How a housewife’s hoard became a record of history.
Some 10,000 discarded household items — grimy bottles, crumbling boxes, broken umbrellas, medicine jars, pots and pans, radiators, chairs, tables — accumulated over decades by a depressed Chinese housewife have been brought all the way from Beijing for an art exhibition in London.
The show, “Waste Not”, opened at Barbican’s Curve gallery last week to slightly breathless reviews, even though it left the non-initiated wondering what the fuss was all about. The most excited, of course, was Barbican’s curator Jane Alison who described it as “so personal and poetic”. She saw it would help people to “understand the reality of Chinese history and culture in the 20th century in a way that newspapers can’t”.
However, this was far from the mind of Zhao Xiangyuan, the woman behind the “collection”, when she started hoarding the clutter as a way of dealing with depression following her husband’s death. It was her son, Song Dong, a well-known conceptual artist, who persuaded her to turn it into art.
Mr. Song said that in a country where people grew up being taught not to waste things, his mother’s collection reminded many Chinese of their own experience when it was first shown at a gallery in Beijing. “So many people came who had a similar life during the cultural revolution...They told her: ‘It’s not your home. It’s my home’,” he said.
The London show follows one in New York last year and more are on the anvil. Some rubbish that!
HASAN SUROOR
Bike Paradise
Where there’s no space for cars, motorcycles rule. Welcome to Male.
How many bikes can a square mile radius hold? Don’t guess until you have visited Male, the capital of The Maldives. Male’s total radius is one square mile with 59.5 km of fully paved, narrow roads. Residents number close to a lakh, nearly a third of the entire population of the country.
More than a third of the country depends on the sub-100cc Honda motorcycles for inland transport. The number of motorcycles top over 20,000, up from 4,026 registered in 1990. Of course, it is also available on hire for tourists. Contrast with this: cars registered account for just over three per cent of the total registered vehicles, making Maldives a country with one of the smallest fleet of cars. The President has the luxury of going around in a Merc, and most of his cabinet colleagues too have cars, but there is no place to drive, let alone zip.
That’s why the sub-100 cc bikes, often derisively dismissed as “girl’s transport vehicles” become relevant. If one wants to get around from one place to another in Male or in one of the bigger islands, these bikes are the safest bets to get there on time.
No one breaks road rules in Male. If one does, chances are that your vehicle will be involved in an accident: Bikes keep revving up till the signal turns green, and, as amber gives way, zip forward.
Despite the fact that there can only be few parking slots, no one parks wrong. If one does, the police could take away the bike. Tracing the apprehended vehicle could become a wild goose chase! There is no helmet rule though. May be, in a city where you can’t speed, helmets are not really needed.
R.K. RADHAKRISHNAN
Surviving change
The Book of Changes , more than 3,000 years old, still resonates with relevance for many Chinese.
The I-Ching, or The Book of Changes, is regarded as one of China's oldest philosophical and cultural works. Some like to say it's as old as 4,000 years; conservative estimates place the text a 1,000 years later. The book's teachings, remarkably, still course through myriad aspects of Chinese thought, art and philosophy, particularly its emphases on harmony and balance.
Last month, one of China's most well-known contemporary artists, Huang Rui, performed a special creative reinterpretation of the I-Ching in Beijing, remembering and saluting in a unique way a work that continues to cast a shadow on Chinese spiritual thought. His art installation can be viewed in Beijing's Opposite House.
The I-Ching is structured around oracular statements contained in 64 sets of hexagrams; each hexagram has six lines — either yin (broken) or yang (solid ) — and split into two trigrams. The eight combinations in which trigrams can be arranged represent natural phenomena, and the 64 combinations of hexagrams, the text says, represent every possible fate.
Huang's creative interpretation of the text was centred around eight spheres made up of black and white umbrellas. He chose the umbrella as the symbol of “a personal, protective space around the individual” who carries it, and a protection against the “unhealthy excesses” that the I-Ching condemns — whether too much sun or rain, or too much of the positive or negative. His performance involved installing the umbrellas, which he handed to 64 participants, each of whom shared the space under the umbrella with the artist for 64 seconds. His slow, deliberate and serene movements on a winter's afternoon brought the text to life. In Beijing, the I-Ching lives on.
ANANTH KRISHNAN
