Fili’s world

Bezalel, a world class Israeli art school located in Jerusalem, has a big showcase for Israeli art at the old airport terminal (terminal 1). It's quite worth the visit, and there's plenty to see in the exhibition, but there are also special theme seminars everyday. Yesterday's seminar was about Chinese art, called "East - a seminar about modern/current Chinese culture". Naturally, as there aren't many Chinese related events in Israel, I had to go have a look.

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(You'll have to excuse me if I write rubbish. The topic of Chinese art combines my ignorance of the Chinese culture with my total ignorance in art)

Dr. Nili Halperin of the East-Asia studies in Tel Aviv University opened up with a lecture about traditional art in the 21st century. Dr. Halperin discussion some of the current work being done in traditional style and the differences in the way that art is perceived in the east and west. Giving a few examples she referred to the art of imitation or even exact-copying, as showing great respect and skills in an artist's skill development and how some artists made it their carrier and international brand to (almost) fraud ancient Chinese paintings. There are of-course the obvious Chinese habits that westerners find to be strange -

• Marking a possession of a painting with a signature. It's ironic that sometimes the singatures are what makes the Chinese painting great or important, and not the art itself.
• Some artists write their perceptions, thoughts or ideas on the art itself. The Chinese art I now have hanging on my wall is a good example of that.
• Some art-teacher will write their critic and thoughts of their student's work on the painting itself and depending on the teacher's reputation that's sometimes considered great honor.

Architect Arye Kotz, with the "Shanghai today" lecture, has shown wonderful slides of his Shanghai collection from 3 visits in the last 15 years, showing the rapid growth in the city. Some architect I've listened to in previous seminars had alot of criticism regarding the modernization process of Shanghai, but for Arye it was obvious that he liked what he was seeing a lot and that he finds Shanghai to be gorgeous. As someone who knows nothing about city architecture, all I could think of is that although Jerusalem is gorgeous and unique in its own right - I'm in the wrong side of the world.

Ranan Horkeni, who was introduces as a Chinese art collector, gave the best lecture of the evening - "Current art in China" with really fascinating modern art and artists in China. I wish I had some of his slides to share with you as they were all wonderful mind-jobs. Combining references to China's recent Communist history and to the Chinese culture happening today, it was emphasized that China isn't all about cheap textiles and manufacturing - China's culture today is very lively and vibrant.

Here are a few examples of wonderful contemporary art he showed up and I found on the web :

Fang Li Jun

Yue Minjun (I really like these ones)

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The second session of the seminar was about martial arts. Though a bit less interesting for me, as that's something to experience rather than hear about, I was able to capture a few demonstrations done by Avi Moria of the Xing-Yiquan school of martial arts and Wingate institute (a friend of mine - after shortly watching the videos - said "I guess you had to be there…", :P) :