NY Times: Forbidden City Treasure at the Met

From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04emperor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Art%20Review:%20A%20Man%20of%20Contradictions,%20With%20a%20Collection%20to%20Match&st=cse,
where you can see a slideshow of the treasures on exhibition.

February 3, 2011
A Man of Contradictions, With a Collection to MatchBy HOLLAND
COTTER

When China’s last emperor finally left the premises in 1924, the Forbidden
City was renamed the Palace Museum, and a labyrinthine complex of ceremonial
and domestic spaces, off limits to all but a few for centuries, was suddenly
open to the world.

Still, it kept some secrets. Few visitors, for example, knew of the
existence of a self-contained suite of small pavilions and gardens tucked
away at the Forbidden City’s northeast corner, echoing its shape.

They made up the Tranquillity and Longevity Palace, which, in the mid-18th
century, had been remodeled as a potential retirement home by the adamantly
unretiring and design-obsessed Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong.

He lavished attention on the palace — covered its walls with trompe l’oeil
paintings, fitted it out with false doors, see-through partitions, Buddhist
shrines and clocks — to make it a place that reflected his adventurous
tastes, a place where he might want to live. But in the end, he spent little
time there. And the palace, often referred to now as the Qianlong Garden,
had only a handful of imperial tenants after he died in 1799.

For most of the 20th century it stayed empty. The Chinese government had no
cash to spare for its upkeep, and conserving Qing culture was on no one’s
list of priorities. The building exteriors were maintained, but the
interiors, with their frozen-in-time ensembles of furniture, painting,
textiles and luxury objects, were left to fend for themselves.

Things have changed. China, now (and not for the first time) a global power
in need of an agreeable self-image to sell, has seen the wisdom of
preserving its visual heritage — all of it. And international scholars of
that heritage, once separated by distance, are now thoroughly networked. A
concrete result of this new one-worldism is a collaboration, now in
progress, between the Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund to restore
the Qianlong Garden to its former splendor.

Among the art historians acting as consultants to the project is Nancy
Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Mass. By 2003, the year the restoration got under way, Ms. Berliner had
already scored a Qing-related coup of her own by overseeing the transfer,
from China to the Salem museum, of an intact house dating to the dynasty.
And last fall she scored a second one with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise:
Treasures From the Forbidden City,” an exhibition she organized for the
Peabody Essex, and which now appears, in a different form, at the Metropolitan
Museum of
Art
.

The show is made up primarily of freshly conserved Qing objects — thrones,
cabinets, screens, religious sculptures, paintings — from the collection of
the Palace Museum, many specifically from Qianlong Garden buildings.
Qianlong himself probably commissioned some of the items. Certainly his
sensibility is written all over them.

Born in Beijing in 1711, Qianlong (pronounced Chee-en lohng) descended from
non-Chinese-speaking northerners who called themselves Manchu and ruled
China as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1911. Self-confident and adventurous,
he was a ceaseless mover and doer, constantly making inspection tours of a
country that during his reign was the largest and richest in the world.

Largeness, in fact, was his calling card. His cultural initiatives seem
conceived precisely to generate preposterous statistics. He commissioned and
participated in the creation of an anthology of 2,000 years of Chinese
literature: it appeared in the form of 36,000 handwritten volumes, which he
ordered to be copied several times.

A writer himself, he left more than 40,000 poems behind when he died. When
he was 50, he published a compendium of his calligraphy. He acquired art of
all kinds in record-breaking quantities. At one point he cataloged a
collection of some 10,000 of his paintings, then went on to collect more.

He was a knot of contradictions. He preserved thousand of books in his
anthology, but also destroyed thousands, some of them legendary classics,
that he considered politically subversive. As an art connoisseur, he had an
uncannily sensitive eye, yet he insisted on incising his name into precious
ceramics and writing it repeatedly on priceless paintings, effectively
defacing them.

