Causes and 3-year-incidence of blindness in Jing-An District, Shanghai, China 2001-2009

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Registered data can provide valuable information regarding blindness. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the main causes and 3-year incidence of registered blindness in Jing-An district in Shanghai, China.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data from the blindness registry (age, gender and cause of visual disability) were collected and analyzed. The prevalence of blindness for 2003, 2007, 2009 and the 3-year incidence of blindness were calculated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The reported blindness increased significantly from 113.7 per 100,000 in 2003 to 145.8 per 100,000 in 2006 to 165.9 per 100,000 in 2009 (P < 0.05, P < 0.05, respectively). Age significantly affects prevalence; the odd ratios (OR) were 2.57 in the 30 y - 49 y range (P < 0.001), 7.27 in the 50 y - 69 y range (P < 0.001) and 21.2 in the ≥ 70 y (P < 0.001). The 3-year incidence increased from 32.3 per 100,000 in 2001-2003 to 34.2 per 100,000 in 2004-2006 to 40.8 per 100,000 in 2007-2009. The causes of new blindness registered in 2001-2009 were myopic macular degeneration (19.4%), followed by glaucoma (17.7%), age-related macular degeneration (11.8%), optical nerve atrophy (9.4%), retinitis pigmentosa (8.6%), diabetic retinopathy (7.8%) and corneal opacity (5.8%).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The 3-year incidence and prevalence of registered blindness increased in the past 9 years. The leading causes of new blindness were myopic macular degeneration, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. The pattern of causes has changed little in the past 9 years and is different from other locations in China. The pattern is similar to that of Taiwan, Hongkong, and Western countries.</p

Images for Iconoclasts: Images of Confucius in the Cultural Revolution

Confucius died and was buried in 479 B.C.E., and he was never seen again. Or so one would think. “You may forget me as I once was,” Confucius reminds us in the Zhuangzi, but there is something unforgettable about me that will still live on. Confucius’s physical frame was concealed from sight below ground, but his body and face were not forgotten either by his followers or his detractors, each of whom remembered him (or remembered him) in different ways. People created semblances of Confucius that reflected their own visions of the past, and constructions of his body took on many lives of their own over the succeeding centuries. [excerpt

Ant Tribe

Ant Tribe describes the post-80s generation university graduates who live together in poor conditions without Social security in communities around China\u27s major metropolises. They dream of a better life in big cities but struggle with low-paying jobs. These struggling elites have become the fourth weak Social group, after peasants, migrant workers and unemployed people. The reason why these college graduates are compared to ants is that they are like ants: clever, hardworking, politically weak and living in groups. The real world is always different from the ideal world of the Ant Tribe in China. They often lose their purposes in a complex society. It is more important for them to recognize the distance between the real and imaginary in order to rethink whether it is a right choice to stay in a big city and try to realize their dreams. The intention of the Ant Tribe installation is to explore the process and concept of changing between the real and fantasy. In the installation, I hope to portray the Ant Tribe phenomenon widely and deeply from an artist\u27s perspective. The most important thing for me is using my artistic practice to investigate the power of the media over the contemporary subject in order to activate the viewers to question some Social issues regarding humanity consciousness. My artwork should be thought - provoking for them. I would like to use my visual language to convey specific Social issues to inquire how far the viewers are from their dreams. I hope they think about themselves in their complex society physically and psychologically when they go through my work

Disillusionment with Chinese culture in the 1880s : Wang Tao\u27s Three classical tales

Leading scholars of modern Chinese literature have long discussed how the May Fourth became a hegemonic force and have sought to uncover the “burdens of May Fourth”; that is, those discourses eclipsed by the May Fourth intellectuals as they promoted the goal of openness and pluralism in the New Culture Movement. They have discovered Chinese modernity in the Late Qing writings as early as the mid-nineteenth century, decades before the May Fourth movement. Particularly, some scholars have argued that features of modernity might have stemmed from indigenous genres or classical language. My study of how the West is portrayed in three classical tales written by the pioneering Late Qing thinker Wang Tao 王韜 in the 1880s contributes to this discussion. These three classical tales, “Biography of Mary” 媚梨小傳, “Travel Overseas” 海外壯遊, and “Wonderland under the Sea” 海底奇境, were first published as literary supplements in Dianshizhai Pictorial 點石齋畫報 and later reprinted in Wang Tao’s story collection Songyin manlu 淞隱漫錄. They are notable because they represent the first tales in Chinese literary history to imagine Western cities and Western women—as opposed to any other places or races or ethnicities—in a period when Chinese intellectuals had begun looking to the West for ways to modernize their nation.5 I argue that these three tales reveal signs of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture surfacing as early as the 1880s, a time when most reformers were advocating solely for technological and institutional changes. Even more interesting, modern sentiments are expressed in classical Chinese. Wang Tao utilized the traditional narrative form of the classical tale to lament the degeneration of the very civilization in which it had flourished

