On Lotuses

I know why there are so many poems on lotuses. In Indian literature, to have eyes like lotuses is a description reserved only for the goddesses or the most beautiful of women. In every temple, the lotus motif appears in thousands of variations. Lotus blossoms fill the white space of Chinese landscape paintings, bursting forth in luminous pink and white.

In the middle of my campus, there are several rows of flower pots filled with lotuses. I didn't notice this small garden at first. In the thick, polluted Beijing atmosphere, everything from a distance appears the same shade of hazy gray.

I've started looking at the lotuses in between classes. The leaves of the lotus plant are wide and flat lily pads, criss crossed with spiderweb veins like the creases on my palm. They fan outwards from a milky white center, edges curled like clouds. Below, in the basin of the flower pot is a viscous mixture of sludge and slime. In the heat of the day, I can see millions of tiny parasites twitching in the water, sparkling like bits of mica. The stalks of the lily pads shoot out of the water, straight and slender. Like many have said before, every flower has a different personality. Young buds are still green, halfway between stalk and blossom. Some sweet cheeked buds are nearly open, swollen into full pink moons. A lotus in full bloom is truly intoxicating. Its scent penetrates my nostrils and fills my lungs. Older lotuses with withered, yellowing petals are no less beautiful. And when a petal of a lotus falls, sometimes it will land on a lily pad and become the eyelash of an angel.

Lotuses

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Long Weekend of Ming

Believe it or not, I am already halfway through my summer program. We took our midterm on Thursday and are now on our "break" from class, which is for all of 3 days. Most of the students left Beijing for greener pastures, but I decided to hang out here to relax and to explore the city some more. Yesterday, I went to the Ming Tombs, which are about an hour and a half outside the city.
The tombs were intended to contain the bodies of all of the previous emperors (the vast majority of them have been robbed repeatedly over the centuries), and are set amidst rolling mountains for good feng shui. The Chinese have had a rather stable approach to the afterlife, in the sense that they really believed that you could take it with you. Death was viewed not as an end, but as a portal to another world, and it was immensely important that you established yourself in the hierarchy from the getgo by displaying your worldly treasures. This is essentially why Chinese art historians exist today: the Chinese left behind a whole lot of loot.
Here I am ascending the stairs to the primary gateway to the tomb. The tomb is completely underground, but the entryway is marked with this structure and a stele containing the king's name.I'm looking down from the tomb mound at the offering table below.

At most of the tombs, you are not allowed to go into the chamber where the body was kept, but I got lucky this time. Now I know that the inside of a Ming Dynasty emperor's tomb looks like Penn Station!
Outside of the tomb there were these cute little tables with elephant seats and three elephants supporting the table with upturned trunks.
Lots of picknickers at these tables.
An incense burner, where offerings were made to the emperor. Today, people continue to put money on these more sacred spots.
Older Beijing architecture has such amazing terracotta decorative elements!
I have to say that this weekend is sure going swim-MING-ly!

Baozi Shack

Ladies and gentlemen, may I direct your attention to the above photo. We are looking at one of China's biggest assets: no, it is not the streets bustling with indefatigable commerce, nor the super highway that propels the Chinese people into the heights of capitalism; rather, it is the somewhat inconspicuous storefront, marked by a single sign, where the apogee of seven thousand years of civilization pulsates. Citizens of the world, I give you the baozi shack.
The baozi shack is akin to the American drive through, only the food is much, much, better. People congregate here at all times of the day: in the morning, for a midday snack, and around dinner time.
I make no exaggeration when I say that baozi have changed my life. Those of you who know me know my obsession with small dumplings and stuffed buns. Sadly, New York's offerings in this department truly bite, and I have been living without regular doses of fluffy white buns stuffed with savory meat for far too long.
Baozi are made fresh daily. The baozi people take pride in their work, but do not necessarily enjoy having their photo taken.
This man was a little less reluctant to have his picture taken. You can see the enormous bowl filled with ground meat and spices at the bottom right.
I was lucky enough to catch him in the process of rolling out small pieces of dough, which are then filled with meat.
They are then steamed over these trashcan like contraptions.
Perfect, mouthwatering baozi. They are actually rather small in size, which it makes all the more easy to pop them into your mouth, one after the other.
The interior of baozi varies by establishment. They can be salty, sweet, sour, crunchy, you name it. Generally, however, they are filled with a mixture of pork and some kind of vegetable.
And if you are still not full, then there are the jiaozi!
You can often see many people walking around with plastic bags filled with baozi or jiaozi. They are put into the bag when they are piping hot, and I am still trying to figure out how the bag does not melt onto the baozi. Baozi defy laws of physics? I can believe it. Anyway, this blog entry is intended not only to inspire and educate people on baozi, but also to provide an explanation as to why I will return home 10 pounds heavier in 2 months from now.