Although he had many self-portraits made, no cohesive reading of his
personality can be drawn from them. In one painting he is an imposing
Confucian ancestor figure; in another, a humble young Daoist scholar. In a
third piece we find him floating at the center of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala
as the embodiment of the bodhisattva of wisdom, which he believed himself to
be.

As a highly self-aware performer, he exploited the public relations uses of
shape-shifting, offering alternate versions of himself to different
audiences, Manchu, Han Chinese and European.

He was wary of Europe politically, but entranced by vision-tickling aspects
of its art, like vanishing-point perspective and trompe l’oeil realism.
Christianity left him cold — why should he worship a supreme being when he
was one? — but he treasured Jesuit missionary artists like Giuseppe
Castiglione and kept them on his payroll.

Contradiction is also the animating dynamic of the art in the Met show
created to adorn the various buildings — reception halls, studios,
libraries, Buddhist shrines — in the Qianlong Garden.

In the circular portrait of the young Qianlong in scholar robes in the first
gallery, the pictorial space is pancake-flat, depthless. But in a
Western-style mural painting on silk nearby, life-size figures of woman and
child beckon us into a three-dimensional hall. (Several such murals cover
walls in the one Qianlong Garden building that was fully restored in 2008
and can be digitally toured in another Met gallery.)

Realism in Qing art, however, often veers into the surreal, as is evident in
a mesmerizingly bizarre furniture ensemble. Like some version of rustic
Victoriana, all three units — chair, couch bed, foot stool — appear to be
woven from roots and vines, though in this case the interwoven strands look
freakishly alive, writhing and twisting like nests of snakes. Only when you
inspect the furniture closely do you see that this organicism run riot is
strictly an illusion. The roots and vines have been painstakingly puzzled
together from many small pieces of wood, in a design meant to evoke a Daoist
immersion in nature.

This kind of interplay between opposites — the unnatural and the natural,
the grotesque and the spiritual — powers the show. Qianlong went for art and
design that pushed such contrasts to the limit and beyond, short-circuiting
received notions of good taste and bad taste to deliver little shocks of
pleasure.

You can feel such zaps radiating from one work in particular: a 16-panel
wood-and-lacquer screen carrying portraits of early disciples of the Buddha,
known as luohans. These figures are traditionally pretty gross: ragged and
repellent old men, with cartoon faces and hair sprouting from unlikely
places. They’re shown that way here too, but in a medium — white jade inlaid
on black lacquer — that is so ethereal, and worked with such fineness, as to
all but cancel out any impression of ugliness.

The screen holds another surprise too. When conservators moved it from its
original position against a wall, they found that the reverse sides of the
panels were painted with images of trees and flowers in tones of gold.
Stunning!

At the Peabody Essex, the screen was free-standing and could be viewed from
both sides. The Met, by contrast, has placed it in a long wall case, with
the luohans face out, and a few panels flipped to give a sampling of the
painting. And this is just one of the ways in which the Met edition of the
show differs from the Salem original.

Judging from photographs, you can see that the installation Ms. Berliner
devised at the Peabody Essex was spaciously laid out, with an effort made to
simulate the architectural interior in which the objects were once found. At
the Met, the same objects have been squeezed into the narrow Chinese
painting galleries, with almost everything confined to tall cases designed
to hold scrolls.

As if to compensate for a more straightened and prosaic approach, the New
York presentation — organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, curator of Chinese art,
with an ingenious design by Daniel Kershaw — has been enriched with examples
of Qing art from the Met’s collection, including a large Castiglione drawing
and a pair of panoramic scrolls depicting two of Qianlong’s imperial road
trips.

We also get something that in most museums we can only imagine: a real
garden, in the form of the Astor Court. It’s based on a Ming rather than a
Qing prototype, but the components — twisty river rocks set in greenery —
are right. And, because the Met’s display cases are as shallow as they are
tall, we can see everything in them close-up: the cloisonné medallions
adorning a doorway surround, the stitch work in a satin chair cover, the
chips of jade, coral and lapis lazuli embedded in a relief of a blossoming
plum tree that comes across as both garish and sumptuous.

