Drawer 4.3: Wish You Happy Year of the Monkey!

Well, here we go: another China year for us. We've been working our way thru the 12 year cycle of the Shengxiao (生肖), the Chinese zodiac. Our first Chinese New Year in Shanghai we met the Rooster...which means...omg!...we arrived in a Monkey year! We thought we'd stay 2 years, maybe 3 & here we are full cycle! 

Those of you who are Monkeys...born in 1932, 44, 56, 68, 80, 92, 2004...might want to visit Drawer #1.4 to catch up on protecting yourself in your ben ming nian (本命年), your zodiac year. It's all about Red Underwear. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I've been in North Carolina all of January with my head happily down at a Winter Residency at the Penland School of Crafts. I was there, at the invitation of Kathryn Gremley, Penland's Gallery Director, (super big thanks, Kathryn!) to work on an installation for an interesting wedge of outdoor space created by the addition of a new gallery building. 

But I also had fun with the yards & yards of the red fabric called Dong Bei Large Flower Cloth I laid it out as part of my April installation at the Hillyer Art Space in D.C. Dong Bei is a province in  Northwest China (though in Chinese that's Westnorth.) but the fabric is favored all over China. By color - red is for happiness - & imagery - the cloth is associated with domesticity & marriage; it's traditionally used for marriage bed duvets (and to decorate Dong Bei restaurants in Shanghai.)  Older Chinese women have a way of putting patterns together that we'd consider mismatched but utterly sings out to me (though I'm too shy to shoot the pics...)  I gave it a try, mixing four different versions of the Dong Bei cloth - some vintage, some contemporary. I learned a lot about pattern and color values but whether it's going to be an audacious addition to the show or an over-the-top failure is yet to be seen...

A few weeks ago He-Whom-I'm-Trailing came home to a pink notice on our front door. Once we got it translated, it forbid the use of fireworks inside the city limits. We were skeptical that this would dampen the show but, indeed, word on the street from Shanghai is that this year there really were no fireworks inside the city limits. I guess that's the safe & prudent way to go but I'm sure glad we were there for the glory days as it gobsmacked us every time...click here for a minute's worth of video of what used to go on for hours & hours...So, this drawer, with its images taken from the spent firework castings that would land on our balcony, is in honor of all that thrilling firepower. Thank you for looking thru the Cabinet with me & Wish You a Happy Year of the Monkey!

Drawer #4.3: from the top 

1. The Chinese Character for Firecracker & a snarl of dragony-looking green tape 

2. A dragon, the highest animal in Chinese mythology, symbolic of males; with a sticker offering services to those migrants in need of a residency permit 

3. A fenghuang a  mythological bird, part phoenix, part peacock, part other things, symbolic of the females; w/ "happy clouds." 

4. Another fenghuang, more happy clouds, all images taken from the decorative wrappers of firecrackers. 

Photo credits: Full drawer, Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel

For more Chinese New Year items, check out Drawer #1.4: Chinese Zodiac Animals;
 Drawer #2.2, Things That Don't Fit in a Drawer #4, Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #3

Drawer # 2.2: Slowly Trotting in with the Year of the Horse

I've been lost in life's sauce... finally surfacing today with the post that should have gone out for Chinese New Year's. But then again, given the state of the world these days (O Ukraine, O so many places & people & things), it's never too late to send out auspicious symbols. 

These being Chinese auspicious symbols, of course, there have to be a lot pertaining to what the street beggars call "moneymoney"...

The Laughing Buddha, Budai, is apparently laughing all the way to the bank, teetering on one gold ingot while hefting another upward. Perhaps better to share it with the God of Wealth, hovering on his own ingot, distinguished by the side flaps on his royal cap and flanked by clouds/yun/云 of
good fortune/yun/运 which are not just lined with silver but laden with gold ingots...

After money, there's food.

Fish/Yu/鱼 you may have read about before on the blog...fishes wish you abundance & prosperity. These ones in the drawer are especially special as they are paired in two: marital happiness. Though they look a lot less happy in their twosomeness out on the street,

like the fate predicted by her mother for writer Amy Tam if she didn't look both ways before crossing the street: "smashed flat two eyes one side of face."

The word for peanut contains the word for "giving birth," not to mention that the nuts in their shell bear a semblance to twins in a womb, so no surprise here: they're auspicious for fertility & abundance. Oranges are the house gift of choice at CNY. The characters of their name can read as "lucky plant," their color associates them with gold, & roundness, in general, is a good thing. Pineapples have too many homophones to mention so let's just say, riches & good fortune. I love them best collapsible.

The character fu for good fortune 福 shows up several times in the drawer as well as, to my surprise, on our front gate, stuck there, I guess, by the neighborhood committee. A good thing as I got to say "fu is upside down" which sounds exactly the same as "good luck has arrived". In this case, the homophone works in my favor but, mostly, people wonder what the hell I'm talking about when I speak chinese. 

Somehow I neglected to stick a bat in the drawer. They're also fu 蝠, good for fortune & happiness, unless they get caught in your hair.

