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Art Diary

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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...

Art Diary

After a month of working in the ceremic studio I was finally able to bring home the first pieces I made. I am especially pleased with the birdbath (front) as I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out. I am also pleased as currently i am using a plastic disposable noodle bowl in the tree as a birdbath. Can't wait to hang it up!!!

Art Diary

I finished the mosaic piece yesterday. Unfortunately, it's in the shadow of the tree above. Will take a better photo of it once I have it hanging on the outside wall of the house. I am planning to mosaic the floor of the backyard and also the front door and steps eventually.

Art Diary

Our home is placed on a rather large piece of land, so right now I am making it more beautiful. I started making a cactus garden, which is still only probably less that a quarter done, and then in the ceramics studio I started creating a dinosaur fossils to place in them. The following picture is still in clay form and needs to be fired and glazed etc.



This is what the top of the hill looked like before I did anything with it.



These are the very beginnings of the garden. It doesn't look really fancy but most of the plants I grew from clippings, and all the rocks we picked up or dug our during our landscaping and hauled it up the hill in buckets. There is so much more to do!!

Art Diary

As I said I have been learning to Mosaic. This weekend I made my first large piece with my own design. It's just some circular squiggles that I filled in with broken tiles. It's not finished yet, still needs to be grouted. Underneath are the first and second projects I made which are small plant pots... (you have to click onto the photos to see the whole photo..)

Art Diary

I am still making goldfish, this time in wool. I am totally experimenting with no pattern and just playing with the forms and hope it comes out. It's still got some ways to go, but I really like it.

Art Diary

For a while I was a housewife, for a few months. I was concentrating on cooking, trying to learn to clean with great frustrations, learning how to lock up a house with an alarm and driving to and fro. I cried sometimes, as things were so different. I would get overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to do, needed to do, and sometimes expected to do because I was home, and Pieter was working. It wasn't anything over the top, but dishes piling up for six days seemed a bit much to him, considering he does most of it anyway. Then one day, I figured out that this time was mine as well. The days don't have to be stuck in the home, I can go find something else that I really enjoy and be a whole person again. It meant a different kind of wholeness, not one that included just what I had in my mind of what it means to be home.

So I started art projects. I picked up knitting and made a scarf, I started to crochet dolls -a gold fish no less. I signed up to a ceramics studio and rekindled an old love of mine that fell away as I grew up. I picked up some tiles and grout to learn to mosaic. They started out as small projects, a few plant pots on the wheel, then I moved onto a birdbath. I started with just one tile and then went onto a plant pot. Then I started to look at my house and realize there were things to make. I thought of soap dishes and gravy holders, maybe a stepping stone here and there. Little projects for my little home. I liked that, we like that because it means that we are not constantly going to chain shops and consuming plastic. Most of the things we needed, I could make by hand. I discovered something about Pieter as well. He didn't just know how to edit cartoons, or make records, he knows how to build shelves and landscape gardens. Somewhere along the line, something else came to being. Between the two of us, we could build or make a lot of the things we needed to have a beautiful home. It would be individualized, self designed, and not a huge impact on the environment. They would be perfect to our specifications. Sometimes, a surprise would come along. While digging out a path, we found an out cropping of sedimentary rock, so instead of knocking it down or covering it up, we decided to dig more into it, and build a retaining wall around it instead. It's a lot more work but it will be more beautiful. It will be with the natural landscape, home made and different.

While working on all that, I found that my project ideas got bigger, instead of making pots to plant cactus and succulents, I thought of making decorations for the garden. While walking around the old South West Museum, I found a small cactus garden up top. It used all the rocks from our neighborhood, and created a rock garden. I decided to do the same. I planted the clippings I had collected and started to place rocks I found around them. It looked like a south west desert. Sometimes it looked like a dig, with my fascination with paleontology and my anthropology background, I started to think of bones. I love them but not in my own house and where would I find it anyway? So I went to my ceramic studio and declared I was making dinosaur fossils for my garden. Which is what I have been doing. I took out a huge chunk of white clay and started molding, it's smooth surface made it like what I thought bone looked like. Then after more research I remembered they have nicks and crevices, grooves and cuts. So I am making rollers with sandstone pattern to imprint the rough surface to the bone. Then I will use an oxide to make it look like it has been in the dirt.

I am going to make eggs as well. Large white eggs so it looks like a dinosaur nest. A foot print too?

And as I start to develop ideas, I realized this is a new kind of art I am making, something that can grow and change, that will lead to something else. The one thing I never had in Hong Kong was space. The space to make a mess, the space to use chemicals without being inside, a space to put things in. For a while I thought the art career was over. I didn't like how my projects weren't going the way I wanted, I didn't like the way I couldn't find people to collaborate with whom where solid and would do what they say. Then moving, made me removed from the political context in which my art was based. Putting a photo of Sun Yat Sen on a T-shirt has very little meaning over here, as much as it has meaning for those who know. There wasn't a statue of the man in Hong Kong until a little over a year ago. There has been one in China town a few stations down from me for decades.

But being out of context doesn't kill one's creativity. It doesn't bury what one's been doing. One has to re-contextualize meaning, and themselves. I am working on the hill, a garden and home, but one day when my skills are up, when I have more experience it's totally possible to do new works. I am excited. I feel that I don't know what will come out of it. It's like new opportunities and ideas will borne of which I have no understanding yet.

I am going to go now, to stand in the sun, to sweat a lot. Put on gloves and dig. I will open plastic bags with cuttings in to let it breath, then seal some mosaics. If I have time, I will pull out some sand stone and wash them to prepare for more rollers. When I have a day off I will go to the Natural Museum with a sketch book and draw dinosaur bones. Then head to huntington garden to look at one of the world's oldest cactus and succulent gardens. Then when things are more settled i will take photographs and then share them with you.

I am smiling already, I can't wait.

Art Diary

March 18th will be the anti-chief executive "elections" protest and I will no longer be in Hong Kong. I feel really sad but knew this is the better thing to do for my life and my sanity and happiness. I was thinking about how maybe I should do something for my friends to take with them, and the very obvious answer came to my head. I am going to do a second series of Hardcore Democracy art and T-shirts. With more experience I could probably do a much better job and getting the T-shirts made. This time the inspiration will be Sun Yat Sen and his three principals of a better China.

I must go and pay taxes and all the end stuff you have to do when you leave a country for a while.