My new apartment in HK

The Imperial Pig

This to me, sums up recent Chinese art that I come across in HK. It is not meant to tickle you a bit - but rather make you pronounce WOW that's gross. But you want to see it upclose, and when you do, you see hair growing out of its back that you wish you hadn't seen.

This is from a nearby gallery in SOHO. I pass this every morning on the way to the office. It is called Wellington Gallery and is one of my favorite around here.

Guess who's studio this is?

Mr. Karl Lagerfeld. To me, this is the most luxe thing, and the last thing I can have right now, while traveling and moving so much without a base/big house.

Photo credit: the Selby

A sketch with my new golden pen

I sketched this with my new golden pen that is FANTASTIC! Here I was inspired by Garance Dore and influenced by the color scheme of Blade Runner, which movie I watched for the first time today!

Stanford Museum

This exhibit was all by local Bay Area artisits. What a pretty color palette!

Japanesque and the Eiffel Tower

I brought back a book from San Francisco on Japanesque, an exhibition shown at the Legion of Honor. It was really packed at the museum and very hard to study and read about all the impressive collections on the spot. But now that I read the book, I am finally starting to understand a little bit more about Ukiyoe.

I always wondered what was so influential about Ukiyoe by Hiroshige, Harunobu, and Utamaro, to the French and other impressionist painters. Other than that it looks like anime and definitely without depth.

I can now see that it is everything from the color and composition, to the imagery. Composition-wise, the impressionists who followed Ukiyoe-style have always divided the background into geometric components, either through a shoji screen in the background or a painting hung in a diagnal direction.

Imagery is what the artist picks up. As a lot of the "Floating World" of Ukiyoe depicts women in the entertainment business as well as brothels, so does Degas (the perv) and Toulouse-Lautrec with the ballerina and courtesans.

One of the Ukiyoe followers even went further, and completely copied a concept. Henri Riviere in paying tribute to Hokusai's Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, created a picture book of Thirty Six Views of the Eiffel Tower. It was shown in a small corner of this grandiose exhibition, but what an enchanting concept!

Perhaps back in the day, it was edgy with the contraversy of the Eiffel Tower compared to Mt. Fuji that has no enemy... or perhaps Riviere being an avid fan of the Eiffel Tower wanted to give the same godly status to the French symbol of today?

Kakizome

For the Japanese, new year is very sacred that compares to Christmas in the West. Being in San Francisco, we did not get to go to a shrine or temple to toss a coin and make a wish for the year, which usually gives us a feel of a fresh new start for the year. Instead, my sister and I did Japanese calligraphy or kakizome to get into the mood.

I haven't held a calligraphy brush since elementary school, and it really made me nervous! You have to sort of be in the Zen mode, but the worry of messing it was really something inexplicable. It's such a simple act - just writing - so you have to put in your entire soul in it.


Embarassing embarassing. The messy ones are all mine! I never received any "gold" prize in elementary school. Honestly, the only decent one from me (I think!) was the character "慶" that we use to express congratulations for super special occasions (like new year). But it's my name that I've been signing papers for the last 20 years.


It was also fun writing our names in hiragana. It truly gives an excuse to be creative... in the manner of Michio Aida.


... and of course we can use the black ink to paint something like ukiyoe or a half-hearted attempt of it.


I wish I had a red stamp (what do you call it?) of your seal or signature to make these work look "real"...

Happy 2011!

My sister made ozoni, which is a typical new year food in Japan. It's the best thing ever to stuff yourself with lots of rice cakes and lazy around for the first few days from January 1st...

Happy new year!