Art by Ai Wei Wei

When we were in Stockholm in April we went to see the art exhibit by Chinese artist and government critic Ai Wei Wei.  I knew very little about him before I went, only that he had been imprisoned by the Chinese authorities and thereby disappeared for months.  The art installation was held in a former harbor magazine, a gallery named appropriately Magasin 3, and it was a suitable place right in the harbor, a place for international trade and global influxes and outfluxes over centuries.

Here is a selection of some works that I found particularly interesting.


The exhibit showed many of his pieces, which are often everyday objects remade by local artisans with special techniques and painstaking, time-consuming efforts.  When you walk into the exhibit you see 96 large, white Chinese porcelain vases standing on the floor.  When you walk around them, you realize that they have Chinese art on them on the other side, increasingly broader and broader patterns.


The vase design is a copy of the most expensive Chinese object ever sold, an ancient vase with the design called "Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain", which is also the name of this installation from 2005. Fascinating! It just makes you stop and think about design, partiality, copying of value and how you can take something unique and make a pattern out of it.  I loved it.


Similarly, was a giant heap, maybe 1.5 m tall (5 feet) of handpainted porcelain sunflower seeds.  From a distance it looks like plain gravel, but when you get really close you see the ceramic pieces up close, each individual, each different, but from a distance they all looked the same.  Just like when you look at people or countries from a distance - everybody looks the same, but up close we are all different. It is a matter of scale and distance.


A World Map made out of cotton fabric, stacked high and cut out with precision into each continent...  I never imagined that it would be so different to see the continents stack high, instead of seeing them just marked on a piece of paper.  Another fantastic thing is that you could walk around and see the world from the North, the East, the West, and sometimes below or at the crustal level if you crouched a bit.  Such a simple piece of art and so thoughtful and thought-making. I love it!


The Norwegian coastline from the North, as seen through Ai Wei Wei's cut fabric in his World Map.

Things that are wrong: Chinese prisoner at gold farms...

... who are forced to play computer games day in and out to earn money for their guards and prison directors. Not only are computer games a waste of time, but this 'gold farming' is even worse, much worse.  Political prisoners, etc., that are forced to stare at computer screen in a virtual, non-reality world to earn fake money for points and gold in the game, that then other players around the world are willing to pay for.  Unbelievable. So wrong.

Book review: Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann av Jonas Jonasson

One more book review of a Swedish book in Swedish on this blog, but this one it on its way to be translated into English and a multitude of other languages.  It was a long time ago I read such a hilarious book.  It helps that the long beginning takes place in a small village not far from where I grew up, and that the author successfully makes fun of Swedish society, world history, politicians and incompetent bureaucrats, and puts together an obviously too-incredible story, but it is fun!  Just like crazy movies like Young Frankenstein is fun.  It is not because the story is believable, but because the book (or movie) creates laugh-out-loud moments in your life. 

In Swedish this book by Jonas Jonasson is called 'Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann', which means The 100-year old who stepped out the window and disappeared. It will be made into a Swedish movie in 2012.  Jonas Jonasson is a former Swedish journalist who had the first draft of this book in his drawer for over 20 years or so.  The story seems simple, but it is not.  An old man turns 100 (named Allan) and decides to escape before his birthday party at the old-people home, and steps out the window.  And then the story starts, which includes murders, elephants, police, journalists, mafia, drug dealers, akvavit, swedish summer, swedish women, and much more... all written in a hilarious Swedish based on 1940-1950s intricate and sometimes stilted grammar with words of today thrown in. Throughout the book the 100-year old reminisces about his colorful life, where he has traveled the world, and in fact, helped (or not) world history personalities such as Franco, Roosevelt, Mao, Einstein's brother, Stalin, and he visits and deals with the associated gulag camps, atom bomb makings, secret submarines, and Iranian revolutions.  The book gives a great work-through of 20th century history, but of course it is all wrong because Allan is inserted in it.  But hilarious! I won't tell you the ending of the story, but it is good to the end.

I loved this book.  Apparently many (snobbish?) book critics in Sweden didn't like it at all, and thought it was silly, overwrought, or just plain dumb.  Well, dumb, that is Danielle Steele.  Overwrought, sure, but that is the point!  Just like a Mel Brooks movie, get it!?  Remember Springtime for Hitler - just the same thing, but this is nearly better, I think.  Silly - come on, good culture can be FUN. One critic complained that the book wasn't believable (hello, it wasn't meant to be!). This is pure entertainment, not serious literature... I am keeping this book so I can read it again next time I get the flu and have to lay in bed for a day or two. It will make me laugh many times again.  (And thanks to BOS for sending it to me!)

