The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena reopens with a show that examines how Mexican artists influenced their Chinese counterparts; researchers from FiveThirtyEight have new ways to examine the representation of women in movies; Alex Heffes scored a day in the life of the planet for a BBC documentary.
How artists from Mexico influenced a closed-off China
A new exhibit that marks the reopening of the USC Pacific Asia Museum offers a rare glimpse into how contemporary art in Mexico crossed the Pacific to influence artists in China.
Co-curated by museum director Christina Yu Yu and Shengtian Zheng, a leading scholar and independent curator, "Winds from Fusang: Mexico and China in the Twentieth Century" includes art and artifacts from this largely unexamined cultural exchange from the 1930s to present day.
The museum, which formed a partnership with USC in 2013, was recently renovated. “Winds from Fusang” is the first exhibit since it reopened to the public last month.
The museum’s ornate building was commissioned by a private entrepreneur in the 1920s and was modeled in the style of Chinese palaces — with a sloping, imperial roof, crouching beast statues and a winding garden courtyard.
Christina Yu Yu recently took The Frame's John Horn on a tour.
Interview Highlights:
On the history of the USC Pacific Asia Museum:
Grace Nicholson commissioned the building back in 1921 and the building was finished in 1924. She was an incredible entrepreneur. Back in the early 20th Century, she became one of the most important art dealers ... [of] American art but also Asian art. Because of her love for Asia and Asian art she actually commissioned this beautiful building after the Chinese palace style. Even the roof tiles. A lot of the details were actually imported from China and incorporated into this building.
On the obscurity of contemporary art in China:
It's really a very unknown topic. And I would say, like many great stories in history, a lot of things happened just by accident. Nobody planned it. This exhibition is really looking at three important time periods in the 20th Century. First we're looking at the 1930s with Miguel Covarrubias from Mexico, who went to China — again, by accident, because his real destination was Bali, Indonesia. At the time, you couldn't go there directly — you needed to stop by Shanghai first and then take a boat.
On Covarrubias as an example of cultural exchange between Mexico and China:
He stopped by Shanghai very briefly for several months ... and he did some very quick sketches there. Very typical of the [drawings] he made for magazines at the time. One is a portrait of a Peking opera singer. The style is very Covarrubias, but the subject matter is very Chinese. And very interestingly, we did not know of the existence of this drawing until we went to China and we found this in the family of a Chinese painter who met Covarrubias in Shanghai. Covarrubias gave this drawing to the artist and the family has kept it since then.
On the isolated nature of China after the Communist Revolution:
The People's Republic of China was established in 1949 by the Communist Party. And since then the country — especially in the '50s, '60s and '70s — was shut down from the outside world. There was very limited contact with America or Europe. Whereas the allies were countries from Latin America, Africa and also, of course, the Soviet Union. So in the 1950s, the art style that was taught in school, and the practice by all the Chinese artists, was the so-called Soviet Socialist Realism. But in 1956 there was a very important exhibition organized by Mexican artists. It was really a [landmark] exhibition for artists. That was the only exhibition they had seen from outside China or the Soviet Union. The exhibition included about 400 pieces — mostly painting and prints. And they are all from the so-called Mexican muralist artists.
On how the exhibit demonstrates China's Cultural Revolution:
The purpose of art was very much in line with ideology that is promoted by the Communist Party. It was art for the people, art for the revolution. We actually made some documentary videos for this exhibition. These artists are in their 70s and 80s now, but back in the '50s they were young artists. They went to go see the exhibition. They said they felt this sincere attitude and emotion from Mexican artists. They were really painting for the revolution. They were painting because the government told them to paint.
On how this exhibit fits in with the museum's overarching mission:
Southern California, as we all know, is really a center for Asian-Americans. Recently we've seen a lot of immigrants from that region. So we are really very happy that we have this place for them, for that community, to showcase what they are proud of. But I think it's also important since our city and community is a place where we have so many people from different cultures and different parts of the world that we can play a role in introducing Asia to people from other parts of the globe.
"Winds from Fusang: Mexico and China in the Twentieth Century" is on view through June 10.
Is it time for a new Bechdel Test?
Researchers at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative have released a new study that reinforces a sad fact: Hollywood prefers hiring white men to direct almost all its movies.
Looking at the 1,100 top-grossing films released between 2007 and 2017, researchers found that barely 4% of directors were female. And of the more than 1,200 directors hired in the past decade, just eight were women of color.
While this USC data is critical, it got us thinking about how moviegoers who are unfamiliar with this kind of data can measure how women are represented in film. One way has been the Bechdel Test (also called the Bechdel-Wallace Test), conceived in the mid-1980s by cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend, Liz Wallace.
The Bechdel-Wallace Test:
- Does a movie have at least two named female characters?
- Do the women talk to each other?
- Do they talk about something other than a man?
It's a simple test that's easy to grasp, but journalists at the FiveThirtyEight website decided to evaluate some updates. The result is a project called The Next Bechdel Test.
The team at FiveThirtyEight, including visual journalist
and culture writer
, asked several women working in the entertainment industry to come up with their own ways of measuring Hollywood's representation imbalance. They then used the new tests to assess the 50 top-grossing films at the domestic box office in 2016.
Koeze, Hickey and writer/actor Naomi Ko (who contributed "The Ko Test") spoke with The Frame host John Horn about their ideas for a new Bechdel Test.
Interview highlights:
On the new criteria that women included in their own tests:
Walt Hickey: I loved a few of these tests. I had two favorites that I really wanted to highlight. One of them is The Ko Test. This is by Naomi Ko, she's a terrific writer [and] an actress in "Dear White People." And her test is: a movie passes if there's a non-white, female-identifying person in the film who speaks in five or more scenes and speaks in English. And the reality is that 29 films failed. More than half of films didn't have a single non-white female character who speaks in five or more scenes. And that was really just shocking. One of my other favorite ones came from Kate Hagan. She's the director of community at The Blacklist. Her test is: a movie passes if half of one-scene roles go to women, and the first crowd scene is 50% women. And only five movies passed this test. And I believe two of them passed because they didn't actually have any crowd scenes in them.
On the inevitable limitations of any test:
Naomi Ko: To be honest, I'm actually kind of surprised that 21 films passed my test. I thought the number would be lower. Which made me think I did not make it hard enough. I didn't want it to purposely fail, but I realized the limitations of my own metrics on the test like, yes, they're speaking in five or more scenes, but what does that mean? Are they just saying yes or no?
On which of the 50 films earned overwhelmingly good and bad scores:
Ella Koeze: I think the film that passed the most tests was "Bad Moms." The whole movie is pretty much just about women, even though antagonists and all supporting characters are women. It also gives women some space to behave in ways they don't often do in other movies — it's kind of crass. That being said, it also failed all of the behind the camera tests. And it's not without its own issues. "Hidden Figures" also did really well, which is probably not that surprising. The films that did the worst — the last three on our list, which each only passed one test — were "Deadpool," "Doctor Strange" and "The Secret Life of Pets."
On why so many films that passed the Bechdel Test failed the new tests submitted to FiveThirtyEight:
Ella Koeze: One of our goals with this project was not only to highlight how dismal the picture is for women and women of color in Hollywood. And certainly we didn't even scratch the surface in some other areas of representation — disability, or LGBTQ characters, or getting deeper into questions of race. There's all these elements that Hollywood is failing on and needs to do better. But we also wanted to get at this question of how it's hard to create an easy test [with] a checklist, and filmmakers or the people of power in Hollywood can just say, Yup, did that, did that — we're all set. It's not really that easy. It's sort of a whole system that needs to be reworked and thought about. And we want this project to be food for thought.