Transference and Creation of Naxi Traditional Culture through Modern and Global Processes.
Peggy Powell Dobbins, Ph.D
Retired sociologist, artist and art curator
Ph.D. 1974 Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Michael Dobbins, FAIA, AICP
Male, U.S.A.
Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning
M.Arch. Yale School of Architecture, ‘65
Georgia Institute of Technology
Hu Ying
How a Naxi anthropologist, a Han middle school principal, and a volunteer cyber diplomat produced exhibitions in 3 U.S. museums and the publication of an illustrated Naxi Genesis myth in English verse without leaving Kunming. The report is from an American sociologist and artist, who after a casual but stimulating conversation with Professor Guo dalie and the artist Gao Feng, promised, “This must be seen in the U.S.” It will include academically humbling and artistically inspiring observations from the experience, with general application to our ignorance of what is lost and appreciation of what has been acquired transcribing, transliterating, translating, interpreting sacred truths from one culture to another to another etc. over time and space. In the course of transferring a Han calligrapher’s use of Dongba symbols to encourage Chinese children to appreciate Naxi traditional culture, I created dialectic didactic art
I attributed to the Karankawa, the extinct Native American people whose culture was eradicated where I live in Texas, and this has influenced other Anglo American and Mexican American artists to organize a new exhibition of Gao Feng’s Worship Heaven in conjunction with the American art it has inspired. Images from Gao Feng’s illustrated interpretations of Naxi myths and from the American artists inspired by it will be included in the presentation. The paper is submitted by Peggy Dobbins, the sociologist and artist involved, Michael Dobbins, the architect who designed the first Gao Feng exhibition and the funding for it, and Hu Ying, who managed the internet communications and translated Gao Feng’s Chinese text, which Dobbins edited into the English poem.
