The Collectors - 4

I'm always fascinated to learn what motivates a person to start collecting.

The owner of this amazing collection of brown and white china - and this is only part of the collection - was motivated by two things: the gift of a brown and white plate and a desire to move beyond the more commonly collected blue and white china.

The end result, or more precisely, the result thus far, is remarkable.

No, I am Not Related to Rewi Alley

Yesterday I was asked if I was related to Rewi Alley. When I was in China I understood the confusion given the Chinese predilection for inverting christian and surnames; here in New Zealand the question just puzzles me. People seem to see the name ‘Rewi’ and assume we are related, overlooking the fact that his was a christian name and mine a surname.
On my last visit to Beijing I visited the former residence of New Zealand-born Rewi Alley, who gave so much of his life to working in China. Given his Communist beliefs, I imagined Alley living in a modest little backstreet dwelling. I was flabbergasted when I arrived at a large, two-storied stately home. Turns out Alley spent his last 29 years languishing in the grand elegance of the former Italian Embassy. He had not been alone. From the beginning of the 1950s the house, now The Friendship Museum of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (succinctly, CPAFFC), had been home to five “important foreign friends” including American journalist Anna Louise Strong, Japan’s Saionji Kinkazu, Jose Venturelli from Chile and Robert F.Williams from USA. They each had a large apartment within the mansion. It was a surprise to learn that Alley had sat in his sunny sitting room surrounded by stunning pieces of antique furniture from the Imperial Summer Palace. Large portraits hung on the walls, blue and white porcelain mingled with carved dragons and a crystal chandelier hung above. It is an understatement to say that Rewi Alley is highly regarded in China. He was considered their “number one foreign friend living in Beijing” and his surroundings made it clear that if you were ‘a number one friend,’ you were well looked after. Deng Xiaoping hosted Rewi Alley’s 80th birthday and he was honoured again by the Chinese heads of state when he turned 90. He died in Beijing in 1987 and his ashes were spread in Shandong, where he had spent much of his time establishing a technical school. When I left Friendship Museum, it was without a concrete impression of Rewi Alley. I wasn’t sure who I had ‘seen.’ Certainly I had a sense of the elderly, sociable, number one friend of China’s elite; but a vision of the younger, dedicated man who lived in austerity in rural China with the working folk, seemed a much more ephemeral thing. From ‘Travels in Beijing, a manuscript, Ajr

Shadow Play

Wellington, 2007.Ajr

I love shadows. I often photograph them more than the objects they stride away from. I like the sense of an object's 'other life,' its shadowy other self.

History has plenty of examples of cultural interest in 'shadow play' - in the 'alternate representation' of an object or a person. China for instance, is one of around twenty countries that has honed shadow play into an art form. Pi Ying Xi (using leather puppets) or Zhi Ying Xi (paper puppets), is a form of story-telling and entertainment that uses opaque figures in front of an illuminated backdrop. For me, the flickering shadows cast by any given object are worth as much attention as the solid reality. They create 'another dimension' that feeds my imagination.

Well Done Motueka!

For standing up to the might of McDonalds. It's not that I have anything personal against McDonalds, it's fast food chains in general and the insidious globalised approach they have to 'taking over the world.'. The first time I went to Beijing in 2001 I was appalled by the impact of McDonalds. My interpreter, thinking I might not like Chinese food, took me to lunch at McDonalds. The place was packed beyond belief. I found that a little unnerving but what really unhinged me, was the fact that I could not understand a thing. Never in my worst nightmares had I expected to be defeated by a McDonalds’ menu; but there it all was, written in Chinese and totally incomprehensible. I wouldn’t have cared if I had been anywhere else but somehow, being linguistically beaten by greasy fries and hamburgers felt like a very real and unnecessary punishment. When a table became available, a very young mother with her baby boy joined us. The baby, she told us, was just sixty-two days old and she was feeding him McDonald’s hot chocolate, cooled by her caring breath as she siphoned it from her cardboard cup into his baby bottle. He suckled contentedly with a frightening vigour. The first McDonalds opened in Beijing in 1992 and people lined up for hours to try the new ‘American-style’ restaurant. The company has never looked back. They’re virtually a part of Chinese urban life now, along with KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway and all the others. In 2003 there were 560 McDonalds restaurants throughout China and the company was aiming for another 100 in 2004. (KFC had 900 Chinese outlets). In China, Ronald McDonald is known by the cute-sounding name, Mai Dang Lao Shushu. And just for the record, when I visited Beijing in 2001 there were 19 Starbucks outlets. When I returned two years later, there were 40. The Chinese have undergone a major transformation in the way they eat and you don’t have to go far to find articles attesting to new, worrying levels of obesity and the chronic diseases often associated with it. It would be unfair to blame western takeaways entirely. The Chinese diet had also been significantly changed by the introduction of many more meat and dairy products, soft drinks and flavoured milk drinks – despite the fact that China has one of the world’s largest known national prevalences for lactose intolerance.