Associated Press Of Pakistan ( Pakistan's Premier NEWS Agency ) - Art exhibition from Pakistan gets positive press reviews

NEW YORK, Aug 11 (APP): An exhibition of the splendors of the ancient Buddhist civilization of Gandhara from Pakistan, which opened at Asia Society on Wednesday, has received positive review in the press.“After what seemed like an endless run of geopolitical roadblocks, ‘The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara’ has finally come, six months late, from Pakistan to Asia Society. Is the show worth all the diplomatic headaches it caused? With its images of bruiser bodhisattvas, polycultural goddesses and occasional flights into stratosphere splendor, it is,” said The New York Times.

“That all but a handful of the 75 sculptures are from museums in Lahore and Karachi is in itself remarkable,” art critic Holland Cotter wrote in the newspaper’s art section.
The Times paid tributes to Pakistan’s U.N. Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon for his role in facilitating the release of the precious objects from the museums in Pakistan to New York. “Without (his) persistent effort ... the exhibition would almost certainly never have happened,” the newspaper said.
“So the show has a cliffhanger back story as an attraction, and some monumental work, like the fantastic relief called “Vision of a Buddha’s Paradise.” (Dated to the fourth century A.D., it’s a kind of flash-mob version of heaven.) The serenely installed show of architectural reliefs, and works of gold and bronze, offers no hint of the immense bureaucratic and political challenges that almost prevented it from opening, wrote ARTINFO, the premier site for news about art and culture around the world.
The highlight of the exhibition, organized by Adriana Proser, a curator at Asia Society, is “Vision of a Buddha’s Paradise.”
“The big Buddha seated at its center wears an off-the-shoulder robe ... while a couple dozen of mini-bodhisattvas around him mix and match international fashions, with no two outfits, or gestures, or poses, quite the same,” the New York Times’ art critic observed. “Two figures gaze raptly up at the Buddha;
another, chin propped on hand, looks day-dreamingly away; far below, two tiny observers feed lotuses to fish in a stream.”
ARTINFO quoted Asia Society Museum director Melissa Chiu as saying that the exhibition will provide not only an important counterpoint to the prevailing perceptions of Pakistan in the United States, but also an art-historicallysignificant reevaluation of the ancient objects themselves.
“For so long, it was this outpost of Greco-Roman culture, and now we’re actually trying to locate it very much within the region and within an idea of how cultures travel and how they became more a symbol of pluralism,” said Chiu.
For Chiu, the Asia Society’s exhibition reflects a reappraisal that is currently underway in the entire discipline of art history. “Gandharan art has undergone a new appreciation now with scholarship being developed around the idea of a global culture rather than a national culture,” she explained.
In the last two or three years, according to Chiu, art historians have begun to argue that ours “is not the only period in which there was lots of culture interchange and travel, but actually in the ancient world there were these moments. And so Gandharan art comes out of one of those.”
The Wall Street Journal wrote,”The carving eloquently embodies the European-Asian synthesis of Gandharan culture in the first to third centuries.
It was there, in what is now the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan,that Alexander the Great’s incursion into India ultimately spawned an artistic expression. Gandhara produced the first sculptural representations of the Buddha,a thousand years after he died.

The Hindu : Arts / Crafts : Experiments with design

What do you get when you bring together two architects who love design and art? Design accents. Sonali Chitale and Ujjwala Naik Goenka, two architects who shared a passion for interior design, were introduced through a mutual friend. As the friendship grew, Ujjwala joined Sonali, and they began SoUk, in Singapore, which offers niche services for residential and hospitality projects. Taking their designs a step further, the duo has opened its first showroom Kaizen, in the city.

Warm ambience

It has warm interiors and warmer lights. There are distinct shades of red and brown on the coconut-made umbrella stands while the metallic black, melted bronze and white brighten the hurricanes, lamps, candle stands and the cheerful dancing women. There is horse-shaped driftwood and tables made of naturally-shaped teakwood. All this to accentuate your home!

Kaizen stands for ‘Zen of better living' and continuous improvements, which signifies the brand's simplistic designs and ongoing evolution. Tables, chairs, hurricanes, lamps and lights are just some of the accents they offer. “We're always experimenting and trying out new ideas, and that is why we decided on that name. Also, we're not a full-fledged furniture store, but deal with accents. What we realised was that not many people accessorise spaces, and we thought it would be good to come up with a niche service of accessorising homes and hotels,” says Ujjwala.

A ‘light' choice

The duo is passionate about lights, and has made them a big part of Kaizen. “We found a void here when it comes to decorative lights, and we've got this range of table, floor and ceiling lights that will accentuate interiors,” explains Sonali.

