“I don’t understand why the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea isn’t swarming with visitors.  But I’m thrilled that it isn’t, because I’m planning to move in for the rest of the summer.”  That’s how New York-based art critic Holland Cotter began his New York Times review of the Mandala show at the Rubin Museum in August of 2009.  My sentiments exactly – I’d like to move in for a lot longer, but  I’ll settle for a few hours once or twice a year.  I stopped in a few weeks ago when I was in town for the Craft New York show, and I was happy to see that The Rubin, which specializes in the art of the Himalayas, hasn’t changed.  It’s still a place of repose, where the soul can expand a little.  I tell myself I remember seeing certain works of art on my last trip, like a 19th century painting (above) featuring Machig Labdron (1055-1153), a well-known figure in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, sometimes called “The Mother of Chod,” but other works were new.  The life-size reproductions of the murals from Lukhang, the Dalai Lama’s private temple in Llasa, were particularly exciting, or maybe the word is challenging, because they vibrate with thousands of colorful motifs whose hyper-specificity overloads the eyes.  Some would say this induces a semi-meditative state.

Also new to me was a small installation consisting of a life-size Tibetan Shrine Room on loan from the Alice S. Kandell Collection.  One stands there looking into the shrine and listening to a recording of monks chanting in quiet monotones, a soundscape of prayer in process.

The Tibetan Shrine Room represents The Rubin Museum at its restorative best, delivering us back to our daily lives, a little bit richer for the experience.  Before you leave, visit the small restaurant on the first floor, and the bookshop across the hall, which offers books not easily found elsewhere.  My favorite so far has been  Eternal Presence: Handprints and Footprints in Buddhist Art, the catalogue of a 2005 exhibition organized by The Katonah Museum of Art and curated by Kathryn H. Selig Brown.  Virtual books may be taking over, but only an old-fashioned type of color print book can do justice to works of this nature.  It is wonderful to hold and to contemplate, another, smaller place of repose.   By the way, the Katonah Museum is currently hosting “Rising Dragon,” a show of contemporary Chinese photography, which looks very promising.

Scene from "Pina"

I had never heard of German choreographer Pina Bausch or her Tanztheatre Wuppertal until I saw ”Pina,” Wim Wenders’ 2011 documentary, which synthesizes two distinct but complementary artistic visions to create that rarest of achievements, a masterpiece.  At least, I think that word is fairly used here.   It’s not only the choreography and the dancers who bring it to life that are extraordinary, thanks to the input of Pina Bausch.  It’s Wenders’ ability to capture the whole while doing justice to the parts that makes this film so memorable.  It is lush and spare at the same time, word-ful and word-less, mindful, respectful….and beautiful.  It pursues a more nuanced interplay of body and spirit than Wenders’ much earlier, nearly-as-magical film, Wings of Desire (http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wingsofdesire.htm).

http://www.pina-film.de/en/reviews.html

A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times: http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/movies/pina-a-documentary-by-wim-wenders-review.html

Joan Acocella’s reveiw in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/01/pina-bauschs-zone-of-discomfort.html

Mark Swed’s remembrance in the LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/07/pina-bausch-remembered.html

Wim Wenders

Pina Bausch

Scene from "Pina"

Scene from "Pina"

Some of you will be familiar with the faces and the names - and if you draw a blank, then stop by these websites when you have a moment:  christriola.com; randalldarwall.com; fordforlano.com; bibaschutz.com – and witness imagination at work.

Back row: Chris Triola, Brian Murphy, Randall Darwall, Valerie Hector, David Forlano. Front row: Biba Schutz

Those days are long gone.  Panjiayuan is proof that capitalism flourishes in modern China.  Every weekend, an estimated 50,000 people visit Panjiayuan, possibly the world’s largest open-air flea market, which extends across the better part of one huge city block.   Hundreds of individual transactions take place every hour between people from all walks of life, all of them conducted in mandarin, China’s lingua franca.  My limited mandarin language skills notwithstanding, I have gone there several dozen times in the last decade, and now it is one of my favorite places on earth.

Hundreds of vendors take long bus rides in from distant provinces to spread their wares on a few square feet of Panjiayuan concrete, hoping to go home far wealthier than they came.  Local merchants also rent space at Panjiayuan during the weekends and run shops in other parts of the city during the week.   Business slows during the lunch hour, when vendors order bowls of steaming noodles from nearby food stalls and pull out their thermoses to sip murky green tea.

