I posted about Zhan Wang’s San Francisco landscape made of pots and pans before. For this image I used this nifty technique for removing color cast. (Compare the color to this image.)

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This painting by Kang Can (Fast Food III, 2007, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 31.5 inches) is a good example of Chinese Neo-Pop art (it was shown at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, Florida earlier this year). In the contemporary Chinese context pop often has a satiric element, aimed at materialism and self-indulgence. At times, as here, the satire can get a little heavy-handed.

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Seven Junipers has been occupied on other matters recently but hopes to return to blogging in earnest in short order.

Here is a trailer for a film about Ai Weiwei’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing, being constructed by Herzog and de Meuron.

While we’re on the subject of Daruma, here’s a clever use of a Daruma image as a logo or brand mark. Ordinarily you would might not think kindly of using Daruma in a commercial context, but how can you not love this charming fellow?

The photo is from Orion’s photostream. This Daruma Sushi seems to be in Helsinki, but a web search suggests that it is an international chain, or at least that there are sushi places with this same name in New York, Rome, and many other places. Hope the food is good!

This painting by Seikou Daruma, chief priest of Temryuji, is easily recognizable as a Daruma image. Japanese Daruma images typically use a minimum of brushwork and exaggerate what are thought of as Indian facial features. The quality of the figure’s expression is key. This one is a little unusual because most often Bodhidarma is depicted in profile or three-quarter view.

Photo by hira3, some rights reserved.

Now that the Zhan Wang exhibit has opened at the Asian Art Museum, I amused myself by photographing reflected colors on the stainless steel surfaces of his massive artificial scholar’s rock. The stainless steel of the constructed rock itself has almost no color, but it reflects colors from its surroundings. Oddly, the metalic surface takes on some of the qualities of water. Here are small versions of several images.

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At San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Chinese artist Zhan Wang is constructing a replica of the city by the bay out of pots and pans. The shiny utensils, stacked by the artist on equally shiny platforms artfully constructed by the museum’s preparators to his specifications, are being arranged to represent the city down to a close level of detail. Here you can see the Transamerica pyramid constructed from cheese grates and salad tongs.

This photo shows the work in progress. It will be completed within the next day or so, and the exhibition, entitled On Gold Mountain: Sculptures from the Sierra by Zhan Wang, will open to the public on Friday, February 15. The title alludes to the Chinese immigrant experience of mining in the Sierra during the Frisco gold rush; the city, called Gold Mountain by the Chinese, was the staging area for the trek to the Sierra.

At this writing a detail of a stainless steel scholar’s rock by Zhan Wang can be seen in the right sidebar.

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On Thursday I showed a Japanese song performed on a Western instrument (the ukulele). Here now is Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” performed on traditional Japanese instruments.

This has got to be seen to be believed.

via Book of Joe

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The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and Yayasan YDY Nusantara of Indonesia have announced a partnership for research and programming at a new facility to be called the New Contemporary Art Centre (NCAC) located in Songzhuang, Beijing (23 km east of the city, not far from the Beijing international airport). Art critic Li Xianting (who coined the terms Cynical Realism and Political Pop) will chair the NCAC’s academic center. The facility will open late in 2008.

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Source: Singapore Art Museum & Yayasan YDY Nusantara’s Partnership to Promote Southeast Asian Art | Art Knowledge News

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This painting comes from the region of Mithila in India, where domestic wall painting is traditionally practiced by village women on the occasion of marriages and festivals. Since the 1960s, thanks to an initiative launched by the Indian government, the women have also been painting on paper (and are sometimes now joined by men)

This is an image of an auspicious tree with colorful birds and two elephants (22 x 30 in.) The artist’s name is Nidhi, of whom I know nothing. I bought this painting from someone who had recently returned from the region. The elephants with their garland probably express a marriage motif. This image is rather unusual in Mithila painting.

Related: an auspicious tree of life from a Mesoamerican context.

At San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum a group of Korean monks has been in residency, producing large paintings and also block prints (visitors can take home freshly printed copies of the heart sutra or other prints). The monks (seunim, a gender-neutral term) include two men, Myung Chun-seunim and Sung Ryun-seunim, and a woman, Seol Min-seunim.

The program will culminate on January 20 with a sacred eye-opening ceremony of two hanging scrolls — the Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara by Seol Min seunim and a guardian figure painting by Myung Chung seunim — that the monks are donating to the museum. During the ceremony, the guardian king’s spirit enters the painting through the eyes, which are the last elements completed. The monks chant invocations to all the Buddhas in the universe to witness the event.

