Thinking Daily

Three Asian artists draw on their heritage to create contemporary works with meaning

The Asian star has risen, that much is clear. And the trend has filtered through to the world of design. It’s no co-incidence, for instance, that the past two winners of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture have hailed from the East – Japan’s Toyo Ito (2013) and China’s Wang Chu (2012).

In New Zealand, where almost 20 per cent of our population considers themselves of Asian ethnicity, the effect is not just cheaper and more flavoursome food but art and design that has the same fabulous vibrancy.

The younger generation, whether born here or under Oriental skies, are looking to their roots to anchor their creativity and lives. They have learned how to combine centuries-old Eastern heritage and traditions with Western funk and fashion sense. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Viva spoke to three 30-somethings to see how they are turning back to their roots to pave the way for the future.

JUN ARITA – GRAPHIC ARTIST, ILLUSTRATOR

Superheroes and storybook characters became the best friends of twin brothers Jun and Ryo Arita when they were growing up in the Japanese city of Kishiwada.

“We were really close. We knew what the other was thinking,” says Jun.

The boys loved to draw and spent long, intense hours creating their own comic strips and painting. For Arita, this love of art has never died and he was lucky enough to be able to attend the only design-focused high school in his hometown.

“At my first exhibition, my teacher told me my colourful art would possibly be more appreciated by foreigners than Japanese.”

Fortunately, Arita had always wanted to travel and he arrived in New Zealand six years ago, determined to pursue a career in art. He had a good start.

At Fashion Week 2007, he entered a public competition to design a T-shirt for breast cancer – and won. “From 400 people, they chose mine,” beams Arita.

Perhaps it was the positivity imbued in his work that won him the commission for the Glassons-produced T-shirt. He is a big fan of bright, happy colour: “I want my art to make people smile.”

Although Arita believes his work has become more “Kiwi” since his move here, the 30-year-old still has a contemporary Pop-art style that is intrinsically Japanese in nature. He may now include buzzy bees and jandals in the graphics, but there’s no getting away from his early influences.

“I think since I’ve lived here, I’ve become more proud of my heritage,” he says. “I want to remember our traditional art. My favourite artist is Hokusai Katsushika.”

This printmaker and painter, who lived from 1760 to 1849, was obsessed with Mt Fuji, and his most famous art is a series of woodblock prints including The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Though Arita’s graffiti-like images are a long way from this, he often references the traditional in the shapes he uses to outline his works. Samurai, geisha and Kanji (pictograms that have Chinese origin but have been absorbed into Japanese language) all feature.

Through his exposure with the Glassons work, Arita was commissioned for a diverse number of other jobs including painting the transformer power boxes for the former Rodney District Council and, for three years, designing the front cover for eCube magazine, a publication aimed at students and tourists from China, Korea and Japan.

His T-shirt work has continued. He designed a “Year of the Dragon” graphic for musician Tiki Taane and a drawing, Tiki Matrix, for an inside page of the King of the Dubs’ CD album Tiki Flux.

Fusing Kiwi icons with Rising Sun culture has become Arita’s trademark. When an earthquake struck Japan in the same year that Christchurch city was rocked, it was natural for him to design a T-shirt to help. “It featured the words ‘Japan NZ’ and had a heart-shaped sun in the middle of it.”

Street art in the form of murals for AUT University and “live painting” exhibitions for Red Bull have kept his painterly passion moving forward, but Arita still sticks to his original reasons for pursuing art. He enjoys doing digital or hand-drawn portraits in coloured pen, and his main aim is to see the eyes of kids and adults alike light up.

“My motto is ‘never give up’. It’s something my mum always used to say to me.”

TIFFANY SINGH – ARTIST

Growing up in the Auckland suburb of Mt Albert, Tiffany Singh barely gave her links to India a thought. Her father, whose paternal roots are in the state of Punjab, was brought up by his Samoan mother’s family, so it was only years later, when Singh was studying at Elam School of Fine Arts, that her mentor, Max Gimblett, encouraged her to visit the sub-continent.

