Polonia Global Fund

KUALA LUMPUR — Sixteen Malaysian, Singaporean and French artists are putting their artistic works on display at a weeklong exhibition at the Soka Gakkai Malaysia here.

The “Pont de Arts” exhibition, which was opened by French Ambassador to Malaysia Jacques Lapouge Sunday, showcases 66 art works by the artists, who all studied at the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts Paris.

The exhibition is the fourth in a series but is the first involving French artists. Previous exhibitions were held in Singapore, Paris and Kuala Lumpur.

Three French artists — Francois Bardez, Michel Herbin and Dominique Thibault — are showcasing their works.

The Malaysian artists taking part in the exhibition include Tan Tong, Tew Nai Tong, Foo Loh Sang and Lim Kim Hai.

Pont des Arts 2002 chairman Tan Tong, in his welcoming address, said the exhibition was aimed at promoting closer ties among countries through art and cultural exchanges.

“I hope this exhibition will bring closer relations among artists from different countries to interact and foster better global friendly ties in art and culture in this new millennium,” he said.

Lapouge, in his speech, also hoped the exhibition would pave the way for closer relationships and cultural exchanges between the three countries.

“Faced with the new challenges of globalization, the existence of such a multicultural event is particularly precious,” he said.

He said the participation of French painters would give more significance to the event and contribute to increased intellectual and artistic exchanges among the Malaysian, Singaporean and French people.

France has always been a country that is rich in art, and in the early 20th century Paris was the centre of the art world.

Pont des Arts or the Bridge of Arts is located near the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, which links the centre of France’s great science and art academies, the Institute of France, and the world renowned museum of Louvre, where the famous painting Mona Lisa is housed.

The exhibition is open to the public from noon to 6pm until Dec 8.

Martin-Gropius-Bau, Niederkirchnerstrasse 7, Berlin, until February 9, 2003. Tel: +49-30-254 860.

Think of the early 20th-century avant-garde, and the great names rise up like Poseidon from the waves: Picasso, Tzara, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Le Corbusier. By the 1940s, in western Europe, these pioneers’ work had become a common standard for artists, the new orthodoxy: the shock of the new had mutated into an established order. To challenge it, you had to go further west: to New York. Abstract Expressionism was America’s response to the European avant-garde’s inevitable ossification. This momentous shift of energy across the Atlantic of course carried with it many innovative Europeans: Arshile Gorky, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy. The latter, a Hungarian, featuring prominently in a new exhibition at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau, provides a perfect template for this migratory tendency.

Born in 1895, Moholy-Nagy settled in Germany in 1920 and became a leading light in the Bauhaus movement. By the late 1920s, he was in Berlin, embracing the Weimar capital’s vibrant taste for cross-disciplinary experimentation: he was draughtsman, typographer, photographer, stage designer, teacher. As the creativity of old Europe crumbled, Moholy-Nagy moved west, first to Amsterdam, then London – where he designed posters for London Transport and worked for film-maker Alexander Korda – and, in 1937, ended up in Chicago. His attempt to keep the Bauhaus School alive there lasted only a year, but until his death in 1946, he exerted considerable influence on American design. !Avantgarden! gathers together numerous works – furniture, objets, photos, drawings, paintings – from sources hidden in a once closed Europe, the Soviet zone, and shows how fertile, inventive and widespread the interwar avant-garde was.

Famous east Europeans – Moholy-Nagy – and many relatively unknown ones – Sándor Bortnyik (Hungary), Josef Sima (Czechoslovakia), Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Poland) – are stars of the show. What unites them? Berlin, for one: Europe’s most explosive pre-Nazi capital acted as a magnet for many an inquiring mind and febrile talent, above all from the east. The expressionist magazines Der Sturm and Die Aktion played a significant part around the time of the first world war in bringing artists from diverse cultures into contact. One of the virtues of this detailed exhibition is to remind us that Weimar Berlin wasn’t all about Marlene Dietrich, Cabaret and Nazis. Another unifying factor was the group or movement, with, usually, a recondite name: Dada, de Stijl, cubism – these are familiar. Skupina and Devetsil from Prague, the Bunt and formists from Poland, Zenitism from Zagreb and the Vienna Kineticists are not, and again it is one of the great strengths of this exhibition to present a new genealogy of the avant-garde, a new vocabulary – new languages even, in publications and typography.

