If you’re not up on the history of colonial inequity, let me explain.  The life-sized wooden and mechanical tiger mauling a European unsubtly summarized the Sultan of Mysore’s feelings for East India Company.  For the Tipu, the imagery of the great beast was an essential psychological trope in defeating the infidel British.  He utilized the tiger motif in many facets of his rule, from the uniforms and weaponry of his “tiger soldiers” to coinage and standards.

After Tipu was killed defending his capital in the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, the automaton was taken as a sort of trophy by the East India Company and displayed in their India Museum for the next fifty years.  Visitors were allowed to “play” the mechanism, which produced the sounds of a man being ravaged by a beast.  Now in the collection of the V&A Museum, visitors are no longer allowed to play organ grinder.  Obviously their staff had grown tired of requests to turn the tiger’s crank, hence the clever introduction of the iTiger.

The catalyst for this story, you wonder?  My most recent score at a thrift store.

It's not a tchotchke--it's history.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Tiger, tiger

It’s amazing what one finds when cleaning out the closet–even when that closet happens to be a photo-hosting site.

Since I’m at nearly 7000 images and can’t seem to find anything when I look for it, it’s time to do some tagging.  A bit tedious, but a reasonable way to spend a slow Sunday morning, especially given my selective memory.  The best part about going back in time?  Discoveries like this picture I’d taken of a friend’s photograph from a trip to Indonesia (so meta!).

Whereas traditional wayang kulit (shadow theatre) is based on the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabarata, this is wayang wahyu, a form that allowed the Jesuits to spread their word through a means more familiar to their Indonesian audiences.  The piece to the right at first looks as though it is the usual kayonan (tree of life) or gunungan (holy mountain) , but look closely and you’ll discover some non-native imagery.
This is definitely not something you’ll see in our upcoming Bali exhibition, but a fascinating aspect of acculturation.  I know a few readers have traveled in Asia–what are your favorite moments of cultural disparity?

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Beyond Good & Evil

Fascinated as we are with the way in which much of spiritual Asia has rocketed to the fore of economics and technology, the well-respected India hand seeks to explain the transformation with his usual elegance.  The event starts at 6, find more information here

(If anyone goes, please fill me in)

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Nine Lives

photo courtesy of Bunky's Pickle © used with permission

Although 1940s Shanghai had lost considerable luster courtesy of occupation, war, and revolution, another Shanghai was angling to take its place.  In the same fashion that Hollywood had been responsible for inspiring glamor the world over, nightclubs in search of their own golden era underwent a certain Shanghai-ification.  The city offered a powerful syllogism, an invocation that promised delight and unparalleled decadence.  Even pre-Castro Cuba with its tropical,  imperialist-friendly allure was home to a theater christened “The Shanghai.”

And then there was Oakland. 

I’ve spoken with a few patrons who fondly remember Fong Wan’s New Shanghai Terrace Bowl.  Possessing everything mid-20th century Americans could want–a nightclub, a bowling alley, and a Chinese restaurant–it was a popular destination, vaguely exotic for its fare, but safely American in its capacities for serving up sport and booze.

Charlie Low’s Forbidden City is perhaps better known to later generations, in part because of Arthur Dong’s excellent documentary on the San Francisco caberet, or perhaps thanks to Flower Drum Song.  I know it well because I get my hair cut on Sutter Street; a modeling school now occupies the second floor space that once housed the club.

Fong famously purchased the vacant building across the street from Low’s Forbidden City, installing a massive sign directing patrons down the street to his own club, a savvy move that helped cement his reputation as a hard-driving businessman.

But this is only the tip of the research iceberg.  Interested in multiple Chinatowns?  Chinatown Time Travel is a good place to start.  As you can tell from the above photo, Bunky’s Pickle has a fascinating archive.  Likewise, Dizzy Atmosphere offers up a native view of our own sinful city.  There’s plenty more to be seen if you trust in a combination of accident and vigilance in your photographic archaeology.

But not all is history: I’m anxiously awaiting Trina Robbins’ June 24th lecture about San Francisco’s Chinese nightclubs, co-presented by the Art Deco Society of California.  Stepping from the past and onto the stage the same evening will be the high-stepping ladies of the Grant Avenue Follies.

