Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan

We spent a long time at the small galleries in Asia Society New York early this week viewing the exhibition. Without any preconceived expectation, I came out with a complex feeling of profound sadness and triumph at the same time. When art increasingly becomes another global commodity and the target of trophy hunting, it is beyond amazing to see again the art that is made as a mere self-expression, as a reaction to reality, and as a way of survival. A well documented war-torn country, one would think it is the last likely place for contemporary art to blossom. When the possibility of death becomes a daily reflection, imminent and random, art and what it represents, logically ought to be remote. Yet the exhibition radiates a powerful energy that is on the verge of emergency. There is so much to be expressed that it must be proportional to what has been suppressed.
Considered the forerunner of the contemporary art in Pakistan, Zahoor ul Akhlaq's work is moody yet rationale, his muted palates and calculated proportion seem to ridicule the turmoils of that country, yet somehow mysteriously forebode his violent death. When some gunmen broke into his house and shot him and his daughter. One survivor of that gathering, Anwar Saeed, spent next few years recovering from his injuries. In the following months during which he underwent surgeries and lost the function of his right hand, he started painting with his left hand on a book called "I Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual", which is the true story of a seventeen-years-old Frenchman who was arrested and kept in concentration camps by German forces in World War II. On the hospital bed, his drawing all deal with his inner fantasy of homosexuality. He hid the book for the longest time as a personal journal. The drawing is filled with such an earthly yearning that it can only possibly be drawn by someone who can never realize that yearning. There is something profoundly humane about a bullet-ridden gay muslin man, laying in the hospital, secretly express his longings in such a lucid and honest manner. No holding back. Obviously if the book ended in the wrong hand, it would not be hard to imagine what would have happened to him.
One of our favorite piece in the show is a photography by Arif Mahmood. On a typical Pakistani street, a man with a sack on his side was drawing a mysterious ladder that appeared without beginning or ending. The moment caught by his camera has a strange spell that demands the decipher of a social meaning. What was in the man's head when he was making such an endeavor. Where did he hope the ladder to lead from and to? and after all, would there even be such a place for the citizens of that country or the mankind in general?
Other artists we loved are Adeela Suleman, who probes into the gender issue in the society and Rashid Rana, whose monumental image of a rug made of collages of the slaughter house challenges the western view of famed Pakistani craft.
Throughout the show, there is a fresh sense of art-making by these artists, who bravely confront the issues of the society that are in desperate need of confrontation. Not only did I find that they have voices, but they have an overwhelming power to move. After the emotion of the chaos and suppression, what I ultimately ended up with was a feeling of long lasting courageous humanity.

Vicunea vs Apaca: Baby Apaca vs Maybe Apaca

I instantly felt in love with Apaca when I put my hands on the softness and warmth of a black scarf made of super fine baby apaca for the first time. That was in a store called Sol on a narrow ally in Cusco. We would of course go back later and bought it. As a matter of fact, I think we systematically combed the whole Cusco for apaca. Pete, our friend who traveled with us, was a shopaholic, not that he liked to admit it. He even crated things that we must look for, sort of like a theme shopping. Yeah, we all absolutely need a crazy apaca hat for ski this winter!

All over Andes in Peru, one can see three major exotic mammals: llyma, apaca and vicunea. They have been domesticated by Incans for thousands of years for their hair. Llymas produce a thick and coarse fiber that is mostly known for its strength. It makes great ropes for instance. Apaca is the most commonly used fiber for weaving. Baby apaca is more sought after due to the conspicuous reason, it is a lot softer. There are many grades: super fine baby apaca is followed by baby apaca which is better than just apaca. There is also royal baby apaca, which by touch, I think it's more or less like teen apaca, falling in between super fine baby and just baby. After that, there is venerable Vicunea, possibly the cutest mammals I have ever seen. Big sensitive eyes, soft short hair, and a delicate deer like build with an equally delicate and shy disposition. Their hair worth a fortune though. First, they cannot be easily domesticated like Apaca. Second, they just don't produce a lot of hair. Yet what is harvested from them are the softest natural fiber in the world.one scarf we had the honor to touch cost about 3000usd. We never bothered to check the price of a coat. Not that we didn't want to. It was locked away like gold jewelries anyway.

