pieces are no longer in Beijing.
Read more at: http://evenmagazine.com/imperial-by-design/.
May 17th in Hong Kong marked the opening of a two-week ‘Umbrella Festival,’ a pro-democracy sit-in protest that lasted from September to December 2014. The Umbrella Movement was one of the largest political demonstrations the city had ever seen.
Read more at: https://cpianalysis.org/2015/06/04/exhibiting-hong-kongs-umbrella-movement-an-end-or-a-beginning/.
This year, the 43rd annual Hong Kong Arts Festival commissioned a chamber opera in three acts called Datong: The Chinese Utopia. Depicting the life and times of Kang Youwei (1858-1927), a philosopher and reformer of China’s last Qing dynasty, it premiered in the theater of the Hong Kong City Hall.
Read more at: http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/culture/new-opera-and-hong-kongs-utopian-legacy.
Last Saturday, April 26, marked the official opening of Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum, the world’s first permanent exhibition on the 1989 Tiananmen student movement. On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the pro-democracy protests and Beijing’s brutal crackdown, the museum—sponsored by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements—opened with another kind of protest on its doorstep.
Read more at: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/on-hong-kongs-tiananmen-museum.
As the 120th anniversary of his birth approaches this month, Mao Zedong has been reinvented. Shaoshan, the village in Hunan Province where the Chinese leader grew up, has spent over 1.9 billion yuan (about $312 million) to restore his former residence and a nearby memorial plaza, and is planning festivities such as a mass singing of the Cultural Revolution anthem, “The East is Red.”
Read more at: https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/chairman-maos-everyman-makeover/282533/.
At the base of the Oriental Pearl Tower is an exhibition of Shanghai history. The Shanghai History Exhibition Hall (Shanghai chengshi lishi fazhan chenlieguan), created in consultation with the Shanghai History Museum, recreates dioramas of everyday life in the Republican era (1912-1949).
Read more at: http://www.thechinabeat.org/?author=1&paged=17.
Denise Y. Ho 