Cover of Vision Magazine by Chen Man
Forget Mao Zedong and the Terracotta Army: if you really want to understand modern China you need to get into The Dragon Tongue Squad.
That was the message yesterday from the organisers of China Now, a festival which is about to bombard Britons with contemporary Chinese culture on an unprecedented scale, from visual arts to music to tea making, via football and mànhuà comics.
As “China's best and most established hip hop crew”, The Dragon Tongue Squad will be appearing at the Royal Opera House next month, one of more than 800 events taking place across Britain between Chinese New Year and the Beijing Olympics in August.
The aim is to make Britons as aware of China as a cultural powerhouse as they are of its booming economic and athletic potential.
Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, said: “It’s phenomenally important that we understand what makes China tick culturally, historically, politically and economically.
“We are bringing over the National Ballet of China but we are also trying to surprise people and give them a different perspective on China with acts like the Dragon Tongue Squad. Are they any good? We’ll see but I’m told that they are.”
The idea for China Now came from the British business community and it has been two years in the planning.
Stephen Green, Chairman of China Now and Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings plc described the scale of the programme as “unique”.
“We are all aware of how China is changing the balance of the world economy but it isn’t just doing that. China is a country with a rich and proud cultural tradition. But it has not ossified and it is not looking back to the Terracotta Warriors and calligraphy. It is effervescent and developing rapidly. I very strongly believe that we need to engage culturally because there’s so much that we can learn from each other. ”
There is ground to make up. According to a survey carried out for HSBC last year 46 per cent of Chinese people knew that the British Prime Minister was either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair. In contrast only seven per cent of Britons identified Hu Jintao as President of China, the same number that thought Mao was still in charge.
China Now will spend 6 months attempting to make the country a little more familiar through exhibitions, performances and activities spanning film, comics, art, literature, music, design, science, technology, business, education and sport.
There will be Shaolin monks at Sadler’s Wells, an acrobatic Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House and the Flying Dragon Circus in Newcastle.
Chinese authors will turn out in force at the summer’s literary festivals while a Chinese Tea Culture Exhibition, created by the National Tea Museum in Hnagzhou will tour the country with a programme of tea-tastings, lectures and workshops.
China is now the world’s fourth largest art market and many of its leading contemporary artists will feature in a national exhibition trail taking in British regional museums and major London institutions such as the British Museum, the Serpentine Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery.
One of the key commissions will be available to anyone, in the virtual world of Second Life, where Cao Fei, a video artist from Guangzhou has created a fictional society embracing communism, capitalism and Chinese mythology and named after Chinese currency.
It will be shown on giant public screens provided by the BBC in several UK cities this summer.
Lucy Charkin, art adviser to China Now said: “It’s a virtual China- a real mish mash of everything. Cao Fei is interested in the changing landscape of China. Anyone can buy property in RMB City, erect a skyscraper or build a museum, just like you can in modern China.”
The sound artists Zhong Minjie, Yan Jun and Wang Changcun have created a series of projects which will bring the clatter of Chinese streets, shops, bars, and offices to the Southbank Centre ballroom in London. At several other locations headphone walking tours will lead listeners through Chinese soundscapes in their local area. For example, when they pass a playground they will hear the sound of Chinese schoolchildren playing.
A major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum this spring will investigate the recent explosion of new design in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
There are grants and education packs for primary and secondary schools to introduce children to Mandarin, Chinese myths, Kung Fu and Beijing Opera. In Beijing, FA-qualified coaches are about to put 2,012 Chinese children through three months of intensive football training prior to a UK tour in May.
Alan Parker, the vice-chairman of China Now and chairman of the Brunswick Group said that the template for the programme was The Japan Festival held in 1991, which brought sumo wrestlers to the Albert Hall as part of a raft of Japanese themed cultural events.
“If you talk to the Anglo-Japanese community they say it fundamentally changed the relationship between the two countries in a really lasting way. It was also chaired by my father.”
The Times is a media partner for China Now, which runs from February 4 to July 27.
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