Some Random Notes on Filmmaking, Art, Music, and Identity

I just watched a great film on that very subject, the Banksy documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" about the underground filmmaker Thierry Guetta (if you can call him that--film collector is more accurate) who turned his obsession for filming street artists into a career as a "street artist."  I wonder if people who film documentaries about artists aren't themselves aspiring to be the artist in the film.  Of course we can all agree that Jia Zhangke is already an accomplished "artist," in that the films he makes have an artistic quality to them. 

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Excavating China's Collective Unconscious: Some Good Contemporary Chinese Art Shows at Shanghai's Moganshan Art District

JJ's show opened on Sept 6 and I was there to witness his performance piece called "water".  This involved the projection of several historical photos of famous Chinese political figures, including of course Chairman Mao, on a blank wall while JJ used water and a large brush to paint images on the wall.  These images faded along with the projections and were then written over or juxtaposed with each other to form a watery impression of recent Chinese history.  He used water as a motif throughout the performance, painting waves and also projecting images of waves on the wall along with the historic figures.  

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Old Shanghai Revisited: Touring the Bund and the Shanghai History Museum with my NYU Shanghai History Class

Last Friday I took my Modern Chinese History students on their first field trip in Shanghai.  Originally I meant to start at the Astor House Hotel just north of the Garden Bridge.  Yet when we reached the Bund, I made a sudden change in plans and took them to the new Waldorf Astoria instead.  We ended up going on an unplanned tour of the Waldorf Astoria, Shanghai's newest elite hotel.  Guided by a young 20-year old Chinese hotel clerk, we toured the hotel, taking in the ballroom, library, several fancy restaurants, and the famous Long Bar.  Sometimes the best part of these field trips is what happens outside your plans.

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Jazzing Chinese Folk: The Solitary Bird CD Release Party @ TwoCities Gallery

On Friday night I attended the release party of the Solitary Bird CD, recorded earlier this year by three musicians in Shanghai, Steve Sweeting, Jeremy Moyer, and Coco Zhao.  I've known Coco since the late 1990s when he emerged as one of Shanghai's first Chinese jazz singers.  In fact, Coco and his band played at my wedding here in 1999.  Since then he has dedicated himself to jazz singing and lyrical composition and has greatly expanded both his repertoire and his skill set as a singer.  Jeremy Moyer plays several percussion instruments as well as bowed instruments such as the erhu, and he plays them all very well.  In this concert he was playing a coconut fiddle from Taiwan.  Steve Sweeting is an American jazz pianist who has been living here in Shanghai for the past five years or so along with his family.  

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Strolling Through China's Revolutionary History: A Walk in Shanghai's French Concession

The other day I had the pleasure to lead a tour of the Heart of the French Concession for a group of around 40 people who comprised the German-Chinese Graduate School of Global Politics in Shanghai.  I was expecting a group of Germans and was surprised when the great majority of students in the group were PRC Chinese.  I had not given a tour of the Concession to a Chinese audience before.  Would they be as interested in the history of this quarter? 

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China's Basketball Brawls: Aggression vs. Etiquette on the Courts and on the Road

I'm writing this entry in appreciation of fellow China scholar and Dartmouth alum Victor Mair's analysis posted on the MCLC e-list (see below) of the recent basketball game between the Georgetown Hoyas and Bayi Rockets, which ended in an orgy of violence involving the players and the mostly Chinese audience.  It strikes me that the dark reading of this event by some Western media outlets e.g. "Basketball Brawl Symbolized Growing U.S.-China Tensions" goes a bit too far.  Mair's analysis, putting the game into context with other similar events, has much greater explanatory value.  

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Shanghai Nights of Blues and Jazz

Shanghai has a reputation worldwide--or had one at least--as a Jazz Age metropolis.  Back in the 1920s and '30s, the city attracted great jazz musicians from all over China, Asia, Europe and the United States who played in dozens of ballrooms and nightclubs around the city.  Back in that age, jazz was an integral component of mainstream nightlife in the city, and it was meant for dancing.

