skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Several weeks ago I was walking to the subway from school, I was feeling pretty fine about things, even a little bit important for one reason or another (I forget now). I left my school a early and happened across the public secondary school just as classes were ending and students were milling about before going home to eat dinner and do homework. Crossing the bridge I spied four high school boys in their jogging suit uniforms eating ice cream and generally being high school boys and I knew they could see me because I could hear the disrespectful and annoying “halooo” that naturally comes out of about half of the Chinese population’s mouth every time they see a foreigner. I have lived in China for nearly six years now and I have gone through various phases of how to deal with this. I have inwardly gotten angry about it and taken it out on the general population by refusing to be polite, especially when buying something, I have ignored it, I have refused to associate with Chinese people. The easiest method, and the one I have gotten the most satisfaction from; is to say hello back. People are normally surprised because they are used to being ignored and either get sheepish or sometimes become friendly. Normally they can’t really speak English but I can speak Chinese and this reaction has even led to drinking rice wine and joy rides in police cars (with police officers of course). My farther-in-law, who is Chinese, almost got into a fight because someone said something like that when we were walking down the street. I have always had a negative side (that no one believes that I have) and this particular day I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of behavior. I was tired and busy and a couple of rude high school kids was not in my plan for making myself feel better. As I passed they said “halooo” a mocking and insidious sound to hear, and I ignored it. Another one said it and without reaction I flipped them the middle finger and didn’t break my stride as I walked away. They responded with laughter and a “fuck your mother”. At this point I felt like punching at least one of them in the teeth, I refrained, but for the rest of the walk down the street I was angry and then some. I thought of how I could tell them they were stupid, vendor’s children and they should continue to talk like that because it is appropriate for their future employment. I wanted to shame them by telling them that I had been here for six years, had helped to better the education system to give boys like them a better chance and that is how they treat people. For the rest of the evening really I was debating on the best way to handle it and it still just bothered me so much to be treated so disrespectfully. I have actually been trying to deal with my negative side properly since the new year and while I have been a Buddhist in certain practices I have wanted to take the next step and have been applying myself to mediation and study. Reciting the Buddha of Peace’s name, and questioning exactly who I am and thereby who it was that is offended. At the time of this occurrence nothing was doing me much good. Until I remembered a passage I read from a Korean monk who wrote about dealing with those that offend you. Kim Jae Woong instructs us to pray for those who offend. Ask that they become more intelligent so that they may serve the Buddha well. This will not only give one peace, it will also help develop a sense of compassion and actually help those who act in rude, help them to become intelligent enough not to be so rude. This is precisely what I did and honestly I had to do it about one hundred times before I truly felt that any good had become of it. I have been hoping to see those boys again. I have been hoping that the next time they can do it I can joke with them and tease them (in a friendly way) about their behavior. They have given me light and I wish one day to also give them some.
Photo credit: Claralastair's flickr
The above photo was taken during the Buddha's birthday in Seoul about six years ago. It was quite a big deal that day and I am fond of this photo because it seems to capture the actual moment. Often times a photo captures a moment but it is not characteristic of what was happening when the photo was taken,
take Cindy Sherman's movie stills as an example. However, this photo does, I feel it captures the event, there simultaneously solemnity and festivity. The temple was overcrowded with people but it was not the normal gawkers that turn up for a high holiday, it was an accumulation of all the people who go to the temple as a matter of lifestyle arriving on the same day. At that point of my life I was going to the temple several times a week to meditate, and my life, despite being totally out of control, had a simultaneous sense of peace. That is why I like this photo so much perhaps, the day it was taken, what is happening in the photo, and what my life was then are all the same.
Several time I attempted to make a painting of this photo, and it only worked once, then I tried to add black to my spheres and ruined it. So from here on in I will leave it a photo.
I went to a Lama temple today, in part because it is nearest to my home. In Northern China there are not so many temples and in China I have been somewhat turned off by the Buddhists. It is far more supersticious and most people are praying for things, normally money. I find the most devote Buddhists are old people (like any religion) followed by business men and then recent college grads looking for jobs. But I am bitching here and I really shouldn't, it is not my point.
Part of my reason for going to the Lama temple is because in meditation I felt I needed to go. Also Since I am ever on a quest for light I thought I might find some light, or enlight if I was really lucky. Sad to say I brought my distaste for Chinese Buddhism with me and in the end I didn't find any light, but I did find what I had been missing many times out of the year, and that was a sense of peace. Going through the inscense burning and kowtows quarantined my mind from distractions. I didn't notice the BMW's or the tourists or the college kids, I only noticed peace, my thoughts were quieted and to paraphrase David Lynch, the pool of my mind was deepened. And for the rest of the day I have been in a fine mood.
Seing as my visual art has been about light and its effects, I had the idea to look through the Bible, The Quran and other sacred texts for the word light, cut them out, and then paste them onto a canvas. My trip to the Lama temple today was a ploy to gather material and more ideas. However, God/Buddha or whoever it is calling the shots had thought otherwise.
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
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.