It would take several pages to describe the vast range of wares on sale at Panjiayuan on any given day.   There are thousands of newly-made “antiques” at every turn, and once in a while, the real thing.  Also thousands of contemporary products, such as cloisonne enamel bowls, white porcelain figures, stone garden statuary, furniture, books, prints, and so on.  And beads of all materials, of mixed quality.

From time to time it’s possible to find old pieces of Chinese beadwork, or old Chinese beads.  But prices have risen astronomically in recent years, and hard but friendly bargaining is mandatory.  You’ll know you’ve done well when a vendor reluctantly admits that your Chinese is excellent and you bargain just a like a Chinese person!   You’ve done poorly when they hand you some small extra item you didn’t pay for….smiling broadly all the while.  Mostly I experience the latter.

Even more interesting than the things one can buy are the people one  sees…..or bumps into, because the aisles get very crowded with bodies, bicycle carts, little wooden stools and cloth-covered boxes of products.  Polite shoving takes over as the only way to progress down the aisle.

While I have never toppled over into a stall, I have come close more than once, and I know the day may come when I lose the fight to maintain my balance.   I hope to land on a rare empty spot, not on one of the spiky pottery-shard piles that dominate some of the stalls.  Chinese people pick through these piles carefully, culling the perfect shards for jewelry-making or other purposes and thereby recycling the remains of countless hand-painted plates, bowls and cups.   Strangely, despite all the culling, the  piles at Panjiayuan never get any smaller.   There they sit, waiting to cushion a hapless fall.

Needless to say, a sense of humor comes in handy.  At Panjiayuan, every fourth or fifth transaction is public.   Other people lean in to hear the offers and counteroffers on a single item and lend their opinions without being asked. Word of the final price spreads quickly down the aisle, and vendors with similar items call you over in hopes of a sale.

Arguments are rare but can be heated.   I did get into one in 1997, with Miss Yang, an ambitious young vendor who set her prices high and then refused to bargain in the least.   She disdained counteroffers of any kind.  All these years later her prices are still high but we have become lao pengyou, old friends, and she tries to save pieces of beadwork she thinks I’ll be interested in until I have time to return.  We haven’t argued since.  I make it a point to see her every time I’m in Beijing;  in my world she is a Beijing institution.  In wintertime we go out for a meal of huo guo, hot pot, together.  We find ourselves reminiscing about the good old days, when intact pieces were easier to find and prices were lower.   When my Chinese falters, which is often, her young assistant is always at hand to summon up a few helpful English words.  We end up conversing in ”Chinglish.”

A fair amount of what I know about Chinese beadwork derives entirely from my long relationship with Miss Yang and others like her, and the pieces that have passed through their hands.   There is hardly another way to learn, because so very few examples are preserved in Chinese or western museums, and no history has been written.  Sometimes it feels like a form of salvage work, to be coming so late in search of evidence that has for the most part disappeared.  From this point of view, every piece we can find and document  is a victory of sorts.

Still more pages would have to be devoted to the pervasive odors of Panjiayuan, such as garlic, cigarette smoke and near the latrines, urine.   More on these in a future post perhaps.   And the sounds of the place…..you have to be there.  Or, if you have 5 minutes to spare, take a look at this tongue-in-cheek video on YouTube, which makes for a decent introduction but can’t begin to capture the nuances:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3xCV7Dh1ps

Below are some photos I took on my last visit, in September of 2008.

Text and images copyright Valerie Hector 2008-9.  All rights reserved.

I subscribe to Beads-List, a listserve with beads and beadwork as its focus.
A few months back, I received a posting about the beaded virus models being created by scientist Dr. Holly A. Wichman, a Professor of Biology at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho.

I knew nothing of virus structures, let alone that they could be modeled in beads….or that such potentially deadly organisms could be rendered so beautifully.  In her scientific research, Dr. Wichman studies the Microviridiae family of viruses.   A few years ago she took up beading, and at a certain point she realized that she could model some of the viruses in beads.  A Microviridiae virus inspired her to make the model in the photo above, which measures about 3 1/2″ in diameter.

Some of Dr. Wichman’s beaded virus models were exhibited from June to September, 2008 in the “Crystal Structures: Viruses in Glass” show at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Gallery in Washington, DC.

