Monthly Archive for May, 2007Page 2 of 2

Kung Fu Hustle online game, a China exclusive

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 11, 2007
in Film and Games
. 0 Comments

Sony Online Entertainment Taipei and Shanghai Northstar are teaming up to create an online game for Stephen Chow’s hit movie, Kung Fu Hustle.

The game will only be released in China, and it will be free to play… unless you wish to purchase extra lives and special items.

According to the press release, it’s a sort of "classic fighting game."

Also, "in Versus Mode, eight players can go head to head in all out multiplayer mayhem."

To try to predict what is to come: here’s an example of a casual, Tetris-like game developed by co-developer Shanghai Northstar called 无厘头快快 (Nonsense On Speed), which features some stock characters from Chow’s movies:

20070512_wulitou

But according to Joystiq, "the shots of this game [the Kung Fu Hustle one] that they showed us look pretty … painful"

According to a Sony spokesperson, Chow’s "an avid
video game player, with a strong sense of game design."

Via Game|Life.

Memedia’s Strawberry Weekly issue 5, in English

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 7, 2007
in Blogs, Translation and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

See Nan Yang’s extraordinary English translation of memedia’s Strawberry Weekly, issue 5, now at GVO, for a roundup of content in Chinese-language blogosphere. So much interesting content, there’s really no way to excerpt it.  It’s quite a bold publication. 

“this is illegal”: turn a mobile phone into a bug?

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 7, 2007
in Mobile and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

From Chinese spambots, ads for a device that allows you to turn anyone’s mobile phone into a listening device.  We followed them to a little company called usa peian, whose homepage says, helpfully:

Every product on this site is illegal.  The products on this site are professionally used by the American FBI. Chinese technicians can discuss high level technology together with us, and bring foreign technologies into China, to assist China in its efforts to catch up with foreign technologies more quickly.

For 5200 RMB (about US $650), you can get a device that claims to allow you to enter the phone number of any wireless device (including Little Smart, China Unicom, China Mobile, and any CDMA device), and then:

  • listen to every call made
  • if you can’t pick up, the device will record the call for you
  • see where they are making the call from with GPS and pre-loaded mapping software
  • listen to anything happening when the caller is NOT on the phone

Pei_an

Usa peian claims to have representatives across China but they have to "protect" them so you can only get in touch with representatives in Beijing, Shenyang, Jinan, and Xi’an.  They promise to have your order delivered with 5 hours of placing it–and their bank account numbers are listed on the website as well.  It all sounds a bit fishy, doesn’t it?

The plot thickens.  See shoujiqietingqi.cn, a website with the banner, "For the happiness of you and your family, please stay far away from Mark Six!"  Mark Six 六合彩 is the Chinese Lotto game originally organized in Hong Kong but now an illegal gambling phenomenon on the mainland.  The site also proclaims: "Strike and punish the listening apparatus commercial movement, and push forward social stability." And it tells stories such as that of Mrs. Gao, who bought a listening apparatus for her daughter’s phone so that she could monitor her.  The device didn’t work.  She realized she had been cheated, but also realized that she shouldn’t have done it in the first place because it is better to communicate directly with her daughter.

So companies like usa peian are cons, conning people to sign up as "sales representatives" for expensive, fake, top-secret, high-tech products, and probably making them buy one first; and also selling fake listening devices to unsuspecting buyers.

But isn’t it interesting that they are marketing such products and such sales opportunities?

Be careful: another site, also claiming to be the sole "authorized general agent for American cellphone listening apparatus, original packaging, lowest price," comes with a warning! 

Geeglechina

Socialist Realism: a Chinese love of Soviet art

Published
by
Nan Yang
on May 7, 2007
in Art
. 0 Comments

Mr. Fan Jianxiang, who owns "Oriental Tea House" restaurants across Russia, is also a passionate collector of about 400 pieces of Soviet Union realism art works, mostly from the Soviet Union period since 1931, and mostly in Socialist Realist style.  Mr. Fan has opened a gallery at Chingning Library in Shanghai. This gallery will open formally in June and charge 20MRB/ person. It is
at Tian Shan Road 356, Chingning District, Shanghai, 3F.

The show was reported in Shanghai Daily, but there are few other reports yet.
Mr. Fan’s son has just begun thinking about making a website and
setting up an academic forum for his father’s gallery, but
he didn’t realize or expect the internet would help to attract more
people’s attention to his father’s collections.

I am interested in what various people would think of this Russian
art nowadays. As a typical young person born in 1980s, I might have
fewer emotions than those elderly people as Mr. Fan when looking at
those Soviet Union artists’ works, and maybe it was difficult for me to
understand those veins, whereas I was fetched by the images and
splendid scenes…
I hope more and more people will get to know Mr.Fan’s great action,
discuss it, and express their thoughts about these precious arts in an
efficient way, such as on the internet etc, otherwise, I am afraid
those spirits conveyed by the art works would fade from people’s memory
in this fast developing and commercializing society…I am expecting to
see Mr.Fan’s son’s online gallery to show his father’s collections, at
the same time to hear some interesting comments from locals or even
other countries, including Russia and America.

