Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Mt Shasta, a Sacred Mountain See: THE SACRED SITES BIBLE.  Anthony J. Taylor The definitive guide to spiritual places.  The world's best selling MBS Series.    Waterfalls near Mt Shasta  on a hike...worth the effort  Crater Lake in its pristine blue beauty 

SAA Lecture with Patricia Berger. “The Moral of the Story:  Narrative Art in Early China.  Key Terms:  Myth, ritual, story, Narrative Syntax; seriation (continuous narrative); exemplification(monoscenes)...justaposition, parallelism, multivalence.  She distinguishes between  cyclical time(seasons cycles) and temporal time, or linear chronological narrative time as well as intersecting temporal times versus lineage continuity.   She makes a point that Buddahs are always identical, with attributes, due to story. .  Patricia  also makes major point that the images : instruct about by a   model and  are warnings about what "not to do",  Other major work is T-shaped Silk Painting. Tomb of Lady Dai . W. Han cs 180 BCE  Mawangdui.  Changsha Hunan.  Hunan Provincial Museum.   Pensive Maitryeas.  Dunhuang Cave 254 (N Wei, ca 470) Central Image Maitrya Buddah.  She concentrates on Pensiv...

So happy to discover a friend from Shanghai,, in this show, or a painting by Zhang Jian-Jun, who also works beautifully in ceramics adapting ancient forms and methods. Viewed this exhibition, FIRST LOOK,  which just opened at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, showcasing its own collection of contemporary art following the Rubell's private collection on view in 28 Chinese, and the SFMOMA site show at the AAM.  .  Delighted to find a acanvas from a show I saw in Shanghai, before leaving, of this artist's works.  I had also seen other shows of his work, and inclusion of his work in major shows.  His wife, Barbara Edelstein, is also a major artist, a scultpress, who had done several commissions for the city of Shanghai, and had shown her own work at the Elizabeth de Brabrant gallery in Shanghai. 

 The scroll is briefly described at this site:  idpuk.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-few-of-ourfavourite-things-1-victor.html  This scroll is kept in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.   Auriel Stein has other scrolls in London. Photo by Janet Roberts at AAM, SAA, SF. One of his memorable phrases:  "The storytellers made pictures move with their words." "bianwen" = transformation texts and "bianxiang" = transformation tableau He reminded us that even in early times, intellectual veiws need to be tested by "sparring".  Teaching needs to be done at appropriate levels with the right devices. Story telling in the Tan dynasty was in the hands of women storytellers on the street with scrolls they would unwind and tell their tales.  The stories were meant as entertainment, as education, as edification. Story telling in China was always prosmetric or alternated between the "sung" and "the spoken". ( (Consider the Beijing ope...