Also on display were beaded virus models made Dr. Bentley Fane, a Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Arizona who took up beading after spending some time in Dr. Wichman’s lab.   Some of his beaded virus models are shown below.

Dr. Wichman and Dr. Fane discovered that some of the beaded virus models they were making were inherently stable—meaning they were hard to crush with the pressure of a hand—and others were inherently unstable—they could be crushed easily.   This led Drs. Wichman and Fane to question whether evolutionary forces tend to select against the unstable structures over time…..a question they might not have thought of, had they not been working with beaded models.

All of this reminds me of the work of my colleague Laura Shea of Parker, Colorado, who has been bridging the fields of beadwork and geometry for a number of years now, by selecting various polyhedra and then setting out to render them in beads….with often amazing results.

And I am also reminded of the work of the various mainland Chinese beadworkers, past and present, who have been creating 3-dimensional structures out of beads for at least a couple of centuries.

To see more of the beaded virus models created by Dr. Wichman and Dr. Fane, visit http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/biology/labs/wichman/reflections/

and also http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2008/0613art_exhibit.shtml.

To see Laura’s website, visit  http://www.adancingrainbow.com/.

When I look at an abacus, I see a framework containing rods that hold moveable beads.  But are they really beads?  Or are they just small objects that happen to have holes in them to make counting easier?

As someone whose assumptions are influenced by an intense interest in beads and beadwork, I would suggest that the answer is “both.”

But I’m not so sure that Madame Chen Lulan of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, would agree.  And she is by far the greater authority on abacus history, theory, and practice, especially as it relates to China.  In fact, she’s become a revered person in China.  in the last few years.  She’s been interviewed by quite a few television, radio, magazine, newspaper and internet reporters, and several dozen articles about her expertise have been published.

It was thanks to one of these articles that I came to know of Madame Chen.

My colleague and fluent Chinese speaker Jeff Keller came across her name in late 2007 or early 2008 on the Chinese internet, in an article that told of her wish to build an abacus museum to house her substantial personal collection.  At my request Jeff contacted Mrs. Chen to ask if I could come to meet her later that year.  Her granddaughter wrote back to us, saying yes.

In May of 2008 a catastrophic earthquake devastated parts of Sichuan Province not far from Chengdu.  For a few weeks Jeff could not get through to Madame Chen by email or cell phone, and we wondered how she and her family had fared.  Eventually we found out that Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, had been largely spared, and that everyone in the Chen family was fine.   

So in September of 2008, I flew from Beijing to Chengdu to meet Madame Chen and interview her about her life’s work.  My Chinese is too limited to allow me to carry on an in-depth conversation, so I brought a translator.

We took a taxi to Madame Chen’s home on the ground floor of an apartment complex in central Chengdu.  The largest room in the home has been converted to a schoolroom, where Madame Chen conducts several classes a week for children of various ages.  At the front of the room hangs an enormous abacus, which Madame Chen uses for demonstration.

A modest and reticent woman, Madame Chen was reluctant to talk about her past or her accomplishments.  Instead she gave us her resume, which Jeff later translated for me.

Resumes the world over give just the bare facts of a life and typically contain huge gaps, sometimes spanning decades.  So it is with Madame Chen’s resume.  For example, she mentioned in our interview that she had worked for the Communist Party in Tibet on a road-building squad in the 1950s, but this is not mentioned in her resume.   I would have liked to hear more about that time in her life, but she did not seem to want to discuss it.  One quickly learns that certain topics are highly sensitive to Chinese people, and it would have been inconsiderate of me to press the issue.

But plenty of other facts are mentioned in Madame Chen’s resume.  Born in 1930, she graduated from the Lixin School of Accounting in the 1950s.  In 1986, she helped cofound the Chengdu Lixin School of Accounting.  In 1994, she published her own textbook, Practical Abacus Calculation, which is widely used in schools.

