The Universerse in the City

I took it upon myself to carry a school camera around last week in my ever widening effort to look for the way light shines. Thus I walked home from work with this and other locations on my mind. This is The Place (in capital because that is its name) just north of the Silk Market in east central Beijing. There is this long video screen and for sometime I watched and snapped photos of it. When I returned how and was sorting through what I took, I came across this one and thought "How delicious, this city is so big that the universe itself will fit inside of it".

In China one of the ideas I got from her (Tracy, who was visiting my school yesterday) was that artists are arguing about globalization in art and retaining Chinese-ness. There is a question about whether or not China should stick to its old way of doing things, teaching art making skills, so as not to loose it Chinese-ness. I think China is also feeling like someone is trying to take it over (China has been terrified of that since WWII) the Chinese, always very, very nationalistic, don’t want to be accused of toadying or copying other powers. I told her that China has a good system because it teaches skills but it lacks because they don’t teach anyone how to think. This is a big problem in China. This is why I am excited about punk rock here because that is the group of people in China that have had it with being told how to do things and are expressive, they may lack skills but they make up for it in creativity. The trick is how to get these programmers (computer programmers are a very avant garde group here), punk rockers and hip-hop-pers into the visual arts fold; or extend visual arts beyond, what it is right now in China, an elitist club. The articles I’ve studied about post-modernism have argued such a shift, even Andy Warhol was getting away from that as far back as the sixties, and since in China visual arts is still a select group, it is very difficult to do. We need more exhibitions like the Fuck Off exhibition at Li Liang’s gallery in 2000. This isn’t to say things have to be extreme, but they can be anything so long as its researched, expressive and done on purpose. And if we could blur the distinctions between who gets to participate in high art and who doesn't then I feel that we in China would really be creating a new idea.

Above photo is from Eastlink Gallery's Fuck Off exhibition. There is some really wild stuff there and while very little of it is salable, the exhibition was a visual success.
http://www.eastlinkgallery.cn

Day After Valentines

Not even sure what to write about but felt that it has been too much time since I've written. The students have been making collages to explore Pop Art recently and this photo comes from that, it's nice doing this stuff with them because there are some fun things that come about as a result. Andy Warhol, when asked what he does when he doesn't have ideas said he waits. I have been doing this lately, just waiting. I created a couple of drawings for play, thinking an idea will come and while I have produced a simple thing or two, nothing interesting has come about. To pass the time I've researched Japanese prints, worked on my school blog and finished carving a signature chop that I am actually pleased with. I wrote a bit about deliberate abstraction and I feel that this is where I should be moving at least I think it will break my block. There are a bunch of photographs I have wanted to return to to explore see if there is something I can abstract from there.

A building in Beijing caught fire last week. I saw some intersting fotage from the internet and I can see the biulding from my classroom. Have snapped a couple of shots of it, would have been something to actually see burn.

Well I have had an on again/off again productive week। I really think that I have gotten some creativity back lost through my long exposure to that big painting. I have completed some small things, mostly traditional Chinese painting stuff, crabs, and flowers and what not and it has been a good experience for me. I remember some techniques, and while calligraphy is still absolute shit I am getting better. I have picked up where I left off which I find somewhat off course because usually my skills deteriorate without practice and I have have not practiced in easily a year. I completed a traditional/modern piece where what I did was take an illustration of a very famous Japanese painting and recreated it on a small scale. The painting is of a section of a pine tree and the negative space is covered in gold leaf. I had complete forgotten about this style in Japanese work and had taken my gold section from some Ai Weiwei paintings I saw a few years ago. In hindsight I am remembering my trips to Japan and how the gold leaf behind the paintings and also reflect on my recent preoccupation with gold tempra paint. Perhaps it is a sign, a direction calling out to me, I think that creativity calls one in different directions and I am beginning to interpret those directions better than before. I could not say that I have my finger on it just yet, rather I cannot put into words what it is saying to me but I am beginning to understand the signs better.

That brings me to something else interesting। I was studying up on architecture last night, better to say that I was reading that huge book I brought home from school and taking notes. At first I was most interested in noting things I thought relevant or important to the field but as time progressed my reasoning went from things I found interesting and then to ways I found myself interpreting it, things that were akin my my method of thinking. This is where I realized I needed to interpret my thinking/personality style and work with my strong points. The NPR Remembrance on Andrew Wythe described him as someone who liked tough people. They then defined tough people as those who lived by their strengths and in in understanding of their weaknesses and limitations. I was taking a short, non-sleeping nap brought on by smoking a cigarette too early in the day at the time, as the words drifted through my mind and my mind wandered about I thought about that personality test I took while I was laid up. It described my personality as a scientist; a person who studies and understands situations impartially. That is really what lead to my venture into Chinese painting last week and also dropped that enormous architecture book on my lap.