So what of the art? As so often in the avant-garde, ideas can become top-heavy, with the “thingness” of an object, its physicality, seeming unrealized or elusive. Much of the painting here is second-rate, though it is striking to see how cubism as practiced by a number of Czech artists – Josef Capek, Ottokar Kubn, even a painter called Bohumil Kubista – flourished just as Picasso and Braque were working it out in its most austere form hundreds of kilometers to the west. Indeed, there’d been an important cubist exhibition in Prague in 1912. In Hungary, meanwhile, the Budapest activists were energized by a magazine called Ma (Today), and by artist and writer Lajos Kassák, who propounded something called “picture architecture”, several elegant examples of which are on show here. A Mitteleuropaisch brand of surrealism is suggested by the precise and witty canvasses of Sándor Bortnyik, a kind of Hungarian de Chirico: his “The New Adam” and “The New Eve” of 1924 are amongst the show’s liveliest pictures.

Throughout the eleven rooms, a drive for abstraction is uppermost. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of a fellow-traveler of Moholy-Nagy’s, the Russian El Lissitzky. In the 1920s, the two were hotly competitive – both were in Germany – though in the end El Lissitzky took the route back eastwards, geographically and ideologically the opposite of the Hungarian’s (El Lissitzky died in Moscow in 1940). His adherence to communism was underpinned by utilitarian ideals, a belief that “space is not there only for the eyes one wants to live in it”. El Lissitzky brought Russian constructivism into this middle European artistic dance and gave it a straight back. His work is also very beautiful; no surprise, then, that one of the most visually satisfying things in this show is his “Proun Room” (“Proun” standing for “Project for the Affirmation of the New”), a box whose interior walls are decorated, in 3-D, with his characteristic uncluttered designs and geometric forms. The original structure was lost during the Nazi years, so this is a reconstruction; as indeed, in a sense, is the entire exhibition – a formidable act of archaeology, recovering vanished fragments from an old world that worshipped the new.

By James Woodall

Recorded HIV/AIDS cases are growing at an astonishing rate in southern Africa and the deadly virus is threatening the manpower of the world’s poorest countries. What can the UNAIDS program do to battle the spreading consequences of this global problem?

It is no coincidence that the six southern African nations that now face the prospect of mass famine — Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — also have substantial and still growing HIV epidemics, with between one sixth and one third of their populations infected. In southern Africa, famine and AIDS are, in fact, directly related. Addressing the links between hunger, disease, lack of education and war is vital to long-term solutions to humanitarian emergencies. The world’s most serious health problems, including HIV/AIDS, are deeply connected to the violence and poverty that shackle hundreds of millions of people around the world.
In observance of this week’s commemoration of World AIDS Day, UNAIDS (the joint UN program on HIV/AIDS) has released new data showing that 3.1 million people died of AIDS this year. Five million were infected with HIV over the course of the year and 42 million men, women and children are now living with the virus.

But what do these numbers mean? What happens when 42 million people in the prime of their lives become ill, the great majority of them unable to access any kind of treatment?

AIDS is combining with other factors — including droughts, floods and in some cases shortsighted national and international policies — to cause a steady fall in agricultural production in Africa. An AIDS-related death in a farm household causes crop output to plummet – often by up to 60 percent. Household incomes also shrink, leaving people with less money to buy food. Multiply that by millions and famine is not far behind. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 7 million agricultural workers in 25 severely affected African countries have died from AIDS since 1985. A 2002 study in central Malawi has shown that about 70 percent of surveyed households had suffered labor losses due to sickness.

Women in agricultural societies, who perform the bulk of duties related to household food production and care, have been particularly hard hit. When caring for a sick husband, the amount of time a wife has available for tasks such as planting, harvesting and marketing drops up to 60 percent. When the male head of household dies, she may find herself denied access to necessities such as credit, distribution networks or land rights. When she becomes ill or dies, the household often collapses completely — leaving orphans to fend for themselves without schooling or the skills to carry on food production. More than 11 million African children have now lost one or both parents to AIDS.

