China | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Shen Yun Buys The Front Page—Promises Authentic, Beautiful, Old “Culture”

February 2, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

As if junk mail spam-bombing college faculty and advertisements stuck up on community bulletin boards everywhere weren’t enough—this morning I awoke to find that the front page of our local community newspaper, The Saint Paul Pioneer Press had an advertisement for Falun Gong’s Shen Yun dance troupe. These guys have some seriously deep pockets and lots of energy to get out their message. OK, technically the advertisement wasn’t *on* the front page, it was the front page—enveloping the whole Sunday […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", Bodies, China, Mythologies • Tags: advertisement, culture, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Shen Yun

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Shen Yun Performing Arts as Falun Gong’s “Wild East Show”

December 13, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This past week I went to my mailbox in the social sciences divisional office and was surprised to find every faculty mailbox had been stuffed to overflowing with a 2014 calendar of the Shen Yun dance troupe. It would be treating the “calendars” with too much respect to call them junk mail—much more respect than was shown to our faculty by the person who dumped them there—despite our administrative assistant’s warning that most would end up in the trash. We […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", China, Mythologies, Random Reflections, Representation • Tags: Buffalo Bill, Chinese Culture, dance, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Shen Yun

What Weibo Wipes: A Collection of Censored Images

November 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Sometime this last week a colleague shared a link to a very interesting collection of images erased from the Weibo microblogging website (“China’s Twitter”). The collection is being made by ProPublica and also includes some very interesting related articles about online censorship in China, such as “How to Get Censored on China’s Twitter.” I saved the link and didn’t really get a chance to look through it until last night. What an interesting collection it is—and most of the images have basic […]

Categories: China, Internet, Scripts, Surveillance, Visual Anthropology • Tags: censorship, censorship in China, ProPublica, social web, Weibo

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The Undying Chinese

November 4, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

It is an unfortunate title for a reasonably good rebuttal to the recent Jimmy Kimmel episode with the famous “kill everyone in China” comment. I’d love to know more about the person or people who produced it. No time today, however, for commentary or analysis of the clips assumptions about “Chineseness.”

Categories: China, Video clips • Tags: "kill everyone in China", Jimmy Kimmel

Channel C: Cross-Cultural Chinese College Conversations

November 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

I’m pretty impressed by a project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, called Channel C. Apparently the brainchild of some Chinese students at UW, the “channel” is a series of short videos that discuss questions across the differences between Chinese students and mainstream American college life. Some topics include common stereotypes of Chinese students such as “Why Chinese Students Don’t Party?!” while others are more concerned with pointing out the unquestioned assumptions of parochial Americans such as “Why Chinese Students […]

Categories: China, Higher Education • Tags: American Born Chinese, American students, Channel C, Chinese Americans, Chinese Students, College Life, University of Wisconsin

“Public Walking iPads” as Portable Distinction

November 2, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

The other day while in the check-in line at the Beijing airport a middle aged man in smart business casual dress, with a modest rollaboard suitcase just also happened to be plugged into his iPad watching a Hollywood blockbuster. The bustle of the airport, the crowded checkin line, the juggling of luggage in one hand and the precarious balancing of an expensive, unprotected 4th generation 3G iPad in the other, made me cringe. A single unexpected bump or slip and […]

Categories: China, Consumption, Gear, iPad, Objects of Power • Tags: capital, conspicuous consumption, distinction, iPad, iPads, Pierre Bourdieu, Social Class

Beijing Sunset

October 30, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Thanks to high levels of pollution in the air, today Beijing “enjoyed” a sunset that lasted much of the afternoon. Driving home sometime around 4pm, making our way through the clogged streets in the thick pollution, I couldn’t help imagine that I wasn’t in the present but in a not too distant post-apocalyptic future of environmental devastation. Then again, who said apocalypses have to arrive suddenly? Maybe they can creep up slowly like a car in Beijing traffic.

Categories: China, End of Times, Environment, Surveillance, Urban • Tags: automobiles, Beijing, cctv, pollution, smog, sunset

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Old Red Books For Sale

October 24, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Books, China, Memory, Nostalgia • Tags: Cultural Revolution, Mao, Red Books, Taiyuan

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Sleeping Under a Bridge in Shanghai

October 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday, while walking along the Suzhou River in Shanghai, I came across an area under a bridge where a bunch of migrant workers were living. They weren’t around–presumably they were working at their day jobs. Walking by, I was struck by the belongings of one person. They were carefully laid out under the bridge as if in a room at home. The bedroll was neatly folded over, and bags and boxes and a cup and a bowl were all meticulously […]

Categories: China, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Urban, Work • Tags: homeless, migrant worker, Shanghai

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Chinese Tycoon to Rebuild Crystal Palace, Remembers Glorious Historical Period

October 6, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Wonderful, amazing, fairylike, are the words that come uppermost in his mind as the full glories of that famous vista break for the first time on his astonished sight. For a few moments he is so lost in astonishment and absorbed in pleased wonder that he can do nothing but gaze upwards on the noble proportions of that vast central hall, in admiration of the cunning workmanship by which such common materials as mere glass and iron could be made […]

Categories: China, Exhibitions and Fairs, Memory, Nostalgia, Objects of Power, Zombie • Tags: 1851, Chinese tycoons, colonialism, Ni Zhaoxing, Opium War, The Crystal Palace, The Great Exhibition, Yuanmingyuang, ZhongRong, 倪召兴, 圆明园, 水晶宫, 中融集团

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