At the top of the drawer, there'a teapot charm: Teapot/hu/壶  is homophones with the hu-s that mean "protect" & "blessing" which feels exactly right when you think of someone fixing you a soothing cup of tea. But you've probably never thought of it in this way: according to Patricia Bjaaland Welch's book, Chinese Art, the teapot signifies fertility "ostensibly because of the manner in which the spout dips into the waiting cup." And you thought I was being over the top about those baby peanuts. This interpretation does, however, shine a worrisome light on all those non-functional/sculptural teapots out there in the craft world...

And finally, at the bottom, there's those funny fish bone looking things near where the fishes tails ought to be. Those are (meaninglessly upside down) the character shou 壽 written in the ancient seal script. The shou-s are wishing you a long life. (Here they are in their rectangular form. In their round form, they'd be wishing you a natural death at the end of that long life. It's a good wish but still...)

Even if it is just full of sequins & kitschy gold hollow plastic, this drawer sings out with radiant energy. May it bring good things your way.

Drawer #2.2: Plastic charms gathered from the city's markets, disassembled & reorganized; gold sequins, square & circular, sold in huge sacks at the notions market, more coveted by me than are ingots. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine. Most of the information on the symbolic meanings of things are from
Patricia Bjaaland Welch's wonderful book
Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs & Visual Imagery.

And just for fun...a little Horse Year tune courtesy of Marybelle Hu...

                                           

Things that Don't Fit #10: A Little More Pink

Little Pink is my bicycle, so named by my former studio assistant, Jam (see drawer 2.1) , the "little" being xiao 小, the sweet little adjective that turns dog into puppy (xiao gou), cat into kitten (xiao mao), friend into children (xiao pengyou) & endears your friends & colleagues by turning them into Xiao Xu & Xiao Mei.

A.K.A, by He-Whom-I'm-Trailing, as Mighty Pink, perhaps in honor of the courage and valour with which Little Pink takes on the daily snarl of Shanghai traffic.

Unbeknownst to us when we arrived in Shanghai, the nature of work life here was going thru a sea change. The old "iron rice bowl" days when your "work unit" or danwei 单位 paternalistically provided for most of your life needs, from housing to cheap meals to health care, and also made sure that you toed the Party line while producing only one child, were quietly fading away. But even so, we got a taste of the danwei's largesse at Spring Festival/Chinese New Year time, when H-W-I-T's work unit, the University, bestowed gifts on all its employees/workers. Over the years, there have been sacks of organic rice; bottles of olive oil of "meditareanean origin"; willow baskets filled with combinations of western sweets and eastern savories; once, a collection of tins containing 8 varieties of native mushrooms, and always, lots of vacuum packed pickled & otherwise preserved foods that we had no idea about. 

For our second Spring Festival, the University offered the pick of two from among a number of goods, including MP3 player (hey, this was 2006...) printer, bicycle, electric soy milk maker and some few other things way off my radar. After a year of brain-rattling taxis & bronchitis-enducing subway rides - I must have had no resistance whatsoever to local flora & fauna - never mind that I, in my terror over city driving styles, was still crossing streets using old ladies as human shields, I was ready for my own wheels. 

And, so lo & behold, with some help from the danwei (the Program's Chinese co-director had to obtain the license & plate as those were forbidden to foreigners...) & an excruciating long bike ride for Santa, (the revival from which required two very stiff shots of whiskey straight up immediately on arriving home at 2 in the afternoon on a Sunday...) it came to pass: on Xmas morning, under the droopy little potted pine that was our first SH Xmas tree, there was Little Pink.

That first year of bicycling was a glory. I truly loved it; it was like being one in a school of fish, all pedaling at the same relaxed pace, gliding in the relative silence of the city streets, a moving mass of stillness. As soon as a year or two later, I found myself puzzled that I never had that school of fish feeling anymore. Maybe I'd gotten jaded? But no, it finally dawned on me, that with 9 new metro lines & millions of new cars hitting the road, bike culture in SH had nearly disappeared.

Something like 1000 bicycles get stolen a day in SH. And there's a market where you can go buy them back. I lock mine with three different locking systems, two of which are actually built into the bike frame. Every time I walk away from Little Pink, I'm convinced that this is it, surely, this I'll come out & Little PINK will be gone. So every time, when I come out & LiTTLe PiNK Is STILL THERE it's like Xmas morning all over again.

(Of course, this post just about guarantees that any day now...)

I'll leave off but just this last little bit of recently spotted pink string. Control over the xiaomao's comings & goings? Protection against demons (who, notoriously, cannot negotiate zig-zag lines)? Or just a little zipline of beauty...

Things That Don't Fit in a Drawer #4: The Big Bang

We were warned, when we first arrived in Shanghai, to get out of town for Spring Festival:
it's what ex-pats were meant to do for the ten day long break from work. And so we did, joining the 225 million people who, during the holiday, reverse the migration pattern that brings workers from their rural villages, their "laojia," to the urban centers.

A few years in, we just couldn't face the frenetic airport/railroad scramble of that exodus & decided to see just how dire it really was to stay in town...

