some things old, some things new. part two

taxi rides through muggy Beijing nights, waiting for the rain

Veruschka in Bill Blass, photographed by Richard Avedon, 1967

hair I covet

Tim Walker, Eglingham Children and Swan on Beach, 2002

Harry Shunk, Le saut dans le vide, 1960

i ♥ Liu Wen

Christian Dior, Fall 2010 Couture/ backstage at Dior, 2010 / Zoo editorial, photographed by Aneta Bartos, 2010/ Chanel, Fall 2010 Couture / backstage at Phi, Fall 2009 / Christian Dior, Resort 2011 / backstage at Chanel, Fall 2009 / backstage at Alexander McQueen, Fall 2009

toro toro toro

Every year when I go back to Yotsuba, I go in fear that maybe, somehow, it's fallen from the pinnacle of sushi awesomeness it currently resides on. Each year, I invariably cross over the quiet shop-front, see the lone sushi maestro busying away at the sushi bar and breathe contentment.

Today I made my long-anticipated first visit of the summer. Yotsuba has been famous for a while in Beijing for serving up the city's most authentic sushi (you will nay find a California roll here) in a cosy (read: small) environment. It only opens for dinner and only serves perfectly alliterated sushi, sashimi and sake. (Venture elsewhere for your udon/tempura fix). The word on the street is that the fish is flown in daily from the Tsukiji market in Tokyo. I've never verified this for fact - the great sushi master does not speak Chinese, which I take as a good sign - but their fish certainly tastes as if this might be true.

crab miso soup

my favourite otoro glistening in the middle, next to a wonderful sweet egg omelette

grilled sea-eel brushed with sweet soy sauce

Sitting at the sushi bar instead of the more private tatami rooms is preferable as it's actually quite mesmerising to see all the sushi being crafted. A deft slice, a clap, a dab of vinegar water, a clump of rice, squeeze, squeeze, and hello, my beautiful otoro. Really, the maestro makes it look so easy.

not very far from hotpot heaven...

Anybody who's ever been to China will know of the national mania for hotpot. The concept is really very simple. A bubbling pot of base soup + lots of raw ingredients which you cook yourself and then dip into a sauce before chopstick-ing it straight into your mouth. Healthy and delish. And yes, even in the heat of summer, you blast out the air-con and indulge.

I'd been dying to go to this particular chain Hai Di Lao (海底捞) for a while - rumours of good quality base soups and ingredients, plus impeccable service - but news of ridiculous queues at all of their restaurants always killed the urge. Finally, somebody had the foresight to book and so I made it to their dubiously lime-green hotpot table. I've always had a penchant for spicy hotpot, but usually you spend far too much time trying to fan out the flames in your mouth, so this time we wisely opted for a non-spicy mushroom soup base to focus exclusively on the eating.

Highlights were their speciality beef (remains tender no longer how much you cook it) and my personal faves: duck's blood (freaks a lot of people out, but is actually very good for you + tasty), the cow's stomach (ditto) and enoki mushrooms. You can make your own dipping sauces here but most people stick with the good ol' Beijing favourite - a type of thick sesame paste, which I augmented with some chilli and coriander. All in all, well worth the hype. The restaurant is apparently open 24 hours, ready and waiting to satisfy all those midnight hotpot cravings. Kebabs pah!

Shanghai Dreamers

Maybe the fact that Shanghai often thought of itself as the 'Paris of the East' convinced John Galliano to up all the paraphernalia associated with a runway show and land Christian Dior's Resort collection there this year. Then the boat for Shanghai was pushed out even further with the debut of David Lynch's Lady Blue Shanghai and the global ad campaigns where Marion Cotillard - in a black leather suit and toting her Lady Dior - passionately pulls away from her lover against the backdrop of the Bund.

This series by the photographer Quentin Shih thus presents itself as a continuation of the Dior + Shanghai theme. It follows on from his previous artistic collaboration with the fashion house back in 2008 which resulted in the haunting series The Stranger in the Glass Box. Quentin's work always has its recognisable aesthetic attributes which mark him out as a superior image-maker in China today. Perhaps the greatest value in his vision is the lack of pandering to Western notions of what China ought to look like. There is no disparagement of outside influences to nostalgically lament a disappearing way of life, but neither is any part of contemporary China embraced wholesale. Underlying it all is his pertinent recognition that the fractured way in which Chinese people view their current cultural condition is inherited and irrefutable. These replicated figures in their plastic clothes come therefore, to reflect as much about the historical fate of these particular dreamers standing vulnerably in the vast and exposed spaces/stages as it does about the beauty of couture.

http://www.quentinshih.com/

Istanbul, circa 1975

Reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence gave me incredible pangs to see the Istanbul he described. Soon, of course, everyone will be able to see the actual artefacts in the Museum of Innocence he is building for real. Until then...

Line 20, 1970s

South African Verona Bass by the Bosphorus at the Eminonu ferry terminal, 1967, on her London-Kathmandu adventure.

Wooden building, 1970s

And then some Ara Güler...

Iron workers waiting for their shift to start, 1970

Beyoglu (Pera), Istanbul, 1962 (but so great I had to include it.)

The Banquet

Contemporary art in Beijing can be very interesting, but is more often than not a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Too many people wanting to jump onto the bandwagon of 'lifestyle' living, and not content with their coffee shop/hotel/bookshop being simply just another coffee shop/hotel/bookshop want to throw some art into the mix. With the Today Art Museum it's a bit of the opposite situation - already one of the leading galleries in the city, they've developed the street behind their building and rented it out to coffee houses and smaller art galleries. Wandering there for a coffee the other afternoon, my low expectations for the quality of art in galleries there largely justified, I was pleased to find one interesting sculpture placed just in front of an arts-and-crafts store.

The Banquet (盛宴) by Lü Shun (吕顺), as I later discovered, was a sculpture originally exhibited in 2009 inside the Today Art Museum, but has benefited I think from being exposed to the outside elements. It draws upon obvious parallels to traditions of the Last Supper in Western art, but as the artist points out, two important figures are conspicuously absent - Jesus and Judas. That, combined with the fact that the subjects are all pigs, is meant to reflect the lack of ideology and contemporaneous crises within society. The subject of eating/banquet is also given importance; such an integral part of Chinese culture is made to seem primeval, quite literally 'piggish'.

This type of straightforward symbolism is very representative of the way a lot of contemporary Chinese art can be read and at its root can always be found a deep discontent with society and its values. What made this more engaging was the consideration with which the pieces are executed. More often than not, a lot of projects are conceived with very simplistic symbolism which is then portrayed very poorly. Here, the emotions and figures of the pigs were in equal parts mournful, grasping and exhausted whilst their rotund shapes seen from the back were in an odd way strangely endearing.