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Arts & Ideas

Proms Plus Literary - Chinese Culture Today

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2599 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2014

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Professor Rana Mitter discusses contemporary Chinese culture with a novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo and Dr Katie Hill, an expert on Chinese Modern Art. The event was recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music as part of BBC Proms. To find out further information about the events which are free to attended go to bbc.co.uk/proms

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

0:21.2

that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

0:26.1

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

0:39.7

Hello, culture used to be a Hello.

0:42.9

Culture used to be a dirty word in China.

0:48.6

Half a century ago, the cultural revolution, inspired by Mao Zedong, meant smashing pictures,

0:52.1

attacking temples and destroying huge amounts of heritage.

0:56.8

Fast forward to today, where Chinese culture means something very different.

1:00.7

As the China Philharmonic Orchestra are making their proms debut tonight,

1:03.1

we thought it would be a good opportunity to ask,

1:05.8

what is Chinese culture today?

1:07.8

And can it go global?

1:11.7

And to argue this question, I'm joined by two people in the thick of the debate.

1:17.1

The novelist and filmmaker, Xiaulu Guo, is here. Now, Xia Lu is Chinese, but she lives in the UK,

1:23.3

and she was chosen in a once-in-a-decade exercise as one of the grant her best of British young novelists.

1:30.9

And she's going to be reading for us from her new novel, I Am China. And here we also have Dr. Katie Hill, a specialist on Chinese modern art from the Sotheby's Institute of Art.

1:34.9

Chinese culture is a huge topic, and we only have a short time tonight.

1:38.6

But, Shaloo, I wonder, could you give me one item, one object

1:43.0

that you think tells us something important about Chinese culture today?

1:48.1

Actually, my background also as a filmmaker, so I would just recommend a film.

1:53.0

You should watch, called the Suu River by Low Year.

1:56.8

And it's a film done in the 1990s, end of 1990s, about a young man falling in love as a prostitute,

...

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