August 08, 2008
Some years back, a group of artists were hounded out of Beijing by authorities. Some went to Songzhuang village, a farming town an hour away. Now, that village is a boomtown –- based on the market for contemporary Chinese art. Communist officials drink beer with bohemians. Will the rising tide raise all the artists’ boats –- or capsize them? Jocelyn Ford goes to Songzhuang to find out.
(Entire program originally aired: November 16, 2007)
China’s government has a strategy of using “soft power” to improve the country’s image –- promoting the arts, building language schools abroad, and, of course, remaking Beijing itself for the Olympics. But it’s a strategy with some pitfalls. Kurt talks with Orville Schell, a journalist and scholar who directs the Asia Society Center on China-U.S. Relations.
A generation of Chinese artists left the country in the 1980s and 90s. Some found great success in the west, but China still looms large in their minds. Lu Olkowski talks with artists about why calligraphy and ink drawing seem so 21st century.
A few weeks ago, after featuring actor Bill Murray’s passion for poetry, we asked you to send us your favorite poems. Kurt calls up a few listeners -– including a surprise celebrity listener -- to tell us theirs.
100 million Chinese have left rural homes to work in the booming cities of northern China. Their lives are hard, dangerous, and lonely. Songwriter Chen Xing wants to soothe their troubled minds. Produced by Gideon D’Arcangelo.
"Drifter's Song" from Chen Xing's album New Ballads for Migrant Workers. (Guangdong Provincial Record Co. Ltd.)
The director's latest film, Lust, Caution, is set in World War II Shanghai, occupied by Japan. As if a Chinese movie by a Taiwanese director wasn’t edgy enough, the film is so erotic it made Lee himself intensely uncomfortable. Kurt talks with Lee and his screenwriter and producer, James Schamus.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
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WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
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National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