So, English-speaking readers, keep your eyes open and get it when it comes out in your country in the translated form.

The world is upside down

ugly earrrings, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Now when you want something that looks old, unique, handmade, and special, you can just buy it at Michaels and it is Industrial Chic made in China. Fake creativity....

better than Matisse?

Koi Pond near Kunming botanical garden, originally uploaded by aroid.

Isn't this amazing? Photo from Flickr friend aroid, currently on a trip in China.

At IKEA in China...

swedish meatballs, ikea, originally uploaded by myshoes51.

They have little Swedish flags in the meatballs! And neat mashed potato balls too. Globalization in action is not always what you expect.

Photo copyright by myshoes51 on Flickr.

Language is not easy...

From a friend of ours:

I bought a little 7" TV/Monitor/AVPlayer for my video work, and reading the manual, I fell off my chair, ROTFL-ing:
 

"Do not put the player in bed, sofa, cloth and clothes, etc to avoid jams in the hole."

Book reviews: Two books about Chinese places and things

A while ago I was on a roll reading things about China, from Chinese food in the US to Chinese history and culture. Ever since I saw the old Marco Polo TV-series as a young teenager I have been fascinated with this country, and I would love to visit, but now it feels like it might be too late to see the old cultural China and its nature. What we mostly hear about now is about environmental pollution, uncontrolled industrial development, and the lack of human rights and natural conservation. It is sad.

The two books I read a while ago are of very different sorts. The first one, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles - Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, there is the number 8 in there), is a book of mixed feelings and mixed contents. She sets out to find where the fortune cookies come from, a common dessert addition in American-Chinese restaurants but never seen in China. After she figures that out through interviews and some fact digging in California, she switches subjects to the history of take-away food, Chinese restaurant owners, illegal immigration, the best Chinese restaurant in the world, the true origin of General Tso's chicken, etc. The book is well-written, very well researched with many trips over the world, but I just couldn't find it that interesting because it was so scattered in its topics. It felt like she put everything she could in there, like a quilt with too many colors. based on the reviews on Amazon, most people liked it a lot better than I did. But after reading Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Chinese food and culture, I am spoiled, I know.

And now for something completely different. Peter Hessler has written about his years as an English teacher working for the Peace Corps in the remote Chinese town of Fuling along the Yangtze River in a book called River Town: Two years on the Yangtze. This was before Westerners were common in China, and in fact, he was one of only four Western people in the whole town of a hundreds of thousands of people. He writes about the everyday struggles with the Chinese language and culture, how he teaches his students Shakespeare with a Chinese twist, how Communist party bureaucrazy gets in the way sometimes, and vividsly describes the landscapes, rivers, people, and villages he meets. It is a wonderful book, but slightly too long. The writing is great, it is just the long descriptions some of this thoughts that become a bit too long-winding sometimes. The town of Fuling is half drowned now because of the Seven Gorges Dam. They moved the down up along the hills as part of the flooding of the Yangtze River upstream from the Dam. It is sad to read about how many Chinese leave old history behind and is all for progress, progress, progress (=more money, more things, more production). I think this book was the most detailed and honest book I have read so far about China.

Next up on my Chinese literature track is Marco Polo's stories I think.

Visste du att... (Did you know that..)

Vattenkastanjer är rotknölarna av starrgräs som odlas på vattendränkta fält runt om i Sydostasien. De har neutral smak och har för växter den ovanliga egenskapen att vara krispig i konsistensen även efter konservering och tillagning. Detta beror på att cellväggarna är korskopplade och förstärkta av vissa fenolföreningar, egenskaper som vattenkastanjer delar med bland annat lotusroten.

Läst i ett matmagasin på en hemsida från Martin Olsson, grossistföretag i Sverige.

LS, please translate if you like.

Translation by LS (and I added a photo too):
"Water chestnuts are the tubers of a sedge that is grown in wetland fields in Southeast Asia. Their taste is neutral and are unusual among plants that their consistency is crunchy even after preserving and cooking. That is because their cell walls are cross-linked and enhanced by phenolic compounds, which is also found in the lotus."

