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Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes

Mar29

A couple of weekends ago, I went to the exhibit “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was somewhat reminiscent of the last exhibit of Chinese art I saw at MIA, “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” which placed Qing dynasty artwork amid various roomscapes, some dark, some brightly lit, and many with music or a soundtrack. “Eternal Offerings” featured painted scenes on the walls of some galleries, music or sounds of activity in the background, artifacts resting on mirrored sufaces, and dramatic contrasts of darkness and light. As the subtitle suggests, the exhibit was of bronze vessels and other items from Ancient China, all of which came from the museum’s own collection. There were no labels to read alongside the objects on display, so the focus was entirely on the bronzes themselves. The show was conceived and designed by Liu Yang, the curator of Chinese art at MIA, and Tim Yip, the art director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In the first room, pale models of fragments of bronze artifacts were suspended from the ceiling over a horizontal mirror. Next was a sort of anteroom featuring a single, Shang dynasty wine vessel in the shape of an owl, standing atop a pedestal on a round mirror. The vessel dates from the 13th or 12th century BCE, which means it’s over 3,000 years old. It’s an amazing piece, and it’s incredible to think that someone crafted this finely worked object over three millenia ago and it’s still here for us to look at.

Shang dynasty owl-shaped wine vessel

Another view of the owl

Beyond the wide strips of mottled gray cloth that hung behind the owl stood several display cases of small bronze animals, including tigers, water buffalos, a bird chariot finial, winged dragons, and what looked like a pair of doorknockers (but were probably just handles?), the rings held in the beaks of bird- or dragon-like masks. Many of the items further on in the exhibit also incorporated decorative elements depicting animals.

A mythological beast with a tiger’s head, hooves, a curly tail, and turquoise accents (5th c. BCE)

The next gallery contained a variety of wine vessels (and the occasional food vessel) in different shapes and styles. Some were like vases, others like three-legged pots, and still others like decorative boxes with over-the-top handles. On the side walls were bronze spearheads and dagger-axes, some with jade blades and turquoise inlay.

Three-legged wine vessel with spout, side handle, and lid, with a pattern of scales on its rounded body (11th-10th c. BCE)

The next two rooms were large, with many vessels on display. The first room’s walls were painted with mountains while the second room’s showed men and women seated indoors at a banquet (I think). In the second room, the floors and opaque walls of the display cases were red, and there was a soundtrack of clinking dishes and utensils. Some of the objects in these galleries had inscriptions in an early Chinese script.

Footed water vessel with dragon-headed handle (9th-8th c. BCE), with a ritual food vessel decorated with dragons and a water basin with animal-headed ring handles in the background

Covered vessel (5th-4th c. BCE)

Four-legged rectangular food vessel (fāngdǐng) with geometric designs, spikes, and bird figures (11th c. BCE)

Wine vessel with pattern of stylized, interlaced dragons (5th-4th c. BCE)

The next gallery was also large. In the center was a display of a large horse, several vessels, a goose-shaped wine vessel, and a few human figures, including a farmer, an ox, and a cart, all of bronze, made for a Han dynasty tomb and found in Sichuan Province. Also in this room were five bronze bells of varying sizes, placed on high shelves on the wall behind the horse, a series of gilt bronze belt hooks with glass, jade, or crystal inlay, a series of round mirrors with varied decorations and inscriptions, and assorted other objects, including mountain-shaped censers for burning incense.

Han dynasty celestial horse surrounded by vessels, with bells and mirrors in the background

Mirror (4th-3rd c. BCE)

The last room contained one display case with a mirrored floor. Inside were many different types of vessels, including a double-owl wine vessel (back-to-back owls), a large, round, Eastern Zhou wine vessel with gold, silver, and copper inlay, and a vase-shaped wine vessel depicting hunting scenes. Against one wall, a video projection showed slowly rotating close-up views of some of the objects in the gallery.

All in all, the exhibit was a fascinating opportunity to see pieces from the museum’s collection that often aren’t on view and to admire the intricate craftsmanship of Chinese bronzes made thousands of years ago.

Cats of Grinnell

Feb28

A post on a Tuesday, look at that! I had to, because today is the last day of February, a month in which I have yet to post, and I’m stubbornly refusing to break my streak of posting at least once a month. And so today I give you an incomplete list of some cats of Grinnell.

