Mao and Mozart

Since 1799, the Peabody Essex has boasted its Asian loot, booty from Salem’s wealthiest merchants, plying the China trade. In 2009, the Mahjong exhibit brings treasures from the old world full circle.

As China develops a brisk art market, subversive works of contemporary artists and social critics are pulling down millions. Riveting are the silly, smiling, identical statues of Yue Min Jun, their repetitious grin a hah! to individuality. More mind-blowing is Cao Fei’s vision of urban mess perched on an island idyll, manufactured in Second Life. The half-submerged shopping cart of skyscrapers off its shore made it for me. And I found a strange attraction to Yin Zhaoyang’s huge “Ode to Joy” - Tiananmen Square at night, glittery, celebratory, masses of people, anonymous and fuzzy. In this gorgeous painting of a killing ground, loaded with crushing memories, there is, to my surprise, (my horror?) a palpable excitement. Our hotel was just there, Kris pointed and mused on the Forbidden City.

Maybe that’s art’s forward message: something new comes from an image or a sound locked in sentiment and symbolism…how about that Marilyn Monroe Mao?...and brings the world alive again, in pain and imperfect, human. Here, on this site of carnage and outrage, a living breathing square full of people, looking up. Fireworks!

So, on this winter afternoon in symphony hall, in that familiar second movement of “Jupiter,” I heard, for the first time, the strings pounding down a pulse. A human heart under the melody. Mozart may not have lived long enough to hear it, but I did.