Posted Oct 17, 2014, 5:45 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Posts: 2,312
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More cynics 
And just love cultural elites who are against "pipelines" eating up money from the Chinese national oil company.
Quote:
Forbidden City announcement as much about business as art and culture
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson illustrated the growing ties between Vancouver and China by speaking Mandarin at Monday’s news conference announcing a Chinese art show that will be shown here next year.
The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors will be exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery starting next October.
Robertson, who has been tutored in the Chinese language, welcomed those in attendance and highlighted the close connections between Vancouver and China.
“The Forbidden City exhibit is a great example of our friendship,” he said in Mandarin.
As the mayor spoke, Fang Zhi smiled and nodded in approval. He’s the executive vice-president of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, the Chinese-government-owned company that recently bought Calgary-based Nexen Energy in a $15-billion takeover.
CNOOC is contributing $1 million to bring the exhibition to Vancouver. The oil giant has made its presence known in the cultural sector nationally, including with a $1.5-million donation to the Calgary public library.
While most news conferences announcing new gallery exhibitions feature artists and curators, Monday’s event had a business flavour and was attended by a high-powered roster of politicians, business leaders and philanthropists.
“We are bound by our ties to China, by our deep friendship with China, by our history which has been made so much by Chinese immigrants here in British Columbia and Vancouver,” Premier Christy Clark said at the news conference.
Clark noted that she had already visited the Forbidden City once and will return to the palace later this year as part of a trade delegation to Asia.
Robertson is also China-bound — he told the crowd that he will be part of the largest ever Vancouver-led business and cultural mission to China in early November. The delegation will visit Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and include executives from more than 18 companies, along with 130 Chinese-Canadian community leaders who represent Vancouver’s sister-city ties with Guangzhou.
Contributing $500,000 to the Forbidden City exhibition at the VAG is philanthropy heavy-hitter Robert H.N. Ho, founder of the Hong Kong-based Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, who also attended the news conference. In 2009, Ho’s foundations gave $15 million to the Robert H.N. Ho Research Centre on prostate and ovarian cancer at the Vancouver General Hospital. In 2011, his family foundation gave another $10 million to Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver toward building a mental health and addiction centre scheduled to open next year.
And, perhaps most significantly for the Vancouver Art Gallery — which is looking to raise millions for a new art gallery — Ho’s family foundation gave nearly $10 million to the Guggenheim Museum in New York to encourage a global understanding of Chinese art.
Ho’s family foundation has been actively supporting initiatives about The Forbidden City as the best preserved and largest imperial palace in the world. They include funding two exhibitions and a publication series of nine books and maps, along with a documentary film and TV documentary series.
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