We were warned by many locals about baby apaca because it can be maybe apaca. So we steered away from most of the stores and headed straight to the two very best, Kuna and Sol. It was an addictive experience. After exhausting all the stores in Cusco, we managed to add the weight of our luggage in Puno (two apaca blankets) and Lima (a woo-so-soft jakcet for pete and a few more scarfs for us). In the end, I don't think there was any apaca left for us to buy. I told myself I was going to import them in my future art/design store and share with all Bostonian, which made a lot easier for me to justify my purchasing as merchandise "sampling".

Cusco: the leftover of the Incan Capital

The air in Cusco was extremely dry, at least when we were there, that, plus the 11000 feet (3360 meters) altitude, the town was a harsh place to breathe for people del sea level like us. But what can I say? One has to brave the thin air for the beauty of that place. As the old Inca capital, it is the getaway to the Incan heartland. Without much distraction of tress or plants, the old town glistened in orange tiles on roof, sort of naked, hugging the equally naked mountain-scape. Many of these buildings were constructed on the Inca stone foundation dated back to the 16th century. Spaniards were surely good at destroying indigenous culture yet they were also quite practical in terms of recycling. Incans were incredible builders. They perfectly cut and fit the rocks together without mortar, some of the rocks weight tons. The Incan wall withstood earthquakes for the past 500 yrs while the spanish wall, mocked as "incapable", fell and tumbled.

The truth is that Inca is the most well-known historical and cultural export of Peru, which has naturally overshadowed a 5000 yr civilization before it. There was Moche, there was Chimu, there was Nazca, but only after we visited the two archaeological museos in Cusco and later the third in Lima, did we gained a panoramic view of the rich history of the country and its colorful ancient dwellers. In Cusco, some amazing textile, which appeared contemporary, complex and sophisticated, was dated back to over 1000 yrs; And in Lima, the famed Chavin Estela Raimondi in The National Museum of the Archaeology, Anthropology was carved in 1000 BC.

Back in Cusco, we climbed up the mountain at the edge of the town as a warm-up for the Inca Trail. Where we headed was a mysterious ruin called Sacsayhuman. Huge blocks of stones were set into impressive wall foundation. Again, no mortar. But one cannot even insert a blade between the two fitting stones. That's how extraordinary the Incan builders were. Many theories hovered over the functions of the place, yet no one knows exactly what the place was for. As a matter of fact, no one knows how Incan emperor ran his massive country. What was the political and administrative structures. No one knows if there was a written language of Quechua, spoken by Incans, or how one interprets the knotted "messenger's ropes", a device that was believed to encode all the necessary information back then, like a letter.

Sometimes it seems hard to understand how could a significant culture was completely erased from the earth without leaving any residual knowledge. Our guide shed some light on this. Obviously the Spaniards systematically killed all the persons with power who also happened to be the guardians of the knowledge. When those people got slaughtered, the knowledge died with them. So technically, that was how such a long civilization had such a quick death. Through the interaction with many Quechua people we met in Peru, we sensed an anguish that was deeply rooted in the lost of their identity, an anguish of not knowing where they were from. That pain, I think, is harder to bear nowadays when everyone is searching for some sort of identity, whatever it may be.

Peru: what it means to be an Incan

So we are back from a 2-week adventure in Peru, I didn't write a thing there. Having only occasional internet access was not really an excuse. I was just too tired! and busy catching my breath, due to the 3-4K above sea level altitude, well, and the stunning vistas of course. My body was doing wired things there, trying to adjust its machinery to be a highlander. I am sure my red blood cell count shot up a great deal.
Now I am back to sea level living, I sense an euphoria. Maybe it's the lingering endorphins triggered from all the trekking, maybe it's just the oxygen.
The bottom line is that we all have to endure some hardship to appreciate comfort. Now sitting in my comfortable chair, I can start blogging about the trip, which more or less changed my trepidation of being a real backpacker. Who I am kidding? After all, I only loved hiking when I didn't have to sleep in a tent. And imagine going without shower for a few days! The trip was a big leap of faith, but luckily at the end, I was converted.