“I only truly discovered my ethnicities as an adult,” explains the 34-year-old. “Up until then, I really didn’t know what I wanted to say through the vehicle of my artwork.”

As a volunteer in the white deserts of Gujarat, Singh experienced a kind of homecoming. The spirituality that overlaid daily life in India seduced her completely: “In the West, we don’t share sacred space; it’s a very personal thing – we go to a church, marae or fale to feel it. In India, the sense of devotion permeates the street.”

Those belief systems had resonance for the young Singh, whose work now embraces several Buddhist principles.

“While I do like my art to be part of people’s homes, I also like it to have a sacred side. The participatory work should have function – and generate change.”

For the past five years, at least, this has been Singh’s credo. Her philosophies are vibrantly expressed in installations such as the Fly Me Up To Where You Are project for this year’s Auckland Festival. Here, 5000 schoolchildren wrote their dreams and hopes on a Buddhist flag at Aotea Square. “Some were really sad, especially among the lower socio-economic kids. They asked to be safe, warm, for food on the table, and for their parents to have more money so they’d be less stressed and more able to spend time together.”

Although Singh deals with weighty subjects, her work is by no means maudlin. Usually it’s colourful, kinetic and on a large scale. The wax deities and Samsara temples (boxes reminiscent of puppet theatres) that she made for a recent exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery in Herne Bay exude a calm beauty. The figurines are symbols of the connectedness of people from East to West. “While religion is an outdated construct, about doctrine and institutional control, I use the Buddhist icons to show we are a lot more connected than we think. We have a global economy; we eat food produced from around the world.”

This was Singh’s first solo exhibition at a dealer gallery and she used it to send a subtle message about sustainability. The kauri tablets on which the boxes were displayed speak of the dieback now marching through our bush. Copper vessels that formed part of the 3D scenes reference how fibre optics are replacing this once-treasured metal as a means of communication; the wax, dripped and dipped, symbolises the dire plight of honey bees. “They are all materials that are going through a hard time at the moment.”

In San Francisco on an international arts residency, Singh is working on her latest installation – her version of a spiritual pilgrimage entitled Bells of Mindfulness. A thousand Indian bells, crafted by the women she volunteered with all those years ago, will be suspended in a tree at the Montalvo Arts Center. People will be invited to take a bell and hang it in a place that is their favourite spiritual home. The bells will be tracked and shown on an online map. There’s one catch – they can be moved by other people at any time. For the participants, it’s a lesson in non-attachment. For Singh, it’s about letting go of control.

Asked whether she considers herself a Kiwi or Indian artist, Singh says: “I don’t really care. I just do what I do and am what I am. In 2013, I think we are beyond those dualities; we draw from everything.”

In India she feels like a New Zealander, but back in her Mt Albert studio – well, she’s Indian, of course.

SASAYA BURANA – GLOBAL FABRIC AMBASSADOR

Like any typical teenager, Thai Sasaya Burana dug her heels in when her mother suggested she follow in her father’s footsteps and enter the textile business. She wanted to be an architect.

By then, Burana was already studying at The Bartlett (University College London).

“I was having such a good time and it was easy to be inspired there. The VA Museum was my favourite haunt.”

Born in Bangkok, Burana’s maternal grandmother had worked at Jim Thompson locally and her father was chief financial officer there. “As the first granddaughter, I was so spoilt,” she admits. At 9, she was sent to boarding school in England but some of her earliest memories are of her mother’s collection of rich brocades, antique sarongs and ikat – patterned fabrics created by a centuries-old resist dyeing process.

Burana earned her degree, even though from the first year she already knew architecture wasn’t for her. For a while she tried art. “I was good but not great.”

And by the time she had finished her master’s degree in management, she began to feel a little like a lost soul.

“I realised I was an Asian girl who didn’t know Asia.”