The designs come in natural materials, almost completely handmade and can even be customised to the client's design. “We've consciously tried to stay away from brands, and try to cater to every kind of customer. Our price range is as wide as our selection, but our products come in small numbers because we try to avoid bulk,” explains Sonali, while Ujjwala adds: “We want to give the best of what we can offer. Our production time is usually six to eight weeks, and we use all kinds of materials such as natural wood, coconut, driftwood to bring in different textures.”

And, they strive to keep up with the trends. “Because we're from Singapore, we've been influenced by the structure and standard there. A lot of architects and designers elsewhere make Singapore their base, and this helps us keep a close eye on the market,” Ujjwala says.

Kaizen is located at Chamiers, 106, Chamiers Road, R.A. P

PressTV - Malaysia to host Iran Qur'anic arts expo

Iranian embassy in Malaysia has programmed to mount an exhibition to display exquisite arts and calligraphy of the holy Qur'an in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur.

Iran embassy's cultural office has attempted to hold an exhibition to showcase Qur'anic masterpieces and calligraphy created by Iranian Artists, IRNA reports.

Islamic paintings on stone, wood and clay along with Qur'anic illumination and cultural productions such as Qur'anic softwares are among other works to be presented at the event.

Organized by Astan Quds Razavi, there would also be workshops on the illumination and calligraphy of the holy Qur'an conducted by world renowned and prominent Iranian calligraphers.

Furthermore, the event is planned to present several Qur'ans translated into 40 languages as well as some precious scripts of the holy book.

Rare and old manuscripts of the holy Qur'an belonging to Imam Ali (PBUH), Imam Hussein (PBUH), Imam Hassan (PBUH), Imam Sajjad (PBUH), Imam Kazem (PBUH), Imam Reza (PBUH) will also be displayed at this cultural event.

Iran's biggest Qur'anic art exhibition is scheduled to kick off on August 14, 2011, at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center (KLCC) Exhibition Hall.

Portrait of a North Korean propagandist turned protest artist - CSMonitor.com

Seoul, South Korea

For Song Byeok, as for many North Koreans, getting out of his homeland came at a steep price.

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The soft-spoken artist decided to leave in 2000 to find food, as famine ravaged large parts of the country. During his initial attempt to cross the Tumen River intoChina to find and bring back food, Mr. Song watched as his father was washed away in the surging waters.

“I was about halfway across the river when the rope grew slack,” he says in a recent interview. “My father told me three times to go and leave him and then disappeared underwater.”

Related Choi Hyun-mi, teen boxing champ, spurs fellow North Korean defectors to keep fighting

Mr. Song dragged himself ashore and begged for help from a group of North Korean border guards. “They refused, saying, ‘Why have you survived? You should die also,’ and they beat me up,” he says.

He spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp, where he lost a finger to frostbite and became disillusioned with the regime. After Song was amnestied, he successfully sneaked into China. A year later, after securing a secret passage to South Korea, he arrived in Seoul.

Song is just one of the estimated tens of thousands of starving or disillusioned North Koreans who have fled the country since the mid-1990s, when a collapse of the country’s food distribution systems coincided with a devastating famine.

Propaganda artist

Before fleeing to China, Song was a propaganda artist. In a rural studio south of the capital,Pyongyang, he created grinning portraits of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il and vibrant billboards depicting ranks of revolutionary workers and peasants.

Song started painting as a hobby, but his talents were quickly noticed by the authorities and he was soon recruited to work for the regime.

He says the central authorities would present him with strict models outlining the posters’ style and content. Painting “outside the lines” – making personal alterations to the models – was strictly forbidden. “Every line, every angle, it was all presented in the model. It was just copying. There was no creativity, none of the artist’s personality, nothing.”

At his small studio in suburban Seoul, Song unveils a reproduction of a typical propaganda poster, rendered in an apocalyptic palette of reds and browns. It shows a stern-faced worker clenching his weapon, with shrill yellow Korean script running along the top and bottom of the painting: Are you going to live as a free human, or as a slave? Let’s protect the red flag of the revolution until the very end.

“In North Korea, this is an actual slogan,” Song says. “But it could be turned back at them: Are yougoing to live as free men or as slaves? Look at how you’re living: You’ve got no freedom of speech or activity or assembly, or anything in North Korea.”

The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea - Dutchman Missing in N.Korea

A Dutch stamp collector has not returned from a trip to North Korea, the Dutch broadcaster RTV Utrecht reported on Monday.

Willem van der Bijl of Utrecht visited the North on July 17 to buy North Korean stamps and propaganda art. He was supposed to return home on July 30 but has been out of contact.

Van der Bijl had been to the North several times before, but this is the first time he has not contacted his family for such a long time, they said.

After the family reported him missing on Aug. 3, the Dutch government asked Pyongyang through its embassy in Seoul and the North Korean Embassy in Switzerland to confirm his whereabouts, but to no avail. The Netherlands is reportedly considering dispatching its ambassador in Seoul to the North.