Hearing loss

Last week, we went down to Palm Beach to visit Curtis' mom. We booked ourselves a surfing class on Delray beach because it always seems so fun to us, especially when it's sunny and high 90s. After an hour tossing and hurling myself around in the ocean, both of my ears were blocked. For the past 5 days, I lived in a strange state of the muffled-land. Regardless of the ten different tricks I tried, including a bob pin down my ear canal and many other compulsive bodily maneuvers, nothing worked. I lived in this eerily quiet world and have these two little water jugs in my ears. I am often overwhelmed by the sounds of my own chewing when I eat, to a degree that makes me disgusted. I have never lost my hearing before and this makes me somehow think how much we take ordinary things for granted, like our ability to simply see, smell, hear, speak and touch. They can be appreciated on a theory level, but it really takes the loss of one of them for me to truly understand how lucky I am to have them.
The real horror is that we are going to a Coldplay concert tonight. I missed it last year when they toured in the Northeast, so I will absolutely be devastated if I go there half-deaf and listen to Chris Martin singing as if out of a broken radio from my across-street neighbor. So I called my doctor's office this morning at 8am desperately to get an appointment. 30 minutes on hold later, I was able to talk to a human being and luckily got an appointment with a certain Dr. Cahill. Not my primary, but that will do. I hope that she can get the stuffs out of my ears, water, sand, wax, chunks of plant, a miniature sea life, whatever it may be, for I need my hearing back by tonight's concert or I will, well, go to the concert with my two muffled ears.
I found how brave and extraordinary is it for one of my friends who has hearing deficit to navigate the world, to get a Ph.D., to learn foreign languages, to fall in love and have a beautiful daughter. Compared to her, I am definitely a cripple. So this is for you, C.

MOMA Waste Not

It is a moving ordeal for me to see the installation "waste not" in MOMA by Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong. A skeletal section of his mother's old house stands amidst all the items kept within it for 30 years, down to a single button, a pair of shoe string. Holland Cotter in NY times thinks the exhibition "is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence". It is well said, yet I also found that the installation poignantly shows a marvelous and curious case of a preservation in an extreme unstable country. The truth is that to me only a few lucky ones like the artist's deceased mother had the luxury to hold onto her possession ritually to the end. For the past 30 years, life in China has been nothing but stable. The foundation of the society has been shaken time and time again. Massive population has been moved across a politically and then later economically turmoil landscape. Willingly or unwillingly, few people were able to live in one place for so long and created a personal emporium, despite clutter-filled and obsession-driven, ironically, it is also proven to be extremely comforting.
It is a record of a person's life, and luckily, a record that is still extractable from a country that nothing lasts long at all.
My mom moved four times in the past decade. It was originally because of a large civic project. The whole neighborhood I grew up had to be demolished in whole sale style for a river-side park and a bridge that links to the free way. Along with it, gone with the memories of my childhood, or more precisely, the physical evidence of my earlier existence. When I went back, I couldn't recognize the place at all. My mom was forcibly relocated, first to a school dorm, then to an apartment bordering a farm land, and finally to a seventh floor apartment without an elevator. The last move was to a first floor apartment because she could no longer climbed the stairs. Along each move, she couldn't possibly hold onto her belongings, so gradually she learned to lighten her load by shedding the weight of a life she has lived. Each move, she had to let something go in order to adjust to the new situation. By the time she was in her current apartment, she had remarkably little from the past, which likely or not, have all been scattered and lost.
And that, is the opposite from "waste not". It is another side of the reality in China.
Fortunately, last time I went home, I found a book that belonged to me when I was in middle school: the complete Tang poems. "Take it with you," my mother said, "for I don't know how long I can hold onto it." So I did just that, savaging a piece of my own memory from a place that things tend to get lost, and appropriately, that piece of memory happens to be a book of poems written long time ago, which not many Chinese would be interested in reading.

