Mooncakes, corruption and protest

Moon cakes with anti-Japanese slogans

In art college during the last days of the Celtic Tiger, the use of cake as a medium fit in perfectly with the whole luxury-embracing tea-party atmosphere.  While the tutors at the time advised us to make salable work since the art market was booming, I was more interested in relational art exploring pleasure and globalization.  This took the form of 'rude' cakes and interactive maps and researching the willow pattern.

Still, the last place that I expected a conflict between China and Japan to manifest itself would be in the form of a mooncake. The seasonal treat has already been implicated as part of a 'crackdown'  on corruption (are there any articles on China in the popular press  that don't use the word 'crackdown' or 'dark side'?) and as a source of phenomenal waste (an estimated 2 million are thrown out by Hong Kong).

During the Autumn Harvest festival last September, the practice of bribing with expensive mooncakes packed with luxuries such as alcohol in the box was widely reported.  The BBC reported the government's ban on use of public funds to buy mooncakes. Subsequently, the Atlantic and Reuters reported luxury mooncake sales are down because of  this ban and that this had a positive impact on waste generated by packaging in general which in 2009 was 40 million tonnes.  While the mooncake's links to corruption are an amusing read while sitting in a cafe sipping coffee, one has to bear in mind that according to the World Bank, those kinds of luxuries are very far many people's experience; 'official data shows that about 98.99 million people still lived below the national poverty line of RMB 2,300 (approx. € 268) per year at the end of 2012 and income inequality has risen steadily since the 1980's; 'not the result of stagnant or declining incomes among poorer groups, but of more rapid growth in incomes of richer groups' (1).
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Because of the use of characters rather than alphabets in the Chinese language, a few characters can say a lot. As Michael Anti reminded the audience at his TED talk, the 140 character limit on Twitter or Twitter clones in China can be a 'a story' in Chinese. The anti- Japanese slogans on the cakes,  the translation from here on UPenn's Language Log blog read as follows:

Tònghèn xiǎo Rìběn 痛恨小日本 ("Detest Little Japan!")

Dǎdǎo xiǎo Rìběn 打倒小日本 ("Down with Little Japan!")

Yǎo sǐ xiǎo Rìběn 咬死小日本 ("Bite Little Japan to Death!")

Gǎn zǒu xiǎo Rìběn 赶走小日本 ("Expel Little Japan!")

Cuisine is often the first entry into a culture; a source of national identity and pride. I tend to think of food as politically neutral, and Asian food in particular in an idealized way; but try, for instance, if you are hungry, to order an 'English Breakfast/Full English' in Ireland.   Using pastries as slogan bearers seems to go against their shared aesthetic pleasure of food; the characters for delicious which in both Chinese 美味měiwèi and Japanese 美味 oishii reads as beautiful flavour/taste = delicious.  Li Zehou further states that beauty is synonymous with good because of  the shamanistic rituals which imbue objects with significance. The character for beauty is made up of 'ram' 羊 on the top and' 'large' 大 on the bottom. Rather than accepting the simplistic explanation that a big ram, ie, a plentiful food source, as good therefore beautiful,  Li argues that instead it refers to a man wearing a ram's head in a shamanistic ritual.  It is through ritual practices that notions of 'good' or 'beautiful' are formed in a process that Li calls sedimentation.  Rather than there being an ideal Beauty that humans fail to 'represent', aesthetics are embedded in everyday life or as Li says,

... the aesthetic realm is the revelation of life through the relationship between feeling and scene, and the objectified realm of the artistic subject—in other words, it is a manifestation of the realm of human life. (Chinese Aesthetic Tradition, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010, p.2)

The sentiments on the mooncakes were expressed in the context of a larger dispute over the (uninhabited) Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands which Japan annexed during the Sino-Japanese war. Han-yi Shaw stated in his extensive piece of scholarship in 1999:
"For the Chinese in particular, the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands have become an important nationalistic symbol which reminds them of Japan's past military aggression, frequent evasion of war responsibility, and possible military revival"(2)
In this sense it fits in with the novel ways in which Chinese protest, given that conventional forms of dissent can result in imprisonment and communications are monitored and censored.   Steamed buns were recently used by protesters as 'a new symbol of social justice' in reference to President Xi Jinping's visit a eatery in Bejing to cultivate 'common man' image. 

According to the Economist, in an article about the islands and Okinawa, Japan states that it 'discovered' the islands in 1884 and they set up a bonito processing plant there.  However, the article also shows a Japanese map from 1785 in which they call the islands by their Chinese name and color them in the same color as China. The China Daily reports that:

Japan seized China's Diaoyu Islands in 1895, and the US took over jurisdiction of the islands after the Second World War. In 1971, the US made backroom deals with Japan, giving Japan so-called jurisdiction.