UN agencies are mobilizing to address the famine in southern Africa, and have launched a joint appeal for more than US$600 million in assistance, including more than US$500 million in food aid. This critically needed assistance may alleviate the symptoms. But as UN Special Envoy James Morris notes, the “dramatic impact of HIV/AIDS on the humanitarian situation in southern Africa is not fully appreciated.” The scale and severity of the impact of AIDS makes swift recovery unlikely. And because the food crisis intensifies and prolongs the epidemic — as insecurity heightens risk, and poor nutrition hastens illness — HIV/AIDS responses must also be significantly stepped up.

This epidemic is not only about Africa, or famine. On every continent, AIDS is traveling along social fault lines and exploiting weakness, hurting both lives and economies. HIV infections increased by 25 percent in Eastern Europe and Central Asia this year. Infections in Asia jumped by 10 percent. Together in India and China, well over 5 million people are now living with HIV, and nearly 2 million are infected in the Caribbean and Latin America. In Indonesia, where there was virtually no injecting drug use 10 years ago, about a quarter of the country’s estimated 200,000 needle drug users are now infected with HIV.

One of the best things we can do now to safeguard economic and human development in the future is to invest heavily in alleviating the impact of the epidemic, extending access to care and scaling up proven HIV prevention efforts. We know that when prevention programs are mounted seriously, they work. Along with sustained drops in HIV rates in Uganda, prevention efforts are beginning to bear fruit among young people in Ethiopia, South Africa and Zambia. Prevalence is leveling off in Cambodia and the Dominican Republic. Countries as different as Senegal and Poland have demonstrated that the combination of leadership and community involvement can keep the epidemic at bay.

Scaling up global spending on 12 proven prevention strategies to US$4.8 billion per year by 2005 would save 29 million people from HIV infection by the decade’s end. When the immediate needs for HIV-related care and treatment are added, the required annual spending directly on AIDS in low and middle income countries is US$10.5 billion. This year, spending will be less than US$3 billion. And the more we delay making a proper investment in the AIDS fight, the more the eventual costs will escalate.

Perhaps for the first time, southern Africa’s famine brings the world face-to-face with the true scale of the consequences of AIDS. With 5 million new HIV infections globally this year alone, if we do not dramatically increase action against AIDS, we will be sowing the seeds of future humanitarian disasters — and not only in southern Africa.

The region is luring foreign R&D investment not just with low costs but with quality scientists and technicians

At a trade show on mobile-phone technology in Cannes, France, last February, Finland’s Nokia showed off what the next generation of wireless systems might do using its “all-IP architecture.” That’s a sophisticated body of software that could allow mobile networks to deliver voice and data — from maps and spreadsheets to photos and videos — to the wireless gizmo in your pocket at speeds rivaling today’s broadband Internet connections.

While Nokia execs took the credit, a group of programmers in Hungary were quietly feeling very satisfied. Most of the work on the new platform was done not in Finland, but at Nokia’s R&D site in Budapest, where nearly 400 engineers toil on software projects.

Nokia isn’t alone in drawing from Eastern Europe. From startup software houses to multinationals developing new industrial technologies and applications, several foreign investors are tapping the region’s abundant brainpower. That’s critical for the eight formerly communist countries headed for European Union membership by the end of 2004. Since the Berlin Wall fell, foreign investment has been the life blood of the new economies that emerged from the old Soviet Bloc.

MOVING UP. But the investment landscape is changing. Wages are rising fast, and that means manufacturing and assembly will gradually play a smaller role in sustaining these economies. Across the region, officials and economists are chanting the same mantra: We’ve got to move up the value chain. “This is a serious challenge for these economies,” says Tomas Vyskocil, an economic analyst for Czech brokerage Wood & Co. “They’ve got to start contributing higher value-added.”

And these countries are off to a good start. Because education, especially in science and mathematics, remained solid through the communist era, several nations already have a track record of producing highly valued research and development. New investors are now harnessing it for the private sector. In telecom R&D, Nokia is joined by Ericsson in Hungary and Seimens in the Czech Republic. American high-tech giant Honeywell has one of its six R&D centers in Prague.