As is often the case at these crossroads, her past held out a comforting hand of welcome. Travel to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and her native Thailand became her balm. She steeped herself in the creativity of her culture, visiting villages where traditional weaving – an exquisitely detailed textile craft – was handed down through generations.

Thus the groundwork was laid. When the subject of working at Jim Thompson came up again, and she was offered the role of international sales and marketing manager, how could she say no?

Burana was in New Zealand recently to touch base with the company’s local distributor, Atelier Textiles, and to launch the new Himma Gardens Collection, a range inspired by Hindu-Buddhist mythology and an imaginary forest filled with exotic plants and soothing scenery.

It’s plain to see she’s found her calling.

She describes Jim Thompson the man as a cross between Indiana Jones (collector of artefacts) and James Bond, and is captivated by his story. Here was an American who fell so in love with Thai silk that, in the 1940s, he relocated his life to the country, set up production and built one of the finest homes that still exists in Bangkok. That he disappeared in 1967, when out on a walk through the forest, and was never found despite an extensive manhunt, only adds to the intrigue of his story.

Today, part of his legacy includes a raw silk farm set on 93ha in the Isaan region of Thailand. Here, 1000 hand-weavers make the cloth that is famous throughout the world.

Antique Thai houses rescued from demolition are brought to the eco-property, where a mulberry plantation ensures the continued survival of the silk worms that spin their fine-thread cocoons. In the workshops, the air is alive with the click-clack of the hand-looms as the magic of silk production takes place in a tableau that is ancient and increasingly rare.

“The technique of ikat, in particular, is dying because no one wants to learn it,” explains Burana. “Country girls want to be city girls and work in a factory that creates microchips, not textiles.”

In her own small way, this globetrotting ambassador, who has finally rediscovered her history, is playing her part in keeping that culture alive.

- VIVA

By Claire McCall

Article source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10885043

Tags: Asia, Beautiful, spot, travel, trip, World Heritage
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Archaeologists just south of Kabul are racing to preserve one of the richest Buddhist historical sites ever found.

The ancient monasteries and statues in Mes Aynak are under threat from a Chinese company which plans to develop the area in order to tap into the world’s second largest copper deposit.

Many fear the $3bn mining contract, Afghanistan’s biggest commercial deal, will lead to the destruction of thousands-of-years old heritage sites.

Al Jazeera’s Jennifer Glasse reports from Mes Aynak.

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Article source: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/05/201352055838102225.html

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On the 3^rd of May, the Rapid Response Facility (RRF) received a request for emergency support in confronting a surge of rosewood poaching in Dong Phayayen Kao Yai Forest Complex World Heritage site.  The petitioners/advocates explained that poaching was becoming more organized and had for the first time turned deadly.  On March 14^th, 33 year-old Thaweesak Chomyong, a park ranger, was shot by a band of poachers he and his colleagues had encountered while on patrol.

The Dong Phayayen Kao Yai Forest Complex in Eastern Thailand is among the last remaining large forested areas of Southeast Asia.  It is home to six cat species, such as the tiger, the clouded leopard and the marbled cat as well as Asian elephants or the Malayan sunbear.  It is also home to the increasingly rare rosewood tree, which is highly prized for fine furniture. The rapidly growing Asian market, particularly in China, is fuelling a growing demand for the tree, encouraging illegal logging. 

The RRF mobilized 5 expert volunteer reviewers of the proposal to provide advice on its technical feasibility, potential impact, and on the capacity of the organization to carry out the work.  Based on these evaluations, the proposal was considered eligible and worthy of RRF support. On the 11^th of May, the applicant was informed of the awarding of a grant. 

RRF provided $30,000 to support training of park rangers and officials, the provision of equipment, securing food for patrols, and facilitating collaboration between relevant government agencies. In collaboration with the park authorities, the advocates will also engage the Royal Thai Army to join patrols, providing additional personnel and on-the-job training.

