Flying visit to London, also old news. Amazing day at Tate Modern with Silje and the wonderful Hunter. GSA Vis Com show at Shoreditch Town Hall – really impressive, the work, the location and the speed and efficiency with which the show was installed. Saw Ester and Mo at RCA degree show. Found Lucien a flat with the help of Ken and Pam…then back home again and back to work…
Yes this is very old news but its so hard to keep on blogging consistantly…real life gets in the way, even http://www.designsponge.com/ takes weekends and holidays and I’m sure they have more than one lonesome writer! Small bowls not at all popular this time around, apparently due to the blue interior not being to local people’s taste. Sunday busier than Saturday and always great to talk to people who are interested in ceramics…just need a few more! Cups [tea and espresso] unexpectedly sold well.
Suddenly rain appeared on Monday around midday but weirdly the thunder and lightening continued directly overhead even though the rain stopped almost as quickly as it started. Black rain came overnight but did not disrupt Sigur Ros at the Asia World Expo who performed brilliantly but almost a little too perfectly despite a few aberrant pixels on their accompanying video.
The Chapman Brothers exhibition opened at White Cube gallery also on Tuesday and Jake was interviewed by Tim Marlow and questioned by the audience and journalists. There’s definitely connection between the music of Sigur Ros and the Chapmans’ vision of an apocalyptic yet somehow sublime universe that dishes out wonder and cruelty in equal measures. Their sculptures depict humans as ants, metaphorically speaking, illustrating the absolute pointlessness of existence and the bleakly ludicrous nature of this knowledge to sentient human beings. As Pozzo tells Vladimir, “they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
Sadly the week has yet again whisked by and despite the excitement of Art Basel, here in town for the first time ever in Asia, alongside accompanying numerous other art fairs and related events around the city another JCCAC handicraft fair is looming, time is running out and the pots won’t make themselves. Need to get to work.
personal messages incorporated into temple roof
Benedict Anderson’s recently published book The Fate of Rural Hell describes a temple complex in the countryside in Thailand that depicts in graphic detail the gruesome results in the afterlife of bad deeds on earth. The imaginatively detailed sculptures produced under the local Buddhist monk’s direction have become an increasingly popular tourist attraction for visitors from home and abroad.
My first trip to Thailand has been inspirational and visually astounding, the incidental beauty of Bangkok was quite unexpected as I knew nothing of this, having considered it as a place of crowds and seediness rather than the location of spaces for contemplation in the heart of the chaos and bustle of human business, endless traffic and relentlessly penetrating sunshine. The temples are like those of Kyoto, offering sanctuary from the craziness of 21st century reality. As an Atheist I feel no sense of “spiritual” enlightenment but nevertheless there is an unmistakeable atmosphere of calm in these spaces that exude an essence of timelessness. They are peaceful, slower spaces set in the heart of the city’s mayhem.
The stray dogs and cats on Bangkok’s streets also seek sanctuary in temple complexes as do wild birds, urban pigeons and the Chao Phraya river’s voraciously hungry catfish. The unfortunate, mangy feline and canine beings serve as a reminder of the harshness of life outside modernity’s boundaries in line with the intentions of the protagonist of Anderson’s book. His visits dating back to 1975 record the changes that Thailand and the rest of the world are experiencing through the untrammelled unfolding of the
capitalist vision of utopia with all its free markets, kitsch by-products, inequality of success versus suffering and seemingly inevitable environmental catastrophe. By contrast to Hong Kong Bangkok is a kind of haven where the past still exists in the flesh and the life of the street riotously continues to fill ordinary people’s daily lives with colour, noise, delicious food and opportunity. It seems to be a place where the balance has not yet tipped in favour of corporate power and the blandness resulting from all the money being in a few people’s hands is still kept at bay…
“But the downpour did not abate, despite every morbid bid for atonement. The air hung heavy, reboant with spent oblations and worming acts of contrition, all tossed back by the rumbling nimbus, like undersized fish.
And all the time the rain still fell, spreading puddles into each other to form pools so dark – even in the half-light of the new day – that they looked like pockets of ink…”
Not quite as bad as Nick Cave’s And the Ass saw the Angel suggests but the rain did seem to be going on for a long time. Personally I enjoy the rain as it keeps the people away, when I walk up the hill it’s usually just the insects and me, however, now as spring heads into summer the mosquitoes are out in force and they are HUNGRY.
The drainage culverts are transformed by the rain into potentially lethal torrents of water and the concrete is softened by the sudden appearance of waterfalls tumbling down the hill. Now is the time to shelter in a citronella cloud and contemplate Microcosmos’ alternative view of the evil little critter that bites…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCHY1n7pzEM
Everyday I travel somewhere in the city, whether it’s in my usual Hong Kong, elsewhere in China or across the globe. My own journeys reflect the way most people on the planet live today and as an artist I’m constantly stopped in my tracks by something that fascinates me. I have always had this tendency but it’s magnified by the fact that since going to art school I have been given licence to do this and now art is my life and work it’s actually imperative to do so. I constantly record my experiences with snapshots of what I see along the way. I’m thinking about Barthes’ punctum or Sontag’s suggestion that, “essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” To paraphrase Simon Yam [famous Hong Kong actor, Night and Fog by Ann Hui is a good introduction to those who don’t know him
http://www.timeout.com.hk/film/features/48829/simonyam.html] if you take photos you’ll always have ideas…so here are a few. This is an ongoing project…
After the recent sale at the JCCAC we had a tidy up which always helps to facilitate clear thoughts. The images of the sale work recedes into the concerns of the present and the joint project we are working on travelling around the subject of text. Coinciding, for me, with the prospect of more writing and editing for Artmap this is a pertinent and enormous topic and is stimulating both our brains considerably. My work concentrates on the poetry of PK Leung and Mimi Khalvati, Hong Kong and British poets respectively. I am adopting the approach taken by comparative literature that brings voices together across the globe in dialogue.
There is also an evolving conversation between the two artists in studio five two four.
Everyone who lives in Hong Kong knows that it is an exhausting city, more so than Beijing? Probably not. In keeping with this theme, a few snaps of sleeping beings passed by on the streets during the daily grind/grime of urban life.
attractive vista
![traditional food preservation, the dissected ducks [not shown] disturbed the New York based architects who are working on the project](https://rachelceramics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/fish-drying.jpg)
The water town, Wuzhen, near Shanghai dates back around one thousand years and in recent times has been developed into a tourist destination and zone of preservation and celebration of traditional handcrafts by a former mayor who is now Buro Happold’s client for an Eden project style development near the Great Wall in Beijing.
It offers an alternative approach to the usual bulldozer/tower block/shopping mall development style that is generally preferred by developers especially in Hong Kong. It does require support though as it is not necessarily as economically viable as purely commercial construction but how great would it be to preserve some authentic Chinese history rather than supplant the past with a mock pseudo-European carpet of self imposed cultural “progress”!
rachelceramics 