Longqingxia

At PiB we usually have a class trip every weekend, and today we went to the Lonqingxia gorge. It is located about 2 hours outside Beijing, a big tourist attraction, offering stunning views of towering mountains and placid waters (courtesy of the man made dam). The entrance of the park is marked by this large dragon tunnel, which surprisingly enough, contains a series of escalators that whisk you up to the water level.
A group of our extremely charming second year teachers, who are some of the best in the country!


There were a number of pretty fab activities at the gorge, including boat rides. Here I am, basking in the serenity of the surroundings. You can ascend the mountain either by foot or by gondola. Most of the PiB students overestimated their physical capabilities and hoofed it to the top. The cliffs rise up quite sharply, so I was quite relieved that I could take the gondola on the way down. Below is a view from the top.
Apart from the beautiful trails and boat rides, there were lots of other interesting activities. Can you make out what is happening in the above picture? No? Okay, so look below. . .
In my Chinese art history classes, we learned that Chinese landscape painting relies heavily on engaging multiple perspectives, which is to say that instead of looking at a landscape from a single vantage point, the artist moves around and combines views of the landscape from all angles. Above is the most famous Chinese landscape painting of all time, "Travelers Among Mountains and Streams," by the Song dynasty artist (11th century), Fan Kuan.
After seeing the landscape today though. . . um. . . I don't know. . . it seems pretty "realistic" to me.
This is a Buddhist temple atop one of the peaks of the gorge. Mountains are holy places in most religions, and the temple was very peaceful.

The bus ride over was really fun! I sat on a bus, which was mostly filled with teachers, and they taught us some really pretty (and simple) Chinese songs.

The entryway to the park--all of the lanterns made me think of one of the scenes from Seth's movie where the children release white lanterns into the sky.

And this is probably one of the weirdest things I saw today: children playing in plastic bubbles. What is even weirder? Parents who drop their children playing in bubbles into the reservoir!

798

This past weekend, I went to the 798 Galleries in Beijing, which is a huge hub for sales of contemporary art. In the past 10 years, Chinese contemporary art has experienced nothing short of a sonic boom in international interest. Prices have skyrocketed, and thousands of Chinese artists are vying for attention. As a result, in a place where there were once 10 galleries, now there are hundreds. I was somewhat overwhelmed by just how many things there were to see, but I did notice that there was a lot of tongue and cheek, and mostly in reference to communist iconography.

For instance: An inverted iron fist, corroded and decrepit, that marks the entrance to an ultra trendy Lower East Side like gallery.

Below, some charming, uniform wearing, gun toting babes en pointe. Behind the sculpture, you can just make out a pastelly, waterlily type painting. Appropriate, in the sense that the communist babes owe a clear tribute to. . .

. . . Degas's dancer series. Both sculptures acknowledge that beauty often contains something that is essentially repugnant. Obviously, Degas is the clear winner here in terms of form and psychological depth, but I think the reference is cool.

There were also a number of shiny porcelain Maos, cast from moulds. Anyone who has any knowledge of Warhol might think these are total rip offs, but I wouldn't mind owning one or ten because I think they are funny. I think they are also interesting in their contemplation of what it means to be a nation with history.

Tourists to China might not know anything about who heads the government, but they can buy one of these red Maos, and they can also visit the number one tourist destination in China, the terracotta warriors of Xian (view last August's post for more on that). These warriors were also cast from moulds (you can buy nearly identical ones today as well). To the average visitor, the terracotta warriors carry with them all the allure of an imagined, Ancient, historical China. They are part of a mysterious past that we can access today--but how much of it is truly accessible? And what part of history do they represent? It seems to me that many Chinese artists are deeply engaged in historicizing the present.

I really don't have much familiarity with the Chinese contemporary art scene, but my favorite Chinese artist thus far is Xu Bing (whose work is very difficult to come by nowadays), who created the fabulous installation piece below, "Book from the Sky." In this piece, Xu invents thousands of individualized, nonsensical characters and prints them on books and sheaves of paper. In his hanging of the paper, Xu imparts a very literal symbolism to his work, in that ancient Chinese historical texts have always maintained that their writing descended from the heavens in the form of light rays, and then manifested itself in tracks of bird's feet, cracks on tortoise shells, patterns in the sand, etc. The burden of history once again!

-->These are imagined Chinese characters! -->