In 1988, she began collecting abacuses and abacus-related material.  Her resume lists her collection as containing :

“…over 1,200 abacuses from the Ming, Qing, and Republican periods made of gold, silver, jade, ivory, blue porcelain, agate, olive wood, red sandalwood, redwood, copper, and elephant tusks. Includes over 600 volumes from the Qing and Republican periods including over 100 volumes and 500 chapters bound in string, over 2,000 abacus magazines, and Three Calculations Textbook and Abacus Methods for Middle and Elementary School Students from the Cultural Revolution period. Collection also includes over 16,000 post cards, over 7,000 lottery tickets, over 4,000 souvenir cards, and over 400 money counters. ”

I asked Madame Chen how she had built her collection.  The answer was simple: hundreds of visits to local flea markets and antique shops over many years.   This surprised me.  The day before I had visited Chengdu’s main flea/antique market, which seemed strangely impoverished and run-down, with weary-looking vendors and absolutely nothing of interest to a beadwork or textile researcher.  But it was not so for Madame Chen.  Somehow she had managed to assemble a world-class collection, drawing solely upon sources in her hometown.

There was no mistaking the need for a museum to house Madame Chen’s collection.  I hope that a benefactor, of any nationality, will step forward and make it happen.

All too soon, another class was about to begin, and Madame Chen needed to tidy up the classroom.  We were out of time.

As the translator and I walked away, my mind returned to one of the questions we had asked Madame Chen: is an abacus a piece of beadwork?  She fell silent and seemed to have a hard time answering.  Probably she did not want to offend me.

When she did answer, she said no, it’s really more of a counting tool.   But you could see it as a piece of beadwork if you want to.

And I have to confess, rightly or wrongly, I want to.

Below, two images of incense sticks alight at the Green Ram Temple, a Taoist temple in western Chengdu that I visited the next day.  In Chinese belief, the wafting smoke carries visitors’ prayers skyward.

(Text and images copyright Valerie Hector 2008-9.  All rights reserved.)

January 5, 2009

They say memories are most indelibly etched in our brains when intense emotions are involved.

One of my most indelible memories came about as a result of a minor car accident about fifteen years ago.  I was driving on an expressway in the Chicago area, and I accidentally rear-ended a taxi in heavy traffic.  Fortunately, it was only a tap, and a fairly gentle one at that.  Still, it was upsetting.  A few seconds went by, and I realized that it wasn’t serious.

I saw the taxi driver start to get out of his vehicle, presumably to have a word with me, and then I saw something hanging from his rear view mirror.  I knew instantly what it was—a beaded mashallah, an elaborate one.

I first saw what I came to think of as a beaded mashallah at my friend Ani Afshar’s house in Chicago some years prior to the accident.  She had gotten it in Turkey long before,  and promised to get me one some day if she ever went back to Turkey.

At the time of the accident, I didn’t have my own beaded mashallah.  For reasons I can’t quite articulate and to this day don’t fully understand,  I really wanted one of my own.   But they were so hard to find in the U.S.

Beaded mashallahs are handmade by prisoners in Turkish jails, and designed to be suspended from the rear view mirror of a car.  The Arabic word mashallah means something like “may Allah so ensure it,” meaning the safety of the vehicle, its driver and passengers.  Such ornaments have been made by Turkish prisoners for at least several decades, as a way to occupy time and a means of generating a small amount of income.

Most beaded mashallahs of this sort feature one, two, or three small birds hanging in little niches above or below the word mashallah.  The birds tend to be worked in bead crochet, while the mashallah inscriptions are done in loomwork.  Other beadnetting techniques also turn up too.  Beaded mashallahs tend to be fairly small.  The blue one on this page is about 7 inches tall, the red one, 8 inches tall.

But back to my little accident.  As the taxi driver started walking towards my car, I got out and started walking towards him, apologizing the whole while for being so careless.  Looking at him with the eyes of an American who had never been to Turkey at that time, I thought he could well have been Turkish.

He was not exactly listening.  He was sort of yelling at me, not in a mean way exactly, and I couldn’t blame him.  After I apologized a few more times, I asked him please to show me the beaded mashallah hanging from the rear view mirror of his taxi.  I pointed to his rear view mirror.

I was still pointing as he shook his head, rolled his eyes, walked back to his taxi, got in, and drove away.   I thought of following him to try asking again, but I didn’t.   Maybe I wasn’t destined to have a beaded mashallah, I thought, and best to be quiet and leave well enough alone.

A few years after that, Ani went back to Turkey and brought back for me the red mashallah shown on this page. Today it hangs in my studio, right above my work table.  Just recently someone gave me the blue mashallah as a gift, and so far it hangs in my kitchen.  I treasure them both, and feel that I have enough mashallahs now.

Although I keep them in my house, not my car, I have the sense that my two beaded mashallahs might still be working in my favor, persuading the universe to try and ensure that only positive things happen to me and my loved ones.

