Chinese compromises

China is enormous and important — culturally, economically  it is a place that can't be ignored. But there are lots of questions we need to ask about exactly how to engage with it. That is, how to be respectful and open-minded about another culture while still preserving our idea of universal western values. And I don't think our sense of history or of the world beyond our borders has prepared to understand these challenges.

I was thinking about this when I read the story in today's Times about how readily Western publishers censor works for publication in China.

Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market. With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995. [my italics]

Some people, who are trying to make a buck, have done the math and figured that this is the way to go. I'm not sure that I am convinced. But that this isn't a big conversation is a serious concern.

This is, in part, what I was writing about in my column about Xu Bing's "Phoenix." Americans have lost the ability to navigate international situations that aren't black and white.

Anselm Kiefer arrives at Mass MoCA

'Narrow Are the Vessels'

Whenever a new building opens at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art it's a treat. Especially when it is a facility dedicated to a major and controversial artist. As the Globe's Sebastian Smee noted, the new building is about a lot of things — a career coming into focus, a museum continuing to stand on its own feet. But it is also about pioneering a new model of private / non-profit partnership in the arts. And for the Berkshire art world, it is another exciting step, as MoCA cements itself as the kind of place that attract Big Name international artists like Xu Bing, and lends some of that sheen to exciting young artists like Jason Middlebrook.

I went to visit the new space when it opened late last month. The building, which is near the Hadley Overpass on a previously unused portion of the campus, is as grand and severe as Kiefer's work. It is pitch-perfect for the works on display, and my only complaint is that it is much smaller than I would have hoped (only three works, really, but each of them is a doozy).

It begins with Narrow Are the Vessels, which MoCA-goers will remember had been in the main gallery for some time awhile back. The piece is a pile of long slabs on concrete, with rusty rebar jutting out in a menacing way, and crumbling bits of cement scattered on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a bombing or an earthquake, the product of some sort of violence. But you realize after a few minutes that you've never seen concrete with such graceful curves and undulations, and wonder what this might have been before it became wreckage.

One of 30 paintings on display

Within a gallery inside the gallery is the 30 painting series Velmir Chlebnikov, a tribute to the "Russian poet and futurist who created complex analytical systems based on esoteric mathematical calculations meant to reveal vast paradoxes in logic and in the progression of history." In particular, it is about famous sea battle through the years, and seeing them together evokes the cycles of tides and weather and water that will haunt you if you go to the sea in the right frame of mind. Each canvas is encrusted with pain, and suggests its subject the way J.M.W. Turner's seascapes do. They speak of dark nights on a moonlight sea, the silent frightening depths, the fog, the lonely strand and scattered wreckage washed ashore.

Each of the pieces is about the patterns that emerge from chaos, about the grace and beauty of these moments in the present, and the ways they harden into memory and history. It is lyrical and human, and not as cold and distant as it seems at first. It's a perfect addition.