Those Russian paintings really impressed me a lot. The Russian artists expressed their emotions about living in the Soviet Union; many suffered suffered through World War II and and later painted their experiences.  While the Socialist Realist style may not be so fashionable today, here is a lot of fine art that will appeal to Chinese and Western viewers.

Here are a few of the paintings in the gallery, reproduced here by permission of Mr. Fan’s son.

Soviet_union_socialist_realism1
巴勃果夫. C    ‘ Little Nurse’    1962

Mr.Fan hunted for this painting for 6 years. He was attracted by the painting at the first sight, so he tried to find the dead painter’s wife, who was already in her 80s and living in the US. For her, this painting is the invaluable treasure from her husband. However Mr.Fan told her that he would put the painting in a gallery to remind people of that period of time, and to get more response. He persuaded her finally to let him show the painting.

White_dream

戈刘塔   ’White Dream’   2003

This is my favorite painting…No wars or politics, all in peace, elegance and harmony.

You can recognize the character ‘Long’(Dragon) on the back wall. Mr.Fan’s son told us that this expressed the artist’s emotion about Chinese culture. Is it a Socialist Realism art work? Very interesting and smart combination of Chinese culture and western art.

More paintings below the jump:

Continue reading ‘Socialist Realism: a Chinese love of Soviet art’

Shanghai’s foreign themed satellite cities

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 3, 2007
in Design, History, Photos, Translation and Travel
. 0 Comments

Shanghai’s One CIty Nine Towns program and foreign-themed New Towns are strange and wonderful things. All are collaborative efforts between Chinese and international design teams.

Shanghai urban planners are trying to preserve the center of the city by not building any more new highways, and by setting up 9 satellite cities, or "New Towns" far out in the Shanghai suburbs.  But they need to attract people out of the city, into the outskirts–a tough job, unless you can create an atmosphere and lifestyle that one can’t find downtown. 

Thus the nine theme-cities, seven based on the architecture of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Holland and Canada. The remaining two cities will be "Chinese," and one of those will a sustainable, eco-friendly city on the huge Chongming Island.  You’ll find a short slide show of many of the towns as part of a recent BusinessWeek article on Shanghai. Fengjing is to be built in Canadian/North American style. Anting, with a race track, is the German town.  The Italian area, Pujiang, is to be the largest of the nine cities with a planned 15 sq km and 80,000 residents.

British-themed Thamestown covers 1 square kilometer in Songjiang District, about 1 hour from downtown Shanghai.  It has a lake, a river, a golf course, a Gothic church, a town square, and villas with names like WindsorIsland.  Here is the Thamestown official website in English, with news about the latest commercials and movies that were shot there, among other events (boat racing). Thamestown officially opened October 20, 2006; here you can see the opening ceremony festitivities–Chinese dance performance against the backdrop of First Vision Creativity Square. 

Thamestown photo gallery. I especially love the shots that took advantage of an unusual snow in Shanghai:
Thames_snow

Luodian is the Swedish town. In a great post on Luodian and its original source, the Swedish town of Sigtuna, graduate student Ada Fredelius points out an irony: you can find more ancient authenticity, and even similarity to the original Swedish buildings, in Luodian’s old town, constructed in the early Min Dynasty.  Luodian’s old town on top, Sweden’s Sigtuna on the bottom, below: 

Luodian

If you are in Shanghai, go on a FAR tour of the New Towns!

 

1/12/07 Financial Times article: Alien Satellites, here.

Sinocities: open-source urban solutions?

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 2, 2007
in Design
. 0 Comments

Sinocities

SinoCities Awards 2007 is an urban design competition sponsored by the civil engineering company MaxitGroup, and related to a Shanghai nonprofit architecture center called FAR (who also write the very interesting SInocities blog, with an impressive list of architect and urban planner authors).  You download the map of "Sinocity" and then do something–anything–to it, as long as it can be represented graphically and textually.  You can win 35,000 RMB (~ US$4500) for the first prize, plus you get flown to Shanghai.  The rules:

further
improve Sinocity’s public spaces by means of architectural design,
urban design, landscape design or any other intervention into Sinocity.

The site or multiple sites can be freely chosen on the Sinocity map
with no limitations to form, size or current boundaries. There are no
applicable limitations in terms of planning regulations, codes or laws.
The participant decides himself which regulations are of concern and
which are not.

new tech and Olympics: subway TV

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 2, 2007
in Mobile, News, Sports and Television
. 0 Comments

We should really start a list of what new services and infrastructure are being promised for Beijing in 2008 Olympics.  Here’s an interesting one: live TV coverage on the new subway line. The line:

will have a transmitter every 200 meters that can receive
above-ground TV signals, said Ding Shukui, assistant general manager of
Beijing Railway Construction and Management Co. Ltd….The locomotive and the last carriage on the train will be equipped
with receivers that can transmit signals to the eight liquid crystal TV
sets in each carriage,