The snake-in precious forms and antiquities-beckons in Singapore

Like a serpent that molts and sheds its skin to renew itself, Bulgari's Serpenti Form art, design and jewelry exhibition in Singapore is not exactly like its first instalment in Rome in 2016.

"Such as the snake changes its skin, this exhibit will also be evolving all the time," Lucia Boscaini, Bulgari brand and heritage curator, told Lifestyle at the exhibit's preopening last week at the ArtScience Museum in Marina Bay Sands.

ICONIC SYMBOL

For starters, the show in the Lion City is nearly three times larger than the first edition in Rome, and boasts over 150 pieces of antiquities, contemporary art, photography, costumes, and jewelry all inspired by the snake.

Serpenti is one of the Italian jeweler's most iconic brand symbols, interpreted in watches and jewelry since the 1940s, and now also appears in leathergoods, accessories and eyewear.

Bulgari's connection with contemporary art is deeply rooted. While putting together a coffee-table book called "Serpenti in Art" two years ago, Boscaini and her team were faced with so many fascinating materials that couldn't go into the tome, that they decided to stage an exhibit.

"A book can be beautiful but static," Boscaini said. "An exhibition is a very immersive and emotional experience. In Rome, we didn't expect the immediate positive feedback from both the press and the audience; we even had it extended. When we saw the interest, that's when we conceived the Singapore exhibit."

With the limited space they had in Rome, Boscaini had to exclude the works by Asian artists. She finally got to show them in Singapore.

POSITIVE INTERPRETATIONS

While the snake is a universal symbol, Boscaini found most interesting in her research the different, sometimes conflicting values linked to it by different cultures.

"In my personal background, it's a negative symbol, [it stands for] temptation," she said. "On the contrary, there are many positive interpretations-a talisman, protector, symbol of fertility, healing, medicine, eternity, circle of life. Frankly I didn't imagine [to find out all of] that at all, it was enriching."

The exhibit, which runs until Oct. 15, features antiquities from the East and the West, like a statue of an Eastern Han dynasty tomb-guardian deity holding snakes and a statue of a young Hercules strangling snakes, both from the 2nd century AD.

There are also snake jewels from ancient Rome.

There are various works by eminent artists, from Joan Miro to Marc Chagall to Keith Haring, as well as photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

"Snakes have so many interpretations, not only in terms of value-rebirth, healing, evolution-but the aesthetic interpretations are also so different," Boscaini said.

"That's the main criteria we followed in the selection of artworks here. There had to be different perspectives, and the provenance of the artists was very important-East, West, and by country as well, because the Japanese interpretations are so different from the Chinese. There's also a variety of materials-wood, bronze, marble, paper cuts, textile, photography, ceramics. We also considered the techniques."

A couple of her favorites are those by Chinese artist Wu Jian'an, "The White Snake hid immediately," that appears like a textured oil painting from afar, but is actually of the traditional Chinese art of paper cut, with intricate images of three-headed serpents, dragons, skulls; and contemporary artist Niki de Saint Phalle's playful snake figures of painted fiberglass or polyester.

Boscaini also included various costumes from cinema and theatre-from Jaye Davidson's Ra costume from the 1994 movie "Stargate" and a robe from Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," to an elaborate opera costume for "Turandot" from 1926 and a snake mask made for Lady Gaga.

"It was so fun. Majority of them were borrowed from private collectors and museums, so it was a mix of everything. We wanted some irony, some lightness to the darkness."

In Bulgari, the Serpenti evolved from the minimalist Tubogas watch with a very tiny head to the more realistic contemporary interpretations featuring the scales of the reptile and, most recently, the focus on its head and eyes in designing jewelry. Now there are also leather bracelets that feature the viper's head.

DELICATE, FEMININE 

At the exhibit opening, guest star and Academy award-winning actress Alicia Vikander wore a Serpenti necklace with a large snake's head pendant. It complemented her earrings-a snake's head on each lobe.

"It's a versatile kind of icon," Boscaini said.

"The snake is very daring, but this ring [featuring a viper's head] is very delicate, very feminine, and wearable. Our Tubogas watch is daring and cool as well but it's very now. It's discreet. I also like that the attention now is all in the head and eyes. It's completely different from the past, but is an example of how Bulgari is able to go farther. The icon is the same, but it's a revolutionary design."

At the Serpenti Form exhibit, one room is devoted to pieces from the brand's heritage collection showing the evolution of the Serpenti. Included also are a couple of one-off high jewelry pieces, a necklace of uniquely cut chalcedony with diamonds and rubies, and a two-headed Serpenti watch of pink gold and diamonds.

Boscaini dispels any ideas that the exhibit is only for jewelry and art connoisseurs and collectors.

"We're not an art foundation or museum, so we don't want to offer a didactic experience," she said. "We want an emotional experience, a form of entertainment but with content. It's not at all addressed toward intellectuals or art historians and art experts, but for anybody interested in beauty."

Those who will see it in Singapore shouldn't expect the same when Serpenti Form moves to Tokyo in November, said its curator.

Charming Beijing tourism event held in Helsinki

A Beijing tourism delegation hosted a promotional event entitled Charming Beijing in Helsinki, Finland on Thursday, in a bid to promote tourism exchange between the two cities.

A full programme was organised aboard the passenger ship Finlandia Princess set amidst the backdrop of Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki's equivalent of the famous Beijing 798 art district.

Finland and China have enjoyed a fruitful relationship over the past few years, with 2017 marking the 11th anniversary of the establishment of the sister cities relationship between the two. Furthermore, the Happy Spring Festival fair has been held in the Finnish capital for the same length of time, alongside a number of other China-related functions and festivities.

During Thursday's event, those in attendance heard a wide range of speeches. Guo Xiaoguang, Cultural Counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Helsinki, opened proceedings, before Song Yu, Director-General of Beijing Municipal Commission of Tourism Development, spoke of the similarities between the two nations.

Song pointed out that 479,000 visitors from Europe landed in Beijing during the first six months of this year, while 1.059m made the trip in 2016. The Nordic region, complete with improved transport links, is seen as an important region for the city and China in general, he concluded.

Outi Pekkinen, Marketing Director at the City of Helsinki's Executive Office, offered a Finnish perspective on the burgeoning relationship between the two cities.

Cui Hua, from the marketing department of Beijing's Municipal Commission of Tourism Development, then gave a visual insight as to what tourists can expect during their visit to China, highlighting the juxtaposition between ancient and modern as well as the opportunities available to visitors.

He also said that the number of European tourists travelling to China is increasing year on year, thanks in part to initiatives such as 72-hour visa-free travel within China.

Following the presentations, there was a multitude of activities and performances designed to offer a flavour and insight into China's capital. Traditional dancing, music and Qing Dynasty costumes were all on display, as well as literature, snacks and the opportunity to paint traditional Peking Opera masks.

To conclude the event, a ‘lucky draw' was conducted, with prizes given away to the fortunate few whose numbers came up. Everyone in attendance was then invited into the hull of the ship for a meal made up entirely of food from the region. Chicken, duck, noodles and dumplings were among the delicacies on offer.

What Does a 2,000-Year-Old Chinese Dynasty Have to Do With Berkeley

As many American universities in the early twenty-first century witness episodes of violent chaos, it is worth recalling that much of what is happening now has happened before. I do not refer to the usual comparisons between the campus Brownshirts and the real ones. Instead, I suggest that we look to China for keys to understanding how we got to, say, April's Battle of Berkeley, and for glimpses of how it will all probably continue to get much worse before it gets any better.

There are broad and disturbing parallels between a ruthless court eunuch named Zhao Gao's aggressive hijacking of a Chinese dynasty more than 2000 years ago, and the New Left's reprisal of that theme in the 1960s in the United States. More than the violence of the counterculture (although there is still plenty of that to go around), what remains most salient are the techniques of herding, culling, and mental disorientation and debilitation—practices perfected in ancient China and now practiced by the academic left.

Zhao Gao was central to the rise and fall of the Qin Dynasty in China in the third century BC. An expert in criminal law, Zhao's advice on using brute force to corral a wary population under the iron authority of the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was instrumental to Qin Shi Huangdi's success in turning a bloody revolution into something resembling a dynasty.

But as Zhao and Qin pushed deeper into the maelstrom of recrimination, retribution, and paranoia, in an attempt to shore up political power, they found that they had to kill an increasing number of people in order to maintain what they called "order" among the court and the realm. When Qin Shi Huangdi died, Zhao forged documents commanding Zhao's potential rivals to commit ritual suicide. Zhao also used the emperor's death as an occasion to exact revenge upon his former tormentors, the Meng family. Zhao then arranged for Qin Er Shi, Zhao's protégé, to become Qin Shi Huangdi's successor, thus ensuring a pliant presence on the Son of Heaven's throne.

