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The Painted Skin II
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The Xíng Tiān (刑天)
The Xíng Tiān (刑天 "the heavens' convict") is a headless giant. He was decapitated by the Yellow Thearch as punishment for challenging him. Because he has no head, his face is in his torso. He wanders around fields and roads and is often depicted carrying a shield and an axe and doing a fierce war dance.
Image from the Shān Hǎi Jīng (Classic of Mountains and Seas).
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Moonlight (殭屍魅影) -- hopping vampires in 2011?
Moonlight was supposed to be a hopping vampire movie with a detective story mixed in. An article in a Chinese magazine said the filmmakers had been reading detective novels nonstop. Half an hour into the movie, I realized WHICH detective novels they were reading: Natsuhiko Kyogoku's.
My favorite film genre, combined with an author who amazes me. This should rock, shouldn't it? WRONG.
But there’s something to learn from the epic fail of this film. Something about creativity. To understand what I mean, let's take a look at the two things Moonlight tried to combine.
At their best, hopping vampire movies are high-energy supernatural fun, dazzling and quirky, with ghosts and goblins around every corner.
The Kyogokudo novels are somber, moving, hypnotic, frustrating, and profound, and they mostly consist of characters standing around talking.
The Dàoshi is the hero of the hopping vampire flick; he burns paper talismans, imprisons ghosts in earthenware jugs, and slays fox spirits with a peachwood sword.
The hero of the Kyogokudo is a Shinto exorcist who doesn't believe in magic -- which is okay, because in that world, _magic isn't real_. He solves crimes by performing an exorcism he doesn't believe in, and the exorcism reveals the truth while unlocking the emotional conflicts of all the characters involved in the mystery. It's brilliant, really. But not at all compatible with the hopping vampire movie.
It may look similar because they both feature Asian exorcists, but fundamentally, like a fraction, they do not reduce. Oil and water. Magic is real, or it isn't. The exorcist has power, or he doesn't. You can't combine these two elements; one will override the other.
What we're left with, in this case, is a Kyogokudo-style story. Without the brilliance that inspired Mouryo no Hako or Summer of the Ubume, Moonlight is closer to Scooby-Doo.
And we're also left with a lesson on creativity. On intersections, and why, sometimes, they fail.
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The Sōu Shān Tú (搜山图)
I've never made a study of Chinese art. There's too much else, the lore and language, clothes and customs, literature, history, music, and religion of dozens of different ethnic groups with the regional diversity you'd expect on a land-mass the size of the US and its outlying territories, except with five thousand years of history.
Have you noticed, by the way, that I like monsters? Always have. I don't want to conceptualize "the nature of the monstrous" or any other abstractosity before really looking at what's in front of me, but I like monsters. I have an interest in them. So imagine my delight when I discovered an entire genre of Chinese art dedicated to a particular monster encounter?
A group of human women are sitting in the wilderness with anthropomorphic animals. The women and animals are apparently lovers. But demons attack! And across these long painted scrolls, a battle takes place, demons vs. animals, with some human women caught in the fracas and crossfire.
I want to do some more research in Chinese texts before speculating more about the meaning and nature of these wonderful painted scrolls. So for now, I leave you with a rather silly write-up from California.
According to Annual Report University of California & Berkeley Art Museum,
Sou-shan T’u starts with a drunken party scene, where Chinese women offer up copious alcohol and the peaches of immortality to large monkeys, serpents, and oxen. The overblown curves of the women and the flowing scarves and robes they wear represent Tang dynasty (618–907 ce) figure style and tastes, but the faceted rocks and the trees dotted with lichen that form the background landscape are clearly a Ming invention. The partygoers come under attack from a horde of demons wearing armor and carrying the latest in bladed weaponry, and the animals and women are rounded up and led off in chains. The captured women fight with passion to protect their animal children, and some even begin to sprout animal characteristics (monkey hands, a reptilian tail) as they are carried off.
The narrative climaxes with a breathtaking scene of a rearing dragon tamed by the fetters demons are placing on its limbs and tail in the midst of an olive-dark sea. Narrative handscrolls have their own flow that depends on how quickly a viewer unrolls and rerolls it to follow the story—some sections we hurry through to find out what happens next, others invite us to linger over details or puzzle out clues to the story—and this scene always stops us in our tracks, exactly as the unknown artist planned.
