The WaPo reports that U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is apparently irked at a proposed statue of Martin Luther King that critics feel is just a tad too Stalinist for their tastes:

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thinks “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries,” commission secretary Thomas Luebke said in a letter in April.

Some have problems with the ethnicity of the sculptor himself:

Last year, the [Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project] Foundation selected Chinese master sculptor Lei Yixin to work on the memorial. He was banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution but is now considered a national treasure with a lifelong stipend from the government.

Critics said that an African American artist, or any American, would have been preferable. And at least one black sculptor, Ed Dwight of Denver, has said Lei’s models do not resemble King.

“Everybody has this problem with how Dr. King is represented,” Dwight said this week. “You can’t satisfy anybody, because everybody remembers him in a different way.”

The memorial foundation has said that Lei is internationally renowned and was selected for his experience with large public sculptures.

More on Lei Yixin and the MLK statue controversy in a 2007 WaPo piece here.

I was recently told by a prominent Korean architect that Shanghai is home to one of the few remaining communities of Art Deco artisans, mostly on account of the city having one of the world’s largest collections of Art Deco architecture (MUST SEE photo set). I say, if we’re going to outsource even the construction of our national monuments to the Chinese, screw Socialist Realism — go Art Deco! Hey, if it was good enough for Jesus…

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The whole story was a little weird in the first place. It just got weirder. There actually appears to be some history behind it and the story is a bit more complex then one would think off hand.

It turns out that Tak Kyung-hyun’s Japanese name is Fumihiro Mitsuyama and he’s the subject of a Japanese documentary and two Japanese movies. The people at Japan Probe wrote about him almost a year ago here. He was the main character in the 2001 film titled “Hotaru” (Firefly) and was the basis of another character for the recent Kamikaze movie “Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku” (For Those We Love) which was, get this, based on a novel written by controversial and ultra-nationalistic Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara. The same site also has a youtube of the documentary.

Truly strange. Excuse me while cognitive dissonance sets it.

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For those of you who don’t know, yes there were in fact Korean Kamikaze pilots during WWII. There were in fact 18 confirmed and probably more.

The actress Fukumi Kuroda is leading the charge (and footing most of the bill) to set-up a monument to Kamikaze pilot Tak Kyung-hyun in his hometown of Sacheon. It’s actually been built, it has been covered in tarp, and is waiting to be unveiled, but other residents have blocked it.

Per the article:

“He was a kamikaze, an aggressor,” said Lee Sun-bok, head of a group opposed to the memorial…

But Hong Jong-pil, a South Korean historian working on the memorial project, said the pilots should be seen as victims of the colonial period. He cited recent studies finding they did not volunteer for their suicide missions but were pressured or forced.

Interestingly, Kuroda (who speaks fluent Korean) said she pushed for the memorial for the following reason:

The project’s driving force is a Japanese actress who has long sought to foster friendship between Korea and her country.

“I’m not beautifying kamikazes. I’m doing this for war victims,” said Kuroda, who flew to Sacheon Thursday to meet city officials and the activists. “I’m confident I can persuade them.”

It’s an AP article, which you can read here or here.

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John Kennedy of Globalvoicesonline.org has posted interesting look at a Chinese exchange troll, allegedly living here in Korea, who claims that Koreans are now persecuting Chinese students — the same ones who were only trying to protect the “sacred flame” (sure). While this poster’s grasp on reality is blatantly distorted, some of the Chinese comments are pretty funny because it seems that quite a few Chinese know what dung smells like as well and they waste no time calling bs on it.

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From a Chosun Ilbo story on North Korean women making regular trips across the river to sell sex to Chinese villagers:

또 이 같은 이유 때문에 최근 북한에서는 아들보다 딸을 더 선호한다고 한다. 이 여성은 “북조선 인구 비율은 여자가 많은데 여자들의 살림가치가 높아서 딸을 좋아한다”며 “북조선에서는 여자들이 없으면 못 벌어 먹으며 이 때문에 북조선 남자들은 집 지키는 ‘멍멍게’나 ‘낮전등’이라고 한다”고 말했다.