Grinnell has many cats. From what I observe, overhear, and am told, not a few residents are feeding stray cats or wind up adopting cats that walked into or otherwise appeared in their lives. My personal experience of the cats of Grinnell derives mainly from the circuit I regularly walk around the center of town. Many cats have their usual haunts, and so I encounter them repeatedly and come to recognize (some of) them by their distinguishing marks. All of the cats except the first one on this list are pretty skittish and will flee if I come too close, so I’ll spare you the photos of blobs in the brush or grainy cats on windowsills. Without further ado, here is a partial dramatis personae:

Mama Kitty

Mama Kitty is a bar cat, specifically the cat of the bar around the corner from my place. Some friendly patron standing outside the entrance to the bar told me her name soon after I moved to Grinnell. She has a little cat house and dishes for food and water outside, and she spends a lot of time on or under the patio furniture against the bar’s façade or between the wheels of pickup trucks parked at an angle to the sidewalk in front of the bar. Mama Kitty is very sweet and friendly, and I try to say hello to her whenever I’m passing by.

Baby Void

Southeast of the historic downtown, two sets of railroad tracks intersect. A bit north of where they cross perpendicularly, there are some brick apartment buildings near the north-south railroad tracks. There are quite a few cats that hang out around these apartment buildings, probably in part because sometimes residents set food out for them. There are several black cats in this area, and I can’t tell them all apart (I know there are several because I’ve seen multiple black cats at once), but one cat I do know is Baby Void. (Note: Mama Kitty’s real name is Mama Kitty; otherwise, all these cats’ names were made up by me.) Baby Void was a little cat when I first identified him several years ago. By now, he’s no longer a baby, but the name stuck. Baby Void is all black except for a circle of white at his throat. It looks like a round tag on a collar, but after years of observation, I think it’s just a patch of white fur.

Queue Cassée

Another black cat I used to see in these same parts is Queue Cassée (Broken Tail), so named after I noticed a black cat whose tail hung somewhat stiffly behind him instead of swishing the way a cat’s tail usually does, however faintly. I think I’d probably seen Queue Cassée before he became Queue Cassée, but the state of his tail made him distinguishable from the other black cats. There was a sort of hump where his tail joined his body. Despite this apparent tail injury, Queue Cassée seemed to be getting along fine, and in fact I’ve seen no sign of him for ages, so maybe his tail got better on its own?

Mr. Floofy

Yet another black cat I see in this vicinity is Mr. Floofy, so named because he’s a long-haired cat. He also has rather short legs. I just saw him on Saturday, against a west-facing brick wall illuminated by the afternoon sun, in the company of another black cat. They both took off at my approach, though Mr. Floofy held his ground longer.

Other Railway Cats

This is my cat hotspot. In addition to the aforementioned denizens, there’s also a white-and-gray cat (who’s a she in my head for some reason), a stocky orange tabby with a white-tipped tail, and several large gray tabbies. I’ll often see some combination of these and the black cats lounging between the west side of a certain apartment building and the railroad tracks. They like to sit on the sills of the windows just above ground level there, and I believe someone sets food (and windowsill cushions?) out for them. On a couple of occasions I may even have seen someone interacting with the cats through an open window. And once I was coming up the road and noticed an odd silhouette/gait belonging to a vaguely cat-sized creature sidling along the building’s exterior wall. It was a raccoon! There were two of them! And they were eating the cat food while several cats sitting nearby looked placidly on!

Tortie

All right, last cat. Tortie is a smaller (I think) tortoiseshell cat whom I’ve sometimes seen behind the chain link fence blocking off the empty lot by my apartment building. The space was formerly occupied by a Mexican restaurant that burned down before I moved to Grinnell. Now there’s a gap, and the ground is planked over with warped wooden boards. Tortie mysteriously appears in this vacant lot; I don’t know how she comes and goes. Through a secret underground tunnel? Over the roof of the building backing the empty lot? Tortie is usually sitting very tidily relatively far back from the chain link fence. She’s in a different spot every time, still and watching.

One more picture of Mama Kitty!

Winter Amusement

Feb9

It’s been fairly cold in the wintry north since the turning of the year (though somehow the East Coast still gets the best snowstorms). Back in January, while I was still on winter break, my family enjoyed some distinctly wintertime activities. First, my brother works in the theater world, and his home base, the Zephyr in Stillwater, built their second ice maze this year. As a sound designer, he was in charge of curating the playlist. I kept suggesting film scores by Prokofiev, but I’m not sure he took me up on any of my picks (I mean, why wouldn’t you want visitors to your riverside ice maze listening to the soundtrack to the battle on ice from Alexander Nevsky?). Anyway, we visited the maze on a Sunday evening, when colored lights illuminated the giant blocks of transparent ice. I also went down the big, slippery ice slide.