Berkshire House

It rained all week last week when we were in the Berkshire house, but we were thrilled because two miraculous things happened. One was that on Wednesday, after drizzling all morning, a huge rainbow emerged in front of the house. We have seen amazing rainbow in Hawaii one time, in the remote resort of Hana, Maui, but because we were so high up on the mountain this time, the rainbow appeared to hang on the same horizontal plane as our house. Instead of raising head, we could simply look at it straight on. And what an incredible sight! The rainbow anchored on two hills and straddled the entire valley in between. From the east side of the house, which was basically all glass, it displayed a complete panoramic profile. Then when we stepped out to look at it more, we realized that it was actually a twin-bow. The twin was much fainter and was blocked by our eve. I ended up jumping up and down, more excited that my 17 years-old nephew.
The second was on Sunday night, we came back from NYC and Philly. It was already dark when we pulled into the garage. But we realized that there were a lot of little lights on the lawn. When we got into the house, I looked at from the second floor, oh my god, the meadow slope in front of the house was sparkling like a light show. Obviously, overnight, all the fireflies in the world got hatched and now they were dancing all over the hill! I poured myself a drink and just sat on my porch looking at them. In front of me, it was the darkness of a summer night and the sounds of all the inhabitants of a forest, upon which, a sea of sparkling light made up of little creatures who seemed to be celebrating something more mysterious that I could ever understand.

Francis Bacon at Met NYC

We are having my nephew James visiting from Atlanta these two weeks. At a sensible age of 17, he finally seems to embark on the initial adulthood which is sparkled by occasional conversations on the "real stuffs" and intellectual curiosity about things like art and culture. A huge leap from the hip hop/gangster culture he left behind. Yes, he wears clothes I wear now, clothes that actually fit and made by Ralph Lauren.
So among everything else, we decided to take him to NYC to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Met. Honestly, it was a kind of selfish motive because I have been wanted to see it for a while.
Francis Bacon is one hell of a painter. Like all great ones, his painting is basically himself, his tormented emotional life, his compulsive-obsessive psychic, his addiction with love and sex, his borderline schizophrenic relationship with this world. And he did it with conviction and success, simply because he didn't take into pleasing the viewers into account. He did what he had to do and for himself, and miraculously he achieved great fame.
Many of his contemporaries found his painting repulsive and yes they probably still remain so to many people nowadays. They are tormented, twittered, fragmented, foreboding and disturbing. Yet they are also honest, naked, vulnerable and therefore endearing. They take the viewers beyond the paintings to a person's life, which reflects the ethos of our society in those particular eras.
One can't avoid the fundamental issues like religion, war, homosexuality and morality when looking at his painting. He chose to confront these issues because regardless being addressed or not, they exist, and by a large degree, they define us as human beings.
James basically "liked" the exhibition. One thing he certainly got was that the guy is weird and not all expensive art has to be eye-candy. I am happy with that. He doesn't need to understand more than that yet at this moment, but at least he witness the existence of such things, just because they exist.