I was reading recently about the inaugural show of London’s Rossi & Rossi gallery in its new, larger space at 16 Clifford Street. The show, an exhibition of contemporary Himalayan art called Consciousness and Form, is over now, but one of its artists, Tsering Nyandak, caught my eye. This wonderfully enigmatic painting is called simply Buddha (photo by Jason Sangster). According to the gallery

Tsering Nyandak was born in Lhasa in 1974. From 1985 to 1993 he lived and studied in Dharamsala (India). In 1993, after returning to Tibet, he started studying art under Tsewang Tashi. He has participated in various exhibitions in China, Germany and Nepal and is a founding member of the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild. For Tsering Nyandak, being an artist is about self-expression and is not culturally stereotypical.

The website of the Gedun Choephel Artists’ Guild is here.

Japanese ceramics artist Tatsuzo Shimaoka died a few weeks ago of a stroke. He was a proponent of utilitarian pieces, or mingei (a term derived from minshuteki kogei, “craft of the people”). He was designated a “living national treasure” by the Japanese government in 1996.

In an article in Clay Times (November 2001), Richard Busch reports Shimaoka’s recollections of his developing interest in mingei and the apprenticeship process.

One day, at the age of 19 and a freshman at the Tokyo Industrial College, he wandered into the Nihon Mingeikan (Japanese Folk Crafts Museum), which had been started by Soetsu Yanagi and several friends, including potters Kanjiro Kawai, and Shoji Hamada, and was struck by the simple, unpretentious pots and other historical items that had been made by anonymous craftspeople for everyday use. It was a turning point in his life.

“Yanagi called these items the people’s craft or Mingei,” explains Shimaoka, “and he believed that they represent what is truly beautiful — not the highly refined work made by top artisans only for the wealthy few. He claimed that good craft must be convenient and comfortable to use because they are necessary every day. Mingei works must be durable, made in quantity, and affordable. Materials used must be natural and indigenous. At the basis of the Mingei philosophy lies the supposition that the craftsperson lives a healthy life, has a healthy mind, and is always sincere in the pursuit of utility.”

The philosophy hit the young Shimaoka hard. “When I was lost at what to do in the future,” he recalls, “Yanagi’s theory was like fertile rain on barren soil. With my mind decided, I went to Mashiko to visit Hamada, an alumnus of my college, and he agreed to accept me as an apprentice after I graduated. He told me that the basis of ceramics is the wheel, and advised me to learn how to throw pots on the wheel while in school. I did as I was told.”

After graduating from college, and following a stint in the Army during World War II (during which he spent time as a prisoner of war), he apprenticed with Hamada for three years. “In retrospect, those years studying under a great teacher were the basis for my career as a potter,” he says. “He would tell us apprentices to leave aside all that we had studied — as he had done when he left school — and to start with a new slate. Handmade work, he explained, is not to be learned by intellect, but with the body. Technique is not to be taught, but to ambitiously acquire.

“This is the traditional way master artisans always treated their apprentices, and how apprentices gained good craftmanship. I now understand that that was the most effective method for acquiring potting techniques. Today I always have a few apprentices in my house, including students from abroad. I teach them just the way Hamada tought me.”

The image is the main page from one of the artist’s exhibitions at Galerie Besson in London’s West End.

• Left: Pot, 2005, stoneware with rope-inlay pattern 22.7 cm (h) x 18 cm x 13.9 cm
• Right: Pot, 2005, stoneware with rope-inlay pattern, 26.4 (h) x 23.3 x 22.5 cm

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Farhad Hussain, a 30-year-old artist from Calcutta, is among the Indian artists being featured at an auction in Paris. The auction is being billed as the first major contemporary Indian art auction in that city. The auction is organized by Artcurial of France. The company’s Indian art consultant, Herve Perdriolle, explains:

After successfully entering the Chinese market with two auctions of contemporary Chinese art, Artcurial is now ready to focus on the Indian art market and is planning to stage two auctions per year.

We have decided to start the Indian sale now considering the growing interest among French collectors in this field for more than a year now. This strong and deep interest is illustrated by several important events like the Indian Summer in Paris in 2005 and Lille 3000 in 2006 to name a few. In step, we know of the famous relationship between Subodh Gupta and Francois Pinault. Pinault, the French billionaire and collector, has been picked by ArtReview as among the 100 most influential people in the international contemporary art world.

Hussein is also the subject of an article in Asian Art News by Uma Prakash, entitled “The Mundane Uncovered.” And he will appear in From the Everyday to the Imagined: An Exhibition of Indian Art at the Singapore Art Museum, November 16 - January 16.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (MOCA) is hosting a major exhibition of the work of Takashi Murakami through February 11 (the show opens October 29). Murakami is much influenced by anime and manga.

