Beijing, 2019-18: National Art Museum

I've visited this museum (free entry--but like everyplace you go, you need to produce your passport) twice, and there is now a dedicated subway stop on line 8. The first time, most of the galleries were closed for new installations, so I mostly enjoyed the sculpture garden on the grounds. As you would expect, mostly it's Chinese imagery, but the first thing you see is probably Salvador Dali's "Saint Sebastian", shot full of arrows.


Still, the statuary is largely martial:


… though a few pieces strikingly illustrate the horrors of war:


It's 2019. The CCP and Chairman Mao took power in China in 1949, 70 years ago, and NAMOC is celebrating with an exhibition of Beijing-focused artwork spanning the era.


The exhibit meanders through several galleries on the first floor, and contains numerous collages and some really beautiful pieces. That last is "Seventeen Arches Bridge at the Moment of Dusk" (count 'em!)


A couple of intriguing detail shots, first of some elderly men in the park, and the second a recent painting from Wang Guanjun's "Juvenile Adventures Series".


Finally, a few shots from the permanent collection of classics on the third floor:


Just a reminder: if you really like a pic, click on it to see a larger version.

Beijing, 2019-18: Ancient Observatory

Come out of Jianguomen sta Exit C and turn right. Soon you'll see this wall, topped by some ancient naked eye astronomical instruments. The Ancient Observatory dates back to the fifteenth century, costs 20 Y to enter, and is a must-see for anyone with more than a passing interest in science. In its exhibit halls, English explanations are as voluminous as Chinese!

For the visitor, the site is best thought of in three parts: the grounds and gardens, the exhibit halls, and the observatory tower. The grounds are beautiful, at least in June, and include busts of important scientific figures, some measurement devices, and gardens, entered through a traditional circular gate. Those busts are of Ferdinandus Verbiest, a Belgian Jesuit missionary; Yi Xing, Tang Dynasty inventor of an armillary sphere; and Zu Chongzhi (429-500 AD), who calculated the value of pi to seven decimals and elucidated the concept of precession of the equinoxes.



There is a second garden with larger scale instruments:



The exhibit halls are each manned by a solo--and lonely--docent, who is friendly but mainly silent. One hall focused on astronomy per se and the heavenly bodies.



Some key ancient measurement devices are included and explained, including a cart measuring linear distance (the figure beats the drum after a specified distance has been covered) and a clepsydra (a water clock), actually first invented by the Egyptians, as far as we know.



But my favorite instrument is the one below. It's missing a key feature, though--each dragon should hold in its jaws a metal ball, perched above the those open-mouthed frogs. This is the first known seismograph, sometime in the second century: in the event of an earthquake, a ball or some balls will be shaken loose and drop into the frog's mouth. This tells the direction, distance and magnitude of the quake. Remarkable.



The observatory tower is no doubt the "money shot" of a trip to the Beijing Ancient Observatory. It was decommissioned in 1927 and is now a museum, but the platform still has several instruments including a celestial globe, armillary, and altazimuth. 103 steps lead up (pictured is the first flight) and the docent/guard certainly expected me to ask her to take my photo.

Beijing, 2019-18: Planning Hall, Railway Museum

City Planning Exhibition Hall
Last Thursday was Korea's Memorial Day, and many schools, including mine, added a sandwich day on Friday, so I headed off to visit TB in BJ Wednesday evening. I was treated to a drizzly Thursday morning so I visited some nice inside spots, starting with the City Planning Exhibition Hall, very near Qianmen sta on Beijing's cheap and efficient subway system. A good way to get an overview of the city, since its key feature is a large model of the city. (Seoul has a better one, I think, in the City Museum, which I blogged about here: http://seoulpatch.blogspot.com/2018/09/lets-flock-to-seoul-without-any.html). But it's pretty good.


There is also a fair number of explanatory exhibits, including models of some architectural features common in Beijing, a model of the subway tunneling machine at 1:16 scale, and a drafting table:


Two caveats: some bits need repair, and the glass viewing area surrounding it have photos beneath rather than the model. Still it is vast, well done with lots of English and worth visiting, especially since it's free.


China Railway Museum
As I made the short trip to the Hall, I passed the Railway Museum and since it was still drizzling, I figured, Why not? It was 20 RMB. Well, most small labels on items had a bit of English, it had three floors of exhibits, including a simulation of a fast train ride (10 Y extra). How close is it to the Planning Hall? This first shot shows the Railway Museum from inside the Hall. Coming from the station, you encounter the Railway Museum before you encounter the Planning Hall.


After a beautiful entry foyer, you see the "Rocket of China".


For the most part, this museum appeals to small boys who love trains and heavy machinery, but its purpose is to extoll the industrial power and modernization drive of the Communist Party. It has bits and pieces of the European engineering of the early days of Chinese rail, but Chairman Mao has a central role.