The final segment shows a misty landscape that becomes peopled with a galaxy of varied and slightly comical demons (a particularly hairy one seems to be channeling Cousin Itt from the Addams Family cartoons), many drawn from folk sources and unlike the serious warriors of earlier scenes. They crowd meekly around a relaxed Chinese gentleman seated on a camp chair and clearly in charge of the proceedings. The scroll ends with a colophon, an added section of paper with a calligraphed text, which was written by a scholar at a much later date in an attempt to explain the pictured events. He calls it a battle of demons and animals, but doesn’t say—and clearly doesn’t know—why they fight.
Even without a good sense of what’s happening (are the demons the bad guys or not?) we get caught up in the impetus of the storytelling here, and also become aware of the visual strategies that create this quickening rhythm—the landscape features that open up and close in to frame the characters, subsidiary figures that lead the eye from scene to scene—and other aspects that occasionally slow the eye down, such as beautifully detailed renderings of sea creatures or humorous asides like the scrawny demon burdened by a hefty and upside-down female captive.
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Zhīzhū jīng (蜘蛛精)
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Hún Dūn (渾敦)
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Chánchú (蟾蜍)
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"Smash All Old Things."
Hong Kong in the 1980s and 90s produced some fantastic movies. Now censorship threatens to erase them, and the culture they celebrated.
In 2011, the Chinese government released a statement condemning movies and television shows that "casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation" (original statement here). There are some who argue that the statement refers only to time-travel stories that misrepresent historical characters and events, but the statement has had a chilling effect on a film industry that has a history of coming under attack.
The Chinese government has made no qualms of suppressing political speech, going so far as to imprison authors for writing stories that the government dislikes. So there is reason for filmmakers' reluctance to pursue creative endeavors that can be seen as promoting superstition.
But Huang Ying and other Hong Kong filmmakers of the 80s weren't promoting superstition; they were reclaiming a forgotten portion of their nationalistic heritage. Why should they make movies about European vampires, when Chinese culture has its own myths, its own ghosts and goblins? These filmmakers explored the horror and the comedy of the jiangshi (weirdly translated as "hopping vampires"), as well as witches with flying heads, beautiful ghost maidens, demonic trees, and the spirits of ancient foxes. And for protection, people could turn to the Dàoshi, or Taoist priest.
These movies are called linghuan gongfu pian, which translates to "spirit magic kung fu movies." In Return of the Demon, Huang Ying gave us an immortal villain whose power came from Daoist internal alchemy, and a kind of werewolf created by a Daoist magical spell.
See? These films seem to be saying. Our cultureis as rich as Western culture. And the 1980s saw a stream of movies from Hong Kong and Taiwan, celebrating Daoist magic, Chinese folklore, and the authors of ghost stories, particularly Pu Songling.
But things have changed. The popularity of the spirit magic kung fu movie died down. Epic and spectacle still exist, like this year's Painted Skin 2, which clearly decided to "casually make up myths" for its "monstrous and weird" plot. But the homely machismo of the Taoist priest wielding a peach wood sword to decapitate ghosts is a bygone. In its place we have movies like 2011's disappointing Moonlight, where the hopping corpses turn out to be fakes, like an episode of Scooby Doo.
The Chinese government statement did not explicitly outlaw the making of spirit magic kung fu movies. But it certainly made Chinese filmmakers think very carefully before producing a film that can be interpreted as promoting superstition. Whether or not the government's statement was intended to ban movies that reclaim traditional Chinese folk magic as a basis of nationalistic pride, the statement can definitely have a chilling effect on the nation's film industry.
"Smash all old things" is a slogan of the Red Guard. It seemed appropriate now. This is Banned Books Week, and I've been thinking about stories that go silent, and stories that are stifled.
I was watching a spirit magic kung fu movie, MR. VAMPIRE, when I had the idea that made me want to write fiction. I could draw on my studies of Chinese language and religion, and I could do research, and conduct interviews, and write a novel that would explore the folkloric depth of the spirit magic kung fu movie with a strong female protagonist. MR. VAMPIRE meets BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, if you will.
A lot of white authors wouldn't touch this kind of material, and with good reason. Cultural appropriation can be harmful; it can lead to unintentional mockery of a culture one doesn't share; it can exoticize the people of that culture, causing them to be seen as "other," inherently different. Cultural appropriation has the ability to do real harm.