Thankfully, I haven’t rear-ended anyone since.   And I did finally get to Turkey in 2007, twice,  but I didn’t see any good mashallahs.

(Text and images copyright Valerie Hector 2009)

"Kindred" Brooch by Kiff Slemmons

We e Chicagoans are fortunate to have Kiff Slemmons living among us, after she and her husband Rod relocated from Seattle a few years ago.  Rod is the Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College of Chicago.

For many years Kiff has been one of the world’s leading art jewelers….although I am not sure that the term does her justice.  She’s more of an artist who happens to work  in the medium of jewelry.

Her latest body of work is being featured at the Douglas Dawson Gallery in Chicago from December 13, 2008 to January 31st, 2009.

"Lebe" Necklace by Kiff Slemmons

The title of the show is “Kiff Slemmons: Artifact into Art.”   The materials used are eclectic and surprising, ranging from hand-shaped African stone beads in soft gradations of shade and size which Douglas Dawson had acquired long ago, to tin can lids or rusty nails that came to Kiff by chance, and dried pussy willows or seed pods she found in rural Iowa.

Only a master could bring these materials together this harmoniously.

What I admire about Kiff’s work, beyond the sheer technical mastery, is her feeling for nuance and her preference for understatement.

And always the wit–it is there somewhere in every piece, a wit born of  intellect, wisdom, humanity, and an abiding curiosity about the world and its people.

"Furl" Brooch by Kiff Slemmons

When she uses beads, it is with wholly fresh vision.   It’s hard to imagine anyone else using African stone beads as compellingly.

But see for yourself.  If you live in Chicago, visit the Douglas Dawson Gallery before January 31st.   And if you have time, stop by the Museum of Contemporary Photography too (www.mocp.org).

Or see Kiff’s show online at www.douglasdawson.com (click on “Calendar of Events).   That is where I found the images that I am showing here.

To see more of Kiff’s work, visit the Art Jewelry Forum website at http://www.artjewelryforum.org/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=905.

There is also a Wikipedia entry on Kiff, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiff_Slemmons, and an excellent article in Ornament Magazine: http://www.ornamentmagazine.com/se_kiff_slemmons.html.

"Close at Hand" Necklace by Kiff Slemmons

December 20, 2008

Recently I came across two small beaded panels featuring commercial prints of the Virgin Mary surrounded by little beaded flowers and set within beaded wirework frames.

The heart-shaped panel shows the Virgin Mary by herself and the oval panel shows her holding the Christ child in her arms.

The front of each panel is topped with a glass dome, shaped to match the piece it protects.  The backs feature metal hooks for hanging.

I originally thought that these pieces must have been made in France, possibly as an offshoot of the beaded funeral wreath industry, but I was wrong.

On the back of the heart-shaped panel, there is a small stamp that says “Made in Czech-Slovakia.”

There is no date, but the hyphen between “Czecho” and “Slovakia,” which was in use at various times between 1918 and 1945, suggests that these panels were made before the mid-1940’s.   I sense they are from the 1920’s or 1930’s, but again, I could be wrong.

The usual questions come to mind.  How were these panels used, and by whom?  Were they produced in multiples, in cottage industry settings, perhaps by women working out of their homes?

Were they made by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands?  Did they hang in homes, in churches, in tombs or on gravemarkers?

In the end, it doesn’t matter.  Part of what makes these pieces special is the sense of religious devotion they communicate.

There is also something very moving about the contrast between the 2-dimensionality of the Virgin Mary prints, and the 3-dimensionality of the flowers and frames.

The prints may have been mass produced in a mechanized and impersonal process, but their subject matter is divine. The beads were certainly mass-produced, but the working of them into flowers and frames is a highly personal and labor-intensive matter, accomplished not by machines but by human hands and eyes, focused on embellishing prints that are scarcely worth a few cents on their own.  Mortals, in the service of the divine.

Were the makers devoutly religious, or just doing what was necessary to earn a wage?

Was each twist of the wire a prayer of sorts, or just another moment in a long workday?

Somewhere there must be someone who knows more about pieces of this type.  I have not seen them published, but they must be represented in museum collections in the Czech Republic– in Prague or in Jablonec nad Nisou?

If I learn more I will let you know.  And if you have any ideas, please share them by posting a response below.

(Text and images copyright Valerie Hector 2008)