Up close was the emperor’s perspective too: proprietary, absorbed,
evaluative. And — who knows? — it may not be available again, once these
objects return to Beijing and are placed, where they belong, in the
completely restored Qianlong Garden that is scheduled to reopen in 2019, to
what will surely be an avid new public.

*Forbidden-City Treasure*

*WHAT* “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City.”
*WHEN AND WHERE* Through May 1, Metropolitan Museum of
Art;
(212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org
.

Peabody Essex Museum the First to Show Off Hidden Works

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2010/07/peabody_essex_m.html

By Geoff Edgers
Globe Staff

A special international partnership will make the Peabody Essex Museum the first place in the world to display a group of 90 imperial objects from a hidden Chinese palace complex inside Beijing's Forbidden City.


Related
Photos
Rare art on display
•Video A preview of the show in Salem

For nearly 500 years, the sprawling Forbidden City served as the home of Chinese emperors. When the last emperor was forced out in 1924, the government closed the doors on a two-acre compound deep within the Forbidden City, filled with magnificent 18th-century artworks and other objects.

Now the US public will see those works for the first time in a show called "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City." The objects, which range from paintings and murals to exquisite pieces of furniture and jades, will make up an exhibition running Sept. 14-Jan. 9 at the Salem museum. Organized by PEM with the Palace Museum, Beijing and the New York-based World Monuments Fund, the show will then travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum.

“These are objects created by the finest artists at the time, and they’ve never been seen before,” said PEM curator of Chinese art Nancy Berliner, speaking by phone this week from the Forbidden City, where she and a group of museum workers are readying the objects that will be brought to Salem for the show.

It is extremely unusual for China to send cultural objects abroad, and the museum will be the first place anywhere -- including China -- that these pieces will be shown to the public.

The partnership springs from an ambitious $25 million project to renovate the palace garden complex, a project that began in 2001 and won’t be complete until 2019. Officials from the World Monuments Fund overseeing the restoration were impressed by PEM’s installation of Yin Yu Tang, a late Qing dynasty merchants' house, at the museum. After viewing the house in 2004, the nonprofit organization hired Berliner as a consultant.

That led to the Salem museum's coup.

This week, as temperatures in Beijing have risen to 104 degrees, Berliner and four other museum staffers have been meticulously packing up the objects in the palace compound created by Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century and last occupied by Emperor Puyi. It is a quiet, contemplative space, Berliner said, where there is often only room to walk single file because the emperor never intended it to be experienced by groups. Of the
27 buildings in the garden complex, just one has been restored so far.

Speaking by phone from a building that had not yet been restored, Berliner said she was holding a flashlight because there were no lights.

“The feeling inside these buildings and in the garden as a whole is a little bit like being in an incredibly luxurious and contemplative playground,” said Berliner, who noted that she has visited the Forbidden City hundreds of times since her first visit in 1980 but only gained access to Qianlong's complex in recent years.

The museum has great expectations for the exhibition, projecting that it will draw as many as 85,000 visitors. That would make it the second most attended at the museum since its reopening after a major expansion in 2003.

But bringing “The Emperor’s Private Paradise” to Salem is not cheap. The exhibition will cost $1.8 million, or more than the museum spent on exhibitions for all of 2009. All but $300,000 is being covered through support from the Carpenter Foundation, American Express, Mandarin Oriental, and other sponsors.

“This is once-in-a-lifetime material,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the museum’s chief curator. “This truly is one of those shows where a lot of stars have aligned to make this possible.”

In Salem, Berliner hopes to use architectural flourishes to re-create the feel of the 18th-century garden complex. The works on hand will provide a stunning window into the private universe crafted by China’s rulers. A Buddhist shrine painted on silk shows a series of holy and supernatural figures with Qianlong, depicted in gold, at the center. A carved wooden throne features bamboo thread marquetry, gold paintings, and a jade inlay. And then there is the jade screen depicting the 16 disciples of the Buddha. Only recently did restorers discover that Qianlong, who commissioned the work, had the screen installed in a way that hid the golden images painted on its reverse side. Conservators never knew of that other side.