There are three floors of this kind of thing, though less and less steam-driven and more and more electrical:


Behind the pantograph in the last photo, you can see the high-speed train simulator. Here's what it looked like on the inside:


Finally, I like to find a Korean connection, and here are some medals won by railway employees during the Korean War (of course, they were on the other side):


I have headed this post (and the ones to come) with "Beijing, 2019-18", because some of the following posts about this trip will also delve into my longer trip last year. After making an initial highlight video post (here), I got distracted and did zero follow-up. That's about to change.

소화기 and the Heat

Many of the valued visitors to my Patch of Seoul have noticed that the quantity of my blogs has decreased over the last few years, but of course, not the quality. My usual answer has been that I have said most everything I have to say about living in Korea. And that's kind of true--many posts these days share my various travels abroad, or the occasional new experience, like the opening of the new Seoul Botanic Garden as recorded below.

However, a look at the early days of this blog reveal that in addition to the big issues--sports, politics, Korean education, Konglish tee-shirt slogans, good stuff to eat--Tuttle would also delve into the minutiae: weather, the existence of God, even new shoes! It is often in such a granular way that the greatest of truths is revealed.

In that light, the delivery this evening to my apatuh of my own brand new(ish) 소화기 certainly deserves mention:


소화기 so hwa gi is obviously the Korean for fire extinguisher, and it suddenly strikes me I have lived here for two years plus without one, if one is needed. I have to say there are six overhead sprinklers, but a little hand tank can't hurt--even if it doesn't have the customary tag showing the last time it was serviced. On the plus side, just inside the front door, you can't miss it.

The weather so far this spring has been mild, or at least, it had been until today. The mercury topped 30 C for the first time: 31 C according to my app. So I guess the fire extinguisher serves as a metaphor for the heat. But the aircon does a better job at keeping the place cool.

Some Art, and my 세탁

My building is called "B One" or sometimes B1 or sometimes in hangeul 비원. Biwon is also the "secret garden" of the emperor located in Changdeokgung, which I blogged about here, ages ago--and got the pinyin wrong: https://seoulpatch.blogspot.com/2008/11/art-in-insa-dong.html. Anyway ...

My building does not have a professional cleaner, or 세탁, so I have to go to the large apatuh across the street, BoBo County (where Helen used to live), since they don't do delivery--a bit odd, frankly, considering as a colleague told me in Teachers English Club recently that Korea is internationally admired for the delivery service culture. This is all straight up true, but not really the point of my story.

But before I come to that … the conversation about delivery service came about because another teacher in the group kindly ordered everyone a drink from a local coffee shop--I got a blueberry smoothie--and it all arrived about fifteen minutes later, with no delivery fee. Our English Club is small but awesome!

Okay.

After school, I took some clothes to be cleaned at the aforementioned 세탁 today in BoBo County (no association with Korea's palaces that I know of), and while waiting for the elevator, I observed, as I have many times before, two minimalist art works in what passes for the BoBo lobby. In fact, my first few times, I thought they were bulletin boards that just didn't have any bulletins on them. That's how minimalist they are. As you can see below:


Over the past year or so, I have started to wonder about them, how they came to be there, is Jürgen Wegner a well-known artist I should have known about, etc. So, today, I snapped these shots, and then spent a solid twenty minutes to a half-hour applying my google-fu to the question. And came away with minimal information. For example, the yellow one above is "untitled (yellow)".

On the plus side, you can purchase some of his works, mostly as serigraphs, from sites like allposters.com and art.com. On the minus side, his dates are 1941 to 1998, so he has passed. Mutualart.com had the following brief bio:

Jürgen Wegner is a German Postwar & Contemporary artist. Their work was featured in an exhibition at the Daimler Contemporary. Jürgen Wegner's work has been offered at auction multiple times. Only one artwork sold; this was Tonnara, which realized $159 USD at Henry's Auction House in 2015.

And from that I learned that he at least was shown at the Daimler Contemporary, in Berlin (from museumsportal-berlin.de):

The Daimler art collection came into being in 1977. Since then, the collection has expanded to include 1,500 works by roughly 400 national and international artists. The works were initially on display exclusively within the company, but in 1999 they acquired a new 600 square-metre exhibition space in the renovated Haus Huth at Potsdamer Platz. A series of thematically structured exhibitions focusing on the collection as well as on new acquisitions are shown four times a year. There are also artists' discussions, theme tours and concerts.
In terms of its overall theme, the collection represents important developments in the art and pictorial ideas of the 20th century right up to the present, with a special focus on the abstract tendencies of this era. The collection contains important works from the Bauhaus movement, constructive and concrete art, informal painting, Zero and Minimalism as well as multimedia concepts and video art.

I'd like to have more information, or at least a good tagline for this post, but I don't. If you can help with either, please comment below.