Plenty of Nothing

Xu Bing

One of the heroes of typography is Xu Bing who in 1988 produced "A Book From the Sky" made up entirely of Chinese characters he invented himself, to the consternation of the Chinese authorities, who have a vested interest in controlling words and meanings.  He often uses letters of the Latin alphabet as radicals within characters. Here is his name:

And Little Bo Peep:

Chin Tsi-Ang

Chin Tsi-Ang was the first female martial arts film star. When she appeared in The Swordswoman of Huangjiang (1930), the first of a thirteen-part series, she had already been in the biz for five years. She worked right into the new millenium, and had a role in In the Mood For Love (2000) at age 90.

Bobbleheads

The deeper you look into it, the more you realize that the Chinese invented everything, including the bobblehead doll. These two, dating from the early nineteenth-century, came up for auction January 23rd.

The Red and the Black, Part X

Synopsis: we are searching the world for soccer teams that dress like the Beano's Dennis the Menace. Three have been found so far: FC Midtjylland in Denmark, NK Čelik Zenica in Bosnia, and plucky Whitletts Victoria FC of Ayr. Today, the East Asian Football Federation.

China. Not many stripes or hoops at all. Shenzhen Ruby FC wear blue and white.

Hong Kong. The British connection has left Hong Kong with an active football scene, but no team that presents a Menacing aspect. Honk Kong FC was founded in 1886 and is obviously dripping with money.

Macao. Hoi Fan wear a red jersey and black shorts and socks.

Taiwan. Nothing.

Northern Mariana Islands. Nothing. Palau. Nothing. Guam. Nothing.

Mongolia. Argh. There's very little information on the Mongolian Premier League on the internet.

North Korea. Imagine trying to follow your favourite North Korean team online.

South Korea. FC Seoul wear red socks, black shorts, and a red and black striped jersey. But there are gold squiggles all over the design. Gyeongnam FC have black socks and shorts and a red jersey with black details. They are nicknamed The Kindergarten. 

Pohang Steelers!

Dennis the Menace Group! Yes!

Steelers are a pretty successful club too. They've won the South Korean championship four times, the KFA Cup twice and the league cup twice. Excellent.

Japan. Consadole Sapporo: red socks, black shorts, red and black striped jersey. Many Japanese clubs go out of their way to try to give themselves a European ambience by incorporating Spanish, French, English, German or Italian words into their nomenclature. Yet somehow none of those hybrid names seems as outlandish as Real Salt Lake. Arte Takasaki wear red socks, black shorts, red jersey. Ditto Zweigen Kanazawa.

Chin P'ing Mei

I've had it in my mind to read the Four or Five Chinese Classics for a while now, so I was happy to find a second-hand copy of Chin P'ing Mei just before embarking on a 24-hour train ride last month. With its rapidly unfolding plot and its 863 pages, it's the right book for a long journey by rail.

Chin P'ing Mei, or as it's transliterated these days, Jin Ping Mei, is commonly known in English as either The Golden Lotus or The Plum in the Golden Vase. The book I was reading is the 1982 Perigree reprint of Bernard Miall's 1939 English translation of Franz Kuhn's earlier German translation -- clearly not the go-to edition for scholarly analysis, but one with an elevated and somewhat vintage prose style that has aged gracefully in 72 years and works well with the historical content.

The novel was written in the 17th century, late in the Ming Dynasty, but the action takes place in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty five centuries before. Authorship is attributed to a Hsaio-hsiao-sheng, but there is no agreement on who that is, and the legend that the novel was written in a few weeks to exact revenge for a debt of honour sounds more like something from the book than something about it.

The story concerns the dalliances of Hsi Men, a wealthy individual with a large household and, at his high point, six wives; and Golden Lotus, who eventual becomes his fifth wife. Both are sexual addicts, and both are utterly amoral in the pursuit of their conquests. The pair manage to destroy quite a lot of people along the way, either directly or through their expanding circles of influence. It takes about 200 pages for the effects of their liaisons to play out after they themselves have met their untimely ends.

There's a tremendous amount of sex in this book, but it's presented in such allusive and poetic language that it's difficult to assign it an X or even an R rating. It is hard to find much raunch in a phrase like "she was well acquainted with the ways of the wind and the moon," though "they cavorted like two fish in a stream" certainly gets the idea across.

The ferocious Wu Sung, who shows up near the beginning and the end of the novel to mete out justice, is a character from Water Margin, another of the classics, which I hope to read soon. D

Paprika As Monkey

Satoshi Kon's 2006 anime Paprika is Inception four years before Inception, plus a lot of film history (The Collector provides an important scene) plus a huge trundling mountain of Asian and Western cultural reference.  Here is Paprika cloud-hopping over Tokyo in the guise of Monkey.

Monkey

I'm reading Monkey, Arthur Waley's 1942 abridged translation of Journey to the West, one of the Four (or Five) Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, about a monkey in search of immortality. If like me you know next to nothing of Chinese cosmology this is the place to start because the story scampers along, picking up universal truths and throwing them over its shoulder, way too quickly to get loaded down by their significance. I think Monkey could contend for top avatar of the hero with a thousand faces, and really ought to supplant Gilgamesh in those introduction to world literature courses.

Jamie Hewlitt, of Tank Girl and Gorillaz fame, made this animation for the 2008 Olympics. D

Chinese Space Station

China has unveiled plans for a very Mir-like (Mir-image?) space station and unmanned cargo freighter to be in service by 2020. The freighter looks a bit like the European ATV and would probably share its capacity for automated docking.

The Siege of Pingyu

If you love to revel in beautiful objects you could never own you can travel to the world's great museums, or you can visit the Christie's and Sotheby's websites and lust after the lots coming up for auction. I favour Asian art, and by coincidence, or maybe not, because my birthday's coming up, it's Asian Art Week this week at both auction houses.

There's an auction of fine Chinese ceramics and works of art going today at Sotheby's New York that features this battle painting commemorating the siege of Pingyu during the Nian rebellion (1853-1868) in the reign of the Guangxu emperor. I don't know but I prefer to think that the man looking at you from the lower left corner is the victorious general. D

Year of the Rabbit

Congratulations, and be prosperous! Now give me a red envelope!