It is customary that Chinese households will do house decorations by putting paper crafts of folding or cutting on windows before the new year arrives. As the year to come is Tiger, we invited Zhuoya ZHANG, a master student majoring in Film from School of Arts, English and Languages to show and tell how to make paper tiger crafts.
The workshop is followed by a series of cultural events covering a wide range of topics.
All welcome!
About Henan Museum
Henan Museum, built in 1927, is one of the oldest and largest museums in China. Its site changed for several times and finally lies at Nongye Road, Jinshui District, Zhengzhou, Henan. It is a history and art museum with a collection of more than 130,000 pieces of cultural relics through the ages.
– China Highlights
After some ten years, I went to visit Henan Museum again. This time, I went there mainly for a show on ancient Chinese music performance, as well as re-visiting the relics.
– Yang Liang
The ticket is free, but one needs to book it, either online or on site. I did it via a mobile app for a slot of admission. Then I took a bus there, as the public transport system is very convenient nowadays and there is a bus station nearby.
The collection of photos show what the main entrance looks like and the main exhibition halls from different angles.
This is what it looks like inside of the museum with some of the exhibits. For a full range of exhibition, you can return to the Museum’s website above.
As a layperson of architecture and archaeology, I’m not going to focus on these constructions and relics. However, I’d like to share with you what I felt about this visit from my personal experience of watching the show performance and some other observation.
I watched the music show before walking to the exhibition halls, as I was more interested in the new forms and functions museum nowadays promote – not only for educational purposes, but also to entertain visitors of all walks of life. I was totally impressed by the quality of ancient music performance, fully immersed in the show and the marvelous acoustic effects which allowed me to travel back to thousands of years ago. Here are a few clips of performances that I recorded:
Nowadays, more and more young people enjoy visiting museums, attending both exhibitions and relevant events like talks and shows which encourage more dynamics and interactive engagement, in contrast to the formulaic stereotypes that visitors just took photos around in museums and left without much understanding and appreciation of such exhibitions. I recall that decades ago I went there seeing the same kinds of lifeless objects without any interest in observing, discovering, and imagining how and why they were relevant to me in history and have impacted on my life, let alone a good level of appreciation. If one has no good knowledge about these exhibits, they would easily feel so bored and want to escape.
This time, when I got it in hand, I found the idea of blind boxes, or mystery boxes, really appealing as I never could have guessed what kind of things were inside until I opened it with a ‘Wow’.
(The added line of characters read ‘拆盲盒的快乐 ~’, meaning the happiness (快乐 kuàikè) of opening (拆 chāi) the blind box (盲盒 mánghé). The photo shows that there is a set of samples of palace maid band designed by Henan Museum.)
I also came across two boys who were giving a video call to their mum, making a live broadcast while walking around. They told their mum what they saw and how they were impressed, and their mum sounded really excited over the phone.
I would also like to attribute this wonderful experience to the advance of modern technology which makes these old objects alive. For example, the amazing lighting and acoustic effect made me feel as if I stood in a traditional Chinese ink painting, exploring a wonderland when I saw many white cranes fly in the sky and heard the stream flowing pleasantly. Wow! Who wouldn’t enjoy this kind of visiting experience?
Editor: Liang WANG
Proofreader: Owen Marles
Speaker:
Dr Yangyang LONG 龙杨杨, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Dr Yangyang LONG is Assistant Professor in Translation and Interpreting. She was awarded PhD by Queen’s University Belfast in 2019. Her works have been published on journals such as The Translator, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents and Coup De Théâtre. She is currently working with Routledge on a monograph entitled “The Works of Lin Yutang: Translation and Recognition”, which will be published with the series “Routledge Studies in Chinese Translation”.
Outline:
Who owns a translated foreign-language play? The translator? The author? The playwright? The director? The dramaturg? The actors/actresses? The audiences? The critics? The theatre company? The (mass) media? What makes a Chinese play – in this case a classic of its national literature – worth translating and performing in a new environment, that is, the here and now of the 21st-century English-speaking world? This talk aims to explore the translation and performance of 2017 “Snow in Midsummer” (窦娥冤, The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanqing), a new stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its “Chinese Classics Translation Project” (2013-2023).
国际妇女节快乐 (Guójì Fùnǚjié kuàilè)！
International Women’s Day is held on 8th March each year and is a global day which celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It is a day to mark a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Worldwide, groups and organisations come together to celebrate women’s achievements or to rally for women’s equality.
From Queen’s Gender Initiative
On Friday 5th March, we hosted the last event of CNY2021 celebration, Panel Discussion – The joy of women artists with brush pens during lockdown, which also marked the celebration of International Women’s Day. We were glad that a wide audience of Queen’s students, staff members and members of the public were positively engaged with the artists, sharing their excellent exhibition as well as their positive life attitude.
We would also like to express our heart-felt thanks to you who have been engaged, as both contributors and audience, with our CNY celebrations starting from the paper crafts workshop, through the Launch day event featuring performance and a guest talk on Great Books of China, followed by a two-week-long culture forum talks from an array of interesting topics delivered by scholars and research students from across a range of disciplines and diverse cultural backgrounds.
All the recorded talks, including the ArtEast exhibition and discussion, coupled with flashcards of Chinese as language input, are uploaded online for reviewing. We hope this will encourage continuation of such conversations.
Finally, while we are in preparation for our future events, we may wish that the Year of the Ox brings us strength and success!
Our CNY2021 QUBLC-ArtEast exhibition provides a cloud space for you to appreciate a selection of paintings from the Art East ladies created during the lockdown period.
It’s amazing that they have kept so positive and productive using their magic brush pens. We hope this exhibition will bring you a different feel towards life and the surroundings.
While this exhibition is ongoing we would like to invite you to join our online panel discussion on 05/03 with the ladies to share their painting perspectives and practice, as well as their positive attitude towards life and art. In particular, we would like to see your vote on the best paintings from each of the artists (e.g. Jing-001, LLi-001, Zhang-001, JLi-001) to match against their own picks in the comment box at the bottom of the exhibition page.
This event also marks the celebration of the International Women’s Day (8th March) which has the theme ‘Choose to Challenge’ this year. Feel free to share on your social media using #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021.
For more IWD-themed events at Queen’s, please visit Queen’s Gender Initiative page.
The CNY2021 celebration programme has reached its second height with a full programme of inviting talks prepared by scholars and research students from across a range of disciplines and diverse cultural backgrounds.
Following the Guest Talk delivered by Dr Frances Wood on 12th February, this week we have enjoyed two interesting talks delivered by Qingying Lin, Queen’s graduate and now an MRCI-AHSS China Media Digital Assistant, and Ye Tian, PhD candidate in Translation from School of Arts, English and Languages.
In the coming week (22nd – 26th February) we welcome you to attend a week-long programme of culture talks, featuring:
