Chinese Art

Six people have been arrested on suspicion of stealing Chinese artifacts worth more than $32 million from two British museums. Police in London on Wednesday arrested two men suspected of the April 13 theft of 18 mostly jade antiques worth $29 million from Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum. The Associated Press reports that on Tuesday, police arrested two men and two women in Walsall, a town in central England, suspected in a recent theft at Durham University's Oriental Museum.

As a young boy in Taiwan, Jerry Yang was forced to study calligraphy - writing Chinese characters with a brush. The practice is thought to mold character as well as to reflect it, but Yang found it a tedious chore. In 1998, when he was turning 30 and had already co-founded Yahoo, he heeded the call to look back to his heritage and bought two Chinese calligraphies at auction. It was the beginning, he has written, of "a journey of discovery, inspiration, and fulfillment. " Today, his collection numbers 250 works, including some by the greatest calligraphers of the Ming and Qing eras, and 40 of them have been selected for "Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy," a new exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (through Jan. 13)

A Macau casino mogul paid $8.9 million for a bronze horse head, stolen 147 years ago from China's imperial palace, and plans to donate it to a Chinese museum. The horse head was originally scheduled for auction Oct. 9 by its previous Taiwanese owner, but Stanley Ho preempted the sale with his offer, Sotheby's said in a statement Friday.

When UC Santa Barbara professor Ann Jensen Adams, known for her work on 17th century Dutch painting, was given the chance to try a new research website from the Getty last week, she first typed in the name of a major artist and author in the search field: Karel van Mander. She was surprised to find online a full-text version of Van Mander's 1604 masterpiece, "Het Schilder-Boeck" (Book of Painters), which attempted to introduce Dutch and German painters like Vasari's classic "Lives of the Artists" did for so many Italians.

Cal Lutheran University will host a festival of Chinese art and culture beginning today and running until March 14. The festival will feature numerous art exhibits, painting demonstrations, a film screening and folk dances on the university campus at 60 W. Olsen Road. Throughout the festival, an exhibit of Chinese ink-and-brush paintings will be on display in the foyer of Pearson Library.

The dragon--a Chinese symbol for good fortune--takes center stage at the Children's Museum at La Habra during this month's exhibition of Chinese art. The exhibition, which runs through June 8, has a 30-foot, fire-breathing dragon made of colored paper bags stuffed with wads of paper and suspended from the center of one room's ceiling. Artwork from 51 of China's top student artists, as well as Chinese-style art done by children in the La Habra school district, is also on display.

BEIJING -- If there was any fear that municipal authorities here might bulldoze the art district known as 798 for one more batch of bland condominiums -- a distinct possibility until just a few years ago -- this month's opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art suggests that the area is eminently safe. Guy and Myriam Ullens, the Belgian benefactors behind the project, won't say how much they have invested in it. But the amount was clearly in the millions.

In a significant boost to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection of Chinese art, museum officials announced Tuesday that LACMA trustee Eric Lidow and his wife, Leza, have donated 75 ancient Chinese works valued at a total of $3.5 million. The gift includes important bronze objects and prime examples of Buddhist sculpture. "This is the most valuable gift the department of Far Eastern art has ever received," said curator J. Keith Wilson, who heads the department.

If Deng Lin, the daughter of Chinese elder statesman Deng Xiaoping, could recreate her life she would be born a boy. As a Chinese male, she would have had an easier time fulfilling her natural proclivities for a life of action and an art of bold innovation. And she wouldn't have spent so many years perfecting delicate flower paintings before creating "Distant Echoes," a strikingly expressionistic series of silk tapestries, part of which is on view at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.

"China is different from the U.S. in that way," says Chinese artist Xu Bing, who moved to this country in 1990. "Here, contemporary art is mainstream--in China it's not, it's still underground." And thus, the added frisson to a show such as "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," which opened last month at the Asia Society and P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. It offers the heady lure of forbidden fruit, as well as the promise of insight into the psyche of that awakening giant: modern China.

Six people have been arrested on suspicion of stealing Chinese artifacts worth more than $32 million from two British museums. Police in London on Wednesday arrested two men suspected of the April 13 theft of 18 mostly jade antiques worth $29 million from Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum. The Associated Press reports that on Tuesday, police arrested two men and two women in Walsall, a town in central England, suspected in a recent theft at Durham University's Oriental Museum.

Ed Asner has developed a knack during his extensive showbiz career for portraying crusty characters armed with a gruffness that camouflages a decent nature and good heart. Those traits were at the core of Asner's most famous role, the crotchety Lou Grant of the landmark "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and its dramatic "Lou Grant" spinoff. But there was a brief moment in Asner's past nearly 40 years ago when he went over to the dark side, playing a villain on CBS' "Hawaii Five-O. " On Monday's episode of the revamped "Hawaii Five-O," he gets to resurrect his bad-boy past.

ART The 16th annual L.A. Art Show returns to the Convention Center with multi-media works from more than 100 galleries around the globe, plus guided tours, discussions and after-parties. This year's focus is on contemporary Chinese art, highlighting the avant-garde collections of Guangzhou's 53 Art Museum. L.A. Convention Center. 1201 S. Figueroa St. $20 per day, $40 for a four day pass. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thurs-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. (310) 822-9145. laartshow.com.

Amid a financial crunch that has forced painful cutbacks at arts institutions across the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is forging ahead on many fronts. The board of trustees continues to grow. Construction of a new building for temporary exhibitions, funded by Stewart and Lynda Resnick and scheduled to open next year, is on track. LACMA visitors currently have a choice of three large special exhibitions as well as permanent collection galleries.

Suzy Moser is on a roll. Resplendent in teal and black, she is schmoozing potential donors in the teahouse of the Chinese garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Moser, the assistant vice president for advancement, tells tales of courting Hong Kong tycoons and local big shots -- part of a campaign that raised funds for the $18.3-million Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance.

LET OTHERS talk about the lure of art from China. James Elaine did something about it. He moved there. "China is here to stay," says Elaine, an artist and curator who has organized edgy exhibitions and introduced emerging figures at the UCLA Hammer Museum for the last decade. "The culture, the art world, it's not a fad of the West that's going to fade away. China is a power."

When gallery director Louise Lewis first saw the photography and calligraphy collaborations that would become "The Garden of Chang Ta-ch'ien" exhibition, she hoped to reconstruct a living Chinese garden on the floor of the Cal State Northridge main art gallery. She had been inspired by the lush, graceful images of plum and lotus blossoms by photographer Hu Ch'ung-hsien, as embellished by the calligraphy and poetry of painter Chang Ta-ch'ien.

Amid a financial crunch that has forced painful cutbacks at arts institutions across the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is forging ahead on many fronts. The board of trustees continues to grow. Construction of a new building for temporary exhibitions, funded by Stewart and Lynda Resnick and scheduled to open next year, is on track. LACMA visitors currently have a choice of three large special exhibitions as well as permanent collection galleries.

Feng SHUI was co-opted by the West at the same time that disco started to take hold, and some 35 years later, it's still rattling wind chimes. Now this quasi-mystical home improvement formula is getting a look from the world of rehab, where its unique blend of wishful thinking and Martha Stewart finickiness is seen as the promise of a more sustainable recovery.

BEIJING -- If there was any fear that municipal authorities here might bulldoze the art district known as 798 for one more batch of bland condominiums -- a distinct possibility until just a few years ago -- this month's opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art suggests that the area is eminently safe. Guy and Myriam Ullens, the Belgian benefactors behind the project, won't say how much they have invested in it. But the amount was clearly in the millions.