But at the same time, when a white author refuses to explore cultures he or she didn't grow up with, then that author is embracing ethnocentrism, and failing to encourage broader perspectives in his or her readership. He or she is contributing to the marginalization of a culture. And, in many cases, such as the wealth of cultural material underlying Hong Kong's supernatural kung fu movies, authors who refuse to delve into other cultures are choosing to stand by and witness the erasure of those cultures, their history and their voices.
In 2011, the Chinese government released a statement condemning movies and television shows that "casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation" (original statement here). There are some who argue that the statement refers only to time-travel stories that misrepresent historical characters and events, but the statement has had a chilling effect on a film industry that has a history of coming under attack.
The Chinese government has made no qualms of suppressing political speech, going so far as to imprison authors for writing stories that the government dislikes. So there is reason for filmmakers' reluctance to pursue creative endeavors that can be seen as promoting superstition.
But Huang Ying and other Hong Kong filmmakers of the 80s weren't promoting superstition; they were reclaiming a forgotten portion of their nationalistic heritage. Why should they make movies about European vampires, when Chinese culture has its own myths, its own ghosts and goblins? These filmmakers explored the horror and the comedy of the jiangshi (weirdly translated as "hopping vampires"), as well as witches with flying heads, beautiful ghost maidens, demonic trees, and the spirits of ancient foxes. And for protection, people could turn to the Dàoshi, or Taoist priest.
These movies are called linghuan gongfu pian, which translates to "spirit magic kung fu movies." In Return of the Demon, Huang Ying gave us an immortal villain whose power came from Daoist internal alchemy, and a kind of werewolf created by a Daoist magical spell.
See? These films seem to be saying. Our cultureis as rich as Western culture. And the 1980s saw a stream of movies from Hong Kong and Taiwan, celebrating Daoist magic, Chinese folklore, and the authors of ghost stories, particularly Pu Songling.
But things have changed. The popularity of the spirit magic kung fu movie died down. Epic and spectacle still exist, like this year's Painted Skin 2, which clearly decided to "casually make up myths" for its "monstrous and weird" plot. But the homely machismo of the Taoist priest wielding a peach wood sword to decapitate ghosts is a bygone. In its place we have movies like 2011's disappointing Moonlight, where the hopping corpses turn out to be fakes, like an episode of Scooby Doo.
The Chinese government statement did not explicitly outlaw the making of spirit magic kung fu movies. But it certainly made Chinese filmmakers think very carefully before producing a film that can be interpreted as promoting superstition. Whether or not the government's statement was intended to ban movies that reclaim traditional Chinese folk magic as a basis of nationalistic pride, the statement can definitely have a chilling effect on the nation's film industry.
"Smash all old things" is a slogan of the Red Guard. It seemed appropriate now. This is Banned Books Week, and I've been thinking about stories that go silent, and stories that are stifled.
I was watching a spirit magic kung fu movie, MR. VAMPIRE, when I had the idea that made me want to write fiction. I could draw on my studies of Chinese language and religion, and I could do research, and conduct interviews, and write a novel that would explore the folkloric depth of the spirit magic kung fu movie with a strong female protagonist. MR. VAMPIRE meets BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, if you will.
A lot of white authors wouldn't touch this kind of material, and with good reason. Cultural appropriation can be harmful; it can lead to unintentional mockery of a culture one doesn't share; it can exoticize the people of that culture, causing them to be seen as "other," inherently different. Cultural appropriation has the ability to do real harm.
But at the same time, when a white author refuses to explore cultures he or she didn't grow up with, then that author is embracing ethnocentrism, and failing to encourage broader perspectives in his or her readership. He or she is contributing to the marginalization of a culture. And, in many cases, such as the wealth of cultural material underlying Hong Kong's supernatural kung fu movies, authors who refuse to delve into other cultures are choosing to stand by and witness the erasure of those cultures, their history and their voices.
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CHINESE GHOST STORIES
Just in time for Hallowe'en, I've published a spooky, fun, and informative article about Chinese ghost stories.
You HAVEN'T seen this before.
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Pí Xiū (貔貅)
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The Xiāng Liǔ (相柳)
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Gū Huò Niǎo (姑穫鳥)
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Yú Jīng (禺京)
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Chinese New Year, a Time for... Exorcism?