“He installed it so the panels were actually up against walls," Berliner said. "When they took it out, they discovered that on the side of the panels that faced the walls were these incredibly beautiful paintings of botanical motifs that had never been seen before.”

The Forbidden City is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than seven million people a year. None of the buildings in Qianlong garden complex, however, have been open to the public.

Peabody Essex Museum director Dan Monroe said that he was moved, walking through the hidden space for the first time.

"There are several gates and doors and pathways, but it shocks you with its immensity," he said. "It’s full of large monumental buildings and small buildings and water features and bridges. And it’s a spectacular space that was designed for tranquility and harmony."
Henry Ng, executive vice president of the World Monuments Fund, said that the Palace Museum's trust in Berliner made it possible to bring the works to the United States.

"I don't think it could be done anywhere else," said Ng. "Nancy is the reason they're letting them go."

Hartigan emphasized the beauty of the works that will be on display.

"The fact that the garden itself is this exquisite combination of art, architecture, and nature and that this comes across so clearly in the exhibition is another important aspect of this," she said. "The notion that not even the Chinese themelves have seen these artworks is really remarkable."

Berliner believes it is unlikely that works from the garden complex will ever be allowed out once the restoration is complete. That means, she says, this will be the first and last time these objects will be seen in the United States.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com

"The Future Belongs to Mandarin": London Guardian

Do you agree with Martin Jacques, of the London Guardian, and visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, that China is "...regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Kahn-t.html

January 3, 2010

Waking Dragon

By JOSEPH KAHN

Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.

China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.

In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.

This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.

Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”

Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.

Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.

The enduring loyalty of its enormous diaspora and even the global popularity of Chinese food testify to the appeal of Chinese culture abroad. But the pervasiveness of a country’s culture depends only partly on its appeal. It also depends on strength, which China is acquiring, and scale, which it already has.

Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia. In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.

China has pioneered its own style of economic production. If the Japanese became known for obsessive quality and just-in-time inventory controls, China has developed a reputation for speed and flexibility. Its companies mix and match suppliers; buy, copy or steal ideas; and churn out products just good enough and just cheap enough to sell. Many multinationals have trouble competing, even when they use Chinese labor.

China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.

As China finds its own path economically, it is unlikely to look west for political advice, Jacques suggests. Its ruling Communist Party, having largely set aside its socialist ideology, has become a modern version of an imperial dynasty. China’s Communist leaders have flirted with reviving Confucianist thought, positioning themselves as protectors of Chinese unity, the state’s traditional role. Many Chinese see that mission as sacred. Jacques argues, credibly, that most Chinese will back their leaders, with or without democratic reforms, as long as the country keeps getting stronger.

So how might the world work under Pax Sinica? Jacques ventures some fascinating guesses: The United States often promotes democracy within nations. China insists on democracy among nations. If the power of countries in the international arena were determined by how many people they represent, China would have more clout than all the Western democracies combined.

Jacques has lived in China, and he writes about his travels there. But it seems clear that he has developed his views from reading books and newspapers (a voluminous quantity of them, to be sure) rather than through any immediate experiences in China or by getting to know its people.

Possibly as a result, he dwells little on the everyday turmoil of Chinese life — the mélange of cultures in its cities, the violent uprisings of its peasants, the factional struggles in its leadership, the pollution in the air, the gridlock on the streets, the bubbly economy and the corrupt bureaucracy. Others have and will be more successful at conveying the human struggle for China’s future.

But the fact that China looks messier in practice than in books does not invalidate Jacques’s thesis. He has written a work of considerable erudition, with provocative and often counterintuitive speculations about one of the most important questions facing the world today. And he could hardly have known, when he set out to write it, that events would so accelerate the trends he was analyzing.

Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.