For reasons like this (selling North Korean girls to entertainment businesses in China), nowadays in North Korea, daughters are preferred over sons. According to the woman, “Women make up a large percentage of North Korea’s population, and women are valuable providers. In North Korea, a household can’t make a living without women, and because of this, North Korean men are called “barking dogs” or “floodlights” that guard the house.”

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You can experience this Korean delicacy vicariously at the Shangaiist. If mollusks could scream, I don’t think this dish would be so popular. On second thought, maybe it would be even more so.

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Daai Tou Lam Diary is a quiet C-blog written by an American resident of Hong Kong. As he is fluent in Chinese, his posts often contain translations from the local Hong Kong media, and he is very critical of the Chinese government. A recent post on the Carrefour boycott drew this conclusion:

As anyone who has spent much time reading the history of the Sino-British negotiations on the handover of Hong Kong, China’s preferred diplomatic wedge is the foreign business community. Read through Jonathan Dimbleby’s The Last Governor and you’ll many many instances where the PRC negotiators leaned on the British business community to lean on Chris Patten to kowtow to PRC diplomatic demands. Carrefour, who needed China more than China needed them as opposed to French hi-tech or automotive companies, would be the fulcrum that the CCP[?] used to move Sarkozy and the French government. There was nothing Carrefour could do to stop the protests except lean on Sarkozy to kowtow to the CCP.

What the CCP wanted was for Sarkozy to quit criticizing China on human rights and commit to attending the Opening Ceremony.

Despite the bad press and public panic surrounding the safety of Chinese imports, China is not really vulnerable to boycotts because most of its exports do not bear Chinese brand names. Chinese imports from Korea and other countries, on the other hand, have foreign brand names that make easy targets for boycotts. While browsing Chinese forums yesterday, I came across a graphic with the logos of about 40 Korean brands sold in China along with a call for a boycott. This was just one website, so it doesn’t look like Samsung electronics dealerships will replace Carrefour as staging grounds for rallies anytime soon.

Carrefour was chosen for a boycott because it is seen as more dependent on the Chinese market than other French firms. Which Korean companies, if any, would be a “fulcrum” for the Chinese government to put pressure on the Korean government?

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I am now convinced that Joshua at One Free Korea has a file of pithy quotes saved on his computer ready to whip out for any occasion.

Today’s evidence, along with some background:

President Lee, it should be remembered, has made an issue of restoring the public order that Roh had allowed to erode. If he lets these goon squads escape real punishment, the Korean street will be furious, and rightfully so. If the South Korean authorities prosecute, the Chinese street will be furious, and it will probably be lost on many of them that doing the same thing in China would likely earn them a stretch in the laogai or a fatal beating in a local police station. For a day, Seoul became for politically repressed Chinese youth what Tijuana is for sexually repressed American youth.

(Emphasis is mine.)

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The Foreign Ministry says it will tighten entry visa regulations for Chinese students entering Korea:

“We are going to talk with the related authorities over steps to toughen the issuance of entry visas for Chinese students and other Chinese people,” said Moon Tae-young, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The tough stance comes as public anger shows little signs of subsiding over violence committed by Chinese demonstrators on South Korean activists protesting Beijing’s crackdown on Tibetan separatists, and its treatment of North Korean refugees.

This also comes after the Hanguk Ilbo ran a piece noting that 31,829 of Korea’s 49,270 foreign students — two out of three — are Chinese, but the Chinese basically pay their way in with little in the way of academic requirements. Nine of 10 Chinese students in Korea, in fact, come to Korea through overseas study institutes in China, some of which forge documents so that undesirable students can enter the country. Then there are all the Chinese “students” who hardly attend class, instead focusing their attention on finding work.

In particular, regional colleges have been quite aggressive in recruiting Chinese students, but now, some schools — regarding Chinese students as problematic — are refusing to take any students from China.

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And for something completely different, we have this piece of culturally insensitive, NSFW fun. Note the expression on the face of the girl to the left.

(HT to reader)

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