144-seat Pan-Asian restaurant and a 50-seat lounge

That's one big ship

Though shipbuilding is no longer conducted at the feverish pitch of several years ago, new vessels continue to slip into the water at shipyards abroad.

Perhaps the biggest news comes from Seabourn Cruise Line, which has not introduced a new ship in 10 years. The line now plans to launch a pair of sleek 450-passenger vessels in 2009 and 2010. The yacht-like ships will be built in Genoa, Italy, at the maritime yards of T. Mariotti shipyard.

Holland America Line will welcome the 2,044-passenger Eurodam to its fleet in summer of 2008 from Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri.

Norwegian Cruise Lines has recruited Aker Yards of St. Nazaire, France, for two new third-generation "Freestyle Cruising" liners, customized for the line's signature fleet of floating food courts; in the wings: NCL also will order a third ship, bringing the line's total outlay for new vessels to $2.8 billion.

And Princess Cruises has under construction at Fincantieri the 113,000-ton Emerald Princess, sister ship to Crown Princess. It is slated for launch in June 2007. Emerald will be Princess' first ship to begin its seafaring days from Civitavecchia, the seaport city south of Rome.

Blueprints for these maiden vessels offer a glimpse of what's new to cruising's seascape.

Long considered a leader in luxury travel, Seabourn touts increasing demand as the rationale for more than doubling its current 634-passenger capacity on its trio of existing ships by adding the two new 32,000-gross-registered-ton vessels.

According to Pamela Conover, Seabourn's president and CEO, each of the new ships "will be three times larger (than those currently in the fleet), but only carry twice the guests. But everything is being designed on a yacht-like scale, so that Seabourn guests walking on board will feel right at home," including maintaining the line's prized nearly one-to-one passenger-to-staff ratio.

The larger real estate, Conover explains, will allow for "some very large suites. With more space, we can offer more variety on board. There will be attractive alternative dining venues to complement (the line's) open-seating" policy, where passengers choose when and where to dine. Deck, pool and spa areas also will be augmented.

A truly revolutionary change for Seabourn, however, will be the balconies. A notable disadvantage in the luxury market, Seabourn's current fleet of vessels - the 10,000-ton Pride, Spirit and Legend - lack them. Some years back, the line attempted to rectify this deficiency to some degree by retrofitting its existing ships with little Juliet-like juttings that at least permitted passengers to open doors that face the sea. With the new ships, however, each with 225 luxury suites, 90 percent of the accommodations will have bona-fide balconies.

The new ships also will be faster and, according to Conover, allow Seabourn to enhance the line's itineraries. "We will, for instance, be able to mount a real world cruise," she notes.

Holland America's Eurodam will introduce the company's next class of liners and the largest ever constructed for the premium brand.

With an estimated cost of $450 million, the 86,000-ton "Signature-Class" vessel will be the largest ever built for Holland America. The 2,044-passenger ship will add 63 more staterooms above that of current "Vista-Class" ships. Of these, 47 will have balconies and 10 will introduce a new style of accommodations with wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor panoramic windows. In all, 86 percent of Eurodam's cabins will have views of the sea.

With the added acreage on its 11-passenger decks, Eurodam's design incorporates a topside 144-seat Pan-Asian restaurant and a 50-seat lounge with expansive views of the ocean and Lido pool. Other innovations include an Explorer's Lounge Bar, a new specialty Italian restaurant adjacent to the Lido, luxury jewelry boutiques, a new atrium bar area, and an enhanced and reconfigured show lounge with theater-style seating.

Eurodam also will feature the latest state-of-the-art navigation and safety systems, including dynamic positioning abilities to hold the ship in a precise position, which should make tendering easier.

The line also holds an option for a second Signature Class vessel for delivery in spring 2010.

Aside from the debut this month of Norwegian's new Pearl, the line has quite a bit more up its maritime sleeve. Two ships are scheduled for delivery in 2009 and 2010, with an optional third sister ship in 2011.

NCL's President and CEO Colin Veitch says the additions will bring the line "one step closer to our vision of introducing the new third generation of Freestyle Cruising ships and to satisfying our goal of having the youngest, most modern fleet in the industry by 2010."