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The Many Faces of Shanghai: Life in the Apocatropolis

Since spending the summer in Seoul, I've been back in Shanghai for nearly a week now.  While I was deeply impressed with the cleanliness and efficiency of Seoul, the politeness of the people, and the variety of life and nightlife in that city, it sure felt good to return to a city whose daily life and nightlife I know so well, and where everyone speaks my language:  Mandarin Chinese with a Shanghai twist.  Over the past week, I've been readjusting to life in China's great metropolis.  

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A Fond Farewell to Yonsei University

Yesterday, after a two-day delay caused by Typhoon Muifa, I successfully departed from Incheon Airport and flew back to Shanghai. Before I get into how elated I am to be back in my fair city, I want to pay homage to the beauty of the Yonsei University campus in Seoul, where I taught world history for six weeks over the summer. Although it rained nearly every day I was there, there were a few sunny days that brought out the natural beauty of the Yonsei campus. Nestled at the base of one of the mountains to the north of the city, the campus is built on a hill. It is one of the greenest campuses that I have ever seen. The main road into the campus is lined with majestic ginkos, and the campus is surrounded by forests of pine and diverse other greenery.
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A Visit to Songdo: Yonsei's Eco-Campus of the Future

Last week my old Dartmouth classmate Michael Kim, now a professor of Korean history at Yonsei University, invited me to join him on a tour of the new Yonsei campus in Songdo. Songdo is an emerging "green city" built from scratch on a muddy stretch of reclaimed land near the Incheon airport. The foundations of the city seem to be constructed by driving concrete piles deep down into the mud and building upon them. Sound familiar? This is how Shanghai's Bund was built since the 19th century.
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Artful Construction Sites: Seoul's Digital Media City

This summer I've been living at the DMC Ville, a set of serviced apartments in the Sangam District in Seoul. We are right next to the Digital Media City, an area that has been developed recently with the specific purpose of concentrating the media companies in the city. Everywhere around us are construction sites with new buildings rising. In order to make the area look presentable while all that construction goes on, artists have been commissioned to decorate the walls built around the sites. There's some pretty funky art out there if you walk around. Here are some examples. I've posted more photos of the wall art of Sangam DMC here.
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A Shanghailander in Seoul VI: So Long Seoul (for now)

It has been a grueling six weeks. Four hours of class per day, eight new lectures per week with only minor overlaps to previous subjects I've taught. As for weather, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of sunny days I've seen in Seoul since arriving in late June. We've had drenching downpours and even a deluge that brought the city to a standstill. But compared to what folks have been enduring in other parts of the world--namely shocking heat waves--I can't complain.
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Another review of my book Shanghai's Dancing World

From a forthcoming issue of Pacific Affairs SHANGHAI'S DANCING WORLD: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. By Andrew David Field. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010. xv, 364 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illus.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-962-996-448-1. /em> This is a refreshingly well-written and richly detailed account of the world of cabarets, nightclubs and elite ballrooms in Shanghai during its jazz-inspired "golden age" from 1919 to 1954, as well as a wider social history of this important city during an extraordinary period of political upheaval in China. It intertwines its stories about nightlife adeptly with critical episodes in modern Chinese history, and is therefore also a story about China itself, as well as about its most hedonist city. Others have described Shanghai's famous nightlife too, but this book is based on previously untapped government documents, newspapers, magazines, novels, photo archives and other materials, and stands out as the most comprehensive and most detailed source on the subject. The book is a must for any library about modern China. I recommend it too for non-China readers who are interested in urban social history, as well as for readers in general who simply want something interesting, fun and intelligent to read. The book is that good; Andrew David Field, an independent scholar-historian, is to be congratulated and deserves to be recognized for his accomplishment.
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A Shanghailander in Seoul V: Beating the Rainy Day Blues

I'm sitting in a cafe across the street from where I currently reside, the DMC Ville.  The cafe is a chain called Twosome Place and they make a decent latte and have a nice brunch set (I usually go for the eggs benedict).  It's a good alternative workspace to my apartment, which is where I usually work, building the eight lectures I have to give each week.  

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