China Revisited -- 2013 [28]

Chen's Lineage Hall

Official on-line information for the Chen Clan Academy (one of three names I am aware of) suggests that 45 minutes should be sufficient to see this state protected cultural site.  Forty-five minutes is about what we had for our visit, but rest assured it was only sufficient for a walk through. To see the site will require maybe a week.

Our brief visit to Chen Clan Academy, a.k.a., Chen's Lineage Hall, now renamed Guangdong Folk Arts Museum, was fascinating.  Unlike the ancestral garden compound we would visit the next morning with Angel's parents, this ancestral hall was not built with on-going family habitation in mind; it was built to honor ancestors. And it was used as temporary housing for clan members who came to Guangzhou to take the Imperial civil service exams.

The structures themselves were constructed in the late 19th Century, not old at all by Chinese standards.  It is the art, architecture, and traditional artifacts that bear the stamp of tradition and timelessness.

Briefly, I'll mention the patterns of architectural symmetry that always astonish in China. There are 19 separate buildings in the compound, which is walled to separate it from whatever would have been outside in the 19th Century. The compound is rectangular, 6,400 square meters, facing south. There are 9 main halls, 10 lesser buildings, and many spacious courtyards.

This hallway is just one example of the precise and sometimes breathtaking repetitions that speak of precision and attention to detail. Both are significant. Those characteristics supplement and enhance the traditional meaning(s) of literally every element of the Hall. I hesitate to apply the word "symbolic" because symbolism as a cultural term reduces the way various features might speak to us. Neither statistics nor architectural technicalities nor artistic language can speak separately to this complex construction.

Among the artistic features are various forms of "decorative" detailing. Along the roof ridges and edges and gutter facings we find vividly colored figures that are human and mythical (e.g., the dragon) -- or natural creatures invested with special meaning and power (e.g., the lion).  All of these characters tell stories; that is, they can be "read," although not by me.

So we have human characters with real stories rooted in history; human characters with stories for which "history" is beside the point (think of George Washington and the cherry tree, from which we get the first rule of honesty: I cannot tell a lie, despite the fact that the cherry tree was invented); human stories connected to mythical characters (e.g., dragons) and/or real creatures (lions, frogs, turtles, et cetera); and traditional "symbolism" all over the place.

Pottery is one medium artists work in, wood is another. The story here is told in the branches of what is either a monster vine or a tree with many twisting branches.  We find many things as the branches go up, from birds who naturally roost in trees to humans in tree houses, to the usual assortment of non-human creaturely things.

What knocks you over is the detail, the painstaking and labor-intensive intricate carving that is made to look effortless and graceful and seamless. And, of course, expressively artistic and compositionally balanced. It is not just a question of art and craft that must be mastered, but of massive perseverance -- just staying at it for however long it takes.

These observations apply also to the ivory carvings, like the boat, displayed in a room full of intricate ivory pieces.

The same could be said of brick carving (below) or stone carving.

These are all decorative, although they are not simply decorations in our modern use of that term. The Chinese clearly have understood the value of the many kinds of creative arts for embodying the culture.  What I mean to say here is that "mere" decoration would make things "pretty," a quality Americans have often consigned to the female, as in, this house needs "a woman's touch."



What we find here is not embellishment, although it is embellishment, so much as embodiment.  The decorative arts cannot be separated from the functions of the building; they cannot be removed from the lives of the people who live and work and visit without losing something vital.  That is the chief insufficiency of even the best museum.


The description of brick carving below expresses more eloquently than I could the intellectual energy identified with all these activities.

True enough.  It is all about auspicious patterns and enriching bald walls with various folk arts "used wildly."  I am all about wild uses of art.  In addition to the art already mentioned there were wood carvings, lime carvings, iron castings, frescoes, and various kinds of textiles (especially traditional dresses and robes that would make the pope look shabby).

When our 45 minutes was nearing its end and Lineage Hall officials were (apparently) getting concerned that we would overstay, somebody came to find me.  I may have been grooving on the gardens out back, which have their own explanations, patterns, and exoticisms.  Maybe I am a slow learner, but as they summoned me to the museum shop, where we were encouraged to take our time, I knew that I would like a few more 45 minute visits. Or better yet, I would like the week I mentioned earlier to see all the things I dearly love, like doors.

China Revisited --2013 [27]

Caught in Traffic
or Why We Don't Ride the Subway in Guangzhou

On our way to Guangzhou -- Edward driving and his mother riding shot gun -- I wrote down two signs in English I thought were worth remembering.  One sign on the side of an office building read, "Community Childbearing Culture Center." Donna and I had a long discussion as to what childbearing culture might suggest.

The second was a traffic sign of the "Click it or Ticket" variety we see in New York. It read "Beat Traffic Bandits and Obey Traffic Laws."

So we beat the traffic bandits and obeyed the traffic laws. I am not sure what traffic bandits are, but we did not beat the heavy traffic. Nevertheless, we got to our hotel, the Ritz Carlton, in good shape, and began the cycle of big meals with former students and parents who wanted to express their thanks to Donna for her efforts in teaching their kids.

We met up with Yujia, who had taken the train back to Guangzhou the day before, her parents, April (pictured below, left), and Cynthia (below, next to April). We piled into two or three cars and made our way through considerable traffic from the new part of Guangzhou, where our hotel was located, to the "old" city, where we were to visit a cultural treasure.   It took an hour, more or less, mostly spent merging or waiting for lights to change. My notes record that Edward was "fuming." I don't any longer know what I meant by that.

At one point as we were sitting in traffic making smart comments about getting out to walk (like mother-in-law jokes, these comments transcend cultural barriers), we asked whether there was a subway system in Guangzhou. Surely, we thought, there must be a way to beat the red lights at every intersection and the pedestrians and the merging lane backups.

"Yes, of course Guangzhou has a subway. This is a modern city."

"Do you ever take it?"

"No. Never. It is too crowded and very complicated.  It would take us twice as long to get where we are going."

When we arrived at Chen's Lineage Hall, a huge walled compound similar in outward appearance to YuYin Shan Fang, we met Syan, another former student and frequent visitor at our home, and his mother.

The Hall was only open for another hour -- was it worth going in at all? There was animated conversation in Chinese; then we moved toward the ticket booth. Since we had made the long trip to the old city from the hotel and would have another long trip back, it had been decided we would see what we could see.

Then, when we had rushed through the Hall, which I write about in my next post, we stopped in the Museum store to find some little things to take back to the US. Most of the things that caught my eye were too big (for suitcases), too heavy (stone sculptures, books), too cumbersome (the paintings and calligraphy), too expensive (most of these) or too touristy (trinkets one could find in NY, Hong Kong, London). 

 We settled on postcards and name stamps, which were carved with our initials in both English and an old form of Chinese while we watched.
 
From Chen's Lineage Hall we reentered the traffic to head for dinner at a restaurant owned by Syan's parents.

At dinner we were treated to -- among other things -- rice porridge fondu, pumpkin noodles with sugar and vinegar sauce to give them flavor, bitter melon, and oyster pancakes. We were also served steak after the American fashion, a concession, no doubt, to the western appetite. We also found the tomato rabbit appealing.  Among the signs of respect I noted were a chair with arms (the only one at the table) and a manager's toast in which the manager led his staff to my end of the table and drank to our health.

After dinner we went out for a walk near the hotel.  Some of the lighted buildings we had seen on our river cruise in 2011 are visible from the hotel.

We are directly below the pink tower on the left.  As in many cities, new building designs in the Chinese cities we visited incorporate light shows so that an outdoor stroll has an entertainment aspect to it. Even on this cold night in January, we found the square full of people -- couples, families, teenagers, older folks.


At the edge of this plaza where we walked to view these building were three gigantic transformers.  I am guessing that they stood 15 feet high.  They rotated their bodies and moved their arms, sending out colored light beams from different parts of their bodies.

Somehow I had gotten separated from our group, like a child wandering away from the adults to look at the pretty robots.  I wanted a picture for my grandson Toren, who is fascinated by such things. But my camera was already full and my unyielding laptop, not the traffic bandits, still held my memory card.