Specifics about the three-ship project, known only as "F3" for now, are a closely held secret, however; details will be released closer to the first delivery date. What we do know so far: Each new 150,000-ton ship will carry 4,200 passengers, deliver 60 percent more passenger space than the largest NCL ships to date, and 100 percent of the ships' outside staterooms will have private balconies.

In the interim, passengers eager for the NCL experience can anticipate the 93,000-ton, 2,384-passenger Norwegian Pearl and the Norwegian Gem debuting in October 2007.

Mirroring the recently launched Crown Princess, Emerald Princess, with a planned maiden voyage set for next year, also will reflect many new design innovations introduced aboard its sister ship, including a dramatic piazza-style atrium and an alluring adults-only retreat called The Sanctuary.

The ship also will boast Princess' hallmark features, such as large-screen movies poolside, multiple dining and entertainment options, a Lotus Spa fitness center, a youth center with dedicated individual areas for toddlers through teens, a wedding chapel and nearly 900 staterooms with private balconies.

But there's other news from Princess' small-fleet division. In April, the 710-passenger ship (now sailing as Swan Hellenic's Minerva II and originally built for Renaissance as the R8) will become the next Royal Princess. This 30,000-ton addition will expand Princess' small-vessel offerings to three; it's two other small vessels are Tahitian Princess and Pacific Princess.

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Asian Art Now - Contemporary Asian Art

Vietnam’s Eternal Flames: The Zippo as Much More Than a Keepsake

"89 Portraits of Vietnam Zippos", The artwork of Bradford Edwards, was held at Pacific Bridge Contemporary Southeast Asian Art during the summer of 2000

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — “Off the record,” Bradford Edwards said, though this seemed an odd thing to say when stating the obvious. “Off the record I’m a little obsessed with the Vietnam Zippo.”
He collects the metal lighters by the hundreds; he studies them; he celebrates them as tiny symbols. He searches for deeper meanings in the epigrams etched into their shiny sides by the American soldiers who left them behind.

With grave whimsy he turns them into art.

For 10 years, starting in the early 1990s, he said, he bought them on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, where they were sold as souvenirs until the supply of genuine wartime lighters ran out.

“I have handled thousands of them; I have handled maybe 10,000 of them,” he said. “I’m really deep into this. I’m saturated with it. But I still haven’t lost my belief in the significance of the Zippo.”

Mr. Edwards, 52, is an American artist who spends much of his time in Hanoi creating art mostly from found objects and images. His father, Roy Jack Edwards, who died last year, was a fighter pilot over Vietnam, a distant, mythical figure to his son. The younger Mr. Edwards missed the war himself, and his obsession with Zippos obviously has to do with more than little silvery boxes used to light cigarettes.

“My dad was a super-professional soldier,” he said. “He was a serious cat who taught at the Naval Academy, worked in the Pentagon and taught weapons design. He was one of 100 Marine Corps pilots, and he did a couple of tours. I grew up with Vietnam in my life from Day 1.”

If Vietnam and his warrior father remain enigmas to him, the answer, perhaps — if it is not blowing in the wind — can be found etched on the sides of Zippo lighters:


“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.”

“Death is my business and business has been good.”

“I’m not scared, just lonesome.”

“Please! Don’t tell me about Vietnam because I have been there.”

The Zippo is a humble, utilitarian object, a chrome-plated brass oblong 2.2 inches high and 2.05 ounces in weight that can be flipped open and lighted with one deft movement if you practice long enough and produces a gratifying thwink when snapped shut.

But in Vietnam, Zippos were more than lighters. Like miniature versions of the crests of medieval knights, they bore the mottos that defined what many soldiers understood, deep down, to be an absurd mission.

In a way they were akin to tattoos, and often the engraving was done at small roadside parlors.

“This is pure,” Mr. Edwards said. “Pure art without ambition, a real and honest venting of feelings: ‘We are the unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.’ ”

In his art Mr. Edwards has found more than 100 ways to present the Zippos, he said, using lacquer, mother-of-pearl, silk-screen printing, metal etching, stone carving, graphite drawing, silver leaf, photography, mixed media and more.