Back to that; I question myself “What kind of architecture do I want to create?” I have not formed the concise answer to this yet but my general leanings are: Green - architecture that is made of local materials, allows to the occupant to adjust climate control (in northern China we do not have control), is insulated for better retention of energy, maybe some device that recycles washing machine water into the toilet - I am already doing this with shaving and washing my face। I use water in a tub and then pour it into the toilet. Also I want the architecture to reflect design styles of old and new. I am in love with the Chinese Si He Yuan a courtyard/garden house, for lack of a better description. Its main idea is that a house is not one building with rooms, it is several small buildings maybe with only one or two rooms each. How can this idea be included into new buildings? I made a poor drawing of a skyscraper enclosing a Si He Yuan last night. but that will not really work, well I guess it could but enclosing large parts of a city under other large parts of the city is kind of a novelty. It cold be done like R. Buckminster Fuller’s idea of a bubble over Manhattan. What would work is designing apartments to work in this way. Apartments that have a courtyard so to speak. An atrium where the living space, a kitchen, living room, receiving room are on the first floor an are opened to a small clutch of bedrooms. The windows could face the north and south so that adequate but not excessive light gets in. Of course one last thought is sprawl. Separated homes that accentuate the natural surroundings (which there is precious little of in Beijing but lots outside Beijing and allow for gardens and natural space. Despite the ample space outside the city the homes there are very much like the ones inside the city, all crammed together with very little personal space inside the home. But then that takes away from the green idea because there is completely insufficient infrastructure to move large amounts of people in and out of the city which would result in everyone getting cars which then would detract from the whole green aspect.

Well I suppose I have gone one long enough for today. This has been one of my better writings because instead of just telling myself what to do I have actually sharpened ideas and thought up new ones while writing. Let us hope it carries on through the rest of the day.

Mode of Expression

Just wrote a lesson plan I think is great about different art styles and how artists use their language to express their view of the world. The idea is to have the students :

1. Understand their view of the world
2. Learn about painting techniques Ab/EX, Realism, Impressionism and Pop Art
3. Create a painting that reflects their view of the world/situation in one of those styles

It is helpful for me as well because it allows me to explore these since personally I have been working in the Cold Abstraction vein the last year or so.

I did some personal brainstorming today about my work because I have been focusing on finishing a larger painting and haven't done any deep creative work lately. While sketching/writing out ideas about the moon a news report came on the BBC about telescope makers and reflective qualities. This really intrigued me and I learned about the spook fish (if I heard that correct) that has eyes that have a strong reflective surface in their eyes used to catch more light. The get this by layers of protein and cytoplasm. This immediately calls to mind Chris Offili's paintings which are so thick with varnish that the painting has several layers that are all translucent. This effect is something that I've been going for in my own work. I did accidentally twice but despite experimenting with layers of varnish and supports I haven't been able to deliberately reproduce it.

I've always been drawn to the work of Wolfgang Laib, James Turrel, Anish Kapoor because I feel their work all has that other-worldly sensation to it and I want that same kind of experience from my own. I have not yet succeeded.

Conceptualization of Personal Expression

A quick note about what follows: This is a unit I am creating for a Visual Arts class. In order to better focus the content I take the concept that I will be teaching and running it through four different criteria for understanding, or as we say at BCIS "Areas of Interaction". There is a some education vocabulary in here but it is accessible to everyone and I would like anyone to have a look and add opinoins.

Method of expression is an indication of how the artist sees the world

I.Community and Service
Different types of art art accepted and understood differently. Islam for example more or less only accepts things that are abstracted, no images of anything, it’s pattern and design. In the west and the new east the visual structure of popular culture is dominate. International students in China are in a very unique position. Chinese culture is simultaneously taking a large hold in the world and absorbing cultures from outside. China is very happy to show its ancient culture and it is interested in taking things from outside its boarders that are of scientific or cultural value. Students now are bringing their culture here to open recipients as well as being asked to accept the existing culture.

II.Health and Social Education
Visual art is generally scene as the philosophy of sight. Contemporary artists are conceptualizing and expressing what it is that we as humanity think of the world through visual mean. Art in its present tense has always done this and the students should be looking the view of the world an how that is reflected in expression. Visual arts has by and large taken a philosophical view but it has, as in the case of Dadaism and the rise of journalistic art, contemplated social issues, think of the photo journalist that captured the ship breaking series, these were simultaneously a bookmark in history, a social comment on the lives of Bangladeshis and visually appealing photos. A student’s expression could very well be a comment on not only prevailing attitudes but also the state of the world in all its complexities

Environments
The significant concept as it relates to the Environments AOI can be multi-leveled. I think particularly in the realm of time frames. As human thought has progressed, so has its means of expression. Most acute now is the difference between the previous modern view that there is angst about the blurred distinction between order and disorder, and the postmodern view that there is no difference between order and disorder and thus no angst. The students would be understanding that the modes of expression are in relation to the world view. However in the unit what I want the students to be thinking about is their own place in the world and how they can vary their expression in a way that is particular to their own environment

Human Ingenuity
Knowingly or not artists use their mode of personal expression to present what they think of the world, normally a small corner of it, what it is they see. This expression is then normally translated to the rest of the world through historians (in contemporary times gallerists and collectors). If the artist is making strong enough of an expression, then the message gets spread world wide and over time as well. It is the artist’s bold or new thought that is now influencing our behavior. In a more global sense it isn’t just one artist but the sum of what all artists are producing that influence our thinking