American Buddhist Net

By Robin Laurence

Zhang Huan: Altered States

At the Vancouver Art Gallery until October 5

Through much of Zhang Huan’s impressive career, his body has been his most eloquent and abused medium.

During his early years as a performance artist in Beijing, he subjected himself to extremes of endurance and self-abasement. He bled from self-inflicted wounds while hanging from the ceiling bound in chains; sat all day in a public toilet, his bare body covered with flies (attracted by the fish oil and honey he’d smeared on himself); wrapped himself in the rib cages of newly slaughtered pigs; and lay naked on a concrete floor for an hour while being showered with white-hot sparks from a metal screw cutter.

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Thursday, August 07, 2008

NEW YORK — Guantanamo waterboarding as a Coney Island sideshow — that's what one political-minded artist has created on the Brooklyn seashore.

The "Waterboard Thrill Ride," by Steve Powers, is a stone's throw from Coney Island's famed Cyclone roller coaster and Nathan's hot dog stand.

For a dollar, visitors get to look through a barred window on a Guantanamo-like interrogation, enacted by animated robots. The hooded figure leans over a man in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered with a towel and his body tethered to a tilted plane.

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“If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” --Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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August 7, 2008

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave-labor camps, was buried yesterday in a cemetery filled with evocations of Communist cruelty and the fight against it that defined his life.

Solzhenitsyn's death Sunday at 89 silenced one of Russia's most influential figures, a man regarded by mourners as critical in destroying the Soviet Union. His funeral and burial at Moscow's Donskoi Monastery offered evidence of his renown -- the Russian president was there as military honor guards fired rifles in salute and white-robed priests sang dirges.

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Actress from Newton hopes games alleviate cultural tensions

By Patricia Wen
Globe Staff / August 6, 2008

BEIJING - It was 19-year-old Kerry Brogan's movie debut, and she stood out just a bit on the set in southern rural China - with her light brown hair, blue eyes, and eagerness to prove that a Caucasian woman could make it in the government-controlled Chinese film industry.

The Newton South High School graduate had just landed a role in the 1999 film, as the headstrong and spoiled American teenager who falls in love with an earnest young man from one of China's ethnic minorities. She had impressed the director with her fluent Mandarin. Everything was going smoothly until news broke that the Chinese Embassy in Serbia had been bombed, in what China branded a deliberate act.

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04/08/2008

The non-stop hustle and competitions of daily life have made people ignore themselves and the things around them. In the chaos of it all, everyone could benefit from a minute or two relaxing and musing on the life they are living.

The 63 photos in the Buddhist-themed exhibition Khoang Lang (The Tranquillity) hosted by HCM City Photographers’ Association depict and suggest the call for the restless to come back to their real, human livelihoods. They record the destinies of a handful of fates.

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August 05, 2008
By CHELSI MOY

VICTOR - In a recently published guide to cultural attractions in western Montana, there’s a small advertisement.

It touts “a simple rustic space to preserve and explore Zen aesthetics as living art.”

The Little Zen Museum in Victor is not actually a museum at all. Not yet, anyway.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 3, 2008

MOSCOW (AP) -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

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The adjunct curator is living amid Chinese artists, watching history in the making in a rapidly changing culture.

By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 3, 2008

LET OTHERS talk about the lure of art from China. James Elaine did something about it. He moved there.

"China is here to stay," says Elaine, an artist and curator who has organized edgy exhibitions and introduced emerging figures at the UCLA Hammer Museum for the last decade. "The culture, the art world, it's not a fad of the West that's going to fade away. China is a power."

With the help of a grant from the Asian Cultural Council -- and the windfall of the 2008 Ordway Prize, a $100,000 award for mid-career artists, curators and art writers -- he has traded his Hammer "curator" title for "adjunct curator" and taken himself to China, where he plans to stay at least two years.

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August 3, 2008
By Geoff Gehman

The Dalai Lama left Bethlehem 19 days ago but a filament of his philosophy remains in a Banana Factory exhibit of Ryan Hulvat's photographs of light fixtures. Like the Tibetan religious leader, he finds enlightenment in the everyday -- even an unused bulb at a dead steel plant.

''You don't have to go to Katmandu to take a great photograph when it's right in your backyard,'' says Hulvat, a resident artist and teacher at the Banana Factory. ''Beauty in the whole world can be right in front of you.''