With the help of Vietnamese masters in these arts he has arranged Zippos in grids, created steel-plate poems with them, photographed mass layouts of them from two stories up, used them to build an oversize working abacus.

It all means something. “The Zippos were the witnesses,” he explained, “and I am simply the messenger.”

He has shown his Zippo art in Oakland, Calif., where he lives, and in Vietnam. A glossy book of his work is being prepared for publication next year titled “Vietnam Zippo” (Asia Ink, London).

All this, he said, in the interest of “going deeper and deeper in pursuit of the meaning of the Zippo.”

That notion, so peculiar in its high seriousness, seems in itself to draw Mr. Edwards closer to the spirit of the men who poured their hearts out on the sides of lighters.

“Tragedy and pop, kitsch and irony,” Mr. Bradford said. “There’s a lot of raw emotions here. It’s not all tongue in cheek. Touching, sad, provocative, genuine expressions. There’s some strong juju here. Strong juju.”

“I know I’m going to heaven because I’ve spent my time in hell: Vietnam.”

“Ours is not to do or die, ours is to smoke and stay high.”

“You’ve never really lived until you’ve nearly died.”

“If you got this off my dead ass I hope it brings you the same luck it brought me.”

It is almost impossible any longer to find a genuine wartime lighter for sale here, Mr. Edwards said. What remains are fakes of varying sorts, including knockoffs made in China.

“That scene is over,” he said. “There are no real Zippos in Vietnam now.”

The Zippo Manufacturing Company in Bradford, Pa., says about 200,000 were used by American soldiers in Vietnam, though Mr. Edwards said he was convinced that the number was much higher. Most of those that were left behind were lost or given away, he said; it was rare for a lighter to be scavenged from the body of a soldier.

“They used them to provide light, to light candles, to burn a hut, to light a flame thrower,” Mr. Edwards said. “They were utilitarian, but they were very personal items.”

“They are powerful documents,” he added. “These documents are etched in metal. It’s not sterile, it’s not flighty, it’s not pen and paper. It’s etched in metal. The only thing closer to eternity is stone.”

And so, from all the thousands of Zippos he has handled, does this artist have a favorite? He does.

“I’m not someone who has a favorite movie or a favorite color or a favorite anything,” he said. “I’m not a favorite kind of guy. But I can tell you my favorite Zippo — the best Zippo, the one I would never sell, unless it was for maybe a thousand bucks.”

This Zippo carries on one side an official emblem, the military insignia of a riverboat with a skull and crossbones and the legend “Give no quarter.”

Turn it over, and four words have been etched into the chrome that seem to embrace the wisdom of all the other Zippos he has collected: “You can surf later.”

Riverboat duty was some of the most dangerous in the war, Mr. Edwards said, riverboats and helicopters. And how many surfers, really, ended up on Vietnam riverboats?

“This guy on the boat, we don’t know who he was,” he said. “We don’t know if he survived. But we’ve got this Zippo. I like it because it’s not enigmatic. It’s not ironic at all, it’s not tragic or sad. It has no deeper meaning.

“The only way he can get through this every day, the firefights. He gets his lighter, and he lights his joint, and he looks at his lighter and thinks to himself: ‘You can surf later. I’m going to get through this.’ ”

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Asian Art Now - Contemporary Asian Art

Perspectives on Asian Art

Another from the Wall Street Journal's focus on art

Perspectives on Asian Art

An Interview with Yoshiko Mori
Chairperson and founder, The Mori Museum
Member of The UBS Art Collection Advisory Board

China is very hot, of course- both in terms of artists and buyers. Why do you think that is?

“It is always the case that when the economy of a country is thriving, the contemporary art also thrives. The number of artists increases and the art market becomes active. In China, up until the turn of the century, most of the contemporary art activities were politically restricted. As a result, the artists could not express themselves freely.

But after 2000, the degree of freedom for such activities was dramatically increased, as the authorities started to promote them as a symbol of “New China”. This shift in political thinking provided the artists with an opportunity to produce works with new vision, and those works attracted the attention of collectors and museums. Moreover, when a prosperous economy triggers the price of art to rise dramatically, this leads to artwork becoming the object of speculative investment. Especially in Beijing, the galleries with Western affiliation or Korean capital are growing very rapidly, and that is establishing a direct link with the West.”

