There is a backstory to the art; Ai Weiwei’s heads are larger versions of a piece designed in the 18th century by European Jesuits for the Manchu emperor Qianlong. They were parts of a famous fountain clock in the Summer Palace. However, the heads were all looted by the British and French during the Second Opium War in 1860. To date, the Chinese government has retrieved five of them (ox, tiger, horse, monkey and boar), two more (rat and rabbit) were auctioned recently at Christies to an unsympathetic patriot who refused to pay. The other five remain lost, and may never be recovered.

Here is a video of NYC city mayor Bloomberg giving opening remarks to the exhibit:

You can check out all of my photographs in this Flickr gallery. There is also some good secondary coverage of the exhibit:

• 12 Heads Do the Talking for a Silenced Artist, the New York Times
• Detained Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei’s CIRCLE OF ANIMALS…ZODIAC HEADS Sculptures Unveiled At The Pulitzer Fountain Outside The Plaza, NYC Loves NYC blog

This is the Last Supper, as veggies:

Chinese artist JuDuoqi produced a range of art pieces with those food we eat everyday such as tofu, lettuce, ginger, cucumber etc. She even reproduced those worldwide famous paintings “The Last Super” and “Mona Lisa”. just incredible!! @.@

004 from Flickr user nycscout

At #8 Mott street, Chinatown Fair has only two reviews, but a respectable 4-star rating. The place has been there since the 50’s, and once featured a “World Famous Dancing & Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Chicken.” Go read the post to find out what that means!

I bought two sheets of 30 each of them, and they are as gorgeous as the dealer’s photos. If you wonder why I’m buying a small amount of silver in coin form, I find that they are much more attractive than bullion. So even though you pay a relatively large premium over silver spot, you’re buying art. Here’s a few pictures I took with my macro lens:

Front side of the coins

Obverse side of the coins

They come in big sheets of 30

Which are vacuum sealed against the air

The People’s Bank guarantees their authenticity

If you are looking to purchase, I highly recommend buying from Gainesville Coins, currently offering 2011 China 10 Yuan, 1 oz. Silver Panda. (Brilliant Uncirculated) Condition at $36.41 / ea with bank wire payment.

BoingBoing has a story up called How China censors Egypt news, and why the story is so sensitive in China which speculates that the current ban is to avoid memories of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989:

The filtering of search result and the blocking of search term “Egypt” in social media websites is to prevent certain interpretation of the political situation in Egypt. The scenes of Tanks moving into the city center, the confrontation between the people and the soldiers are very likely to recall Chinese people’s memory of the June 4 incident back in 1989 and the criticism of the authoritarian government in Egypt can easily turn into a political allegory in China.

For the best news on Egypt and the middle east, we recommend Aljazeera’s ongoing coverage.

Join us as we go behind the scenes to trace the romantic journey of the Singapore Girl around the world.
The complete journey with Singapore Airlines’ timeless icon unveils 5 February 2011.

Check out her journey through a few Asian countries:

Update: Check out this final cut, a single video featuring Singapore Girl assisting folks from various countries in one breathtaking, dizzying take!

It’s a funny, nearly recursive, fortune cookie meme!

How do I get my feed?

Paste in a Douban tag URL (it will look like movie.douban.com/tag/2010) here, and click run. Then you will have a custom feed, you can click on “Get as RSS” and import that link into Google Reader:

What will it look like?

The feed will look like this:

What’s behind the scenes?

I’ve setup a simple solution to use Yahoo Pipes to scrape tag pages and produce beautiful RSS. I’ve created this Douban Movies Tags RSS, which you can input a URL to a tag page, such as 电影标签：2010, and get back an RSS feed you can subscribe to in Google Reader. The Yahoo Pipe is simple, and looks like this:

Yahoo will automatically periodically update the data and produce new feed items. I haven’t tested it on the other two sub-Doubans, the music/book reviews, so if you have some specific problem let me know!

A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

While this is no surprise, public confirmation of China’s big-brother activities will probably only harm efforts at improved international relations.

There are a few comments on the original post and a Baidu blog to check out!