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Sunday August 03, 2008

NEW YORK.- An installation of 30 palm-leaf folios from Indian illuminated manuscripts will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on July 29, 2008. Featuring some of the earliest surviving Indian manuscripts, dating from the 10th to the 13th century, Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-leaf Tradition will center on one remarkable Mahayanist Buddhist text, the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra ('Perfection of Wisdom'), illustrated through the Museum's rare holdings of eastern Indian and Nepalese illuminated palm-leaf manuscripts, book-covers, initiation cards, thankas, and sculptures.

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About

Where to start. I've typed this thing a few times over the years and always want to change it. Here is the latest, simpler version, or so I'm setting out that way.

My name is Mike Hollingshead. I was born and raised in Blair, Nebraska. Graduated high school here and that was about it as far as education. I started college a few places, but quickly quit after doing so each time. That's likely to do with the fact I still don't know what I want to do. I don't want to work much, that's about all I am sure of...unless it relates to this hobby/job/site.

I started out as a storm chaser, with no plans or desire to shoot still images. My thing was just video taping storms with a cheap camcorder. I soon saw a few cool skies and realized I needed something better to show the images on my site. So I had to buy a still camera, a Sony F707 in July of 2002. I only briefly had a still camera in my past. I had a film rebel for a couple months back in 96 or so. I shot maybe 4 rolls with it, before trading my sister for her video camera.

I began storm chasing May 16, 1999 but had always filmed and watched storms from town. Watching storms from town and actually heading out to chase are two very different things. If one ever wants to see amazing storms you're going to have to drive a lot and often for nothing. Each year I would increase my chases. I'm now to around 40 chases a year, which is more than enough. In 2005 I had just over 18,000 miles dedicated just to chasing storms. In 2006 it was around 22,000 miles which ranged from TX to ND and CO to IN.

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Good piece, worth reading, especially if you are not familiar with the history of this area. Moreover, given the importance of Buddhist Gandhara, Taxila, and Greco-Bactria, and given the known influence of these regions on both Indian and Chinese Buddhism, it is hard not to conclude that Eastern Mediterranean coastal areas were also deeply influenced by these kingdoms and that consequently early Christianity was influenced by Buddhism. Some say that it was profoundly influenced. Central Asia is one of the world's most important historical regions, though constant changes in the area often obscure that fact. ABN
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August 1, 2008
Pervaiz Munir Alvi

Pakistan is home to the ancient Gandhara Civilization. Its Buddhist character, which this civilization is best known for, was first established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when colonial British military men and archeologists discovered various ancient religious sites near the city of Taxila in the Potowar region of Pakistan.

However since independence of Pakistan, the late 20th century studies and research conducted both by the Pakistani and Western scholars have documented and confirmed that Gandhara Civilization was not always Buddhist in character but had also gone through some well defined Hellenistic and Parthian periods as well.

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July 30, 2008
By HOLLAND COTTER

BEIJING — On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde.” Police officers swarmed into the museum. The show, the country’s first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.

The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time. Why she did what she did was not immediately clear, but this didn’t matter.

She had set off a symbolic explosion.

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Kenro Izu documents the ravages of time — and more

By Glen Mannisto

Detroit, MI -- In this city of cars, with an economy founded on the production of the disposable, and, lately, an artistic identity founded on the exploitation of detritus, Kenro Izu: Sacred Places, explores the impermanence of the manmade in human history. It makes for an ironic little insight into the really transitory nature of our reality.

Descend to the dark, moody, newly remodeled Albert and Peggy De Salle Gallery of Photography, in the quiet womb-like center of the Detroit Institute of Arts. There, in the most peaceful gallery of the DIA, is a selection of photographs by the renowned Japanese-born photographer who, for more than 30 years, has devoted himself to photographing some of the most outrageous human constructions on the planet. Kenro Izu: Sacred Places is a revelation about how, in building shelter, certain cultures have wed deep respect for place with profound cosmologies.

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I wish people would save their outrage for things that actually mattered. Seriously, what's NOT funny about a princess being force-fed cake? Get a life. Robyn
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By Ben Silverman

She's plump, powerful and ready to cause more controversy than "SuperSize Me."

