Baseball, Japan, San Francisco: A Short & Biased History

Willie Mays & Joe DiMaggio at the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park

Every morning on my way to work, I cast a glance at City Hall to remind myself that I’m not dreaming.  The Giants flags still fly, the banners proclaiming victory remain, and the Lone Star flag that once flew above Civic Center Plaza has yet to be replaced, an irresistible target for fans.
The air has been a little sweeter, the populace friendlier.  Upon the heels of history, reminiscing is in order.

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The Other Shanghai: a sea voyage the hard way

“The year 1871 was not particularly important in the development of Shanghai as a physical place, but was noteworthy when it comes to historiography…the Oxford English Dictionary singles it out as the year during which “to shanghai” began to appear in newspapers.”

Jeffrey Wasserstrom,

Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments

Currently enthralled with all manner of 19th Century appurtenances, San Francisco is home to a second golden age of handlebar mustaches and historic cocktails served in period-specific bars.  Luckily for 21st century patrons, the fascination is all surface: absent are the trapdoors and opium-laced cocktails that made the city’s storied drinking holes famous for shanghaiing.  Precious little romance was involved in the process, as quite a number of men died while being taken, and unseasoned civilians were just as likely to fall to a drugged drink or truncheon.  Once aboard, a man dared not tell how he came to be there–his hope lay in being able to jump ship or find his fortune at the end of the line in Shanghai.

Also called “crimping,” the system was essential to early San Francisco’s maritime trade for the simple reason that more money could be made from the land than from the sea.  A sailor shipping out of San Francisco could earn many times more than at any other port of call, yet very few chose seagoing toil when a potential fortune was to be found on land.  The shortfall was made up the hard way.

The practice was hardly unusual or mysterious–the British impressed enough American sailors into their navy so as to cause ill feelings between the two countries.  But in its inimitable way, San Francisco found a way to put its own mark on this ignominious history.

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Celebrate India

By Saturday, August 28th, the city’s sweltering summer heat will yield to a more accustomed winter chill, so we recommend warming up with the Asian Art Museum’s Celebration of India.

Get moving with the Chitresh Das Dance Company, flex your mind and body with yoga gallery tours, sample Indian desserts and spices, and create your own works of art.

And since no fewer than five people have asked about it today, yes, Sanjay Patel will be presenting his new book, Ramayana: Divine Loophole.  Check out his Gheehappy.com, or learn about his influences (he has excellent taste) and read an interview on Pixar’s site.

A huge new shipment of South Asian books just arrived in the Museum Store, so if the docents pique your curiosity, you can take some of the museum home with you.  Namaste!

Meanwhile…

If you didn’t get enough qipao in the Shanghai exhibition (it is a broad survey, after all), I recommend you see what Softfilm was up to at the Hong Kong Museum of History.  Nearly 300 examples of the classic dress are on view and not one that can be tried on–talk about heaven and hell.
Many thanks to Dave for the great photos!

Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Shikumen

We get a lot of crazy questions in the museum store, like “How much is that?”  Ordinarily  this is not an unusual question, given the nature of our endeavors, but in this instance patrons are pointing out Jian-Jun Zhang’s installation, Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden.

Even those who don’t follow the art market know that major Chinese contemporary art is priced out of the the means of most apartment-dwelling San Franciscans, so the question “How much is it?” is a question not asked casually.

tilt-shifting courtesy of TC

If you’ve seen the Shanghai exhibition, Zhang’s work is the one comprised of bricks from dismantled shikumen, as well as life-sized silicon rubber scholar’s rocks and an unsettlingly flesh-hued vessel.  For those of you who require a little more  background, see this earlier post.

Happy news for those of us who like to buy art and afford lunch, as Zhang has proven in a multiple charting the disappearance of old Shanghai.  His Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Shikumen, consists of an enevelope of nine photographs of the rapidly disintegrating past and a wee paper boat to help you travel the waters of memory.  Both the folded boat and envelope are fashioned out of a painted composite map of Shanghai showing the restlessness of the landscape.  The best part?  This artist’s work is $15.

