Glutter

Just a grrl

I love rereading my facebook status, it's like a mini-diary


Today
Yan is so happy to see her friend Matt, whom she hasn't seen for over 12 years!!! 10:21am

Yesterday
Yan is unnerved and amused the Sheriffs knocked on our door at 2am... only in LA. 11:06am

August 19
Yan is home from her first cactus and succulent show at the LA Botanical Gardens. 9:00pm

August 17
Yan is worried she killed her Catapillar. 10:56am


August 16
Yan is back online (No thanks to my wireless service). 8:43pm

August 9
Yan is fine. Earthquake was small, but it woke me up. 8:40pm

August 7
Yan is off to buy some Native Violets so the endangered Oregon Silverspot Butterflies has place to lay eggs. 9:40am


August 6
Yan is pleased she has a path to walk on. Applause for Pieter.. 11:03am

August 5
Yan is enjoying Sunday and going OFF facebook. 12:22pm

August 4
Yan is joining the HK network Fluff Friends Petting Frenzy. 12:03pm

Yan is up at 4 43 am and not very happy about it. 4:50am

August 2
Yan is "Hurting Feet" from dancing Salsa.... 11:45pm


August 1
Yan is trying to put three "tween" boys to bed, and they are making farting noises in the living room. 12:09am

July 31
Yan is home after taking her nephews to the Natural History Museum and hung out with dinosaurs and butterlies. 7:46pm

July 30
Yan is trying really hard to come up with a good idea for high and dry exhibition..... argh. 11:18am

July 27
Yan is home after her first Native American Pow Wow. 11:10pm

July 26
Yan is hailing the King (of Kowloon). 3:00am

July 25
Yan is saving CACTUS from a construction site and giving it a home (That's for Chris). 10:35pm

Yan is sick iuck. 9:18am

July 24
Yan is sick of being covered in grout dust, but the piece is done. 4:19pm

Yan is waiting for the grout to dry. 2:09pm

Yan is planting. 10:37am

Art Diary

Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. Edit.

After playing around for soooo long, I finally worked out what I want to say in three statements.

"FOOD IS HOME"

"1895: Sun Yat Sen Dreamed of Democracy in China Walking Down Peel Street."

"Today: We Do Too."

Everything I said in that long winded post is said.

Yay!!!

I worked out a clever way to talk about the food in a visual way as well, then scan, print, send, mount and I am in my first major group show...

Double YAY!

Art Diary

Trying to work on a piece for an exhibition relating to the Peel Street Market. The market is about to be demolished and an exhibition commemorating the place, to celebrate its spirit is being organized. I am one of the 50 artists invited. I am pleased, I am happy and I am completely stuck.

What I wanted to do at first is to have an empty fridge, that's all. Nice and simple although I am not quite sure how I would have installed it being in LA, but having an empty fridge would symbolize everything that needs to be said about the destruction of the market.

A market is a place for food. It is a place where one gets the ingredients to cook to feed to norish. An empty fridge is a statement about what happens when a market closes. Sure you can buy stuff somewhere else, but it's conceptual afterall.

But the curator found that depressing, as he wants this exhibition to be celebratory. I understand. He advised me to not focus on the doom and gloom senario that the market will be gone as there might be a chance to save it, partly through the exhibition.

He also liked the idea of doing something on Sun Yat Sen as Sun Yat Sen organized the first Canton revolution on those streets, thus he must have walked there, ate there, and slept near there as well. To destroy the surrounding areas of the market is destroying part of the Sun Yat Sen Trail.

Sun Yat Sen the art work would be. It was my plan to do something on him before I left Hong Kong. It was meant to be the next Hardcore Democracy Series, after Zhao Zi Yang, the next would be Sun Yat Sen. It was a logical and sensible choice both for the curator and for myself.

So there is no problem so I thought, except as the deadline closes, and a number of ideas come and gone, nothing seems right. I would like to blame being busy, which I am, or that I don't really have a space in this house right now. I could say that no matter how hard I tried I could not find a step up transformer to get my scanner and my printer working. We're going to have to put a double circuit into the study so my equiptment will work. I know that all that does not help but something I knew was missing.

It wasn't the equiptment although it really does not help, it's that I can't really put everything together without making it a history lesson.

On this site, Mr. Sun did this, on this site Mr. Sun did that. Maybe I should put a poster up for the Sun Yat Sen Trail and people can go on it themselves.

Then I thought of just doing images of Sun Yat Sen and putting them on T-shirts, and of course does that have anything to do with the market at all? Not really.

Not to mention I am not in HK to take the photographs myself and I am away from it all so I can't even walk down the market for inspiration. I can look at books and I can look at photographs. But somehow it's just not gelling. I can tell you it's not good. I researched Sun Yat Sen, I thought about markets and I know I can make a competent collage on the computer and print it out. I can do that.

But I am looking for something more. Something about Sun Yat Sen, the market and our collective memories. I spent some time today reading about the Queen's Pier, i spent some time writing about it (although the post got lost) I keep thinking about if something is lost, then how can we learn? How can we remind ourselves of what we should remember when the place is demolished and shining malls and business take its place? The Denai Peoples (Navaho) nation believes Wisdom Sits in Places, that when one walks into an area or to see an area, the stories of the place will remind one of how to live, remind one of the family and lineage, and how to be, how to treat others and yourself.