The Hague is having difficulty because it has no official communication channels with Pyongyang. No phone calls can be made from there to the Netherlands, so the loss of communication does not necessarily mean danger, a spokesman for the Dutch Foreign Ministry said.

But North Korea experts in the Netherlands are worried about his safety. Prof. Remco Breuker of Leiden University said it makes no sense that the North Korean regime cannot say where he is since it normally assigns guides to all visiting foreigners.

There is speculation that the Dutchman may have been arrested for trying to buy rare stamps from an individual North Korean, whom foreigners are banned from contacting.

If so, this could damage relations between the North and the EU, the Dutch press said. The EU has been talking with the North about ways of giving it humanitarian food aid worth 10 million euros (approximately W15.5 billion).

Photographs of Sikkim by Alice Kandell are Now Online

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Sikkim is high in the Himalaya Mountains of India, bordered by Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. The setting is remarkable, with steep slopes, thatched cottages, Buddhist temples, cobbled paths and terraced fields. During many visits from 1965 to 1971, Alice S. Kandell photographed vivid scenes from daily life, documenting the culture of the tiny kingdom before it vanished. Three hundred of these extraordinary photographs, showing both people and landscapes, are now online at the Library of Congress. Photographer Kandell has dedicated the rights to the public to encourage worldwide access. Researchers who visit the Library can consult the entire collection of 15,000 color and black-and-white images, which Kandell donated to the Library in 2010.

Sikkim was an independent kingdom in the Himalayas ruled by a hereditary line of kings (Chogyal) from the 17th century until it became a British protectorate, then an Indian protectorate in 1950. Sikkim was formally annexed by India in 1975. In culture and religion, it has been linked closely with Tibet, from which its first king migrated.
In 1963, the last Chogyal, Palden Thondup Namgyal, married Hope Cooke, an American student at Sarah Lawrence College. Cooke then became the Queen of Sikkim and lived with the king and their children during the final years of the kingdom. Due to this fairy-tale romance, Sikkim became well known in America through major magazines and newspapers.

Kandell, Cooke’s college friend, became a frequent visitor to the small, mountainous kingdom and, at the Chogyal’s request, embarked on a project to document the Buddhist way of life in Sikkim. While traveling extensively through a country not much larger than Delaware, Kandell went high in the mountains to meet farmers and traders and photograph their families and homes. She visited monasteries and attended religious ceremonies with monks and lamas, captivated by the music, masks and dances. She captured formal and informal scenes with the royal family in Gangtok, as well as artisans with their crafts, children in schools and the mountainous landscape.

"I tried to use my camera to communicate the warmth and openness of the people of Sikkim. I wanted to capture the beauty that is everywhere," Kandell said.

Prince Palden Namgyal of Sikkim, who lives in New York, said "Dr. Kandell’s collection of photographs represents a rare and valuable snapshot of an era that many young Sikkimese have very little knowledge of today. The pictures are not only beautiful but represent an important historical record of our family. More importantly, they capture the culture, tradition and daily life of a far simpler and more innocent time. We are very grateful to the Library of Congress for preserving Dr. Kandell’s collection and making it accessible to all."

Inspired by her experiences in Sikkim, Kandell assembled a major collection of Budhhist art and religious objects. She also retained her connections to the Sikkimese people. In 2010, Hope Cooke joined Kandell at the Library of Congress to describe their work in Sikkim. The webcast from this program, "A Tour of the Lost Kingdom: Sikkim," can be viewed online.

The Prints and Photographs Division is responsible for acquiring, preserving, securing, processing and serving the Library's unique and vast collection of visual materials, which includes more than 14 million photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons, fine-art prints, and architectural and engineering designs.

India-Bangladesh art summit begins in Mumbai

Mumbai, Aug 1 (IANS) Artists from India and Bangladesh Monday came together to participate in a weeklong summit dedicated to two legendary artists of the subcontinent, M.F. Husain and Mohammad Kibria.

India's Husain and Bangladesh's Kibria died within two days of each other in June this year. The exhibition, beginning Monday at the Museum Art Gallery, features 56 art pieces.

Scheduled to end Aug 7, the India-Bangladesh Art Summit brings together the works of 74-year-old Samarjit Roy Choudhury and 30-year-old Biswajit Goswami, the oldest and youngest participants. Both are from Bangladesh.

Roy Choudhury, who has participated in several group programmes and six solo exhibitions in various countries, taught at the Government Institute of Fine Arts (presently Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka) for 43 years. He would be displaying two of his creations.

The 14 Bangladeshi representatives include Paris-based veteran Shahabuddin Ahmed, Abdus Shakoor Shah, Afrozaa Jamil, Biren Shome, Mohammad Iqbal, Jamal Ahmed and Kalidas Karmakar.