Murakami tends to work with flat planes of color. His often oversized work evokes otaku culture. He combines high and low art, slyly critiquing consumerist culture while being complicit in it. Like manga pioneer Tezuka Osamu, he has made his art a big business, mass producing items for sale in many types of venues. Sales of Louis Vuitton handbags are a prominent feature of the MOCA show.

The MOCA show website features 11 different videos, 8 of which make up an exhibition tour. Which is fine, but there is a dearth of text content to accompany the videos. This makes it difficult for the casual visitor to get a quick sense of the show. But maybe a video-only approach works in L.A.

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Image: And Then, and Then and Then and Then and Then, 1996-97. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board (2 sections), 110 1/4 x 118 1/8 inches (overall). Image from the Marianne Boesky Gallery.

This painting by Anupong Chanthorn (sorry I haven’t been able to find a higher-resolution image) has caused quite a stir in Thailand. Entitled Bhikku Sandan Ka (Monks with Traits of a Crow), it suggests immoral behavior (avarice, it would seem) among some of Thailand’s Buddhist monks. The title comes from a phrase attributed to the Buddha to describe a kind of immorality.

When the painting was awarded a prize and an annual art exhibition in Bangkok, some monks staged a protest. Led by Satian Wibhroma, a member of a Buddhist group known as the People’s Network to Protect the Nation, Religion and the Monarchy, they accused the painter of insulting Thai monks. They asked Silpakorn University to revoke the prizes awarded to Anupong, which the university refused. The story is told in Asia Times Online.

An editorial in Thailand’s The Nation asserts that

People who consider themselves good Buddhists, who really care about their religion, should thank artist Anupong Chanthorn for creating a pair of award-winning paintings that honestly reflect the precipitous decline of Buddhism in this country.

Buddhist temples used to be centres of learning, and monks were the guardians of our cultural heritage, but many temples have turned into dens of iniquity. The failure to reform Buddhism and keep it up to date with the drastic social and economic changes has not only resulted in the religion’s diminished influence as a force for good but also contributed to corruption and social decay. Thai society needs more artists and lay Buddhists like Anupong, who care enough about Buddhism to criticise, to satirise, to put pressure on the monastic order to reform. These people deserve praise, not condemnation.

An exhibition of Roger Shimomura’s paintings that recall his experiences as a young boy in a Japanese internment camp, called Minidoka on My Mind, is at the Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave. S., Seattle, through Dec. 22. Shimomura’s images are effective because he does not appear to editorialize but presents his recollections in an almost noncommital mode. He blends elements of ukiyo-e Japanese prints with an American pop art tradition (he is, of course, an American of Japanese descent). As Regina Hackett notes, compared to Masami Teraoka, Shimomura prefers harder and flatter forms.

The image is from the Kucera Gallery site. I think it is called “Justified Internment,” but I was not able to locate information about it on the site.

This image of a giant thangka (devotional painting on cloth) produced for the annual Shoton festival in at the Drepung monastery in Llasa, Tibet, was taken by Chris Webster.

The monastery was founded in 1416, and remains a popular pilgrimage destination. Shoton means “yogurt banquet,” and the Autumn festival celebrates the yogurt that was traditional provided to monks following their austere hundred-day summer retreat.

The Ruben Museum in New York is showing an exhibition of such large objects, through March 17, 2008. The museum’s website offers this brief description of the show, entitled BIG! Himalayan Art:

This exhibition presents the largest objects from RMA’s collection in a dazzling display of brightly colored paintings and explores the reasons for creating the even larger tangkas (Tibetan scroll paintings and textiles) that are majestically draped over mountainsides and in valleys. These large works are the focus of community celebrations and accrue merit for all who participate.

The internet, that is.

What could be a more appropriate image for our inaugural post than these ironic echoes of the first emperor’s terra-cotta army. The tennis warriors are in the offices of el blogador, a digital media consultant who divides his time between London and Antigua, Guatemala. They were created for the ATP Masters Cup being held in Shanghai (in fact, just as each of the first emperor’s soldiers has an individual face, so Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic are recognizable in these images). The artist is not identified.

For 7Junipers I intend to range freely over Asian art and culture, from ancient to contemporary times and across the entire continent. Art and literature will be my main subjects. Since I’m already stretched thin, I’ll probably move somewhat slowly on this, but as posts accumulate I will gather them into categories by culture, era, and medium. The globe on right can be clicked to visit particular regions (not much is up yet).

The title alludes to the seven junipers of Zhidao Guan, a Taoist temple in the city of Changshu in China’s Yangzi delta, as well as to a famous 16th-century painting of them by Wen Zhengming. The seven junipers also represent the seven large cultural regions that fall under the scope of this website. For more, see the “about” tab above.