The Rapid Response Facility is an emergency small grant programme that provides rapid assistance to counter major threats to wildlife conservation, primarily in UNESCO designated natural World Heritage sites.   The RRF is financially supported by the Arcadia Land Trust and the Franz Weber Foundation, and aims to process emergency funding requests of up to US$30,000 in just 8 working days.

For more information about the RRF visit www.rapid-response.org, or send an email to rrf@fauna-flora.org.

Article source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/1010

Tags: Asia, Beautiful, spot, travel, trip, World Heritage
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FOR young people of Muslim heritage, the internet can either be a deadly temptation or a breath of fresh air. At worst, for some frustrated kids with time on their hands, it opens a window into a world of extremism where all moderating influences from real life (parents, teachers, imams) can be cast aside.

For other Muslim kids, however, the web seems to offer an escape of a healthier kind. As a counterpoint to a real-world existence where they are obliged to think, pray and behave by hard-and-fast rules, the net can bring them into a modern or post-modern realm where many different ideas and cultural styles can be questioned, discussed, discarded or combined. That was the experience of Amir Ahmad Nasr, a young writer and entrepreneur of Sudanese origin who was one of the participants in this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF), an annual human-rights festival that attracts brave and enterprising opponents of despotism from all over the world.  At this year’s forum, the opportunities and perils of the net, and how to keep legitimate private communications safe, were much on people’s minds.

Back to Mr Nasr for a second. His own white-knuckle journey through ideological cyber-space is neatly encapsulated in the title of a book he has just written: “My Isl@m: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind—and Doubt Freed My Soul.” Not only did his surfings take him on a circuitous mind journey of his own, from conventional Islam to atheism to a sort of freewheeling Sufism. He also used the web to encourage lots of his young compatriots, whether in Sudan or in the diaspora, to explore new ways of thinking about their country, the universe and everything else. This was done through a blog called the “Sudanese Thinker” which he wound down in late 2012, having revealed his real name a year earlier.

As Mr Nasr acknowledges, there are times when he wants his pronouncements to be as public as possible, and other times when he needs to keep his communications private. It is, of course, comparatively safe to be an anonymous “Sudanese thinker” when you live, as he he does, in the Asia-Pacific region, thousands of miles away from the homeland. But he takes web-security advice and assumes that, despite his best efforts, most of his private e-mails are being read. Many of his compatriots back home are less sophisticated, and more vulnerable. A wave of arrests in Khartoum last summer was probably made easier by poor cyber-security.  All the authorities needed to do was get hold of a few e-mail passwords; that would have enabled them to see inside lots of digital inboxes and get an idea of who was promoting subversive ideas.

To protect his compatriots from their own impulsiveness, Mr Nasr strongly hesitates to start an e-conversation on a sensitive religious or political topic with a person living in Sudan, though he will reply if somebody else starts the chat.  One topic that is particularly risky for open-minded young Muslim Sudanese to discuss frankly in their e-conversations is secularism: the idea that the state should be religiously neutral. (Ironically, secularism is entirely consistent with devout adherence to Islam; but for those who believe in explicitly Islamic governance and law, the word is anathema.) Any Khartoum-based believer in secular principles would be well advised to keep his communications as private as possible.

In a previous generation, dissidents testing the limits of thought and speech in authoritarian countries used to beg their friends in freer places for printing presses; then it was laptops; now the mostly badly needed thing may be help with keeping their musings private when they want to.  “Our community of human-rights activists are infants in this field,” says Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the OFF.  “A government can easily shop around for software to snoop on its opponents, but it is harder for those opponents to protect themselves.”

Just to prove the point, an Angolan corruption-fighter attending the Oslo forum, Rafael Marques de Morais, had his laptop inspected by Jacob Appelbaum, a fellow participant in the OFF who knows a lot about cyber-security and likes to help dissidents. His diagnosis? The PC had been infected with specially designed malware, resistant to most firewalls, that was taking snapshots of his screen every few seconds. Whether the preferred topic is malpractice in high places or new interpretations of Islam, any blogger subjected to that degree of surveillance would be well advised to mind what he types.