Are there other areas of Asia that are also becoming more visible on the international art scene?

“India, which like China has a booming economy, is becoming more conspicuous. The average eight percent annual growth of GDP is creating a new affluence in society, and that has lead to a strong interest in art. Some of this attention will be given to the traditional arts and the leading figures in Indian modern art, but of course, contemporary art will also benefit. In fact, the price of Indian contemporary art is rising. I think the current interest in Asian art was triggered by the introduction of Japanese contemporary art to the international art market in the late 1980s, that was followed by the introduction of Korean and Chinese art.”

What artists and art movements are of particular interest in Asian countries?

“I think it is a time of individualism, and art movements based on great philosophies are not likely to emerge. The characteristic trend of Asia is works with themes of everyday life, or the Manga-animation inspired works of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, that were created as the result of the fusion of high art and popular culture. This phenomenon can be seen not only in Japan and Korea but also in the broader region including Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. Now, a number of Asian artists have experience studying abroad and they are well versed in the vocabulary of international contemporary art. I think that more artists from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka will emerge in the near future. I expect to see contemporary interpretations of their regional traditions – such as miniature and abstract pattern paintings. I am keen to keeping an eye on the artists of the Middle East, as well.”


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Asian Art Now - Contemporary Asian Art

The Contemporary Art Movement: A New Way of Looking at the World

The Wall Street Journal has several interesting article on contemporary art here is one of them....

By Brian Scott Lipton and Evie T. Joselow, Ph.D.

In the aftermath of World War II, Americans looked at the world with new eyes. They were colored by the horrors of genocide overseas and the threat of nuclear annihilation, yet equally alive with a renewed belief in the possibility of economic prosperity and global harmony. The dreams and realities those eyes saw have been reflected by the great artists of the past 60 years: men and women such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Barbra Kruger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Julian Schnabel, to name but a handful. These practitioners of the Post-War and Contemporary Art movements are true visionaries; people who were gifted enough to comment on the world around us in ways that the rest of us were unable to fully express.

In 2006, the eyes of everyone from billionaires like David Geffen, to leading gallery owners like Larry Gagosian and Arne Glimcher, to art enthusiasts from all walks of life, are all firmly focused on the works of these innovators. “Contemporary art feels particularly vital today,” says Brett Gorvy, international co-head of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art division. “It is a starting point to an exciting world unto itself. I think people are attracted to contemporary art because it reflects their lifestyle and demonstrates their tastes.”

If art appreciation has always been a subjective affair, it’s never been truer than today. “Contemporary art is a particularly visceral
experience,” says Charles Moffett, executive vice president at Sotheby’s. “You either love something or you don’t.” Adds Bali Miller, a well-known New York-based art advisor: “I love contemporary art because it has that special excitement — the spark that comes from being engaged with the way we think and feel today.”


Certainly, there is a broad selection of contemporary artwork to embrace, whether you are a viewer or buyer. Just as the world has moved with lightning speed in the past seven decades, the art world has followed suit, with stylistic movements coming, and sometimes receding, in little more than the blink of an eye. Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on introspective work, bold gestures, and preoccupation with color, led off the post-1945 era and dominated much of the next 15 years. But it soon gave way to Minimalism, characterized by its startling use of geometry and austerity; Pop Art, which commented on, celebrated, and even satirized consumer culture; Optical Art, in which the physiological response to visual stimuli is often the work’s raison d’être; and Conceptual Art, in which the message often outshines the medium. As the decades passed, there was the birth of Environmental Art, Neo-Expressionism and any number of other subdivisions and offshoots, each of which is an authentic expression of the greater world.