Chopping sticks and tender loins in China

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper- a sweet-sour memoir of eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop.
This is one of the best books I have read about China, in my whole life. It is really a memoir about the author's escapades in China's kitchens and restaurants, but it is also so much more. The author, Fuchsia Dunlop, starts with her first visit to China, where she after a few months end up as the first foreigner in the chef's school in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Her fascination with the Chinese foods are truly contagious. Duck, tendon, dumplings, spicy peppers, soy sauce, all is described in exquisite prose and vivid words. It is very personal, but also very easy to relate to. Fuchsia is not afraid of showing her opinions about politics and environmental disasters, and as the author of a 'revolutionary cookbook' and someone that has eaten many endangered species through her time in China, she battles with her guilty conscience as well as local politicians and bureaucracy.

The book is a fantastic introduction to the Chinese culture. Aside from the food, and a few recipes too, she tackles everything from traveling undercover to areas closed to foreigners, the disdain for Western food as well as the love for it by the Chinese people (apple pie is strange, McDonald's is OK), the influence of history and famine on food culture, and the economic boom in the last 15 years and its environmental and food consequences.

Her love of China and Chinese food seeps from the pages, and it makes me want to visit some of the more remote parts. I also want to find a restaurant close to us that make real Chinese food, not the Americanized hodge-podge most serve.

Some excerpts:
"Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure."

"By all accounts, Mao remained a Hunanese peasant in his eating habits to the end of his life. He was addicted to spicy food, and famously told a Soviet envoy that you couldn't be a revolutionary if you didn't eat chilies." (yeah - vodka belt meets fiery chilies!)

"The Chinese do seem to eat everything, one must admit. But in a sense they are just a distorting mirror, magnifying the voracity of the entire human race."

Swedish Chinese food is even worse, at least it was in the 90s. It was the same everywhere: 4 kinds of sauces (brown, white, sweet & sour, spicy), 4 kinds of protein (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp), and a variety of vegetables (mushrooms, pineapple, green beens, broccoli, tomatoes, baby corn, bamboo shoot). The menus was just different combinations on this, like Beef with Tomatoes (very unchinese), Chicken with Green beans, Shrimp with broccoli - all with the nondescript brown sauce. I liked this kind of food, but it probably isn't very Chinese. And the constantly available lunch offering "Fyra Små Rätter" (=Four small dishes), which is never served in the US. Four small dishes for lunch, like this one at Restaurang Peking in Trollbäcken: Deepfried jumbo shrimp with sweet and sour sauce (Friterade stora räkor med sötsur sås), deepfried pork with sweet and sour sauce ( Friterad fläskfilé med sötsur sås), chicken with currysauce and vegetables (Kycklingfilé med currysås och grönsaker), and beef with bamboo shoots (Biff med bambuskott). 89 Swedish crowns, I think that is about $12 now. Wow, this restaurant also serves Shark Fin soup, Hajfensoppa, and the menu certainly has more items than a regular Chinese restaurant in Sweden in the 1990s.

When I moved to the US and saw my first menu in the take out restaurant I had no idea what to order. There certainly wasn't any Beef with Tomatoes. Egg Foo Young - what is that? Moo Shu Pork? Not even the Chicken with Green Beans tasted like the dishes in Stockholm. I liked the Americanized Chinese food better, not so sweet and more spicy. Garlic Eggplant, yum. Duck rolls! And now I think I am ready for the real thing, as long as there is no tripe (intestines), tendons, or endangered species in it. I could eat a snake, that doesn't bother me, but I wouldn't eat brain or kidneys. I'll just stick with muscle meat I think.

Now I am going to let a friend borrow my copy of this book; she is from China and I would love to know what she thinks about it. It is a marvelous book, read it.

Mixed things

Chinese food, worth a look: scorpions, insects and such

MADDER is not a herbal medicine against craziness, it is an herb related to coffee. Not sure why it was in a jar in an old pharmacy in Philadelphia. Mad, Madder, Maddest?




And check out what we saw this weekend:



Update: This fantastic photo was taken by and processed by AREA, and you can see more of her photos on her Flickr account. Check out the teal-colored Jaguar on her web site. I also have car photos from the same show on my Flickr account.

Vancouver, the city - like it or not?

