cool global BIZ

"China Heavyweight" the Real Thing, No Flying Warriors or "Rocky" Fantasy

 

 

Movie trailer for "China Heavyweight," a new documentary by Yung Chang on young Chinese boxers Miao Yunfei and He Zongli. Video via YouTube.

FOR ASIA WATCHERS and sports lovers, there's a fascinating story in the Asia Society's blog on "China Heavyweight," a new documentary about boxing in the Sichuan province of China. The film, by acclaimed director Yung Chang, looks at young boxers Miao Yunfei and He Zongli and their coach as they train for China's national team and the Olympics. The New York Times calls the film a "remarkably tender portrait (that) positions a particularly violent sport as nothing less than a lifeline to the 21st century." Can't wait to see it. It's the real thing. No flying kung fu warriors or "Rocky" film fantasies.

 

• Asia Blog, "Interview: Yung Chang Steps Into the Ring with Documentary 'China Heavyweight' " by Sherley Wetherhold.

 

Paris Street Artist, Photographer JR Creates Global Public Art on Soulful, Human Scale

 

 

From "JR in LA" by Lord Jim (Stefan Kloo), under a Creative Commons license on flickr. Kloo is a German photographer in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

 

 

 

Editor's note: An earlier version of this blog post was published last year.

 

UNLIKE ART HANGING in galleries, street art has the mojo to smash class boundaries and cultural biases. The eye-opening work of JR, the Paris-based photographer and artist, can be found in France's slums, Brazil's favelas and other impoverished areas. The pieces are large and looming, but still connect on a soulful, human scale. This is public art that people embrace -- not pretend to enjoy, to be polite. All are welcome, and they pass on the spirit. In his new film, Women Are Heroes (see below), a proud old matriach says: "I won't be here, but that doesn't matter. Others may benefit."

 

From JR's Web site : "JR owns the biggest art gallery in the world. He exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not the museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit."

From the TED video (below), after the global think tank awarded JR $100,000 last year: "I'm not trying to change the world," he says. "But you know when I see a smile up there in the favelas, or down there in Cambodia, in a way I feel like I achieved my goal."

(Photo, above) "Freeze, You're Being Filmed" by Miguel 77, under a Creative Commons license on flickr. JR artwork at the Tate Modern national art museum in London, England. 

 

Entrepreneurship and Immigration: One Japanese American Family's Tale

 

The San Jose Taiko group performed last year at the San Jose Buddhist Temple's annual Japanese obon festival in Silicon Valley, California, U.S.A. Video on YouTube courtesy of TravelWithChris.

Editor's note:  Summer is festival time for Japanese Americans, who honor the memories of their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. I republish this blog post each year in honor of my late parents, grandparents and family spirits. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.

  

 

THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.  Like the legendary industrialist  Henry Ford  (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.

 

THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke   University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

 

Clash of Cultures: Hoo Boy, the New York Times, China, and Media Censorship?

 

OH BOY, THE New York Times launches a China edition. Other companies can dodge politics while sticking to business, but what happens when the world's gold standard for journalism and the free press gets censored, as has just happened? I'd love to be a fly on the wall as editorial and marketing execs debate that one. They'll have to kowtow to the august publisher and the multi-billionaire owner.

Boundaries Blend, Cultural Fusion Thrives with San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival

 

 

The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival 2012, still going strong. Video courtesy of the festival, on YouTube.

 

THE WORLD'S ARTISTS and writers have always found haven in San Francisco. Cultural fusion has thrived in Baghdad by the Bay for generations, and leave it to the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival to show how it's done. First saw the festival in the '80s. Caught up with this past weekend's show, and the dancers and musicians continue to amaze. Diversity, ethnicity, otherness no longer typecast their work. Boundaries blend. Beats merge, rhythms synch. They simply are performing artists of a high order. All excel. My favorites:  The mash-up of Indian dance (Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose) and Japanese taiko drumming (San Jose Taiko), and the high-energy twirling and foot-stomping of Ballet Folklórico Mexicano de Carlos Moreno and the Diamano Coura West African Dance Company. Is a global aesthetic emerging? If so, it'll happen in the dank streets and dark retreats of S.F. -- and New York, L.A., London. Elitist critics won't get it for decades. So polyglot, multicult, millenial creatives will need to root it out, define it, delineate it as we speak.