Funeral procession, Fu Min township, Yunnan, China

Funeral procession, Fu Min township, Yunnan, China

Boy Playing On Street, Fu Min Township, Yunnan, China, January 2010

Boy Playing On Street, Fu Min Township, Yunnan, China, January 2010

“Women” by Charlene Shih

An animated short film from 1999 by the Los Angeles-based Taiwanese filmmaker Charlene Shih.
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雲門舞集 – 水月

An excerpt of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin’s most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

This week Cloud Gate are performing Moon Water in London at Sadler’s Wells. The whole work is set to Bach’s suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers’ bodies and movements. It’s amazing.

Reviews are here:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

Hong Kong

I stopped in Hong Kong on my way to Taipei yesterday to take up a long-standing offer to have a local’s view of the city. Hong Kong is a place I have been to more times that I can remember but somewhere I never feel I have had a chance to get to know.

Hong Kong island from the Star Ferry terminal. Duh.

The People’s Bookshop coffeeshop in Causeway Bay. Maoist kitch/po-mo cool, Hong Kong style. The Little Red Book is actually the menu.

The New Territories.

The new MTR line that runs to the New Territories. Makes just about every other subway system in the world look 19th century.

Democracy

A montage of video from the January 2008 Legislative elections in Taiwan. Video requires Quicktime 7.    

Last month a group of us from Europe were in Taiwan for the legislative elections. The dramatic wins by the opposition KMT stunned the Democratic Progressive Party, but for reasons that have been widely canvassed, the results leave the presidential election in March open and uncertain. The video has footage from the DPP rally in Longshan, then the KMT rally in Sanchong, with both events occasionally bordering on the comic, then at a school in southern Taipei of actual vote counting. At that point, they were counting the two referenda held simultaneously with the legislature vote. Overall, the mood in Taiwan is depressed and negative, with deep dissatisfaction towards both sides of politics from the electorate and profound mistrust and animosity between the two main parties. Yet, to watch the practice of democracy in a classroom with the volunteer vote counters, who were local teachers, was rather moving.

Cheerleaders with guns

Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School Honour Guard and Drum Corps performing at this year’s Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Video requires Quicktime 7.               

The Edinburgh Military Tattoo began in 1950 as a kind of last hurrah for Empire, rebranded after WWII as the British Commonwealth. Nowadays it seems a curious spectacle, ripe for “reading”, if one is so inclined, the violent history of British colonialism and its cheerful reimagining as colourful nostalgia. It’s hardly a small event, though, with more than two hundred thousand tickets selling out in January for the three weeks of performances in August each year, and it is surely the world’s number one showcase for all things marching. So hats off to the Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School for their invitation to perform. It would be really interesting to know the history of their performance styles, as they look like a rather riotous amalgam of Japanese imperial, Chinese republican, and US military/high school culture. And whatever one thinks of the KMT (e.g. not a lot), it’s very nice, too, to see the flag of the Republic on display on their shoulders at an international event.

China Week

I have been in Melbourne at my alma mater, Monash University, for a series of events over the last couple of weeks. It included me giving an updated presentation of the BBC China Week seminar from the project I started in 2005. The BBC’s China Week is the gift that keeps on giving. Back then I edited a montage of the BBC’s version of China, which I have uploaded here. Requires Quicktime 7.

Atomic Dome, Hiroshima

The Atomic Dome, the only structure in downtown Hiroshima still standing after the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.

I visited it a number of years ago on the day coincidentally it was declared a World Heritage Site by the UN. I was accosted by a Japanese tv news crew wanting a reaction, and the English-speaking reporter asked me if I was American. I said I was Australian. Oh, sorry, she responded with some disappointment. We fought you people, too, I said, trying to be helpful.

After Zhang Yimou’s Hero, one of my least favourite films is Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. It is the story of the Bomb fed through a narcissistic adolescent militaristic fantasy. Akira ends with a symbolic Bomb and sets up a sci-fi allegory which folds a future over the past and the present. Structured around this moment, it rewrites Japan’s military imperial history through a narrative and characterizations which argue that Japan was destroyed not by military excess in WWII but by the corruption and weakness of bureaucrats and capitalists. By inference, it loops over the present to critique Japan’s contemporary circumstances as being similarly emasculated by consumptive excess, crime and bureaucratic corruption. In the ending of Akira is the horrifying conclusion that what Japan needs now is another Bomb, to cleanse it of its weakness and allow some imaginary Bushido essence to prevail. In its way, Akira is as repulsive an apologia for Japan’s form of fascism as Hero is for Communist authoritarianism.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong. I took this years ago, on my way between China and Taiwan. It’s always been a favourite photo of mine.

Making noodles in Shanghai

Making noodles in Shanghai.

Another view of Shanghai

Another view of Shanghai from a few weeks ago.