It’s almost impossible to imagine an era when chop suey was as adventurous as the Szechuan treats served up on Clement Street today, or an era that wouldn’t have read the above image as the pretext for an argument against orientalizing.   I’m no apologist, but I do know that if we didn’t have Chinatown and its nightclubs this city would be a very different place.  What can’t be forgotten is that culture goes both ways.  I’m saying this as someone who was taught to use chopsticks by a Chinese aunt–at Benihana.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

The Other Shanghai: Oakland?

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

There are no guilty pleasures

While there’s plenty of excitement in all this potential energy, I’m actually more interested in what will remain after the Shanghai Expo.  We seemed to make out alright, didn’t we?

PS good job Shanghaiist!  We look forward to your reportage over the coming months.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

In case you were wondering,

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

–JG Ballard

1942 saw the foreign population in Shanghai more than quadruple, as Europeans and Russians fled for the relative safety of the international city: in Shanghai, one needed neither a visa to enter nor proof of income to stay.  The uneasy peace was not to last, as Germany pressed Japan to ghettoize the Jews of Shanghai, exacerbating already dire conditions.  Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Army began to intern American, Dutch, and British citizens, including a young J.G. Ballard and his family.

Fittingly, the boy who would become the author of multiple dystopian futures found some kind of freedom in the Lunghua internment camp.  He spoke and wrote often of the “hundred and one games” that could be played in the camps, while surely his contemporaries who had evacuated to Britain were in constant fear of air attacks.  The Shanghai-born author’s Empire of the Sun was published in 1984; just 3 years later, Spielberg’s adaption starred a 13-year-old Christian Bale.  It is impossible to tell whether Ballard would have become a writer had it not been for his early experiences, but we need only look to the desolate airfields and machinery of his fiction to know the influence of war.

Empire of the Sun stands apart from the body of his work, yet the straightforward reportage still allows for his trademark discomfort.  In a frenzy–Shanghai’s humid air thick with the portent of war–the fictionalized Jim loses his parents, effectively shifting our focus to the boy.  What follows is the madness of adults attempting to keep order in a realm ordered solely by their captors.  Essentially, Ballard makes a convincing argument that children are better suited to wartime than adults–although it will cost them.

At heart, the writer knows he needs no tricks to make us feel as though we inhabit a kind of hell.  The family’s life before the war–parties, chauffeurs, a Jewish governess–are the fragile shell of calm to which most adults long to return.   For Jim, who discovers the nature of the true world, a return to that illusory peace is impossible.
What Jim discovers is what the author discovers: that in the fused deaths of society and youth are the keys to the creation of new worlds, new selves.  Who else but an artist could find birth in war and violence?  Ballard made these his trade, and ensured his readers felt the scars of history as keenly as a surgeon had inflicted them.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

The Other Shanghai: JG Ballard

Perhaps for this reason I am grateful for longer-running exhibitions, not the least because I’m lazy, but because I’m a glutton for return visits–especially if they involve something that can be done during my lunch hour.

This afternoon I was watching the final touches being put on the Main Library’s Korean Comics exhibition.  U.C. Berkeley’s Dr. Sung Lim Kim curated the show in the Jewett Gallery, which runs through June 13.  Trina Robbins–who will be at the Asian Art Museum for an exciting lecture this June–will be part of an esteemed panel on Manwha for girls on April 8th.

While you’re at the museum, take the elevator up to the third floor to visit the Chinese Center, a drool-worthy collection of books rivaled only by the excellent Shanghai embroideries on view there until May 31st.
It’s no mystery why I rarely leave the neighborhood.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

neighborhood love

And because this is San Francisco, your weekend starts now.

You have just Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to catch the Swinging Chinatown exhibit at The Old Mint.   A colleague and I took a walk through the beautiful decrepitude of the old building last Monday and were enthralled by the stories of the performers and artists responsible for changing the way Asian Americans were perceived.

A group from Creativity Explored was in the museum today, probably in part because of this great show at the 16th Street gallery.  The opening is tonight, but I can almost guarantee there won’t be Shaolin monks in the Mission, because they’re all at tonight’s MATCHA!.

What else is going on this weekend that I’m going to miss?

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Your Weekend Plans

We try to keep their Octonauts series in the museum store, but I’m expecting their books to sell out as quickly as Oliver Chin’s Year of the Tiger books did for our Lunar New Year celebration last weekend.  Obviously, I am powerless when confronted by the charms of a cartoon Sasquatch.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Meanwhile, in the frozen North