[Buddha-l] curious

[JKirkpatrick]

Hmmm---interesting. Recently I read an article somewhere (New
Yorker I think it was) about young artists in China painting
kitsch for the tourist market and also amazingly for export to
the USA!! like postcard scenes of bridges in Venice!  I wonder if
some of those imperial family paintings were recent and not
antiques. 
If feng shui is on the rise then new, elaborate family tombs are
not far behind (as I saw when I visited Vietnam).

Did you find anything nice when going through those antique
markets? Speaking of Buddha images, one habit that I've always
deplored is cutting heads off works of art or devotion, and
taking them back to one's country as trophies. This practice in
the ME and Asia in general used to be done during wars, when it
was a desecration. How on earth did we think it was hunky dory to
do it and then put the loot in museums or on our piano? (Our
age-old ignorance, no doubt.)  I'd never acquire only the head of
a Buddha image, of Apollo, or anyone else! Yikes.

Joanna


Erik wrote:

it is, but the statues and the painting scrolls are still
circulating. 
This summer I saw quite a few small statues and portraits of Cixi
(dowager) and Pu-Yi at the Shanghai antique market. According to
the vendors some even from Guangxu (it's difficult to see the
difference). 
The vendors explained that these came from old people dying and
clearings of attics. A probable cause for the availibility of the
statues could also be that many temples were just locked and that
some of them now have been cleared because of the need for
building sites. 
Buddhism is in the rise, because of the new rich. Even  feng
shui, which was considered utter nonsense in the Mao- and
Dengperiod is back again.

JKirkpatrick schreef:

> But paintings of the imperial family? that's a big surprise
since the 
> government still claims to be a communist system. You mean the
Manchu 
> Dowager Empress and relatives?
>
>