Soon, however, the inevitable rebellions against the Qin dynasty's monumental cruelties began to overtake the ability of the central government to suppress them. Zhao Gao, the real power behind the throne, rightly feared that he would be blamed for the breakdown of military discipline in the borderlands. So he preemptively had his protégé Qin Er Shi killed, too. The replacement whom Zhao selected was understandably wary of what Zhao intended to do to him, and so, finally, Zhao himself was assassinated by enemy forces inside the imperial court. Just as Zhao had done to his own victims, Zhao's family line was annihilated, root and branch, in order to erase both the danger and the memory of Zhao's dark influence over Chinese politics.

This hijacking of institutions did not end with the downfall of Zhao Gao. At the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), for instance, Howard Zinn, a radical leftist historian, and John King Fairbank, an apolitical scholar of Ming history, famously wrestled over the use of a microphone. Zinn, along with fellow far-left activist historians Jesse Lemisch and Staughton Lynd, were attempting to drive through resolutions on overtly political issues such as the American bombing of North Vietnam. (Earlier proposals, which died in committee, also called for supporting the terrorist activities of the Black Panthers.)

Many other historians, Fairbank included, thought it would cheapen the profession to turn the annual meeting of scholars into a platform for political grandstanding. Even slavery historian Eugene Genovese, himself a Marxist-Socialist who had caused trouble in the past for publicly supporting North Vietnam, warned against the politicization of a body of scholars holding diverse views. When Zinn became impatient with parliamentary rules, he simply grabbed the meeting's microphone from Fairbank's hands and attempted to browbeat the committee through sheer volume of voice.

Fairbank won the battle but lost the war. Zinn's forces were defeated, and the apolitical candidate, historian (ironically) of the French Revolution Robert Palmer, was elected president, but the avalanche of politics continued to pour into both the AHA and the wider historical profession as a whole. Even before the contentious AHA meeting in 1969, for example, the 1968 meeting of the Association for Asian Studies witnessed its own civil war and bitter secession, as a radical contingent of younger scholars broke away from the AAS due to that organization's failure to "take a stand" against the war in Vietnam. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars—the flagship vessel of the radicals—was only the beginning of the tidal wave of politics that finally swept over the bulwarks of scholarship and swamped the academy in its current quagmire of self-righteousness.

This hostile takeover of the academy, while less spectacularly violent than Zhao Gao's "long knives"-style takeover of the Qin court, was effected through similar methods of intimidation and score-settling. One method in particular shared by Zhao and the New Left stands out: the use of obvious absurdities and highly contentious positions as a means of gauging who among the intellectuals is pliable enough to be easily controlled. For Zinn, pinning the academy down on the questions dearest to the New Left's political program was essential to mapping out the academic takeover. In Zhao's case, he once famously led a deer into a hall of officials engaged an imperial audience and insisted that the deer was really a horse. Everyone who pointed out the obvious to Zhao—that the quadruped was cervine and not equine—was later targeted for assassination.

Zhao preferred to work with the easily duped, and had no spare time for critical thinkers. Those who were willing to commit intellectual suicide in order to maintain their positions were precisely the kinds of people whom Zhao Gao knew he could manipulate into doing his bidding.

This method of introducing an offensive proposition in order to identify and eliminate potential resistance to one's hostile takeover of an institution hardly ended with the downfall of Zhao Gao. Time and again, beginning with the politicization efforts of Howard Zinn and the New Left, waves of de facto purges have swept through American academe, each purge more violently transformative than the last. After tiring of the direct confrontations that rocked campuses in the late 60s and early 70s, the left adopted Zhao Gao's tactic of pressing shibboleths—usually the sacred cows of identity politics—on faculties in order to mark for elimination any who seemed willing to fight.

For example, over the past few years, scholars at U.S. institutions have increasingly been faced with a Zhaoian dilemma. On the one hand, it is certainly possible to acquiesce in the insistence by administrators, gender and women's studies departments, and other members of the faculty, that human beings can become anything they wish simply by willing it to be so. Men are women, women are men—or anything else one might imagine, the Zhaoian proposition goes. One visiting scholar at the University of Arizona who publicly identifies as a hippopotamus (yes, the giant pinkish-gray creature which enjoys floating around in lazy rivers) was warmly welcomed by his colleagues as such. (No word on whether he received an extra stipend for bushels of watercress.)

On the other hand, some foolhardy scholars may run the gamut and point out that these kinds of assertions fly in the face of reality. The price for doing so, however, is steep. Usually, such protestations are rewarded with Star Chamber Title IX trials, public pillorying by a thoroughly Zhaoist press, and immediate dismissal from one's place of employment. Those who manage to survive the initial wave of political correctness are left to face years of ostracism and shunning, until, inevitably, they are denied tenure and sent quietly on their way. Everyone else quickly learns that it is far, far easier just to call a deer a horse.