Ice dragon guarding the maze

Braving the maze

Minnesota pride

Later, we went cross-country skiing at Hyland Lake Park Reserve for the first time in several years. It was a warmer day, a good day to spend outdoors. I should really ski more often!

Back on the ski trail

They’re hard to spot, but there are two deer in this picture

A sky of soft-edged clouds

Drypoint

Apr1

These are strange, scary times, and I have little to say that others aren’t already saying with more thoughtfulness, eloquence, and authority. So I’m not going to wade into those waters. Suffice it to say that I am well, I feel lucky, and I’m currently confined with Isabelle and Olivier.

Back in the early days of the confinement, Isabelle let me make a print from her most recent drypoint plate. Drypoint is the latest printmaking technique she’s picked up (see our earlier adventures in linocut, screenprinting, and Gocco). In drypoint, you carve a design into a plate (Isabelle uses plastic ones), and the ink fills in the grooves. Thus what you carve is what is printed (vs. what you leave uncarved, as in relief printing). Apparently drypoint is etching, but without the acid.

Isabelle carved the plate; I just made a print. This design is called “Springtime frailty” (“Fragilité printanière”). I first smeared black ink onto the plate, filling in all the grooves. Then I used a bit of paper towel to rub away the excess ink.

Next I placed the plate ink-down on the paper.

I cranked the plate through Isabelle’s Cuttlebug, which we were using as an improvised press.

The completed print!

My First Iowa Caucus

Feb12

Iowa is, of course, famous for its first-in-the-nation caucuses, the subject of intense attention on the part of candidates and the media in presidential election years when multiple contenders are vying for a party’s nomination. Last year, when I accepted my current job at Grinnell, I realized I’d be an Iowan for the 2020 caucuses. And more generally, I’d be living in Iowa for the remainder of the presidential race.

Many candidates made campaign stops in Grinnell (and many downtown storefronts were converted to campaign offices), but I didn’t actually see any of them. Either I found out about their visit only when it was already happening (Pete Buttigieg), or I didn’t try to get into their CNN town hall on campus (Joe Biden, Tom Steyer), or I just didn’t try to go (Elizabeth Warren). Bernie Sanders came to our local coffee shop, Saints Rest, with Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal the Saturday before caucus night; I found out a few hours earlier on Facebook and later heard there’d only been room for 60 people inside. I kind of regret not seeing any candidate give their stump speech to an Iowa crowd, but ah, well.

I was looking forward to the caucus because I figured it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I could participate in a political event that the eyes of the nation were glued to! (For the record, I don’t think it makes sense that Iowa plays this outsized role in the presidential nomination process, but that’s another discussion.) At 6:30, I walked the few blocks to my caucus site. Now, it had already crossed my mind that I wasn’t temperamentally suited to caucusing (as opposed to voting in a primary). I don’t really like talking to people I don’t know, especially about my political views. Consider this: I had contemplated going into the caucus uncommitted. When I arrived, a young campaign worker in a Pete t-shirt asked me who I was supporting that night, and I demurred, partly out of that lingering indecision and partly because I was not there to caucus for Pete. He immediately asked me what I was looking for in a candidate, and I started looking for the quickest way out of this interaction. I mean, the whole point of caucusing is to talk to your neighbors about why you’re supporting who, but I am clearly not meant for this type of gathering. But I at least wanted to witness it and be in the same room as people having those conversations. (Also, as far as I could tell, nobody was uncommitted in the first alignment at our caucus, so if I had been, I’m sure I would’ve been swarmed by representatives from every other candidate’s huddle, and that would’ve been an introvert’s nightmare.)

There were quite a few other new faculty in my precinct, most, if not all, of us caucusing for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. It was gratifying that everyone respected one another’s choice. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about one’s vote being public; I mean, now we all know who supports who. I’m a pretty big believer in voter privacy. But respect for political differences is supposed to be a hallmark of the Iowa caucuses, I’m told, and I felt it was observed at my caucus. There were also some new faculty in the observer section; they must not be registered to vote locally. We were not in the same precinct as the college students, and I believe our caucus was smaller than at least a couple of the other Grinnell caucuses. I was definitely reminded I now live in a small town (like most Iowans): one of the check-in volunteers was a former president of the college who attends the same church I do and whose name is on the local public library, and I also saw my landlord. The other day, I stopped by the grocery store, and one of the clerks at my register looked incredibly familiar. I knew I’d seen her somewhere recently, but I couldn’t figure out where, until it hit me: she’d been the precinct captain for our candidate’s group at the caucus.