(very not-to-scale)

There’s little chance that I’ll ever be able to buy anything that we exhibit in the museum–minus what’s in the museum store.  I’ll take what I can get, until someone wants to gift me one of the great rubber scholars rocks.

Tiger, tiger

I have just discovered the only reason to want an iPhone.  This impetus, strangely enough, comes from the V&A Museum’s Tipu’s iTiger App.

If you’re not up on the history of colonial inequity, let me explain.  The life-sized wooden and mechanical tiger mauling a European unsubtly summarized the Sultan of Mysore’s feelings for East India Company.  For the Tipu, the imagery of the great beast was an essential psychological trope in defeating the infidel British.  He utilized the tiger motif in many facets of his rule, from the uniforms and weaponry of his “tiger soldiers” to coinage and standards.

After Tipu was killed defending his capital in the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, the automaton was taken as a sort of trophy by the East India Company and displayed in their India Museum for the next fifty years.  Visitors were allowed to “play” the mechanism, which produced the sounds of a man being ravaged by a beast.  Now in the collection of the V&A Museum, visitors are no longer allowed to play organ grinder.  Obviously their staff had grown tired of requests to turn the tiger’s crank, hence the clever introduction of the iTiger.

The catalyst for this story, you wonder?  My most recent score at a thrift store.

It's not a tchotchke--it's history.

Beyond Good & Evil

It’s amazing what one finds when cleaning out the closet–even when that closet happens to be a photo-hosting site.

Since I’m at nearly 7000 images and can’t seem to find anything when I look for it, it’s time to do some tagging.  A bit tedious, but a reasonable way to spend a slow Sunday morning, especially given my selective memory.  The best part about going back in time?  Discoveries like this picture I’d taken of a friend’s photograph from a trip to Indonesia (so meta!).

Whereas traditional wayang kulit (shadow theatre) is based on the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabarata, this is wayang wahyu, a form that allowed the Jesuits to spread their word through a means more familiar to their Indonesian audiences.  The piece to the right at first looks as though it is the usual kayonan (tree of life) or gunungan (holy mountain) , but look closely and you’ll discover some non-native imagery.
This is definitely not something you’ll see in our upcoming Bali exhibition, but a fascinating aspect of acculturation.  I know a few readers have traveled in Asia–what are your favorite moments of cultural disparity?

Nine Lives

If I hadn’t committed myself to pressing matters of civic pride, I’d be at the Mechanics’ Institute on Wednesday to see William Dalrymple talk about his new book, Nine Lives.

Fascinated as we are with the way in which much of spiritual Asia has rocketed to the fore of economics and technology, the well-respected India hand seeks to explain the transformation with his usual elegance.  The event starts at 6, find more information here

(If anyone goes, please fill me in)

The Other Shanghai: Oakland?

photo courtesy of Bunky's Pickle © used with permission

Although 1940s Shanghai had lost considerable luster courtesy of occupation, war, and revolution, another Shanghai was angling to take its place.  In the same fashion that Hollywood had been responsible for inspiring glamor the world over, nightclubs in search of their own golden era underwent a certain Shanghai-ification.  The city offered a powerful syllogism, an invocation that promised delight and unparalleled decadence.  Even pre-Castro Cuba with its tropical,  imperialist-friendly allure was home to a theater christened “The Shanghai.”

And then there was Oakland. 
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There are no guilty pleasures

I got into Project Runway when I caught the mother of all colds last year.  Cable television, in its infinite wisdom, was catching up late-to-the-gamers with an entire season’s worth of shows in a single day and me, being soft in the head, fell hard.  While I don’t stay home to watch it nowadays, I still like to keep an eye on the action, especially given that SF-based Jay Nicholas Sario is in the running this season.
Why am I writing about this on our blog?  Because Sario’s ten fashion week looks were based on last Summer’s Lords of the Samurai exhibition.  Since this combines both work and pleasure, I’m calling for an emergency meeting at my house Thursday night.  Who’s with me?