Here's another one for the bucket list!

From line dancing to rockabilly, you'll see it all. Young and old. Construction workers and bank tellers alongside uni students, mums and toddlers. Even in 40C-plus heat.

Music and dancing are just two of the rich cultural connections to the arts you see everywhere in this central Chinese city. People meet in groups daily, mostly in the evenings, to take part in whatever form of dance they fancy. It is exercise, but also an opportunity to socialise and be outdoors in a city of nine million plus where most live in units.

In one large square in front of Xi'an's Great Wild Goose Pagoda on a hot Sunday night, several hundred people are out and about. It is after 9pm and around 33C, much cooler than the 43C in the middle of the day.

In one corner, a group of about 50 people, aged from young teens to well into in their 80s, is participating in local folk dancing with large fans, flags and streamers as a band plays music from various traditional instruments.

Metres away, a similar sized group waltz, tango and foxtrot as they ballroom dance on the pavement. A smaller pack of about 15 cool teenagers have an old school ghetto blaster in another corner where they break dance. The largest group performs as big speakers' belt out very loud techno music with rows of eager line dancers in synch.

Overwhelmingly, everyone is getting involved. No one is self-conscious. It is a beautiful thing to watch … and take part in as the locals encourage you to pick up a fan and have a go.

Jinbao Lin, 22, who works at a phone shop during the day, comes every night to take part in the techno line dancing with loud blaring music. He's a relatively new recruit, having joined the crew about a month ago. The group meet between 9pm and midnight seven nights a week.

"It is good exercise and I get to make new friends," Mr Lin says of the group that consists of young kids to the (very) elderly. "This is something for everyone. It keeps you happy. It gives me more energy for work every day to earn a living. Sometimes international travellers join us — they just can't help it because it is infectious."

Antique dealer Yanteng Chang, 57, leads the folk dancing group daily between 8pm and 10pm.

"It is good exercise," Mr Chang explains. "You can build up the body health but it is also letting people know about the culture of our province. There is no limitation for the ages of people to get involved, from old people to young kids, everyone can do this. We have many different dances."

Tour guide Shi Yang, 27, loves to dance too. She's not part of any particular group but loves to join in when she can.

"It keeps me healthy, it keeps me happy," she says, saying the Wild Goose Pagoda square is just one of many areas where locals meet to dance.

"Any time I go around and see them dancing on the street I stop and dance with them."

For a deeper understanding of China's rich cultural heritage and the link between music and dance, a visit to the Shaanxi History Museum is a must. Tourists there can learn about the famous 13 dynasties of China, as well as how the city Xi'an got its name, which translates to "Forever Peaceful" or "Western Peace".

Ms Yang suggests those wanting a greater experience of Chinese culture should take part in the famous Chang'an Impression — Tang Dynasty Grand Welcoming Ceremony at Xian's City Wall South Gate.

Previously performed only for special international dignitaries such as former US First Lady Michelle Obama, former US President Bill Clinton and Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, the ceremony is now held several times a week for the public. A special event will be held on September 14 to mark the China-Australia Year of Tourism.

In a jam-packed hour, the spectacular ceremony includes a traditional welcome in front of the gates before guests are ushered in to the city wall and treated to a cultural performance of dancing and music from some 200 or so actors wearing colourful and intricate costumes from the Tang dynasty.

"The performance is based on the origin of city, how we built it, how we maintained it and our culture and history," Chang'an Impression director Ning Su says.

"Music and dance is very much a part of that history."
MUST DO's IN XI'AN

1 Try Biangbiang noodles at First Noodle Under The Sun restaurant, near Wild Goose Pagoda.

2 Eat dumplings at Defachang Dumpling House near Xian's historical Bell and Drum Towers.

3 Ride a bike around the 14km city wall, China's most intact city wall ageing back more than 1200 years.

4 Take part in the Chang'an Impression, a Tang style welcome ceremony for visitors and dignitaries.

5 Visit the world famous Terracotta Warriors.

6 Take a dip at the Huaqing Hot Springs, followed by the Song of Everlasting Sorrow cultural show.

7 Climb to the top of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda.

8 Bargain for goodies (silk, handicrafts and yummy food) on the city's famous Muslim Street.

9 Day trip to Mount Hua, China's most precipitous mountain.

10 Take a day trip to Hukou Waterfall, the only yellow waterfall in the world and China's second largest waterfall.