Among the 14 painters from India are Debabrata Chakrabarti, Kashinath Salve, Ram Viranjan and Bishwa Bose, the organisers said.

"We have a good mix of senior and junior artists," said Kolkata-based Sukhomoy Majumdar, whose organisation Autograph International has tied up with Bangladesh's Gallery Cosmos for the exhibition.

Shahabuddin's untitled oil-on-canvas that depicts people running is the most expensive exhibit priced at Rs.6 lakh.

Among the Indian artists, each of Salve's works are priced at Rs.2.50 lakh.

Young artist Bishwa Basu's two works on display pay tribute to the victims of the July 13 Mumbai blasts. Both the installations on canvas are titled "No More".

"This is my way of expressing my agony at the loss of innocent lives and an appeal to all that such dastardly acts should stop," said Bishwa.

Eleven of the Indian artists and two from Bangladesh have already reached Mumbai. Organisers are hoping that Shahabuddin would also attend.

Kibria, considered a pioneer of the modern art movement in Bangladesh, died June 7 at the age of 82.

Husain, one of India's best known artists, died two days later on June 9 at the age of 95.

Art curators from different countries in Armenia : Public Radio of Armenia

Art critics are came to Armenia to participate in the Art association international summer seminars for the 6th time in the world are experts in different countries joining their colleagues from Armenia, 10 days after the presentations, collective discussion, group readings and discussion are a number of professional issues.

Armenian connection between artists and society is weak, there are no critics, curators, art managers, art, communication, organizing the designers or administrators of this gap began to tend to him early last century to the middle of 90th, when he began to establish relations with foreign countries in 2006 was held in Yerevan summer art workshops, which aim to improve more every year are subjected to structural changes.
July 25 at the beginning of this year's seminars will be completed tomorrow, August 4.

In India, Snake Charmers Are Losing Their Sway : NPR

Snake charmers used to be a fixture at Indian markets and festivals, beguiling crowds with their ability to control some of the world's most venomous reptiles.

But one of India's iconic folk arts is fading away — and animal-rights activists say it can't happen soon enough. They say it's an art based on cruelty.

These days, it's not easy to find a snake charmer, even on Nag Panchami, the yearly religious festival in honor of the king cobra, which fell on Aug. 4 this year.

It took a full day of searching in New Delhi to find Buddhanath, a thin man with a long, white beard who was sitting cross-legged on the pavement behind a round, flat container that looked a bit like a tortilla basket.

Buddhanath wore a loosely wrapped orange turban and a sweet, joyous expression as he tapped the basket.

"I have a king cobra," Buddhanath said. "He is Lord Shiva's cobra, and we worship him."

The blue-skinned Hindu god is usually portrayed wearing a king cobra around his neck.

The charmer flipped the lid off the basket, and the cobra popped up like a jack-in-the-box, scanning around with its hood fully extended.

It fixed its gaze on the tip of Buddhanath's gourd flute. The cobra's black scales glistened as it swayed, following the movement of the flute's tip.

Art Transcends Politics for Asia Society's New Pakistani Exhibit - DNAinfo.com

UPPER EAST SIDE — Only three months after U.S. armed forces killed Osama bin Laden in the countryside of Pakistan, and almost 10 years after the al Qaeda attack on 9/11, the Upper East Side's Asia Society wants to challenge New Yorkers to see Pakistan's history in an entirely new light.

When Asia Society's new exhibit "The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara" opens on Tuesday, museum-goers will have a chance to see Buddhist sculptures, architecture and other art works made from gold and bronze from the ancient area of Pakistan that have never been on view in the United States.

The exhibit is the first of its kind in nearly 50 years, according to a musuem spokeswoman.

It was significant that the art was made available to an American museum in light of the the recently strained alliance between the two countries after bin Laden's assassination, Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu said.

“Against a backdrop of political turmoil and tensions in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, securing these loans has been an extraordinary achievement,” says Chiu, who is also vice president of the Global Art Programs.

The exhibit is separated into three sections: "Classical Connections," "Narratives and Architectural Context" and “Buddhas and Bodhisattvas." It shows the influence of Greco-Roman culture on the area's artwork, scenes of Buddha's life and the multi-faceted nature of the religious figure as he was represented in Pakistan.

Chiu hopes that these 70 works that have been so carefully preserved might give New Yorkers more insight into Pakistani culture.

“Despite images of Pakistan as a place of violent extremism, the region has an ancient tradition of tolerance and pluralism as evidenced by the survival of these spectacular examples of Gandharan art," she said.

The majority of the works are on loan from Pakistan's National Museum in Karachi and the Lahore Museum in Lahore. At its height, Gandhara encompassed areas in Afghanistan and northwest India.

"Through this exhibition, Asia Society aims to provide new contexts for looking at the arts and culture of Pakistan today, in keeping with our long history of programming about and engagement with the region," Chiu added.