After the election of the chair and secretary, we all lined up to receive a preference card (and be counted). The chair announced that there were 132 of us caucusing, and so the number of supporters a candidate had to reach in the first alignment to be viable was 20. Looking around the room, only Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg looked to have that much support. Indeed, after the first alignment, they were the only candidates to have passed the threshold (Sanders: 48, Warren: 33, Buttigieg: 25). Next, each precinct captain made a one-minute timed speech in support of their candidate. They spoke for Sanders, Gabbard (literally one guy), Yang, Warren, Klobuchar, Biden, and Buttigieg. Then everyone whose candidate was no longer viable had to find a new group. People in viable groups were not allowed to change allegiances. I thought it looked like most people flocked to Warren.

After the second alignment and a little math, our caucus was ultimately to send to the county party convention 5 delegates for Sanders, 4 for Warren, and 3 for Buttigieg. The chair was pleased to report that exactly 132 preference cards had been collected. Precinct captains recruited actual delegates and alternates, and then after a little business it was over. The whole thing had taken a little over an hour. We new Iowans left the caucus feeling pretty happy about our role in participatory democracy.

Later that night, national news outlets began wringing their hands: where were the results from Iowa? I was puzzled and a bit worried. Our caucus had gone so smoothly, so what was going on? I wasn’t too troubled, though, and I went to bed assuming I’d learn who the winner had been in the morning. Well. We all know how that went. At least the part about there being a winner.

But here’s where it got interesting for me. Despite being an Iowan on paper, I don’t actually think of myself as an Iowan. But I did caucus in Iowa last week, and I do live here. And suddenly it was really weird to me to be seeing all these opinion pieces in The New York Times about Iowa, mostly written, I believe, by columnists who haven’t actually been here, at least not for this caucus season. I had a bit of a What do they know? reaction, which should probably make me think harder when I read those same columnists on other parts of the country they may not have been to (I read The New York Times a lot). The caucuses were being portrayed in the media as a train wreck, with talk of the “debacle” and the “fiasco”; #IowaCaucusDisaster was trending on Twitter when I got up the next morning. And it was just so dissonant with my own caucus experience of orderliness, efficiency, and clear results. I’ve heard other Grinnell folks emphasize that the caucus process itself did work, and a lot of volunteers worked very hard to make sure it did.

My initial take was that the caucuses had gone just fine and it was the reporting that was the problem: an app that crashed and swamped phone lines. (Trying to implement the app without adequate training and testing was clearly a mistake.) But I didn’t think the rest of the country was making this distinction; from the headlines in the papers, they were probably concluding that the whole thing had been a horror show. And I knew from direct experience that this just wasn’t true. Moreover, there was a paper trail, so we’d know the real results in the end. I did think the reporting issues and the fact that there was no winner to report to a nation on tenterhooks was very unfortunate. I think it will undermine people’s trust in our electoral systems and make people more skeptical of and cynical about our democratic processes. And the last thing we need is for people to be discouraged from voting because they don’t think their vote will be counted properly. I was chagrined that the optics were so bad for Iowa when my caucus experience had been entirely positive, and I knew the Democrats’ nomination process was off to a very rocky start.

Later, I read a more worrisome report (yes, in The New York Times) about caucus numbers that didn’t add up or were internally inconsistent. If this report is true, that is bad. (The New York Times has since reported even more.) Caucus officers did have to report more sets of numbers this year, and I can imagine how this might’ve led to confusion. As far as I know, the caucuses are basically run by volunteers, many of whom probably have years of experience and are very competent. I would hope that there’s careful training and built-in safeguards to ensure that caucus results are reported accurately. I hope that the final Iowa results will express what happened on caucus night because with all the other flaws in our electoral system, at the very least we need well-run local elections.

Carving and Printmaking

Feb13

Our university’s international student center has a new artists and writers collective whose meetings Isabelle and I have been attending. At the last meeting, Isabelle taught everyone how to carve stamps out of plastic erasers with X-Acto knives. The erasers are nice and soft. For my first ever stamp design, I eventually decided on a bass clef, and the result wasn’t too bad. It’s like a rustic bass clef.

