Last year I wrote a Long Read for theSouth China Morning Post weekend magazine on the old Shanghai Academy founded and run by the artist Liu Haisu. The Academy was housed in the same building for many decades on rue Bard (now Shunchang Lu), which is sadly slated for demolition at some point soon. You can read the article here.
Anyway, a few new pictures (to me at least) of the old rue Bard and the Shanghai Art Academy….
Rue Bard, French Concession, 1920s
Front entrance of the Shanghai Art Academy, Rue Bard, French Concession, 1920s
An exhibition of student work, first floor gallery, Shanghai Art Academy, Rue Bard, 1920s
A good long review of Joseph Sassoon’s The Global Merchants by Jordyn Haime for the Tablet magazine, with a few quotes from me too! Click here to read. And, by the way, my own review of the book for the South China Morning Post is here.
Tom Pellman’s novel The Soul of Beijing (from the good people at Camphor Press in Taiwan) out this December is a nuanced and intricate portrait of near contemporary Beijing…
New Year fireworks illuminate the Beijing night, but all twenty-year-old Panzi can think about is the mysterious former classmate who has just burst back into his life. Impulsive, spontaneous, and full of compassion, Xiao Song is like no one he has ever known – the first person who has made Panzi feel whole since his father’s suicide.
Across town and a thousand social strata away, the son of Beijing’s vice mayor and his gilded friends tear through the night in a cherry-red Ferrari, swerving off the road and into Xiao Song’s life. Panzi rushes to the scene just as a barely conscious Xiao Song is whisked away and evidence of the crash scrubbed out of existence.
The police stonewall Panzi. His mother tells him to let sleeping dogs lie. Desperate and unwilling to give up, he enlists a hard-nosed trainee journalist and a loser expat English teacher in his search. They comb Beijing – from homeless shelters to gaudy faux-French penthouses – inching closer to the truth about Xiao Song, the crash, and the soul of the city itself.
Fantastic marketing all along the Seine in Paris for Marek Halter’s new novel of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto –La Juive de Shanghai... A rough translation of the publisher’s book blurb below, though I can’t explain why the woman on the cover is dressed in a traditional Vietnamese Ao Dai garment, which would have been pretty rare to non-existent in 1940s Shanghai.
Berlin, 1937. Ruth, juive et talentueuse couturière de 22 ans, se lie d’amitié avec Clara, jeune résistante allemande. Pourchassées, elles décident de rejoindre une destination inattendue : Shanghai, où des milliers de juifs se sont réfugiés. Clara est la première à partir pour la Chine. Ruth, elle, doit traverser l’Europe entière… jusqu’en Sibérie. Grâce au consul japonais de Lituanie, elle obtient un visa pour Kōbe, le grand port du pays du soleil‑levant. Parvenue enfin à Shanghai – ville bouillonnante où se côtoie un monde interlope d’espions, de trafiquants d’opium et de résistants –, elle y retrouve miraculeusement Clara, devenue agente des communistes. La suite ? C’est Bo Xiao-Nao, la fille de Ruth, qui la raconte. orpheline, elle tombe sur un carnet tenu par sa mère. En le feuilletant, elle découvre, bouleversée, le destin fascinant de celle qu’on appellera à jamais la Juive de Shanghai…
The Frida Kahlo exhibiton at the Palais Galliera in Paris reveals this Chinese skirt and shawl that was in her wardrobe. Apparently acquired on her first visit to San Francisco and the city’s Chinatown in 1930-1931. Kahlo wrote back to her father in Mexico City: ‘Imagine, there are 10,000 Chinese here, in their shops they sell beautiful things, clothing, and handmade fabrics of very fine silk.’
Photography’s development as a new form of art and technology coincided with profound changes in the way China engaged with the world in the nineteenth century. The medium evolved in response to war, trade, travel, and a desire for knowledge about an unfamiliar place. Power and Perspective provides a rich account of the exchanges among photographers, artists, patrons, and subjects in the treaty port cities that connected China and the West. Drawing primarily from the Peabody Essex Museum’s historic and largely unpublished collection of photographs, this generously illustrated volume examines the confrontations and collaborations that shaped the adoption and practice of photography in China. Offering an original reassessment of the colonial legacy of the medium, Power and Perspective addresses photography’s representations of racial hierarchy and its entanglement with histories of European imperialism in nineteenth-century China.
Power and Perspective: Early Photography in Chinaexplores how the camera transformed the way we imagine China. Photography’s development as a new form of art and technology in the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way China engaged with the world. The medium evolved in response to war, trade, travel, and a desire for knowledge about an unfamiliar place.
The exhibition features 130 photographs in dialogue with paintings, decorative arts, and prints drawn largely from PEM’s outstanding collections with select loans from public and private collections. Power and Perspective provides a rich account of the exchanges between photographers, artists, patrons and subjects in treaty port China, offering a vital reassessment of the colonial legacy of the medium. By calling attention to the power dynamics at play, the exhibition sheds light on photography as an inherently social medium that continues to shape our perspectives today.
Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum. The exhibition is made possible by the generosity of Dr. Edward G. Tiedemann Jr., the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Additional generous support was provided by Stephan Loewentheil, Henry Birdseye Weil and Ann Uppington, Xiaohua Zhang and Quan Zhou, the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, the Blakemore Foundation, Robert and Bobbie Falk and two anonymous donors. Thank you to PEM supporters Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation and the individuals who support the Exhibition Incubation Fund: Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Kate and Ford O’Neil, and Henry and Callie Brauer. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