As the city emptied, the streets became eerily quiet. Unimaginably, capitalist enterprise utterly shut down... well, except for the fruit vendors doing a hopping business in the oranges that are the requisite host gifts (today's homophone: good luck.) Negligible car traffic.

And explosive noise! Wild ecstatic primal noise! For hours at a stretch & for days on end! We loved it.

So, ever since, on New Year's Eve, we can be found on the 18th floor balcony of a friend's apartment.

But this year's celebrations seemed a little quieter than usual, the "smoke flowers" a little skimpier. There's a lot of attention in the english-language press about the new government's attempts to curtail extravagance:  large banquets have been banned, luxury watch sales are down severely (details here on Evan Osnos' great "Letter from China" blog) & the Propaganda officials want it known that the new President, Xi Jingpin, has cut his menu down to a modest "six dishes and one soup." 

Could it be that in the past there was extravagant spending on New Year's Eve explosives by a certain Party, speculates our posse on the 18th floor. 

Here it is in all it's glory, shot from that balcony several years back by Artist Kurt Perschke (of the wonderful globe trotting Red Ball Project.) Just 1 single minute out of several hours of pure unmitigated ecstatic profligate extravagance...

                                       


And from this year, a view on the frontlines: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=4834493134793

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #3: Sounds like Fish

                                  

Seems just yesterday I was posting about signs of winter & here they are already, the signs of Spring. Or at least of Spring Festival as, entirely unusually, it is snowing today in Shanghai.

Gigantic fishes, splayed flat and dehydrated  - some as long as 6' - hanging in formation in the market streets, chickens & sausages & mysterious pork parts suspended outside windows & from the bamboo poles of the neighbors' clothes racks. The first winter we lived here I watch with horror as the strung-up chicken of our neighbor turned blacker & blacker over the course of several weeks, then mysterious donned a newspaper cape for several more. Now I know that chicken as the Iberico Ham of Shanghai. (Though I'm still sort of glad not to be invited for dinner given the particle pollutant count around here...)

年年有余 Nian Nian You Yu is the New Year's blessing that accompanies the fishes. In my bad Chinese, that means Year Year Have Fish. But the sound of Yu/Fish is also the sound of Yu/Abundance or Surplus. And so I wish you: May every year be abundant. May every year there be extra.

Drawer #1.4: Chinese Zodiac Animals

Even though Chinese New Year isn't until Feb 10th, the Year of the Black Snake begins today. It's a mystery how that works but that's par for the course.

We arrived in Shanghai in the year of the Monkey but the whole Chinese "zodiac" thing, the Shengxiao, (生肖), didn't really get on my radar until the following New Years's, when my Chinese teacher gave me  a set of postcards with papercuts for the Year of  the Rooster.

The next year was the year of my animal, the Dog. You might think, like I did, that the year your animal rules, you'd rule too. Not so. In fact, that's the year when things are most likely go askew for you & dangers lurk. I learned this the hard way: when the ladder to our top floor slipped out from under me, leaving me dazed for the next 4 months, everyone said knowingly, "oh, it's because you're a Dog." Only then did I learn that I should have been wearing protection. As in: red underwear.

I'm not making this up, people: by this time next week I'll now exactly which of my neighbors is a Snake by what's on their clothesline. No secrets here in the lane.

By the time the Year of the Pig rolled in, I was firmly sucked into the Chinese New Year kitsch market.

And when He-Whom-I'm Trailing's animal, the Rat took over the following year, we were fully armed & prepared: a drawer full of red underwear emblazoned with giant gold good fortune characters & a neck amulet bought in Hong Kong by the mother of a friend who knows about these things. A cow charm on a red string: all the decoy needed for spirits to go looking elsewhere to ruin a Rat's day. (Zig-zag bridges, foot high door jams, decoy charms... it's good to know that one's demons are so easily out smarted, says He-Whom-I'm-Trailing. One can imagine them all slamming themselves around like a bunch of Wile E. Coyotes.)

Next up was the Ox, carrying a sack of wealth, inscribed with the Fu of good fortune.

Fu is everywhere this time of year, often up-side down. That way, when you spot it  & say, in Chinese, "Fu is upside down" you are also saying "Good Fortune has arrived" as upside-down and arrived sound exactly alike in Mandarin. Which might also explain why I'm always a little turned around round here....

And so the twelve year cycle continues, each Animal ruling in the order in which it won the mythic Great Race: Rat, that cheater, conning the Cat out of participating & hitching a ride on the unsuspecting Ox, diving in to race to shore in the final stretch; Dog distracted, despite being a great swimmer, coming in almost dead last... (See The Rematch staged amuzingly last year in Zhujiajiao by American artist Duke Riley for SmART Power.) The years go by: Tiger, then Rabbit, then Dragon & now Snake.

We came to China thinking we'd be here two, maybe three years.... it's nine now. I'm saying that I'm not staying into the next cycle. I'm getting out before it's Monkey's turn again...but the Animals might have other plans...