Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One (1867)
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| Si Weiwei |
The artist will unveil his first major public artwork in the city since 2017 on Roosevelt Island as part of the Art X Freedom initiative
Ai Weiwei is returning to New York with a new installation on Roosevelt Island.
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| Ai Weiwei |
Technology is no match for the human will, with all its potential for beauty, creativity and the possibility of making mistakes
China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist
Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.
The Collected Poems of Li He
trans. J. D. Frodsham
(NYRB, March 2017)
Most American readers of Chinese poetry come to it through classic translations by Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Burton Watson, and a few others. With some notable exceptions, those translations have tended to focus on the poetic triumvirate of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE): Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei. The literary context in which those three Tang poets are placed—in China as well as the U.S.—is part of a long, ascendant tradition in Chinese letters, beginning to certain degree with the early anthology that Confucius assembled: the Shijing, better known in English as the Book of Odes or the Book of Songs (Pound translated it as Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius). The poems of the Shijing, which often seem little more than folk ditties, span seven centuries during the fabled Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE)—the time, according to Confucius in his Analects, when politics and society were ordered as they should be. In China, the Zhou and Tang periods are acknowledged as two golden ages, exemplars of what is best in the Chinese tradition. A trajectory of one to the other is easily assumed.
His style as a poet and artist was informed by his upbringing in Shanghai and his years in Paris. He then joined the Pop-fueled studios of New York.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Flickering among the major figures of postwar art — the Minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin, the avant-garde artist Pierre Alechinsky, the abstract painter Sam Francis and others — is the radiant shadow of Walasse Ting.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s of the last century, Walasse Ting's work was immensely popular in America and Europe.
In black silk, head covered over in a yellow and white scarf, she hobbles in pain down the street. An elderly woman, her feet and four toes had been mangled and bound as an infant, a relic of yesteryear's Confucian ideal of elite Han beauty—a bizarre and aberrant statement of protest against the bestial behavior of the Manchu barbarians—that foot fetish of the three to five-inch lotus root.
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| Celebrations for the ninth anniversary of the People’s Republic, Beijing, 1 October 1958 |
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson |
On June 16, 1958, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson arrived in Beijing. According to a press release from the Chinese Photographers Association (CPA), Cartier-Bresson came to China on a “photographic visit” for a book to be entitled “Ten Years of the People's Republic of China.”1 As “friends will be treated with good wine,”2 on June 26, the president and vice president of the CPA received Cartier-Bresson and hosted him at a banquet according to Chinese etiquette. During Cartier-Bresson's shooting in Beijing, the CPA also sent someone to accompany him.
In Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China’s Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard University Press 2020), Robert Cliver reconstructs the history of Chinese silk production in the Yangzi River Delta during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focussed on the 1950s, the book tells the stories of male silk weavers in Shanghai factories, who enjoyed close ties to the Party-state and benefitted greatly from socialist policies after 1949, and the young women toiling in silk thread mills or filatures, without powerful organisations or ties to the new regime. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, and their actions compelled the Party-state to adjust its policies, which in turn produced ever-new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than either war or revolution.
In response to the renewed emphasis of the central government on national security, in November 2015 the authorities of Jilin province, in northeast China, introduced a hotline to report possible spies. The dilemma was how to recognise a spy. Local officials instructed concerned citizens to look out for eight revealing signs (Yang 2015). First, spies never explained their work with clarity, wore different professional hats at the same time, and had plenty of funding at their disposal. Second, at gatherings they often came up with controversial topics then withdrew in the shadows to observe how people reacted in order to select contacts to develop. Third, foreign correspondents, journalists writing about foreign affairs, missionaries, or people involved with NGOs were all likely to be spies. Fourth, spies had proper business cards, but worked irregular hours and the information on the card did not hold up to closer scrutiny. Fifth, people who had studied abroad in many different countries or whose history of studying overseas did not match their age were most likely spies. Sixth, spies enjoyed asking sensitive questions, especially on politics, military affairs, public opinion, and trade. Seventh, they held regular meetings in this or that place to exchange materials and documents. Finally, they could be found at academic conferences and business meetings, where they often gave reactionary speeches and exaggerated the positive aspects of foreign countries.
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| Shi Yang |
When they knocked at his door on the afternoon of 7 February 1923, Shi Yang had just come home after a day in court. Guns in hand, a dozen uniformed policemen rushed into the room, led by a detective in plain clothes. The officer was the first to break the silence: ‘The boss of our department wants to meet you for a chat. Hurry up!’ An experienced lawyer, Shi Yang was not easily intimidated: ‘Who is your boss?’ ‘The head of Hankou police, don’t you understand? Stop talking and follow me!’ ‘Since the director of such an important department has ordered you to come in person to fetch me, I will obviously come. Just please don’t be so aggressive. There is no need.’ Compliant, he followed them outside, despite the protests of his wife who insisted on accompanying him. ‘And why would you do that? Go back inside. I didn’t violate any law: wherever they take me, there is nothing to worry about,’ he reassured her.
The following is a guest post by Arafat A. Razzaque, a PhD candidate in History & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He specializes in medieval Islamic social and cultural history, and has a secondary interest in the Thousand and One Nights, stories from which he first read in Bengali translation.
This article is the first of a two-part series about Aladdin. Part two, entitled “Who wrote Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller,” can be found here.
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The recent clamor around Disney’s forthcoming remake of Aladdin (1992) was a vivid reminder that an entire generation of people today grew up enchanted by the film. Rumors about the studio’s alleged difficulty finding an actor to play Aladdin sparked renewed criticism of Hollywood’s diversity problem. The comedian Hari Kondabolu responded on Twitter: “Lots of brown kids got called Aladdin growing up. Now you…don’t want to cast one of us?”
When I moved to China nearly two years ago, one of the first things I bought was a bicycle. I live on a university campus, where everyone rides, and the bike was cheap: $17 for an ancient Five Rams cruiser, with a lively color scheme of teal and rust. I used to cycle to work when I lived in New York, dodging tourists and threading in between delivery trucks. But the moment I pulled out onto a street in China, it became clear that this was going to be a different experience.