Two days later, we went to a linocut workshop hosted by the Horn Press, UCLA’s book arts society. Isabelle is quite experienced with linocut, but I had never done it before, and it’s a bit trickier than plastic erasers. We used gouges of various shapes and widths to carve linoleum plates mounted on wood blocks. It took me a while to come up with a design again. I tried thinking of things I used to draw when I was younger that I actually felt turned out well, and I remembered these little birds made of simple shapes for the crown, eye, beak, wings, tail, and feet. I don’t remember what originally inspired those drawings; I think I must’ve seen a brush painting somewhere. Anyway, I set to work with my gouge, and of course I picked a design that required me to carve away most of the plate. But I finished.

First print at the workshop

Later I did some additional cleanup with some of Isabelle’s tools, and I tried printing again.

hapa.me

Sep12

Yesterday I went to the Japanese American National Museum to see Kip Fulbeck’s exhibit hapa.me: 15 years of the hapa project. I’ve blogged about what hapa means before and also about seeing Kip Fulbeck at the LA Times Festival of Books in 2017. For this exhibit, Fulbeck took new photographs of the participants in the original Hapa Project and again asked them to respond to the prompt, What are you? The result is about 40 double portraits separated in time by fifteen years, accompanied by the subjects’ original written statements and their new ones.

I wanted to see the exhibit because I’m always interested in explorations of mixed race Asian (American) identity, but I was also particularly looking to see how Fulbeck’s subjects engaged with their identity and the label hapa fifteen years later. I was curious whether some of the participants, like me, felt more ueasy claiming the word hapa than they used to in light of a growing sensitivity to the appropriation of a Hawaiian term. On this front, I was rather disappointed by the double portraits. There was basically no engagement with this specific question. I still enjoyed the photographs and the statements, though.

Only after I’d looked at all the portraits did I realize there was a panel on the wall on “The Etymology of Hapa.” Here, I thought Fulbeck might have wrestled with the question of who gets to call themselves hapa. I was again somewhat disappointed. The text recognized that different people think hapa means different things and some people argue that there is a right way (and thus implicitly a wrong way) for the term to be deployed. This appeared to be an oblique acknowledgment of the controversy over mainland multiracial Asian Pacific Americans identifying as hapa. But the text read as defensive to me, emphasizing as it did how language is constantly evolving. Sure, that’s true, but I don’t think that’s a shield we can step behind to avoid having to really question our claiming of hapa.

In the next gallery, there were eight albums of additional portraits with written statements. I believe these represented work from Fulbeck’s ongoing Hapa Project (I actually tried participating at the Japanese American National Museum a while ago, but they didn’t need any more people). The walls were also covered with miniature photographs of exhibit visitors, with accompanying answers to the What are you? question on half sheets of paper. (This interactive component only happens on Saturdays.) I read a bunch of these, and finally I found one that expressed what was on my mind: “I used to ID as ‘hapa’ but don’t feel like it’s my word to claim anymore as a mainland mixed kid.” I was honestly surprised not to see more of this. That said, in my experience, it’s younger (say, under 30?) multiracial Asian Americans who are more likely to choose not to call themselves hapa anymore. In any case, thank you, anonymous museum goer!

Women’s March LA 2018

Jan24

Last Saturday I participated in the second Women’s March in Los Angeles. I went with Adam, a friend from the department. I was expecting a smaller crowd this year, and certainly public transportation was far less clogged (though that might’ve been in part due to Metro planning for massive crowds). But downtown, it still felt like a big turnout, and that was heartening.

Not everyone invested in resisting the current administration embraces the Women’s March, and I understand the dissatisfaction and the critiques. Others can and have expressed these much better than I could. The reason I marched on Saturday was because I wanted to help swell that crowd of protesters. I wanted the Women’s March to be big, and I knew the only way it would be was if countless individuals like me made the decision to show up.

Like last year, there were hundreds of signs, which varied in their content, tone, and degree of punninness. I took almost no pictures, but when I read a sign I really liked, I tried to tuck the words away in my memory. So here’s what stuck from my favorite signs:

  • We march for indigenous women
  • The revolution will be intersectional or it will be bullshit
  • Sex is cool and all but have you tried intersectional feminism?
  • Japanese Americans say: No Camps!

And also this one:

The best moment of the morning for me was when we were marching up Olive Street, past some tall apartment buildings. Several elderly Asian ladies were out on their balconies, each on a different floor. One looked benevolently down at us as she tended her plants. Another leaned against her railing, smiling and waving as we passed by. And a third stood on her balcony and raised her fists above her head, beaming as she watched us march. We cheered. She looked so happy.