It is also a resources dispute. The Japan Times describe it as part of a larger strategy for maritime resources control or 'territorial creep' since China is also reexamining the 'resources-rich' Himalayan border with India. The conflict flared up when oil and gas reserves were found on the seabed in the late 1960's and  escalated again when the Japanese government purchased the remaining islands that were not already under its control from the private owner in 2012. Arguments about the Okinawan trough and claims on Okinawa will only escalate this conflict. 

None of this changes the fact that these mooncakes still look and probably taste good. By associating pleasure, traditional culture and ritual with anti-Japanese slogans it is the ultimate in soft power persuasion, making animosity a flavor to be savored.



(1) Terry Sicular, "The Challenge of High Inequality in China." Inequality in Focus vol 2, 2 (August 2013): 2 Poverty Reduction and Equity Department, World Bank.org.
Available at http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/Poverty%20documents/Inequality-In-Focus-0813.pdf
(2) Han-yi Shaw, "The Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands Dispute: its History and an Analysis of the Ownership Claims of the P.R.C., R.O.C., and Japan. " Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies 3, 1(1999): 5. Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mscas/vol1999/iss3/1.
1087 words


 

I'm in you, you're in me

This was the title of the drawing experiment which I conducted at the Outlaw Studios during ArtTrail 2009. Honestly, I never thought the title, taken from Peter Frampton's 70's song, was rude but now that I type it, it does seem fairly graphic. No one actually knew the title anyway.

The experiment went as follows--
Two or three volunteers were asked to draw each other for a few minutes until the drawings were beginning to describe some sort of features. Then they were told to switch papers and draw for a few more minutes so they were forced to adapt to what was already on the paper. Some of the participants were artists and others were not. The artists tended to draw over what was already there, but the non-artists tended to avoid it. That is fairly apparent in the three-person example above. But I found the non-artists drawings just as interesting.

Rude cakes @CCP Opening

For the opening of the drawing exhibition, 'Chalk it Down' at the CCP Gallery, I proposed the idea of drawing on and selling slightly subversive cupcakes with messages from a desperate housewife who expresses her anger to her husband via cake.

I thought cupcakes and rude drawings would be an interesting contrast. It took longer (beat until light and fluffy) than I thought to make the cupcakes. Also, I was overwhelmed by the amount of products available from the cake-decorating industry with its beauty pageant-like mix of bile and spectacle.

These are some of the designs I had planned for the cakes. On the night I ran out of time to decorate them all so I brought icing, letters and sprinkles and let people indulge in DIY artistic expression.

This produced such poetic gems such as, 'he's no good' and 'he's got a small willy.'

Patrick St. Gallery Exhibition 28 August - 10 September 2009

There were three pieces in this show. All the pieces were relational; viewers were asked to offer prayers, questions, suggestions or apologies depending on the piece. The opening reception was a tea party. The idea for a tea party instead of the usual wine reception was to make it more social and conducive to interacting with the pieces. It also tied into my interest in cultural hybridity and rituals created during the eighteenth century as a result of commodities and cultural exchange with Asia.

Ask the Cosmos/Prayer Tree offered viewers an opportunity to post a question to the 'cosmos' or offer a prayer on the tree. I was pleased at the variety of comments that were posted, from poetry to drawings of an 'iceberger' (Am. English 'ice cream sandwich'). The work was a musing about time --cosmic time, elandscape time, tree time, a moment in time.

The other painting, Helpful Hints the viewer was asked to comment about the work on the work itself --- to make their thoughts transparent.
Apologies was a board on which one could offer apologies on cards with quasi-Victorian sentiments by filling in the blanks. 'Please excuse my appalling want of ______ for _______ing on your _______.'

London: 27 May - 30 May
Michael Raedecker at the Camden Arts Centre
http://www.camdenartscentre.org/exhibitions/?id=100645

He uses thread as a combination of colour and line. Had a discussion with an artist about why he wishes Raedecker would 'use paint instead of embroidery' ---the lack of 'hand' and expression is what bothered him.

Things I looked at today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/feb/22/highereducation.highereducationprofile
Michio Kaku talks about string theory and parallel universes

Kenzaburo Oe talked about how ones life splits when a tragic event like a death happens there exists another universe in which the person didn't die. So if everyone is generating parallel universes all the time wouldn't it look more like a fractal? But I suppose death keeps the whole thing in balance as the universe is expanding and slowly dying

ArtTrail 08

ArtTrail, September 2008, Hironari Kubota performance, spinning a Ford Transit van, one of the highlights.













My work at ArtTrail was similar to the Crawford degree show. Titled, Welcome to Our World, it invited visitors to plot their journeys on a map which I had traced out by hand. I think the enlarged Ireland on the map works for two reasons-- 1) Ireland is enlarged in my mind (it should actually be larger) and 2) Most of the people will be starting or ending their journey from Ireland (it was completely obliterated on my degree show map)
I had hoped to render the hurricanes on the map to make it more of a hybrid diagram and verisimilitude object. Some school kids came in and wrote exactly how they felt about it. Which is part of the plan to ground it in place and time. I got some really 'Irish' comments.