American idols

Guests invited to the Independence Day celebration at the new US Embassy last week might not know what to make out of the compound. It's ultra-modern, yet it has a whiff of traditional China in it. The earth tone and the narrow passageways are reminiscent of a Beijing hutong. A smattering of bamboo and a lotus pond are faintly southern China.

Sitting on a 4-hec block in northeastern Beijing, the embassy looks very serious and does not call attention to itself - this in a city where new edifices scream "look at me".

The self-effacing opening on August 8, 2008, coinciding with the opening of the Beijing Olympics, adds to its low profile. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP, Architects (SOM) of San Francisco, with landscape by Peter Walker and Associates of Berkeley, California, it broke ground on May 28, 2004, and cost $434 million.

The interconnected five buildings house 30-some US federal agencies with a total of almost 1,000 employees. The half-million-sq-f floor space, including offices, marine security guard quarters and a parking and utility structure, is surrounded by landscaped ground, and outside it, a perimeter wall typical of government compounds in Beijing.

What turns this government building alive is the objects d'art on display throughout the compound. They are traditional; they are abstract; they are muted; they are colorful; they are invariably thought-provoking.

Twenty-eight artists from the US and China, some Chinese-Americans, fused two cultures in imaginative and infinite formations.

Using media as diverse as painting, sculpture, drawings, works on paper, installation, mixed media and photography, these artists looked to nature as their muse and strove to create something called "landscapes of the mind".

The objects are not meant to be faithful replicas of what existed in nature, but nature as contemplated and transformed by inquisitive and stylistic eyes and hands.

They are nature expanded by the mind. And in this process of expanding and transcending, they reach the point where East and West no longer exist in dichotomy, but merged into one.

Next time you visit the new US Embassy in Beijing, check out the art collection. It'll make strictly business slightly more fun.

The Monkeys (top)

There is a folk tale in China about a group of monkeys forming a chain by locking arms and tails and reaching down to capture the moon as reflected in a pond. The installation in the consular section consists of four such "chains". The Monkeys is the word "monkey" in a dozen different languages, abstractly shaped like monkeys.

Expatriate Chinese artist Xu Bing, a Chongqing native raised in Beijing, created this suspended sculpture in 2001 for the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, where it remains on permanent display. The piece, of which the embassy has a replica, was presented by the family of Madame Chiang Kaishek in commemoration of her historic visits to the Joint Session of Congress in 1943 and her return to the US Capitol in 1995.