Here’s Wallis (nearest camera) in the summer of 1925 swimming at the lido in the American Legation in Peking. The man sitting beside her is Eddie Mills, an American living in Peking and working for the Salt Gabelle (China’s salt tax agency). Mills had helped Wallis with her luggage on Tianjin Station in December 1924 when she heading to Peking. They remained friends.
A mounted policeman (with cutlass) in Shanghai c.1905. Photograph by Albert Henry Aiers who served in the SMP from 1902 to 1939. To be honest I’m not sure if this is a member of the SMP’s small mounted unit or a member of The Shanghai Light Horse unit of the Shanghai Volunteers? Any comments from experts most welcome!
And thanks to Robert Bickers at Bristol Uni who tells me: “Walthamstow-born Sidney George Reading (for it is he), once a furniture salesman. Sidney, possibly tiring of China ponies that were too small, left the force after 4 years and was later a tram driver in Brisbane.”
Much deserved recognition for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine “Post” at the SOPA (The Society of Publishers in Asia) awards – a really consistently great mag (to which I occasionally contribute admittedly)….. Click here to read in full… And last weekend’s great cover….
Visited the Cutty Sark at Greenwich last week. Though I’d walked past it many times I hadn’t actually been aboard since a school trip! I was there as Xiaolu Guo was speaking about her new book – Ishamaelle – set in the world of the old whalers so an East Indiamen seemed fitting.
The Cutty Sark was of course in the China trade for many years – the fastest of the clippers. It visited Shanghai in 1870 for the first time. Here below a couple of entries from AR Lubbock’s The Log of the Cutty Sark (1928)…
Art by Fan Ho, Xiyadie, Cai Dongdong, and Klaus Capra
Poetry from Marianne Boruch, Aiden Heung, Alina Stefanescu, Farnaz Fatemi, Malena Mörling, Timothy Yu, and Paula Bohince
Fiction from Roseanne Pereira
Nonfiction by Jeff Wasserstrom, Mary Cappello, David Chaffetz, and Cris Mazza
Critical essays by Jing Wang, Paul Cuff, Yiren Zheng, Zhang Ling, and Carlos Rojas
Interviews with theater director Wang Chong and filmmaker Paul Rosdy
Reviews by Flair Donglai Shi 施東來, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, and Qingsheng Xiao
Translation featuring works by Lo Yu (Fion Tse), Dai Wangshu (Tin Kei Wong), Yang Biwei (Liang Yujing), Zuo Fei (Ana Padilla Fornieles), Feng Zhi, Bian Zhilin, Wen Yiduo, Luo Qilan, & Li Bai (A.Z. Foreman)
Alice Leone-Moats (1908-1989), an author who was born in Mexico to wealthy and socially prominent American parents. She became the Colliers correspondent in the USSR and China during WW2 who wrote Blind Date with Mars (1943)… In 1944, the State Department cancelled her passport as she had travelled to Vichy-controlled France, and under war-time regulations it was illegal to travel to enemy-controlled territory
Canton Modern presents twentieth-century Cantonese art and visual culture in its full complexity as an important chapter in global modernism. United in a shared linguistic and cultural identity, the southern port cities of Guangzhou (also known as Canton) and Hong Kong were historically marginal in China. The birthplace of revolution, the two cities gave rise to a distinctive visual and artistic modernism, one shaped by cross-cultural interactions and tensions between conservative and progressive artworlds. Cantonese artists broke away from the elegant poetics of classical ink painting to forge a socially oriented realism, depicting subjects ranging from leisure and labour to war and disaster. Working as journalists and publishers, they exploited the immediacy and circulation of print, photography, and cartoons to intervene in and even reform society.
Li Hua and Liang Dong, Transfer Fighting to the New Oilfield, 1975. M K Lau Collection
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Cantonese artists helped to construct its self-image in propaganda and Socialist Realist art even as national agendas increasingly subsumed regional and individual character. Although post-war Guangzhou and Hong Kong embarked on politically divergent paths, their art and visual culture remained traceable to a shared modernist legacy. Hong Kong artists, including those who overtly embraced international trends, often had fraught sympathies with their contemporaries across the border. Bringing together over 200 works from institutional and private collections, many on public display for the first time, Canton Modern recovers a deeply rooted local story with contemporary global resonance.
