Dali House

There are Chinese miners buried in coal at the moment at Tang Contemporary Art in Bangkok, in an exhibition by conceptualist Xia Jing called “Weapons of Assassination”. Profiled for The Nation by my colleague Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, the show has some harrowing comments on, among other things, our over-reliance on fossil fuels.

Xia gets some sort of message across vividly, at any rate, with a collection of spears and swords of the sort flung about in king fu films, a decapitated Buddha statue, the aforementioned lost miners and the device pictured below, the legendary Flying Guillotine.

This relic of brutality is attributed to an emperor of the Qing dynasty 2,000 years ago, though there’s some doubt that it ever really existed. Xia Jing has come up with a model based on historical hint and her imagination — a sort of hat with a rotary saw on its rim that fits over the head and, with the yank of a chain, severs the neck.

“It took a man’s life the way a camera takes a man’s image,” Xia said cheerfully.

The photos here are by Thanis Sudto of The Nation.

The Frumplingtons being alliteratively frugal, were recently reading Wise Bread, a bloggish website about “living large on a small budget” and came across the astonishing revelation that modest incomes needn’t stop us from patronising the arts.

The Frumps are actively creative themselves, so it’s unlikely that they needed to hear this advice, but the solution, Andrea Dickson wrote, is eBay, the Average Joe’s answer to Reagonomics, or whatever system it is that our banks are following at the moment to keep us poor. See the rest.

How China ensures the world an unending supply of art

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and every one of them who’s any good with a paintbrush works in a squashed little tenement of a “village” called Dafen, actually a hemmed-in suburb of Shenzhen, just across the former border from Hong Kong.

Okay, not every Chinese painter works in Dafen, but upwards of 10,000 do, and their nefarious work is churning out copy after copy after copy of famous artworks. The factories in this four-square-kilometre wedge of a settlement produces five million oil paintings a year for the European and American markets, 90 per cent of them copies.

I have no idea how they manage copyright and licensing. See the rest.

Back in March, blogmother Shana nominated to the Dali House hall of amusements the tale of the Chinese artist who painted a picture of a panda on a single human hair. Unfortunately I misplaced the story and had to use a microscope to find it again.

It was in a tiny little capsule full of other electron-size peculiarities, all whirling around one another hoping for some mutual attraction. I’ve finally rediscovered it, so here we go. See the rest.