Chinatown Mural: Anti-smoking message?
I'm not qute sure what's supposed to be going on here.
In the middle, we have a trio of characters that I assume are supposed to be Buddha in the middle, Confucius with his beard to the right, and a̶n̶ ̶u̶n̶k̶n̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ Laozi on the left. They sit (on clouds or smoke?) in front of a Taoist Yin-Yang symbol, surrounded by the hexagrams of the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Okay, fine, fairly standard Chinese stuff here, I suppose.
But then you have these cartoonish Keith Haring style figures at the center of each quadrant of the image, in yellow, grey, green, and blue, plus other smaller ones scattered elsewhere. And at the top center, we have what appears to be an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and once you notice that, you can't help but notice that actually there are cigarette butts all over the place on this thing. Does that make the "cloud" that the Buddha et al is sitting on a puff of tobacco smoke? Is this some kind of anti-smoking message?
And then at the corners, we have some red Chinese dragons, each with a Chinese character that I can't read, or search Google for. Anyone know what these characters say?
Oh, and the whole thing is like 20 feet tall, it was huge. For scale, note the roofs of the two cars parked in front of it.
* * * *
Update 16 April 2010, via a Posterous comment:
Marc Moskowitz said...
The characters are the cardinal directions and the third guy is almost certainly Laozi. I can't help with the rest, except that I think the lines on the figure in the lower left are acupuncture meridians.
* * * *
So, looking at it a bit more, Marc is right -- a Google Translate "English to Chinese" search for north, south, east, west shows 北，南，东，西, which do seem to correspond to the characters on the mural. Clockwise from the lower left then, they go north, east, south, west. That's a little weird -- western maps normally put north at the top-center, not bottom-left -- but they're in the right order, so that's fine.
Additionally, there seems to be a division in what is being shown in each half, and each quadrant, of the image. The left side, with east & north, seems to be positive things, while the right side, south & west, seems to be negative things. Additionally, the top side, east & south, seems to be external things, while the bottom side, north & west, seems to be internal things. Thus:
• The upper-left (east) has people engaged in sports and farming, blue skies, and an open eye.
• The upper-right (south) has the ashtray, a weak-looking smoker, and dark skies.
• The lower-right (west) has a weaker-looking smoker, a pair of lungs surrounded by cigarette butts, a dark background, and a crying eye.
• The lower-left (north) has a fat (?) person surrounded by plants & healthy food and an acupuncture diagram.
Here my understanding of Chinese culture & iconography gets really weak, but to a certain extent maybe this makes sense, in some weird, numerological hocus pocus way. After all, the sun rises in the east & sets in the west, so that could explain why the "east" quadrant has the nicest things, and the "west" quadrant has the saddest ones. But why north is also "good" and south is also "bad"? There I'm not sure, but I'm sure there's an explanation for it. And dividing things this way, and dividing them again, plays along with the taoist duality yin-yang thinking suggested at the middle of the painting.
I still don't totally get it, but broadly speaking it appears to be some kind of illustration of how to lead a good life -- favoring things on the left -- and avoid a bad one -- staying away from the things on the right, which mainly seem to be tobacco.
It's more memorable than a Surgeon's General warning label, I guess.
Chinatown Mural: Anti-smoking message?
I'm not qute sure what's supposed to be going on here.
In the middle, we have a trio of characters that I assume are supposed to be Buddha in the middle, Confucius with his beard to the right, and a̶n̶ ̶u̶n̶k̶n̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ Laozi on the left. They sit (on clouds or smoke?) in front of a Taoist Yin-Yang symbol, surrounded by the hexagrams of the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Okay, fine, fairly standard Chinese stuff here, I suppose.
But then you have these cartoonish Keith Haring style figures at the center of each quadrant of the image, in yellow, grey, green, and blue, plus other smaller ones scattered elsewhere. And at the top center, we have what appears to be an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and once you notice that, you can't help but notice that actually there are cigarette butts all over the place on this thing. Does that make the "cloud" that the Buddha et al is sitting on a puff of tobacco smoke? Is this some kind of anti-smoking message?
And then at the corners, we have some red Chinese dragons, each with a Chinese character that I can't read, or search Google for. Anyone know what these characters say?
Oh, and the whole thing is like 20 feet tall, it was huge. For scale, note the roofs of the two cars parked in front of it.
* * * *
Update 16 April 2010, via a Posterous comment:
Marc Moskowitz said...
The characters are the cardinal directions and the third guy is almost certainly Laozi. I can't help with the rest, except that I think the lines on the figure in the lower left are acupuncture meridians.
* * * *
So, looking at it a bit more, Marc is right -- a Google Translate "English to Chinese" search for north, south, east, west shows 北，南，东，西, which do seem to correspond to the characters on the mural. Clockwise from the lower left then, they go north, east, south, west. That's a little weird -- western maps normally put north at the top-center, not bottom-left -- but they're in the right order, so that's fine.
Additionally, there seems to be a division in what is being shown in each half, and each quadrant, of the image. The left side, with east & north, seems to be positive things, while the right side, south & west, seems to be negative things. Additionally, the top side, east & south, seems to be external things, while the bottom side, north & west, seems to be internal things. Thus:
• The upper-left (east) has people engaged in sports and farming, blue skies, and an open eye.
• The upper-right (south) has the ashtray, a weak-looking smoker, and dark skies.
• The lower-right (west) has a weaker-looking smoker, a pair of lungs surrounded by cigarette butts, a dark background, and a crying eye.
• The lower-left (north) has a fat (?) person surrounded by plants & healthy food and an acupuncture diagram.
Here my understanding of Chinese culture & iconography gets really weak, but to a certain extent maybe this makes sense, in some weird, numerological hocus pocus way. After all, the sun rises in the east & sets in the west, so that could explain why the "east" quadrant has the nicest things, and the "west" quadrant has the saddest ones. But why north is also "good" and south is also "bad"? There I'm not sure, but I'm sure there's an explanation for it. And dividing things this way, and dividing them again, plays along with the taoist duality yin-yang thinking suggested at the middle of the painting.
I still don't totally get it, but broadly speaking it appears to be some kind of illustration of how to lead a good life -- favoring things on the left -- and avoid a bad one -- staying away from the things on the right, which mainly seem to be tobacco.
It's more memorable than a Surgeon's General warning label, I guess.