Art Auctions in China – 2006

A Tang dynasty camel, anyone?

Ceramic sculptures of the ruminant mammal may not have the popular currency of Chinese-made lighters or DVD players, but Chinese art – where Made in China is a good thing – has been traipsing its way to record prices, climbing on the purchasing power of a widening pool of collectors willing to pay millions for a 14^th century blue and white jar here and a Qianlong period armor there.

Ever responsive to emerging tastes and opportunities, many international auction houses are putting more attention and resources in their Asian operations, centering on Hong Kong.

But with the rising number of mainland buyers a tantalizing sign of a large new market, can China, specifically Beijing, be the next frontier for international art auctions?

Many say it is – citing growing sales within China. But there are questions about how international it can really be.

While China may be home to untold hordes of potential collectors, concerns about provenance issues as well as currency and export restrictions drive away many Western collectors from buying or selling in the mainland, diminishing access to both major pieces and clients.

Also, in the world’s most populous nation the world’s most prestigious art auction houses can show but not sell because of cultural protection laws. While no one contests China’s right to safeguard cultural treasures or its concerns about smuggled artifacts, some believe international auction firms could help China further toward becoming a more desirable destination for art auctions.

“The best auction is when you can bring the most unencumbered art to a single place, you can bring as many eager collectors as possible to that place, and then have them competing against each other,” explained Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s managing director of Asia and Australia.

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Not Another Teen Story: JROTC in Brooklyn

Linda Wu of Brooklyn will likely attend Baruch College in Manhattan this fall, after a high school career where she did a bit of everything. The Fort Hamilton High School senior, 17, has been on the bowling, softball and track teams, is a member of the Asian culture club, and belonged to the now-defunct engineering club, where students built things out of wires and batteries and sometimes straw. Academically, Linda took part in the computer science academy, learning html and how to make Web sites. This year she is taking advanced placement courses for American history, government and literature. She also has a job as an assistant in a small local law firm. Yet in her college personal essay – the one telling prospective colleges who I am and why you should want me – she chronicled her journey through Fort Hamilton’s junior reserve officers training corps program, or JROTC, and explained how it changed her.

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Police Story – Written with Jacqueline Barba

Officer Steve Simone doesn’t romanticize his work at the 68^th Police Precinct in Brooklyn. “I’m just a summons guy. I just give out tickets,” he said.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Simone previously worked the 73^rd Precinct, planted in a district where shootings are common. In 1999 Simone transferred to the precinct of his choice, a reward for several bribery arrests. So he chose the 68^th, which he said serves one of the “nicest” areas of Brooklyn. “This is a very slow house,” he said of the 68^th Precinct. “It’s a ‘C’ house. It goes ‘A,’ ‘B,’ or ‘C,’ and ‘A’ houses are the busiest.”

Simone’s career reflects the tremendous divide between precinct classifications. In the ‘A’ houses, officers face a barrage of violent crime, something Simone suggests weakens the spirit of civic duty.

“When you first become a cop you want to save the world, you want to work in a precinct where a lot of shit goes down,” he said. “But after a couple of years of that, you don’t want to do nothing.”

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Hungry Preschoolers

One recent February morning, twenty preschoolers set about their task with uncharacteristic focus and voraciousness: they had come to eat their lunch. The children gobbled down the day’s menu of roast turkey with gravy, corn and white bread. Most plates were left empty, and others showed speckles of yellow from uneaten corn. Juice and spittle dribbled down chins.

Yet the simple operation of feeding a classroom full of three-, four- and five-year-olds can be as complex as preparing a six-course meal. But you don’t have to tell Peter Metralexis, health coordinator at the Educational Alliance community center in the Lower East Side. His unenviable task: appeasing the mouths while fighting the fat for the building of 200 children – a group of pre-preschool, preschool and day care kids from low-income families, most in the national Head Start program.

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My Story in the Korea Times

That Mary Connor has become a guide for educators isn’t surprising: she taught American history in Los Angeles-area high schools for over three decades. But now the 68-year-old Evanston, Illinois native is teaching teachers about Korea.

Since 2004, teachers from 18 Los Angeles public school districts have come to Connor’s educational programs on Korean history and culture. They’re introduced to Korean family life and philosophy; treated to a production of the Korean folktale “Chunhyang”; and taken on field trips to a Buddhist temple.

For Connor – whose interest in Korea is rooted in her contact with Korean-American students and the Korean-American community – bringing Korea to American teachers is more than just educational outreach.

“I would say bottom line it’s a need to teach about Asia,” Connor said, explaining that increasing American consciousness of Korea not only benefits Korean-Americans, but all Americans, as the country becomes more connected with Asian-Pacific economies.

Meanwhile, the New York-based non-profit Korea Society has been reaching out to educators in the greater New York area. Last November the organization held a conference on Korean studies for elementary, middle and high school teachers in its Manhattan office, with Connor as a speaker.

Forty-one teachers signed up for the conference, said Yongjin Choi, senior director of the Korea Society’s Korean language program. Many others had to be turned away, there being over 150 inquiries.

At a time when U.S. politicians debate a national language and a nuclear test on the Korean peninsula has created international alarm, small groups within the U.S. attempt to bring all things Korean to primary and secondary school teachers. Efforts stem from a number of causes, including the rising number of Korean students.

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Raising Quality in New York Preschools

Even with the lights off, room five in Williamsburg’s Jonathan Williams Day Care Center glowed. At 1 p.m. the kindergarten children slept in their blue cots as light slid through the partially lowered blinds onto the white walls decorated with the preschoolers’ art.

But only four years earlier room five had another look. One side of the dark and dull classroom was blue and the other pistachio green. The lighting, furniture, and even the cots had been around from before anyone could remember. The building blocks had faded in color, and there were no computers. The city’s Administration of Children’s Services said they had no money for new equipment and a paint job.

Enter Quality New York, an initiative dedicated to getting preschools to meet national accreditation standards. The group is powered by Bank Street College, Child Care Inc. and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, and funded by United Way of New York City.

As part of a push for accreditation Quality New York recommended the center for grants by a non-profit foundation to buy new furniture and revitalize several of its classrooms, a change that lifted not only the children but also the adults at the center.

“That even built up the morale of the teachers, because they had modern things,” said Mildred Hook, the 71-year-old bespectacled educational director of Jonathan Williams.

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Going Green in Harlem

The limestone bricks of the four-story townhouse at 459 West 140th Street have faded to a muted brown and gray. Its windows have been boarded or cemented shut with cinder blocks, the front entrance is shuttered with a metal gate, and its locks are a rusty green. The weeds springing from the cracked steps are the only signs of life. To pedestrians, the abandoned house reeks of decay, but change is coming.

The owners of the townhouse, the Harlem-based environmental group West Harlem Environmental Action, or WE ACT, have ambitious plans to make the 19th century house into a 21st century center for environmentalism. Eco-friendly buildings have sprung up throughout the city, but often at addresses far south of Harlem. WE ACT’s new headquarters, to be called the Environmental Justice Center of New York, will bring Harlem its first green non-profit community center when it opens in 2009, and only the second green building in West Harlem (the other is a residential complex). But instead of another monument to the Toyota Prius school of environmentalism — where buying green products and going carbon neutral has become the latest in lifestyle choice — the converted townhouse aspires to reflect the unique concerns of environmental activism in West Harlem, where warding off climate change takes a back seat to the more immediate realities of pollution and health.

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