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Art Now

Asian Art - A blockbuster in all but reputation

Asian Art - A blockbuster in all but reputation

It's hard to underestimate the significance of the APT several of these artists were artists-in-residence at Pacific Bridge. Unfortunately a decade later the penetration of Asian Art into the US is still in waiting

DOUG Hall is content to look back at his 20 years as director of the Queensland Art Gallery and admit to ignorance. "Sometimes the more you know, the less you will try to do," he says. When in 1990 he convinced QAG trustees to commit to an initial series of three Asia-Pacific Triennials, the potential was there, but very little else.
"With the first APT in 1993 and the second in 1996, most of the artists hadn't been heard of," Hall says. "We were breaking new ground. We were able to write about the art and collect it where there wasn't a body of critical opinion that was able to support it. We just had to back our judgment."

Hall's assessment was shrewd. Given its history and location, Australia would always be a poor relation among the families of the old art world, and Queensland always the country cousin within the local family. The solution was to create a new family and with it a circle of interesting and increasingly influential friends.

"We were looking to mark the things that were different about us and, as a quirk of geography, we look towards Asia and across the Pacific so, psychologically, that's our difference," Hall says.

The idea of strategically rethinking Australia's political, economic and cultural identity was fashionable in the 1990s. The University of Melbourne's business and cultural centre, Asialink, began its arts program in 1990 after the federal government set up the first ministerial meeting to establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum at the end of 1989. Looking towards Asia seemed like a good idea, but what it meant in practice was less clear. In 1987, the same year Hall was appointed director, the new chairman of QAG's board of trustees, Richard Austin, made a speech suggesting that an Australian gallery "on the periphery of Asia" should take into account countries to the near north. Austin, a former soldier, diplomat and businessman with a passion for collecting Japanese art, had also been known during his time on the board of the National Gallery of Victoria as someone resistant to modern art.

It was all the more extraordinary, then, that this octogenarian conservative (he died in 2000) and the iconoclastic 32-year-old director should hatch a plot to revolutionise Queensland's cultural identity. What's more they encountered little effective opposition, either at the time or as the project developed.

Hall's argument was that QAG's historical collection was, at best, patchy.

"As we looked at developing the policy, we kept coming back towards a focus on art now," he says. "So while we take our art history very seriously, we realised that if we wanted to do something distinctive, we had to narrow our options."

That meant widening their horizons, with what appears in retrospect to be a kind of wildly optimistic chutzpah. "I remember being in a taxi in Indonesia with Doug in 1992," says Alison Carroll, now arts director with Asialink, "and I thought to myself, 'This could all go horribly wrong'."

Carroll was one of a small group of advisers brought together by QAG in the set-up period: it was a very small group, she says, because there weren't many people with sufficient expertise in the area of Asia-Pacific contemporary art to assist.

With the backing of his board, Hall reasoned that to spend large amounts on lesser works by major artists would still not give QAG a collection comparable to the southern galleries. And an attraction of getting in early with works by contemporary Asian and Pacific artists was the relatively low cost. For example, a work by Takashi Murakami, known as the Asian Andy Warhol, created for the 1996 APT and acquired for $32,000, is now insured for $1.2million. Works acquired across the past 15 years by artists such as Heri Dono, Lee U-fan, Nam June Paik and Yayoi Kusama are now part of the new Gallery of Modern Art's permanent collection.

"We've been able to buy the main event," Hall says. "We own the real touchstone piece of many of these artists."

Art Asia Pacific magazine's New York publisher and editor Elaine Ng describes QAG's collection as a goldmine and credits Brisbane's APT with sowing the seeds for the rapid growth of biennials across the region, "setting the trends and forecasting where the creative energy is".

"If you look at the Queensland collection," she says, "all those artists are now a name and historically important. The Guggenheim in New York this year appointed a curator of Asian art (announcing itself as the "first major international museum of modern and contemporary art" to do so), but Queensland were pioneers in their efforts."

Ng says the entry of the world's leading contemporary art institutions into the Asian-Pacific field has created record sales figures that put much of the new work out of the reach of smaller galleries, but Queensland has the jump on the "big powerhouses".

"There is now, more than ever, an urgency for expertise in the area," she says.

QAG's new Gallery of Modern Art, which opens tomorrow, will house an Australian Centre for Asia-Pacific Art, the research centre established in 2002 in support of the APT. APT5 will be displayed in the smaller original QAG building as well as the GoMA. Almost 70 per cent of the works on show are already part of the gallery's collection, although many have not yet been seen.