Today people are celebrating the end of a year and the start of another. With fireworks they scare away the monster called Nian (year). They eat mooncakes and perform lion dances, and in one part of China, it's time for an exorcism.
This exorcism takes the form of an opera.
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In the region called Gui Zhou (贵州), people put on masks; they dance and perform a ritual to banish devils, illness, and poor luck.
The ritual is called Nuo Xi (儺戲). It is performed in various regions at various times of year; now, at Gui Zhou, the performance takes place with the accompaniment of a single gong and a single drum. It is performed upon a single tract of land.
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Nuo masks are fascinating and famous. Some are designed simply to scare away the devils, but others represent characters out of religious literature, like Sun Wukong (Monkey). The perfomances can last ten or twelve days, and often incorporate stories from classical Chinese texts, like The Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.
Some more photos of the Gui Zhou Nuo Xi:
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This exorcism takes the form of an opera.
In the region called Gui Zhou (贵州), people put on masks; they dance and perform a ritual to banish devils, illness, and poor luck.
The ritual is called Nuo Xi (儺戲). It is performed in various regions at various times of year; now, at Gui Zhou, the performance takes place with the accompaniment of a single gong and a single drum. It is performed upon a single tract of land.
Some more photos of the Gui Zhou Nuo Xi:
And finally, a video:
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Turtle and snake
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This Young Woman Climbed a Ladder of Swords
But the young man was fighting cancer. And he didn't live long enough to undergo the ceremony.
Enter his sister, Zhiwei (芷瑋). She's 29 years old. When her brother passed, it was important to her to fulfill his dream. So she trained, and meditated, and fasted. Forty-nine days abstaining from meats and grains. She broke down once or twice and ate forbidden foods -- but when she did, she had vomiting fits. She decided this was the gods' decree, then.
Fourteen days before the ceremony, she began to dream of her brother. Every day he entered her dreams, teaching her how to climb the Sword Ladder. He told her that she had an important mission, reminding her that their father would have no one to follow in his footsteps if she didn't climb the swords.
She was terrified, but her brother's words inspired her; this was her mission now.Three days ago, the time came.
It was time to climb the Ladder of Swords.
The Sword Ladder, or Dāo tī (刀梯), is serious business. All 108 rungs of the ladder are swords, and the ladder towers to vertigo-inspiring heights. The swords are sharp enough to slice melons and cucumbers. The student is expected to climb barefoot to the top. At the top of the ladder is the "Sky Door," or "Door of Heaven," and usually something for the adept to bring back down, like a pennant.
Three days ago, it was time. Time for Miss Kang to climb the Ladder of Swords and receive the Ordination her brother aspired to, or back down.
First the area was purified. The Abbot performed the Five Camps Flag Military Ritual, cleansing the area. Then it was time for Miss Kang to begin. She stood barefoot in a bucket of water, then she stepped out of the bucket and stood on salt.
This was all the preparation her bare feet were given, before it was her turn to climb the Ladder of Swords.
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| She doesn't look too confident here. |
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| You can see that yellow paper talismans have been folded over the blades, for magical protection. |
She climbed back down from the Sky Door. She threw the Divination Blocks, drawing the Three Holy results. A wreath-laying blessing was performed, and Kang Zhiwei was proclaimed a Nu Daoshi (Daoist Priestess).
There's a new Daoshi in town! Kang Zhiwei said she hopes her brother is happy...she hopes he's not going to haunt her in her dreams anymore. But I hope to hear more of Kang Zhiwei's adventures in the future.
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http://blog.sina.com.tw/168vn/article.php?pbgid=131079&entryid=642324
http://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E7%88%B6%E9%A0%92%E8%AD%89%E6%9B%B8-%E7%99%BB108%E5%B1%A4%E5%8A%8D%E6%A2%AF-29%E6%AD%B2%E5%A5%B3%E6%99%89%E5%8D%87%E6%B3%95%E5%B8%AB-004626744.html
http://www.appledaily.com.tw/realtimenews/article/new/20130407/174004/
Video: http://video.udn.com/video/Item/ItemPage.do?sno=3-2B4-23343-2F303d3d3c4-233-2F323-2B3-2B4-233-2B
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China's AMAZING tomb guardian beasts!
墳墓獸, Fénmù shòu, "tomb beast."
I haven't found a reliable written source about these, outside of art-historical documents which seem to have less concern with magic, belief, and, like, monster-magic, than they do with sociohistorical issues.
These statues were buried with dead men to protect them. Visually I find them magnificent.
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More after the jump....
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It's like a lion-frog, only with extra spikes!
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Different angle of a similar figure, looking more lizardy.
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Sort of like the frontquarters of a horse, with a man's face, a lion's teeth, a pig's snout, shoulder armor, a frog's throat, and some wildebeestie horns.
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Looks almost sphinxlike, with its equine front legs, possible boobs, human face, squatting on what looks here like canine hindquarters.
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Leonine! Love it.
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Somehow this makes me think of kaiju.
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Similar, but different, with its vertical curlicue hairstyle and geometric protrusion behind it. Almost looks like it's laughing.
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Amazing, human-like face with a nose that looks like Cyrano de Bergerac gene-spliced with Richard Nixon. Elephant's ears, winding horns, an asparagus-tip mohawk, and, oh lord, wings.
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Fantastic. It looks like it could be contemporary artwork, with its effortless blending of the natural and the forged. But it's from the fourth or third century BCE. Looks like a fanged human face with a protruding tongue, with a pedestal for a body and tremendous antlers.
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Anyone know if there's a term for those spikes on its back?
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Man, dig that crazy headgear! Anyone know if there's a term for the cactus-shaped protrusion on its back?
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The pairs tend to have one human-ish face and one animal face.
I need to stop now before the awesomeness kills me.
I haven't found a reliable written source about these, outside of art-historical documents which seem to have less concern with magic, belief, and, like, monster-magic, than they do with sociohistorical issues.
These statues were buried with dead men to protect them. Visually I find them magnificent.
More after the jump....
It's like a lion-frog, only with extra spikes!
Different angle of a similar figure, looking more lizardy.
Sort of like the frontquarters of a horse, with a man's face, a lion's teeth, a pig's snout, shoulder armor, a frog's throat, and some wildebeestie horns.
Looks almost sphinxlike, with its equine front legs, possible boobs, human face, squatting on what looks here like canine hindquarters.
Leonine! Love it.
Somehow this makes me think of kaiju.
Similar, but different, with its vertical curlicue hairstyle and geometric protrusion behind it. Almost looks like it's laughing.
Fantastic. It looks like it could be contemporary artwork, with its effortless blending of the natural and the forged. But it's from the fourth or third century BCE. Looks like a fanged human face with a protruding tongue, with a pedestal for a body and tremendous antlers.
Anyone know if there's a term for those spikes on its back?
Man, dig that crazy headgear! Anyone know if there's a term for the cactus-shaped protrusion on its back?
The pairs tend to have one human-ish face and one animal face.
I need to stop now before the awesomeness kills me.
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Bainiaoyi
Sources are reporting a Chinese-produced movie based on ethnic minority Zhuang folklore, the tale of the Bainiaoyi (百鸟衣/Hundred Birds Coat). While I'm excited about the film, there have been some amazing dance, theatre, and ritual performances based on this tale. Here are some of my favorite images.
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They're not really Daoist priestesses.
They burned scented candles, they waved banners and pennants, as if the gaming convention was a temple. In the pictures, they flank Li Zheng, a master of feng shui and numerology.
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| Photo by 王蔚, a reporter from China Economic Net. |
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| Flyers for the game, made to resemble Daoist talismans. |
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Hanged Ghost
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Soul-Arrester
He has a list of the names of all the people who are about to die. When someone is dying, the Ju Hun Gui takes on the appearance of a living relative or friend of the sick person. When he gets the dying person alone, he changes his appearance to that of a dead relative or friend of the sick person, and starts to call the dying person's name, over and over, repeating, "I'm here to take you away."
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Chan's Ghost
Chan (产) was a woman who died during childbirth. She envies women who can have children, and is always looking for a pregnant woman to replace her. If she kills a pregnant woman, she would be reincarnated.
Chan is afraid of oil-paper umbrellas.
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The Five Weird Ghosts
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The Painted Ghost
She appears at night as a beautiful young woman, approaching men to tell them that she's lost.
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Drowner
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