So if we demolish the market, how can Hong Kong people remember Sun Yat Sen? Will there be plaques of the Sun Yat Sen trail anymore on the streets? Of course not -there will be no street. It will be a smooth marble air conditioned office room, as no doubt there would be underground parking as well. The street level won't even be the ground floor anymore.

But how to one make something physical out of those ideas? I keep thinking of memories. I want to make something about memories. But memories denote, is a nod to the market dissapearing. That the curator prefers us not to metion. How about my own memories? I do not living in HK anymore, am I allowed to make a piece about my own memories of the market?

But what are they?

They are having a drink with my friends, they are meandering around buying food, it's walking home with a lot of plastic and nylon bags full of fruits and vegetables. It's about the feeling of thinking how Sun Yat Sen walked those streets dreaming of a democratic China much like myself.

I am thinking of making a story. A story of a little girl walking the markets. I am not sure if I walked those markets with my grandmother, I would assume we might have as I lived only ten minutes from the streets. But I am an artist and I writer. I can make it up can I not? Does it have to be true because someone else would have walked down the market with their grandmothers. They would have a weaved basket in one hand and walking the other.

Maybe I will do that...

Glutter's Hong Kong

Today is the day they might set to demolish the queen's pier (or at least I think because the reports as choppy and I think the government is going to do it on the sly). I just spent an hour writing about this, how I feel (angry), what I think (the government is useless and again maybe the only way forward is democracy) and mourning the lost of another little part of my home. Sadly, the post got lost, although I do not know why.

I must go. I am working on a small art project to commemorate the Peel Street Market. Another historical space going to be over taken by monster malls.

For now, please visit the photos of Chris at Hong Kong Digital Vision

Last Night of the Queen's Pier

http://hkdigit.blogspot.com/2007/08/last-night-at-queens-pier.html

Just a short note for the KCRW listeners who may have come to the blog when they heard my donation read over the airwaves. Right now the blog is more geared towards my personal discovery in LA, although there are many political articles in the blog as well. I meant to write more or add the old posts up, but my internet is down at the moment, so please come back sometime.

As for those not in California or the US. KCRW is a public radio station in the US, and they do rely on fund raising drive to keep it on air. Last week I made a donation and they asked me if they could thank me on air. I didn't really need to have my name read on air, and decided that I rather use my 3 second sound bite for something more useful, which of course is to remind people that the issues of free speech in China is still contencious.

So what they read instead was, "Glutter.org supporting Free Speech in China."

Say what you may about the fact a public radio station in a country needs donation rather than being completely supported by the government like the BBC or RTHK is, but for not too much money, I was able to get an idea to a huge geographic spread and a lot of different people.

I am currently using my neighbour's email at this moment, so I shall get back on line at some other time.

Yan

Home Creationism

Our property straddles two different lots, which means our house is on one side while the extra land is on the other. Since it was meant to be two plots of land there was never anything created to facilitate getting from one side to the other. The only way was to walk outside, up a hill and into a gate on another road, which of course was stuck because of the over grown ivy.

So to get to the top of the hill where my citrus tree and cactus garden are, I have to use a chair to climb up a wall and walk on some loose soil to get to it. It was all overgrown of course as well as no one ever went up there -a few months ago I attacked the ivy and agave one afternoon and created a little "path" that I could walk on - so as we started to do more with the garden it seemed only sensible to build a proper path up.

At first i thought the whole operation was a necessary pain and had to be lived with. After the first few days I was really pleased with the crop of rocks we found, decided to preserve and began to see it as a piece of art.

However, when it wasn't finished when I thought it would, I started to feel it was the the work of a crazy man, passive aggressively trying to destroy our nice little sitting area to cause me personal psychic pain. After another weekend I started calling it the "Great Wall" likening it to the great wall of China, as it is debatable if it was a useful endeavor or not.

Finally this weekend the retaining wall is starting to look like one, and I can see that we needed it to hold up the hill so the soil doesn't continuously slide down onto the path we're going to make and I had a break through: people build walls all the time, in fact every house, garden and fence around here was built by someone, either for themselves or a contractor. In fact giant sky scrappers are being built all the time and not to mention giant reservoirs, damns and bridges are being built in China, one brick at a time mostly by hand and not with massive equipment that you find in the US and HK. So in the context of great architectural projects in this world, our wall seems just rather small and easy to make. So I am more than okay with what's going on in the house. yay!

it's still going to be a week or two of probably six before it's all finished. I thought I would share the work in progress...



As you can see in there is nothing just a little gate and a hill.



Here Pieter is attacking the ground and wall to build the first landing. So there is something to build steps up on



We then found a crop of rocks we wanted to preserve, so he poured the concrete around it.



Here is the pretty wall we made around the rocks, including our little alcove and sticks to evoke the South Western Adobe Style of the original settlers.



This is the retaining wall and path.



You can see here that now there is a landing to build some steps up to and I can walk and take things up and down the hill.

Yes, it all looks insane, but it will be very beautiful in the end.... (I hope!)

Home Creationism

In another life I worked as a divemaster, and part of the reasons I love cactus and succulents so much is because their shape generally reminds me of the reef. Last week I popped into the Californian Cactus Centerto get some brain coral and living stones, and while I was there I bought a bunch of succulents that looked like seaweed, a dead sea urchin, and polyps as well.



When I got home I made a separate small little "reef" garden away from the other more traditionally shaped cactus and succulents. Unfortunately the sand I put in mixed with the volcanic rock shifted after the first watering, but I still really like it and hope to make this section of the garden bigger as time goes on.