Not that anybody raised in the hazardous world of dissident politics in the Middle East expects to keep communications private. Ahmed Benchemsi, a veteran blogger from Morocco, says he was brought up to assume that all the family’s telephone conversations were intercepted, even banal discussions about forthcoming weddings. But there were moments in his journalistic activities when he would have liked a degree of privacy to protect his interlocutors.

In the end, as one participant in the forum quipped, there are times when the ancient search for philosophical truth and the modern concern of cyber-security seem to converge. That remark came from Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister-in-exile of Tibet. When using his PC, he said, he reminds himself of the need to avoid opening strange attachments which may contain deadly viruses or spying software. He does so by recalling one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism: non-attachment.

Article source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/05/islam-internet-and-privacy

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As poachers fired on forest elephants inside the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, a World Heritage Site in the Central African Republic (CAR), the impotence of foreign governments and non-governmental organizations in preventing the slaughter of wildlife amid political chaos was, once again, revealed.

Earlier this week, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that on May 6 a group of 17 heavily armed poachers, who presented themselves as part of the transitional Séléka government but were of Sudanese origin, entered the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park.

They then headed to Dzanga Bai, a large clearing where between 50 and 200 elephants gather at any given time during the day and night for the mineral salts. Ecoguards later reported that they saw these poachers fire at elephants from the observation platform used by scientists and tourists.

Located in southwestern CAR, the Dzanga-Sangha reserve (which includes the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park) is part of the Sangha River Tri-National Protected Area (TNS), which includes Nouabalé Ndoki National Park (NNNP) in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Lobéké National Park in Cameroon. Dzanga-Sangha is home to rare western lowland gorillas and more than 1,000 forest elephants. (This population is part of several thousand that share habitat with NNNP.)

While most World Heritage sites in elephant range states are seriously affected by poaching, the remoteness of the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, combined with on-the-ground support by WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), have helped protect it from major poaching incidents. Until now.

For the past 30 years WWF, WCS, and the CAR government have collaborated on programs within the Dzanga–Sangha protected areas that both protect wildlife and support livelihoods for hundreds of local people.

For nearly 25 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) also has supported efforts in the park, including funding research on the forest elephants that use Dzanga Bai.

Dozens of Elephants Dead

Following the retreat of poachers on the evening of May 8, ecoguards explored Dzanga Bai the next day and found more than 26 elephant carcasses: 20 adults and four youngsters in the clearing itself and two in the river nearby. All their tusks had been hacked off.

An assessment of additional damage, possibly including other elephant carcasses in the surrounding forest and smaller clearings, is ongoing. It is reported that at least one of the camps in the park has been ransacked.

Elephant slaughter at Dzanga Bai, CAR. Photograph courtesy of WWF.

A Surprise

The violent incursion took conservationists by surprise. Months earlier, groups of poachers originating from Sudan, who were killing elephants in the Ngotto forest (some 60 miles from Dzanga Sangha), had been successfully blocked from advancing toward Dzanga-Sangha by government troops supported by WWF.

WWF staff in the area thought the poachers had left the region and started their trek back to Sudan in order to beat river levels rising in the rains; their donkeys and camels would be unable to cross the swollen rivers.

While lawlessness in the area had increased over the last two months—rebels repeatedly pillaged park headquarters and WWF offices, and there had been some local elephant poaching—nobody was ready for the methodical attack.

Since 2010, poachers had sought the Dzanga Bai elephant clearing, but conservationists had managed to prevent them from reaching it.

“We didn’t expect to find our worst nightmare: the most experienced elephant killers of these parts of Central Africa,” said Bas Huijbregts, who leads the Illegal Wildlife Trade Campaign for WWF in Central Africa.

