There's room for both traditional China and contemporary China at the China Festival in Berlin.

Yu He, a 43-year-old master of Peking Opera costumes from Beijing Peking Opera Theatre, represents the traditional side.

Yu has traveled abroad with the theatre's performing artists many times. He makes sure every performer is properly dressed.

In the past few days, he's been readying mannequins at the gallery of Saalbau Neukolln in southern Berlin for the Peking Opera Costume Exhibition.

To Yu and his colleagues, dressing up mannequins in Peking Opera costumes and having them displayed around the world is one way to preserve and continue the traditional opera genre, and, in a broader sense, traditional Chinese culture.

Yu takes his job seriously.

"I told him few in the audience would notice any differences," said Zhang Zhongwu, set designer from the Beijing Peking Opera Theatre. "But he just tells me to re-do the job, saying: 'It doesn't look right.' "

It takes couple of hours, or even longer, for Yu, Zhang and Dong Shihua, the make-up assistant, to finish one job.

At one point in the mannequin preparations, Yu asked Zhang and Dong to help him put an embroidered red robe on the mannequin.

"Now that touch makes the mannequin look more like Zhong Kui (a prominent male role in Peking Opera similar to the humpback in Le Notre Dame)," Yu said after tying a cotton belt around the mannequin.

Their work has won the admiration of Wendy Wallis, an American who has lived in Germany for nine years and who works on the exhibition with the gallery in Saalbau.

As one of the first viewers of the Peking Opera Costumes Show, which opened on Wednesday, Wallis was immediately drawn to the costumes, make-up and ornaments that Yu and his colleagues worked on.

"It's so beautiful, so dramatic," she said.

Wallis has seen very short takes of Peking Opera and has heard some arias before. But this time, she had a chance to see the behind-the-scenes preparations.

"The costumes are not in one piece; they are one layer upon another layer," she said. "They are so intricate and involve so much thought and handwork."

Kung fu performances

Wallis is not the only one fascinated by traditional Chinese art.

Quite a few local Germans have been excited about the China Fest. Not only does it offer them an opportunity to see, taste and try Chinese things, but it offers them the chance to show off their own mastery of Chinese culture as well.

Meng Tao, a teacher from the Wushu (kung fu) Department of Capital College of Physical Education in Beijing, was hardly surprised when different teams of young Germans demonstrated their skills on stage after her team members finished performing.

One of the teams was led by Martin Brucks, 30, a self-acclaimed kung fu master. He founded the School of Chinese Martial Arts more than four years ago and has attracted 86 students between the ages of five and 46.

His own fascination with kung fu started 15 years ago when he joined a martial arts show. He was lucky to meet a Chinese martial arts teacher and went through systematic training with the master for several years. Brucks has also visited Hong Kong 13 times for further training.

"His team members have mastered a lot of the basics, and their performance is pretty good," Meng said.

There are at least four kung fu schools in Berlin. The most recent one to open - the Shaolin Martial Arts School - is said to have some contacts with the Shaolin Martial Arts School in Central China's Henan Province.

One of the other schools is run by Lee Hong-tai, an overseas Chinese who emigrated from Indonesia to Germany many years ago. Lee has 150 students, including Turkish, Chinese, Russians and Germans.

Michael Rooder, 33, a piano tuner, has studied with Lee for a few years. Roder said he started with taichi (taiji) to improve his health. When he did improve his health, he began to learn other skills, too.

"While learning taiji and kung fu, I feel I am training my patience as well," Rooder said. "When I began with kung fu, the practice showed me how far I've come in taiji."

For Rooder, piano tuning and kung fu are, of course, completely different. "But meditation in taiji does have something to do with the piano tunes," he said.

Alexander Rohnsch, 20, a college student majoring in computer science, also studied kung fu for a year. "It was fun, and I learned much more about me and my body," he said.

Contemporary China

But people like Mechthild, a freelance writer for local radio stations, want to know what China is like today. "I am not interested in traditional China; I am interested in modern China, in China's coming to the world," she said.

For them, the "Living in Time" exhibition, which is now open at Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum fur Gegenwart, in northern Berlin, allows them to share the experiences of 29 contemporary Chinese artists and listen to their avant-garde reflections of life in China.

"These works are both typical and atypical of China," said Hou Hanru, an overseas Chinese artist who worked as one of the three curators for the "Living in Time" show. "That's because the 29 artists represent different generations and have had personal experiences different from one another."

In the past, Hou said, Chinese artworks were one-dimensional in their depictions of life in China. But today, life is so diversified that "it's difficult to paint a single Chinese face," he said.

Gabriele Knapstein, another curator of the show, said it was wonderful to gather the works of so many contemporary Chinese artists.

"They have very strong and convincing ideas in their works," she said. "Theirs are intense reflections of daily life in China."

For Peter-Klaus Schuster, PhD, director-general of the museum groups in Berlin, the contemporary Chinese artists have opened a direct dialogue with their colleagues in Berlin and in Europe.

"China has entered the world not only in the economic sense but in the art sense as well," he said.

Contemporary Chinese artists have been criticized for their tendency to look to the West for inspiration and idioms. "But Western artists have always looked to Oriental art for inspiration, too," Schuster said.

He believes that when each side studies the opposite way, they can succeed. "Art without dialogue would be very dull," he said.

(China Daily 09/23/2001)