To all who have been wondering where i have been – apologies if i haven’t been visiting blogs – gah….got murdered by one final exam and there is still one more exam to go. so  i will return in full force next week! love to all {v} and thanks for visiting

as promised, here is my updated blog on jap art with pictures!

dang. the cable modem connection at home is down…i can’t update stuff much until after it comes back on and my exams end! back in a week’s time

here’s the weblog that i really wanted to do – will add to it with my xanga premium when i can get to a computer with explorer!

i’m studying for the final exam for my japanese art class and i have these vivid images in my mind, vestigal visions of wonderful works of art that express japanese aesthetic sensibilities.

i love yamato-e or japanese style paintings for their rich decorative quality. The Lotus Sutra done by the Heike Clan as a means of gaining good karma during the time of Mappo (Decline of the buddhist law) is one of my particular favorites. the emphasis on the decorative elements, flatness of the picture and the arrangement of forms to yield a pleasing array of positive and negative spaces on the surface of the sutra is only the beginning of what makes this object a timeless piece of art. the rich colors and use of gold leaf contribute to a sense of lushness and beauty, so much that my eyes keep straying from what they are supposed to be reading and instead dwell on this dream made tangible.

on the other end of the spectrum, i love too the japanese aesthetics of sabi and wabi, respectively, the beauty of worn and rustic things and the worship of poverty, principles of appreciation developed by the 16th century artist Sen no Rikyu. He opposed blatant vulgarity of wealth and instead stressed simplicity of expression. His tea-room at Honen-in is the result of his teachings: the interior walls are dark, worn and burnished, and straw peeks through areas which were deliberately left unplastered to give a sense of rusticness. the entrance to the tea room is small and half the normal height of a door, forcing visitors to crawl through it, so as to make people show respect and modesty, and also to prevent people from bringing weapons into the room. although i have never been there, it is esay to see that it is a place of simple pleasures meant to free the mind from the constant preoccupation with material things.

i love the teabowls that exhibit this aesthetic too – it’s such as sensuous experience holding it in your hands, feeling the crevices and textures on the body of the bowl, appreciating the subtle play of colors that play below the surface of the tea, and taking in the bitter fresh smell of powdered tea. ahhh…..just thinking about this makes me very relaxed….
the top bowl is Moichimitsu which means ‘without a thing’, by Sasaki Chojiro. The lower image is of Fujisan, Mt Fuji, by Honami Koetsu. Can you see Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak?

i promise to update this part later with pictures! lemme get my damned exams over with!!! gahhhh@!!!!!

so slope day passed with lotsa fun in the sun, no passing out, but i did gain a nice tan – i no longer look pale and sickly…! my friends came up and we spent some time enjoying glorious spring weather as the sun slowly set in a blaze of molten gold beyond the sleepy hills that lay stretched out along the shores of the lake.
for one glorious moment, we talked of silly things that mattered not in life, of moles, of bras and body shapes, and for a precious while, became ordinary kids enjoying the prime of our lives, drunk on the soft winds and jeweled laughter filling the air.

so few of these moments before i have to grow up and leave them behind….

OUT ON THE SLOPE

This friday marks the end of classes for the academic year. to celebrate this, my school has an annual ritual or rite called Slope Day, where everyone goes out on this big slope in the middle of campus and gets sloshed

yep.as you can imagine, this is not a pretty site :100s and 1000s of college students getting tipsy and then stone drunk on a hot spring day. there is streaking and lots of drunken hooking up involved……all rather amusing actually. if you are stone sober and come across this event, it is really a disgusting thing. my professor tells me this all the time, and i know that by the time i am his age, i’ll be of the same mindset. the trick to it all though, so i have discovered, is to not only get tipsy enough such that the smells and sights do not repulse you, but also to spend it in good company with good friends such that the tipsiness is confined, at least in your perspective, to your one little group. i didn’t do this in freshman year, so Slope Day was gaaaaahhhhhh.

But Slope Day is fun, otherwise why would we continue this inane tradition year after year? – you can make your fun out of anything, provided you know how to. Slope Day has to be done in a group. drinking is no fun by yourself – it is downright miserable. the main and original purpose of alcohol consumption is to relax oneself and therefore facilitate social interactions. getting stone drunk, whether to forget stuff or because you think it is cool really doesn’t work. you feel physically horrible after that. believe me….i was definitely not miss universe material the day after i got drunk.

Slope Day is about having good fun with friends - we go through a tonne of homework in the academic year and bitch about classes so much that it this last day of classes becomes the collective steam valve. not that it justifies this binge-drinking, but then, it is fun for having fun’s sake, something that we rarely get to do as this world becomes increasingly fast-paced. it is a sophomoric (sophomore, Greek: sophos = wise, moron = fool) event of epic proportions, and like its definition, it is a crazy thing to do while i am young and able to make mistakes, recover easily and learn from them. but even then, when i do go out to make mistakes, especially in this case, i am glad to have my friends with me – it’s so much better to trust your well-being to people who care for me , in the same way i do for them.

