All posts tagged: Turkish

New Uyghur Interior Design and the Art of Dilmurat Abdukadir

On the top floor of the Aq Saray or the White Palace hotel in Ürümchi is a massive reproduction of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. He is flanked on his left by a reproduction of Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (which everyone associates with Anna Karenina). Across the expansive red room, otherwise decorated in the style of a Russian tea room, gigantic reproductions of Venetian canals and cityscapes fill out the walls. Overhead murals of clouds, star constellations, and pheasants in flight glow against the ornate heavy white archways that surround them. The paintings are the works of Dilmurat Abdukadir– who was hired by the owner of the restaurant to produce life-sized images of paintings the owner had found on the Internet. The space is fascinating. Not only does it unapologetically embrace an amalgam of European aesthetics, but it is symptomatic of larger trends in Uyghur restaurant politics and aesthetics. Somewhere around 2008, scholars began to notice that Turkish imports were on the rise in Xinjiang. Suddenly chocolates from the massive …

Möminjan, Turkish Pop, and Islamic Devotion

Beginning with the very first cassette tape he released in 1999, Möminjan has been popular with young people. One of the main ways people experience music in the city is in nightclubs where the music envelopes the tight confines of a room and the pageantry of moving to the beat with friends and strangers comes to life. Uyghurs can dance. And Möminjan’s songs were eminently danceable. Not only is his voice remarkable similar to his uncle Abdulla, but Möminjan is a suave performer. He’s likeable. Even in his early days when he was still studying archaeology at Xinjiang University, his fellow classmates elected him president of the student club of his institute. Möminjan’s path as a musician has diverged from other performers in interesting ways. Unlike other young singers who made it big, he has not tried to cross over to a popular Chinese audience. He doesn’t even sing Chinese translations of traditional or “red” folk songs. Instead, beginning in 2003 he began to sing in the Uzbek and Turkish style. Möminjan’s goal in doing …