Power, identity and antiquarian approaches in modern Chinese art

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Following various publications by Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Wu Yi 武億 (1745-1799) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728-1804) in the 18th century, the study and collecting of rubbings of Northern Wei stone inscriptions and steles was popular. Such spread of interest in jinshi, inscriptions on metal and stone, also formed a base for studying seal carving, epigraphy and archaic painting. While traditional antiquarians would cherish inscriptions which enabled them to correct mistakes in the transmitted historical texts and the Classics, however, much of the antiquarian activity was adapted to mere literary exercise or connoisseurship, for instance, to supplying materials which could provide models for seal-carving and calligraphy. Examples could be seen in the calligraphy works and seal carvings of the Xiling bajia 西泠八家 (Eight Masters of Xiling, i.e. Hangzhou), also known as Zhe School of Calligraphy and Carving. Their keen interest in seeking inspiration from steles for their artistic presentations has been recorded in their writing and painting. In addition, the way the scholar-collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries mounted the rubbings, seals, inscriptions, paintings, letters and textual evidence studies into one album shows a changing ideology: rubbings were not only for scholarly study in classical learning, but were regarded as part of the art form and were appreciated on various social occasions. The antiquarian movement ultimately served as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China. This paper aims to address the phenomenon and formation of the jinshi painting that dominated in late Imperial and early modern China. Through case studies of three important jinshi societies in Shanghai, I will investigate in what way literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced imperial patronage which was in decline after the Qianlong emperor’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to the southern regions from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspectives in history and the history of objects

Electric Shadows (Dianying) *

Catalogue Essay on Isaac Julien's installation "Ten Thousand Waves". Probably also included in catalogue for Isaac Julien exhibition Sao Paulo Autumn 201

Out of China: Monumental Porcelain

Working collaboratively with teams of local craftsmen in a Chinese manufactory in Jingdezhen, Aylieff has explored how technologies can be adapted to produce appropriate, original and unique contemporary sculptural expressions. Her research has resulted in artworks using an extreme scale not typically associated with porcelain. During a series of residencies in Jingdezhen, Aylieff investigated local traditional ‘blue and white’ ceramic techniques, including glaze application, decorative brushwork and firing methods. This body of research was primarily presented through four exhibitions, two with associated texts. ‘Out of China: Monumental Porcelain’ was an Arts Council-funded solo exhibition of work by Aylieff. During 2008–9, the exhibition toured to three venues: Barn Gallery, West Dean; Gallery Oldham, Manchester; and Lightbox Gallery, Woking. An associated book was published with text by Aylieff and an essay by Professor Emmanuel Cooper. ‘Contemporary Craft Comes to No.10’ was a joint exhibition of work shown at No.10 Downing Street in 2011. Aylieff was one of eight leading makers whose work was selected to be shown. Porcelain City Jingdezhen, a joint exhibition by Felicity Aylieff, Roger Law, Ah Xian, and Takeshi Yasuda was shown at the V&A Museum (2011-12). The exhibition focused on the rich language and history of Chinese porcelain and present-day life in Jingdezhen through contemporary ceramic production. The publication Porcelain City Jingdezhen, which accompanied the exhibition, included an essay by Aylieff: ‘Scooters, Buddhas and water lilies’. ‘China’s White Gold’, an exhibition held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2012-13), featured eight of Aylieff’s pieces, including four monumental works. Pieces from the exhibitions were acquired by public institutions and for major international collections including the V&A; Shipley Art Gallery; York Museum, and Chatsworth House. During her residency at Jingdezhen, Aylieff was interviewed for the BBC4 television documentary Treasures of Chinese Porcelain (2011)