CHEERS!

ooooh! this new premium feature in xanga is cool

all this spellchecking and fonts and things….all this reminds me of things that have been on my mind after i had been studying econ.

i was thinking of how to break monopolies. Probably the idea has existed in theory for quite a while, but it’s just something at the top of my mind right now so i wanna blog about it for blogging’s sake, plus, i get to play with the new features!.

Using miKrowsoft just for discussion’s sake: let’s assume that it has a total monopoly in the market of operating systems. how on earth do you break that stranglehold in theory (this is all very basic and i haven’t really thought it through, so there is bound to be holes in my reasoning) ?

To achieve this, mebbe the following things could be done:

• find out the flaws in the OS
  
• find out the programming behind the OS etc and how software is programmed to be compatible with it
  
• come out with your own OS that improves on these flaws and is compatible with the majority of existing software
  
• enter the market with a niche group and market agressively – you must have very very generous seed and venture capitalists to compete with miKrowsoft

so anyway, those are the overly-simplistic seeds of my ramblings amid the overgrown tangle of my mind. maybe i’ll think about it a bit more and refine it one day.

boy….that is one long post…..

How to look at Non-western Art

i’m not going to talk about all western art but instead use chinese art as a means to express my ideas as i am most familiar with chinese art. the issues i raise in this blog, while incoherent…are applicable, i believe to the art of all cultures. so bear with this long blog! it’s inspired by ZaraD’s question as to “why wouldn’t chinese artists keep on painting women in a chinese style” –

well, there are many Chinese artists who upon exposure to Western art methods, imitate them wholesale without thought – there is a lot of bad chinese art out there , believe me!

plus, alot of westerners, upon exposure to modern era chinese art, tend to think of it as mere derivation from western art traditions and so dismiss that art without first attempting to understand how the artists think and express themselves. thus my questions were somewhat very unconsciously aimed at emphasising this “chineseness”.

still, there is also very good chinese art out there that looks very western by most definitions. if i hadn’t known the facts beforehand, i would have attributed a few of these pieces to some famous contemporary artists. for example, one of zhu wei’s paintings of a man dressed in a mao jacket ( i can only find the lithograph version here) looks very much like the portraits of francesco clemente’s at first glance i.e. the large eyes and angular features. but the subject matter is totally different. this portrait by zhu wei is also an anomaly in his oeuvre, but it is nonetheless a beautiful piece of work that retains its own identity once you begin to think about the subject matter and means of execution. 

other works by other artists seem totally devoid of the chinese cultural context, and are hence thought of as derivative. but one has to ignore the issue of culture and race that always rears its head where non-western art is talked about, for these artists are geniuses in their own right (but this is difficult at this point in time where the world is only beginning to break down the walls between countries). shi hu, in his early career (late 80s and early 90s) painted, in this work  for example, in a cubist/modernist manner, and was hailed the picasso of the east by western art critics.

this comparison of shi hu with a western artist irritates me to a certain extent as it invariably puts the notion in people’s minds to compare shi hu with picasso. doing so often sets picasso as the de facto yardstick of comparison, and people will invariably find some way in which shi hu’s work doesn’t measure up – and of course it isn’t the same as picasso’s because they are imposing western standards of artist achievement on art that is really the product of a totally different culture. even if they draw inspiration from some of the same sources, eg african art, they way they digest their inspiration is different.

i accept however that the western art critics have to use picasso as the standard as what other point of reference could they use which western audiences could understand? picasso is the best-known (in the west and the east) artist whose work is closest to shi hu’s in style. this is a problem then for chinese artists, of exposure, for there are comparable examples in chinese art history, but western audiences are not familiar with them. this comparison is a double-edged sword, for while it is in some way meant to imply that shi hu’s work is good, it can also work the other way.

still, i can let this go (for now at least) only because it gains chinese artists exposure outside asia and till the day we become truly globalised, i am prepared to deal with the cultural mishaps and misunderstandings that will inevitably occur on the path to gaining equal recognition for non-western art.

i saw a few images from the modern chinese art movement (i.e. early 1900s) on a recent trip to the Met in new york and i was quite intrigued by the way the women were portrayed. given that many chinese artists were in paris at the turn of the century, absorbing all the avant-garde movements such as cubism and fauvism, why were they still portraying chinese women, in chinese dress?

that era was a turning point in the way women were portrayed in chinese art as for the first time, chinese artists had nude models to study from. and they fully absorbed the modes of representation of nude women from western artists of the time.

for example, Lin Fengmian’s use of line in modeling the nude female body is distinctly like Matisse’s, yet it is modulated in ink, after chinese calligraphic style. I can’t find the image, but here’s an example of Lin Fengmian’s depiction of women: while the woman bears the modigliani-esque depiction of face in her elongated face and upturned eyes, the woman is put in a chinese setting and wearing chinese dress.

from something like this it is very evident that chinese artists were not merely imitating western art wholesale stylistically (unlike the social realist art of the communist era) but instead absorbing these new ideas to formulate a new chinese mode of expression. of course the exhibition is more than just images of women and if you are interested in it you can visit the Met’s site i have lots more to say, but there’s also much more i want to mull over before i put my words to print! enjoy!