On our last day in Vancouver we spent a few hours downtown, and went to four different areas: Chinatown, Gastown, along the harbor, and Granville Island. I took lots of photos, and will only show a selected few here, the rest can be seen on my Flickr account, in the Vancouver folder.

Some thoughts about Vancouver: All buildings are made of glass, especially modern apartment and office buildings. There is a lot of construction going on, but also areas right downtown that are in horrible shape, real dumps with homeless people or abandoned lots. Reminded me of parts of Baltimore or St. Louis, so a real American city-problem. The harbor is right in the center of the city, which is surrounded by mountains. You have giant cargo ships, railroad, and roads straight into the city center. The railroad that ends in Vancouver is Canadian Pacific and you can take the train all across North America nearly to Greenland from here.



















The worst we saw was in Gastown, or near it, is an area that in the guidebook has been described as 'old town' feel with cute stores and cobble stone streets. There were some cobble stones, but most stores were tourist souvenir shops with things Made in China. We did see a sweater made in USA, a thing you can barely find in USA these days. Run down areas here too, and a steam powered clock that whistled four times an hour. That was cool, it is the only one in the world, but I bet they just put it there to lure tourists to the area. But some alleys you stayed away from, you just didn't feel like walking on a street where someone had just peed (we saw him do it).




Chinatown was wonderful, and had a different feel to it compared to New York's Chinatown. The buildings were smaller and it seemed more authentic and much less 'krims-krams' sold to tourists. Here were many markets with fruits, seafood, and medicinal plants and animals. Dried gecko, dried scallops and mussles, dried squid, anyone? We had lunch at a fantastic place called Hon's Wun-Tun (Noodle) House, highly recommended. We stuffed ourselves with dumplings, roast duck, noodles and chicken dishes. Nothing tasted like the usual Chinese-American fast food restaurant, and it was so different and so much better. The Chinese beer I had was the best I had during the whole trip, and Canada is known for its great beer so I must have missed out on the good ones.

Finally we ended up on Granville Island, which is paradise. It is a small island nestled under a big bridge going into downtown, and filled with old wharf and shipyard buildings that mostly have been converted to stores and restaurants. The best is a large public food market, just like a Swedish 'saluhall', but good and filled with local and organic things. I could live there forever! I bought spices of course, Asian ones that are hard to find, and sambal oelek, an Indonesian chili sauce that I love. You can get it in Sweden but not in New Jersey. SK and I ended up at the restaurant The Sandbar (with its own boiler signage) for a fast dinner before we had to go to the airport. SK had her first raw oysters, and she loved it, and the rest of the food was great too. But the best was the view over the sound and the rest of Vancouver. Absolutely magnificent. Each chair came with its own blanket to wrap around you if the evening got cold. What a place. At that moment Vancouver city redeemed itself in my eyes. I really could live there I think. I have more from Vancouver, pictures from the Botanical Garden and Anthropology museum are up next.

The Chinese Zodiak, why animals?

I´m wondering, why these animals? Some are not considered to have much value in the western hemisphere, like the rat, which is the animal of this new year. And by the way is a dragon an animal?
I myself is born in a rooster year in the monkey month of september. I don´t believe my life is guided by starsigns or chinese animals, but find it amusing to read horoscopes. Before I married MH a friend made a couple horoscope (western) for us and found out that it was a good match. Which I already knew of course!

/EH

An artpiece of chinese zodiak animals


And a kids version...

Stamp of the Day: The Year of the Rat

A new stamp from the US celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year. 2008 is also the Year of the Rat in the Chinese calendar.
"People born in the Year of the Rat are said to be industrious, adaptable and ambitious. The Year of the Rat begins Feb. 7, 2008, and ends Jan. 25, 2009." (link)

I love these kinds of Chinese lanterns, especially red ones. I have a favorite store in New York, Pearl River, where they sell hundreds of different kinds of lanterns like this. Not only that, they also have beautiful sushi plates and really cool lunch boxes (I am just afraid they would leak).

Book review: The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

This is a fantastic book. This is GREAT book. This is a book that made me change my view of China and Chinese food. This is probably one of the best books I have read in 3 years. The author Nicole Mones has written three novels that all center about Chinese and American culture shock, modern and history, contemporary love stories about art, food, and love.