“With our staff evacuated after the pillaging,” Huijbregts said, “our main priority was maintaining a minimum protection presence to stop local poachers from going on a rampage in the park while continuing to try to mobilize reinforcements from central government troops in Bangui. We were not prepared for this.”

Elephant slaughter at Dzanga Bai. Photograph courtesy of WWF.

Who Are the Poachers?

Who are the poachers? The answer is unclear. The vehicle carrying the group into the park was branded as Séléka. The poachers did not speak the local language or French.

“We understand that these Sudanese poachers came with a mission order from Séléka powers in Bangui,” Huijbregts said.

In March, Séléka, which means “union” in the local Sango language and is an alliance of seven opposition groups, finally ousted former CAR President François Bozizé. Chaos has reigned since then.

There have been many reports of looting, rapes, killings, and other human rights abuses since the takeover. On April 29, the UN Security Council issued a statement expressing strong concern about the worsening humanitarian and security situation and the weakening of CAR institutions.

The Séléka-dominated government is having a very difficult time establishing control over the country. There are many fighters who report to no one, and many splinter groups, who refer to themselves as Séléka but who may or may not be part of the “official” alliance. It seems that each of the seven members of the alliance has its own chief of staff and armed fighters.

One such subsidiary of Séléka is currently stationed in Bayanga, a town near the park, where they’re in charge of protecting Chinese diamond prospectors. Unlike previous groups who sacked  the region, these men are reportedly well-disciplined. They have helped reestablish some rule of law and have had meetings with local authorities and ecoguards.

On Wednesday, this subsidiary delivered a message to the poachers in the park from the Séléka leadership in Bangui asking them to leave the park immediately and report to the Bayanga-based Séléka.

It appears that the poachers obeyed. According to WWF, by the evening of May 8, they had left the park with their truck fully loaded with ivory.

Since the shooting, WWF reports that no elephants have been seen in the area.

What Is Happening Now?

The CAR ministry of environment in Bangui was expected imminently to announce a mission to secure the area in and around the Dzanga-Sangha protected areas. But when that announcement will be made, what such a mission would be, and who would be involved is unclear.

It would likely be made up of agents from the ministry of environment, plus some compilation of other forces. These could include members from one or more of the seven groups that make up Séléka and perhaps some of the official armed forces, who reportedly have little or no weapons or equipment.

As of May 10, most of the park’s 42 ecoguards are back at their posts—watching and waiting.

“We’re at war right now, and it’s foggy,” explains Richard Ruggiero, Chief, Branch of Asia and Africa at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Ruggiero has worked on the ground in Central Africa for over 20 years. “The possibility exists that we can turn this around in the very near future.”

Indeed, it’s not the first time conservationists have faced this situation. In 1997, rebels threatened to wipe out elephant herds in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), and a group of dedicated conservationists and government rangers successfully prevented it.

“We are considering all options,” Huijbregts said. “We urge the government in Bangui to send the support troops to the area that were promised almost two weeks ago. In the meantime, we continue to support the local rangers, who, against all odds, are still doing their job.”

The Greater Malady

Whatever actions are taken to resolve this crisis, the larger issue is the underlying incentive for the elephant poaching: high demand and high ivory prices.

“What we’re seeing in Dzanga-Sangha is a symptom of a greater malady,” Ruggiero said. “The malady is human selfishness and ignorance that produces the market that causes all of this demand. We’re seeing the symptoms being played out in CAR. The disease is greater and comes from elsewhere.”

“At the end of the day, one of two things will end poaching,” Huijbregts added. “Either there is no more demand, or there are no more elephants. The choice is up to us.”

Baby forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) amidst other elephants in Dzanga Bai, a forest clearing in Dzanga Sangha Protected Area, CAR. Copyright WWF-Canon/Carlos Drews

Article source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/13/chaos-and-confusion-following-elephant-poaching-in-a-central-african-world-heritage-site/

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