Pharmaceutical companies are also active. GlaxoSmithKline has scientists working on new drugs in Poland, and Novartis has made an offer to buy Slovenian drugs group Lek, partly because of its strength in developing new products.

SPROUTING WILDLY. Then there’s General Electric. In the conglomerate’s lighting division, Hungarian scientists are working to improve the use of materials like tungsten and phosphorous and boost technologies used in fluorescent lamps. GE Medical Systems has invested in an R&D center in Budapest that specializes in the technology behind diagnostics equipment like x-ray machines and MRIs.

The R&D crowd isn’t just Western multinationals, either. Small to midsize foreign-backed software developers that handle outsourced programming projects have sprouted wildly across the region. Even Indian software house Tata, which usually draws business to the subcontinent, has hired about 60 programmers at a new office in Budapest.

R&D costs in Eastern Europe are, like manufacturing costs, lower than in the West. But that plays a smaller role in the corporate decisions to invest. For one, the cost gap is narrowing with the West. According to Risto Enbusko, head of Nokia’s R&D center in Budapest, software engineers in Eastern Europe come at only a 10% to 20% discount to their Western European counterparts. And with so much at stake, corporations that rely on R&D tend not to squeeze costs there like they do in production. “It’s not about cheap labor. We opened an R&D center in 2001 in Mountain View, Calif. It’s about quality engineers,” says Enbusko.

DIMINISHED EDGE? Can Eastern Europe keep this ball rolling? Some are worried when they look to the future. Jan Svejnar, a Czech native and professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, says while most sectors in Eastern Europe have been restructured over the last decade, education has been badly neglected. As a result, the best young teachers and graduate students are increasingly going abroad or to the private sector. “This edge we have will be diminished, and we won’t be generating the next generation of qualified young people unless there’s reform,” he says.

But it’s not just about colleges’ lack of money. In addition to investment, Svejnar believes Eastern European universities need competition to improve their offerings. He recommends accrediting more private and foreign universities. That will frighten those who are running state universities, but it’s a small price to pay to keep investors on the prowl for the best minds in the East.

By Christopher Condon in Budapest

As advertisers continue to digest the 2000 Census data that show America is increasingly a multicultural melting pot, more dollars are being shifted away from general market budgets to those targeting Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans.

According to a new survey done by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 72% of advertisers are now specifically targeting the multicultural marketplace. It also indicates marketers are being most aggressive about going after Hispanic dollars. With a rapidly growing population that has attractive qualitative statistics and a typically larger household size, many companies see a marketplace that has still been virtually untapped. According to the ANA, 70% are specifically targeting Hispanics, followed by 59% for African Americans, and 27% for Asian Americans.

Marketing and advertising executives are also tapping the burgeoning media market targeting various ethnic groups in their native languages, the ANA research found. To reach the multicultural groups, the survey finds buyers are most often counting on targeted television (76%); followed by targeted print (76%); targeted radio (68%); sponsorships (57%); and grassroots efforts (56%), running mainstream advertising on “ethnic” programs (39%); out of home in ethnic neighborhoods (39%); targeted newspaper (35%); and targeted online (35%).

For those targeting a small demographic subset, nearly half of the respondents to the ANA survey felt that their mainstream agency is not capable of creating an effective multicultural campaign for their product. It is no surprise then that nearly eight-in-ten use a boutique agency to craft a more targeted message.

“The survey results confirm what ANA members have been telling us. Multicultural marketing and advertising is a key priority,” said ANA president/CEO John Sarsen.

The one a caveat is that numbers remain small. The survey shows an average of $4 million, or just 8% of the total advertising budget, being spent to target a specific group. That may change, however, as over half (54%) expect to increase the amount of the budget that is move into the multicultural ad budget, with another 26% saying they plan to keep it at roughly the same level. The small number (6%) that expect their multicultural marketing budget to decrease say their limited ad budget simply does not afford them the opportunity to expand their message.

It was the top complaint cited by 39% of those surveyed. Among their other concerns were the lack of market research on the particular ethnic segments and the inability of top management to commit to such ad campaigns.

© By Frank Saxe