The three books are unrelated, but related in that most of the stories take place in today's China. The first book I read by her was A cup of Light - also one of the best books I have read in 3 years. I can't remember books longer than 3 years, so that is my cutoff date :), (well not really true... I do remember some books forever). A cup of light is about ancient Chinese porcelain and ceramics and antiquity dealers. Her third book I am reading now, and it is called Lost in translation, and is about the search for the hominid skeleton called Peking Man.

But back to this book, The Last Chinese Chef. A woman has lost her husband in a car accident a year earlier and finds out that there is a woman in China that says her husband is the father of her child. So she has to travel to China and check it out. She is also a food writer for a magazine (think Gourmet), so the editor tells her to go and interview a new, young American-Chinese chef that cooks Chinese food the old-fashioned "imperial" way in Beijing. He has just been invited to be one of ten finalists for a competition to design and cook a banquet, and the two winners will form the Olympic team. You only get to have two helpers, and he has two old uncles that help him out. His father was a famous chef before he fled China with his family and settled in California - and in his new life he stopped cooking. I won't tell you what happens, you will have to read the book.

What makes this book such a great read is the descriptions of people, places, and details - from the food to the language to architectural details. The American author has lived in China for 18 years, and you can tell. It is like the book is a documentary, that is how true it feels.

I didn't know that food in China is such a social event - people never eat alone, and food is always shared on large plates in the middle of the table, never plated on separate, individual plates. And presentation is really important, and texture more than taste sometimes. Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. And 'fake' food that surprise you, such as a whole chicken skin stuffed with tofu and mushrooms so it looks like a chicken, but is not. Nothing is like the Chinese food you get at restaurants in America or Sweden! This sounds so much better!

Now I, 1) want to go to a REAL Chinese restaurant and order a sampling menu of traditional Chinese food, and 2) learn how to cook some of these dishes. Maybe not the chicken skin one, or boiled chicken feet (served in Princeton, in fact), but there are others that sound so good. Chinese cooking is not just soy sauce, fried shrimp and sweet and sour sauce with white rice... it is spareribs with ginger and scallion wrapped in lotus-leaves and crispy duck with aromatic herbs...

Other people like this too:

"The most thorough explanation of Chinese food that I've ever read in the English language." -RUTH REICHL (see my earlier book review)

On Nicole Mones website you can also get advice on how to find good real Chinese cooking in America. And she explains the paradox about Chinese restaurants in the US and their boring menus:

"Chefs have told me “American taste” means Chinese-style dishes prepared with a limited range of pre-mixed sauces, usually no more than 5-7 per restaurant. This is why a Chinese–American restaurant can have 150 menu items but only a handful of different flavors."

"Wherever you live, there may be better Chinese food than you think. More than one immigrant chef has told me he would love to cook and serve Chinese-style dishes, but he fears his American diners won't accept food prepared according to real Chinese tastes." (link)

Stamp of the Day: Crayons

The stamp of today is relevant for three reasons:

1. Crayola crayons are made in Easton, Pennsylvania, and we was just across the river from Easton yesterday in New Jersey's Phillipsburg (yes, riding steam trains, drinking wine, and having lunch in an old train dining car, but more about that another time). They even have a Crayola museum in Easton.

2. Look at the box. This is old-fashioned design, and out-of-style, but this style is coming back, at least here in the US. I love this old style, instead of today's boxy, kid-friendly designs (like this).

3. What happened to green? This is a box of 8 colors for a school child, and no green? Was this box supposed only to be used in the wintertime? This time of the year we are surrounded by different shades of green, and if you had this box, you really couldn't be an impressionist around here.

The box on the stamp is the first Crayola crayons ever sold and the first ever kids-crayons ever made too. This box cost a nickel (5 cents) when it was sold in 1903.

I can't remember if we had Crayola crayons in Sweden while growing up, but my kids have used up hundreds of them. Most crayons are made in China these days (not Crayolas though), but watch out, some contain lead. Not really great for little kids to chew on.

The names of the newer colors are amusing too: Outer Space, Macaroni and Cheese, Purple Mountain's Majesty, Inch Worm, Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown, Radical Red. Now, go and make some art!

Chinese made soup out of dinosaur bones

Imagine eating a soup of a something that is more than 65 million years old. You can read more here (AP story) or here (in Swedish from DN).

(this was found by O.K., but I am posting it)