Thursday, July 26, 2007

Art on Your Cell Phone

Recent news reports claim that more and more Americans are surfing the web with their cell phones and PDA's. It's hard to believe. The screens are so small and the data most cell phones can handle is severely limited. Not for nothing does one popular TV ad show a hapless cell phone user asking, "Can you hear me now?"

We'll believe surfing the 'Net with cell phones is a promising trend when our own phone can handle telephone calls inside a department store.

Added to that, so we've read, the sundry cell phone manufacturers are no closer to agreeing on a uniform method for rendering web sites than they are on a compatible technology for making telephone calls. The result is not every cell phone can show a "mobile" page in the same way. Some can't do it at all.

Still, the New York Times reported earlier this year cell phone web-surfing is all the rage in the Far East. And it looks like it's coming our way:
It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.

In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.

“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.

In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.

Undoubtedly, instant surfing with a cell phone has its conveniences (when it works). But no one knows if artists, galleries, and museums -- or others with interests centered on the visual arts -- are likely to find them compelling.

Nevertheless, friends of Tu Zhiwei have decided to experiment by dipping a little toe into these murky cellular waters. On the News section of the Tu Art Gallery web site, there's a new hyperlink called "Tu Art News for Mobile Devices." It takes readers to a proto-site titled "Tu Zhiwei Art Mobile."

The "mobile" site is slimmed-down -- downright skinny, in fact -- with only three pages (or "cards" as they are known) and just 15 lines of text and four images, in total. They look fine to computer users. It's anyone's guess how they appear on each of the several thousand different cell phones in use around the world.

The idea behind the "mobile" web site experiment is that PDA and cell phone users may find it convenient at times to surf for calendar or contact information about upcoming art gallery shows. In this instance, what's being offered is, first, hard information about Mr. Tu's next one-man show, scheduled to open at the Andreeva Gallery in Santa Fe on August 16.

Second, they can see a few tiny images of recent shows of Mr. Tu's paintings in Guangzhou, Shaoguan, and Beijing.

Third, cell phone users can use a link on the "mobile" web site to navigate to Andreeva Gallery's own web site and even fire off an email message.

Some new ideas are better than others. This one -- using cell phones to view art -- will take time to mature, at the very best. In the meantime, though, we plan to have fun watching how the experiment turns out.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Call for Help

Two new sections have been added to the Tu Art Gallery web site. One of them includes a general call for help.

"Reviews of Art, Shows, and Exhibitions" reprints a number of newspaper reviews, articles, art book introductions, and television reports about Tu Zhiwei's oil paintings. Some go back as far as 1996.

We know there are a lot more out there, in English, Mandarin, French, Dutch, Russian, and Arabic, for starters. So, on the Tu Art Gallery web site, readers are being asked to send along any reviews or commentaries they may know about:
We have begun compiling here newspaper, magazine, television, and book reviews about the art works of Tu Zhiwei, as we learn of them. If you know of any not included here, please let us know.)
The problem is that many older art show newspaper reviews, descriptive brochures, and the like were published before the Internet was invented, never made it to the web, or are buried too deep (for example, in an unfamiliar foreign language) to be easily discovered.

Probably the most difficult material to find will be notices from foreign art shows of Tu's work from the 1980's and early 1990's -- such as the earliest exhibitions in Guangzhou, the Algiers "World Cultural Convention" in 1987 when he was awarded the "gold prize", or his first gallery shows in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, and Michigan.

We know there are a lot of other newspaper and magazine reviews out there -- especially from the artist's earlier days in China (1972-1986) and after he emigrated to the U.S. in 1987. If you happen to have a hard copy, please scan and email it. If you know of something suitable on the web, just send along the url.

The same might be said about the other new web section. It's called "Lectures, Installations, and Happenings."

Tu Zhiwei is an active volunteer (consistent with his busy international schedule) for community art organizations. He also often participates in painting demonstrations or college lectures for art students, and from time to time engages in other entertaining 'happenings' like group art installations.

A few past events of this order already have been noted on the web site's 'Happenings' page. Again, however, we're sure there are many more that we haven't discovered, yet, either on the Internet or described in dead tree print.

The artist himself is too busy doing all of these things to do any 'scrapbooking' of his own. We can all help him out -- not to mention, assist future biographers -- by playing catch-up now.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Time Traveler

China Daily's review of the recent exhibition of paintings by Zhiwei Tu at the National Museum of Art in Beijing is now on-line. The title of the piece is "Time Traveler."

Here is a snippet:
Looking at any of his colossal, epic oils full of action and drama, the viewer would be deeply affected by the well-calculated composition and infectious ambience Tu has poured out with passion on the canvases," comments Shao Dazhen, a renowned art critic and professor with Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

"Imbued with brilliant expression of emotions, Tu's masterful depiction of the chapters of Chinese history are so arresting to the viewers thanks to the lush colors, dazzling lights, alluring imageries, and astonishing details," Shao says.
You can read the entire review in the original (English) version here, or on the Zhiwei Tu Art Gallery.com site here, along with other recent news about the artist.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Santa Fe One-Man Show

Just back from a hugely successful two month sojourn in China, Zhiwei Tu now has to prepare for a one-man art show at the Andreeva Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Click here for more information.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Video of The Beijing Exhibition Review

Video of the CCTV Channel 9 review of Tu Zhiwei's one-man show at the National Art Museum of China is now available. Watch and enjoy: