“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, April 14, 2011

Taiwanese Objects


An extraordinary trip with an extraordinary guy, Professor Serge Dreyer, resulted in many many photos of some of the most incredible objects I've ever seen: old Taiwanese antique objects, some indigenous, some Chinese, some in the typical Taiwanese style of ceramics, which I fell it love with. These latter are dark, smooth clays with a solid, mysterious presence to them. Photos to follow—I don't have my camera USB lead with me.

Professor Dreyer has been around: working in Soviet Russia under Brezhnev, Saudi Arabia and the Congo—he's worked in Communist, religious and fascist versions of totalitarianism...and he loves oud music. We had a blast.

Oh yeah, he's also a tai chi master and teacher and has that wonderful anarchistic Daoist thing going on. He has a lovely house on the Tunghai University campus, full of puppets (another love of his) and Taiwanese pottery.

He taught a class on clowning as a way to help his students think about creativity, and he sees some links between clowning and tai chi.

We got talking about drama, karma, theater, tricksters, illusion, nature (which in many cultures is about sensual pretense and display, not essence). He told me about a north eastern Chinese kingdom ruled by opera actors in the late nineteenth century...

2 comments:

Will DuPower said...

My apologies in advance if this is a repeated comment. Can you give us anymore details about the Chinese kingdom?

Thanks,

Rob

Will DuPower said...

Can you give us any more details about this 19th century Chinese kingdom? I thought my google-fu was strong, but I can't seem to find anything about it.

Thank you,

Rob