A few years ago, my friend Liu Kankan and I traveled from downtown Beijing out to the beautiful campus of Tsinghua University, perhaps the best in all of China.  After I bought a t-shirt, we walked around to the gate of a historic site known as Yuan Ming Yuan.  Like most westerners I didn’t know much about it, but I learned quickly that every Chinese person knows these ruins well, that they are left unrestored as a symbol of what Western powers  can do to a weak China.  Britain and France looted and burned the vast  (partially western-style) Summer Palace in 1860 as part of the Opium War and again in 1900 during The Boxer Rebellion.

This May, while confined in a Chinese prison after his studio had been destroyed by Chinese police, Ai Weiwei opened a public exhibition outside the Plaza Hotel  at Central Park South and Fifth Avenue, it’s a show of 12 zodiac sculptures.  Most people who walk by seem to think they are an apolitical homage to Chinese astrology about which they don’t really care, mostly they pose for a quick snapshot with the Rat or the Rooster and move on to buy a hot pretzel or pet a carriage horse.  The sculptures were a mystery to me as well, until I remembered my visit to Yuan Ming Yuan, I realized these were part of what was looted from the Imperial Summer Palace, I now read that the Chinese are still trying to recover them from Western collectors and have paid large sums for the few they have already re-acquired.  Ai Weiwei has cast new bronze versions and sent them to the West for display, he says their purpose is simply “for the enjoyment of the general public”.

My feeling (based on no factual knowledge) is that Ai Weiwei, arrested in his own country for his provocative way of thinking, is playing a sly game with us westerners as well.  As he’s learned to do in his own country, Ai Weiwei is hiding his intentions. He’s sending us an apparently uncontroversial piece of decorative public art, which is in fact, a potent infiltration of bitter Chinese memory into a central artery in American mythological life: these powerful symbols of foreign destructive power currently sit without a peep of controversy on the very corner where Eloise took her innocent walks around The Plaza Hotel.  The timing of this opening just at the time of Ai Weiwei’s arrest by Chinese authorities, was, for me, supremely ironic, in that this piece appears to be, from the Chinese point of view, a notably patriotic/nationalistic act – instead of throwing him in jail, they should have thrown him a banquet.

The show is also on exhibition in London and will open in Los Angeles September 1, 2011.  The pictures linked from here alternate between images of the sculptures in New York and Yuan Ming Yuan outside Beijing, the place from which the originals were looted, the place where the Chinese were “taught a lesson”…. but history is long, as is the memory of those who lose wars.

Peter and three "Zen Masters"try to catch some sleep at Meatloaf Kitchen on E.2nd St.

Over the cold, rainy Easter weekend a group of 17 Zen Peacemakers, once again followed Roshi Bernie Glassman out onto the streets on New York with little or nothing in our pockets (I broke the rules and snuck in a small camera).  This was a short street retreat by our standards, just two nights, and it seemed like a pleasant  reunion picnic until we woke Saturday  in a freezing, bone-soaking windstorm.  Our morning meeting, sitting on cold concrete among early-rising TaiChi practitioners in Chinatown was exotic but I didn’t care, I didn’t even make a picture,  I just wanted  to get out of this idiotic scheme and into a warm bed.  But they say miracles do happen and so they did, the cold unpredictably  morphed into another feeling and then another, we were reborn again and yet again, Buddhists experiencing Easter.

Round and round we go: The Staten Island Ferry (my thanks to The City of New York)

At night we tried to sleep on cardboard under an overhang  but between the rain and the police,  I wound up on the Staten Island Ferry both nights.  Round and round we went, sleeping 15 precious minutes (dreaming was not possible) , then out to the terminal and back onto the boat again and again – it became like a Buddhist bowing practice, over and over, no expectations, no thinking,  just  the doing of it over and over and then again,  until dawn when the beauty of the water and city and sky overwhelmed the desire to sleep.  And then hunger, one desire becoming another.

Staten Island Ferry

We were saved from our bourgeois version of pain by the best soup kitchen I’ve ever seen: heat, grace, dignity, fine food and warm socks, it’s called Meatloaf Kitchen, if any of you are thinking about volunteering or contributing in the area of serving the homeless I highly (highly) recommend this operation.  I’d also like to thank The Bowery Mission which fed us once again with food and spirit. They continue to do their inspirational work even though their immediate neighbors are now a giant modern museum on one side and a red-roped nightclub on the other.

Brother Bernie and Brother James discuss the practice of compassion after supper at The Bowery Mission

We finished with what Bernie called a “Recognition Ceremony”  in Chrystie Park which was littered with drug needles and condoms when we started doing these street retreats, but now is clean and wholesome, lying as it does in the shadow of  Whole Foods.  Myself, I’ve managed to mingle in this Zen Buddhist crowd for 30 years as “a man of no rank” (some say that having no rank is the highest rank of all), but now  I have a title, and I fear all is lost.  But my experience in the month since, indicates that being lost and being found feel about the same.

I’d like to give to my European friends who came across an ocean from France, Germany, Poland, Belgium, and Israel to sleep on hard benches and soggy boxes with us crazy Americans.  

Kuku and Batman on Easter Morning, 2011 (photo Sally Kealy)

Yesterday, my friend Taku Nishimae, a New York based Japanese television producer, invited me to stop by AIGA gallery at 164 Fifth Avenue, so I strolled over from 23rd Street, never suspecting that I would soon be engaged in an intense hour of filmed conversation with a fellow photographer, whose parents had vanished in the tsunami.  Mayumi Sukuki’s father and grandfather had been the town photographers for two generations, the visual recorders of all the town’s marriages, children, and distinguished personalities for over 80 years; their studio and all but a few of their negatives disappeared in the catastrophe. Mayumi and her husband, both art-school trained photographers, searched in tears for two weeks for her parents’ remains. They finally found some closure when they come across her father’s camera buried in what others call “the rubble”.

  For Mayumi and her husband, these ruins became accidental memorials to countless washed away memories; they have set out to become the third generation of her family to document the history of the village, as it is now and as it will evolve into the future.  This New York exhibition is the first draft of what will probably become a lifelong project for Mayumi.  It is only open until Friday afternoon, if any of you are nearby, I recommend stopping in.  Myself, I feel grateful to Mayumi for bringing me into personal connection with this mythically-scaled “3-11″ disaster, I expect we will continue our connection as colleagues and friends.