《神州交流》Chinese Cross Currents

Foreword: Culture, Art and Society
— Labours for a New Life

Vol. 1, No. 3, July-September 2004

It is worth remembering that in 1979, just three years after the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the great violinist Isaac Stern accepted an official invitation to visit China. Two years later, the 1981 Academy Award winning documentary From Mao to Mozart showed world audiences that the visit turned out to be not merely a "sight seeing" favour but an extraordinarily "cultural" event. Had it been transformed into a deeper "cultural revolution"? As Bernard Levin wrote then in The London Time , "this film won an Oscar in the documentary category, it deserves also a prize for its contribution to understanding, to art, to civilization and to humanity itself."

(See www.maotomozart.com/intro.html ).

Since then some happier years have borne other artistic fruits. As a matter of fact, cultures in many ways are used to be considered the inner expressions of the lives of various peoples and societies. Their evolution remains subjected to many factors—be they geographical setting, traditional ethical values, political imperatives, economical contingencies, or spiritual interpretations of what is to live a human life. Yet our epoch does not allow us to consider the various cultures of the world as mutually isolated. There are many "crossing currents" in today's Global Village, some old and some new; currents coming from various origins and exerting different influences; currents that have an unequal force and are encountered and welcomed or rejected in very different ways.

Crossing the Asian steppes, mountains or deserts, Chinese and barbarian travellers on the old Silk Road long ago already observed this multifaceted variety, taking it for granted or, after overcoming so many hardships, for a kind of reward : they were able to see with their own eyes the similarities and differences. But in our age where easily acccessible knowledge can facilitate deeper reflection, experiences of intercultural awakening through art, like that of Isaac Stern in China, are not uncommon. Another instance worth mentioning is Ma Yo-yo's Silk Road Project , when he writes "we live in a world of increasing awareness and interdependence, and I believe that music can act as a magnet to draw people together. Music is an expressive art that can reach to the very core of one's identity. By listening to and learning from the voices of an authentic musical tradition, we become increasingly able to advocate for the worlds they represent. Further, as we interact with unfamiliar musical traditions we encounter voices that are not exclusive to one community. We discover transnational voices that belong to one world."

(See www.silkroadproject.org/about/vision.html ).

In this third issue of Chinese Cross Currents , the special dossier offers to our readers some perspectives on the world of arts in present day China. Most of the authors have experienced for themselves what Isaac Stern and others had intuitively observed. During the past thirty years, through ups and downs, the artistic world in China has gone through the labours of a new life.

That life has been expressing itself for many years, with wits and humour, through popular folk songs which have no dates or known authors, as Chen Xinhan's article analyses in details. At the same time, the real challenge for artists was not only, as often in human history, to manage how to work under political control. Artists in China were struggling in a society that itself was struggling to catch up with the Western world while they were labouring to distance themselves from the influence of Western art that remains so pervasive even to this day. Articles by Oscar Ho Hing-kay, as an art critic, and Li Puwen, who up to recently was a museum vice director, give us a glimpse of these struggles based on different observations.

Perhaps due to its wide reach or maybe for some other reasons, the "seventh art" (film) often seems to be a kind of indicator of new life in the arts of modern societies. Dominic Yeung—by a precise analysis and comparison of Oscar winning films produced in China, in Hong Kong and in Taiwan—shows how artistic life through film in Greater China has already grown to world class and maturity. Finally, Ou Jianping reveals his mastery in showing how Chinese choreographic tradition is, at the same time, "so old and so new."

Yves Camus, Director