She's Fat Princess, the star of Sony's upcoming video game of the same name. Debuting at last week's E3 expo, the colorful Fat Princess is a capture-the-flag game with a twist: you can thwart capture attempts by locking the once-thin princess in a dungeon and stuffing her full of cake, thereby increasing her girth and making her harder for your enemies to haul back to home base.

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Yo mama so fat, stupid, nasty, etc.

Friday, July 25, 2008
By ERIKO ARITA

Love's warmth can be found in the coldest of places — and among the wildest of creatures.

A photo exhibition titled "White Gift," which features polar bears sharing intimate communication, will he held in Tokyo from July 25 to August 8. The pictures depict polar bears as being full of life and love, hugging and displaying affection.

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Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008, showing June 26 – September 28, 2008 at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston MA

Posted July 28th, 2008
by ruzik_tuzik

During 1914 and 1915 Mrs. Gardner created a private subterranean chamber known as the Buddha Room (or Chinese Room) at Fenway Court, which possessed an atmospheric, evocative arrangement of Buddhist statues, altar tables, temple ornaments, and decorative screens. This exhibition will attempt to recreate that space, as part of a broader examination of Gardner’s lifelong fascination with Asian art and culture.

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By Jory Squibb

"Surfwise," a documentary of the Paskowitz family -- two dropout adults and their nine children raised in the 1960s and '70s in a camping van -- is a good example of such better-than-average theater fare.

I found the movie very helpful, along with the Strand's discussions before and after the film, in clarifying two issues: how did the underlying principles of the '60s work out in the long run, and what is the family legacy of a dynamic and strong-willed parent?

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ORI Anuenue Hale of Wahiawa, which helps the elderly and adults with mental retardation and developmental disabilities, has been given a jade statue of Kuan Yin, Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, Healing and Mercy.

The donors are friends of agency founder, Susanna F. Cheung.

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Sa Dingding's music melds traditional harmonies with offbeat electronica to create a layered hypnotic sound.

By Matthew Shaer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
July 25, 2008

New York - It's probably best to start here, because here is where most newspaper and magazine profiles – both Chinese and Western – start: Yes, she's beautiful, sharply and distinctly so. Slighter than she looks in her music videos, where she often sweeps across the screen in splashes of bright color like a cloth-bound dervish, singing in four languages (one entirely made up), and mugging happily for the camera. But beautiful in a way that is both confident – the emphatic glance, the wry smile – and eminently reserved.

...Dingding was born to a Han Chinese father and a Mongolian mother, and raised in Inner Mongolian by her grandmother. She plays a score of ancient instruments, including the horsehair fiddle; she traffics in speak-sing mantras, delivered in Mandarin, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and an invented language she describes as most closely resembling the Mongolian she once spoke with her grandmother.

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2008-07-23

...As Sri Lanka marks the 25th anniversary of the riots Wednesday, two exhibits by artists from the Sinhalese majority seek to prod their countrymen into acknowledging a quarter century of suffering, in the hopes of offering a path out of the violence.

"We need to take a minute after 25 years to think," said [Anoma] Rajakaruna, 43, a photographer and documentary filmmaker. "People haven't dealt with this as they should."

Her exhibit, "July: Life After 25 Years," is a series of photographs of Tamil victims of the riots and the ensuing war. The images are stark and each portrait shows a different facet of the tremendous suffering.

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Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion
October 4, 2008 through March 1, 2009

Baldeck explores the territory, often called "between heaven and earth," encompassing ethnic, cultural and historical Tibet, which stretches from the western Himalaya mountains of Ladakh (northern India), to Bhutan, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and east into Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Her photographs offer a compelling look at an ancient, mostly Buddhist world through portraiture, landscapes, architecture and still life.

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July 22, 2008

PARO (Bhutan) - Long-time celebrity couple Carina Lau and Tony Leung Chiu Wai were finally married in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan yesterday morning, said reports.

It took them 20 years to get to the altar.

... The 43-year-old actress and 46-year-old actor were married in a Buddhist ceremony, said Sina news website.

About 20 lamas were seen leaving the hotel after the wedding, it added.

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July 21, 2008
By Simon Augustine

"A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes suffering. " - The Buddha

"The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality." - Goethe

"The secret to film is that it's an illusion. " - George Lucas

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