As with all previous APTs, there is no single curator but instead a curatorial team that includes Hall and senior staff from QAG.

"From day one, the curatorship has been invested in the institution," Hall says, "not only because there was insufficient curatorial strength to carry it unilaterally, but it also took into account that these are collective cultures we are dealing with, so that the idea of unilateral curatorship brings forth legitimate arguments of colonialist mentalities arriving to do whatever they like.

"Australia has built a different dynamic than, say, America, because we have built an independent cultural, intellectual and governmental relationship with the region.

"I think one of the reasons for the ease with which the APT was accepted in the region is because Australia didn't colonise anyone and we had been colonised ourselves."

Endless expressions of angst in group curatorial meetings did, nevertheless, cause problems. Hall remembers, after one drawn-out process of self-examination, a representative from an Asian gallery told them: "Look, it's your triennial, just do it."

Sixty thousand people came to see the 200 works by 76 artists at APT1, a surprise success Hall is at a loss to explain. "Why is it that you show contemporary art from cultures little understood, by artists who have never been heard of, and the public comes in and loves it? I don't understand the phenomenon, but I think it's got a lot to do with the personality of the gallery."

It also says something about Brisbane: perhaps it's not as conservative as its reputation would suggest, or at least it's easygoing enough to try something new.

Double that number turned up to APT2, then 155,000 for APT3, until, three years ago, 220,000 people visited the three-month free exhibition. These are figures that stack up against blockbuster exhibitions in other state galleries, such as Melbourne's Winter Masterpieces. Yet, although it looks like a blockbuster, acts like a blockbuster and pulls the punters like a blockbuster - minus the entry fee - the APT "isn't mentioned in the same context as the blockbusters, like something coming out of the school of Paris", Hall says.

It's as though blockbusters are just about Western art history, he says, and showing contemporary art has to be pitched as a festival. "If you asked the general public whether the APT is a blockbuster, they'd probably say, 'We don't know'," Hall says. "But they come, and they love it."

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Life imitating art, art imitating life

You might envy China artist Feng Mengbo. After all, his job involves playing computer games and calling it art.

Life imitating art, art imitating life

The exhibition here, Built To Order: r_drawworld 0, features two series of prints on canvas by him. One is based on screenshots from his Quake works.

He says, "I discovered I could take thousands of screenshots at random and find meaning in them. There is an aesthetic in these still images that motion cannot mimic."

In fact, he goes so far as to compare his fluid screenshots with the action paintings of American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.

The other series features iconic images of Mao Zedong, executed as though the late Chinese leader was a three-dimensional character in a blockish computer game landscape.

In a sale of contemporary Asian art at Sotheby's in New York last month, one of his Mao prints, titled 2006LII02, was sold for USD45,600.

The Mao prints are a nod towards both Chinese portrait painting as well as Andy Warhol's colourful silkscreen renditions of the leader.

As Feng points out in the exhibition catalogue, there was a saying during the Cultural Revolution that only artists who had official permits were allowed to attempt painting Chairman Mao.

"Andy Warhol certainly didn't have a permit," Feng notes wryly.

It is precisely Warhol's opportunistic turning of art into mass-manufactured products in the 1960s that he wants to explore.

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Contemporary Asian Art

Saigon Open City looks like it will be very interesting, more to follow

Saigon Open City is a long-term art and cultural project consisting of exhibitions and special events that will run within a two years period 2006 - 2008. It will address the significance of modern and contemporary art, looking at visual strategies and historical contexts in Vietnam from the liberation period up until the present.

Saigon Open City will contextualize and juxtapose these strategies and contexts with regional and global perspectives.The exhibitions will be based on specific, thematic chapters. The three different chapters will focus on the issues of Liberation, Unification and (Re)construction.

The project wants to bridge the gap between three generations of artists and audiences, by promoting an awareness of contemporary art to the general public, through a series of proposed events, lectures, workshops and educational programs. It will be an opportunity and venue for exchanges and exposure both for both the local artistic community as well as the international and regional art community. The project would like to bring to the public and the artistic community a greater perspective and understanding of contemporary art and its importance and function in society.

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