Dia NY: a silent converation between Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois

The past weekend we went to Curtis' nephew's wedding in upstate NY and took the time to visit Dia at Beacon, the Riggio gallery of the Dia art foundation established to collect modern and contemporary art since 1974. The gallery is in a 1920s Bauhaus-style printing factory. Its minimalism vast space and flooding natural light sets up a surreal stage to present the artwork in its collection.
Needless to say, there are many pieces that are landmarks of modern art, such as Chamberlain's monumental sculpture The Privet, Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, and Donald Judd's untitled wooden boxes, to just name a few. What I found mostly visceral was the presentation of Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois' work. Serra's work is known for its complexity masked by the simplest forms. His deployment of steel provokes an impersonal, rational feeling when first approached, yet with each minutes spent with them, one was more and more absorbed into its organic forms and gigantic proportions, maneuvered to overpower the sense of being. The feelings when one walks into his sculptures becomes very much personal, so intense in a way as if one embarks on a psychic journey, a little bit unpredictable, intriguing and repelling at the same time.
I think Serra's work (especially the Torque series in Dia) deals with our emotion in reaction to the outside and everything within its scope, an intuitive emotion that we are born with, which through his work, is reduced to the absolute abstract. Louise Bourgeois' work, like the shadow of Serra's, the ying to the yang, complements strangely well with Serra in both scale, material and concept, by dealing with our emotions in reaction to the inside. It digs deep into our primordial memories that we build and then suppress in order to live on. Compared to Serra's work, her form is bodily instead of celestial, her dimension is personal rather than imposing, yet their work both provoke the visceral feelings, one of inside and the other outside, which ultimately is the same fundamental thing because emotion, regardless lies within ourselves and often stay with ourselves.
I have been a fan of Bourgeois for a long time. In 2007, we spent a whole day in Tate Modern London to look at each piece of her work in the retrospection exhibit. In Dia, with Serra's work looming nearby, I was somehow able to discover yet another layer to the psychic and emotional aspect of her work. To me, that's the beauty of art.

Let's talk about money, not politics

My friend told me that my blog was banned in China. "No long accessible", he said.
That's kind of funny actually. Does that mean I can now write whatever I want? Good timing, because June 4th is coming. The 20th anniversary of the student movement on TianAnMen square .
The other day, I read an article about an autobiography by the former prime minister of China, Zhaoziyang. Zhao died 4 years ago after more than 15 years of house arrest in Beijing since the summer of 1989. He secretly taped his own biography on top of Peking operas. The records were later smuggled out of the country and is now published. The book comes timely to reveal the inner political struggles within the communist party. Zhao's pro-democratic stand was crashed along with the students on the square.
Then two days later, two simultaneous articles in NYtimes and Financial times reported a recent pool from interviewing students in major universities in Beijing. The Result: the memory of TianAnMen is distant and blurry if there is anything at all. What students care, after 20 years, is no longer politics, but personal development, that is, what's good for ME.
Maybe this is a good sign of individualism in an otherwise long-time totalitarian society. But we must remember that they are university students in Beijing, the front runners of the intellectual. If anyone cares about politics, it would be them. Can you imagine what the common people care?
One thing clear now is that the government succeeded in getting people's mind completely off politics. Big time. For what else would be more interesting than thinking and talking about money! Maybe I haven't been back for a long time, my three-week stay in China was full of over the top money talks.
First off, money has never been a taboo in Chinese culture. Friends and family openly discuss salaries, bonuses, numbers in the bank accounts, gain and loss in stock market. It is like the national pass-time. In general, money talk seems also to be a good way to break the ice and start off a conversation between strangers. I had many taxi drivers asking me how much I make after they found out that I am from US. Then one taxi driver proceeded to tell me exactly how much he lost in his investment in a restaurant business. I didn't even know his name.
My friends, some of whom I haven't seen for years, would call me up and wanted to meet for a meal. We would talk about many things yet the conversation would eventually turned toward economy before heading straight to personal salaries and asset. And at the same time it all felt strangely nonchalant and benign, if conspicuously nosy. After a while, I dreaded for such meeting to catch up because I found that I took pleasure in it myself by telling them about our newly acquired mountain house, including how much we had to pay for it.
Money money and money. Kevin and I spent a good deal of time talking about money too. When I got a little fed up and pointed it out to him, he got defensive, saying that I looked down on him and his vulgar talks of money. The truth was that I'd want to talk about something else, like some books, or a movie we saw, even celebrity gossips. He promised not to talk about money with me anymore and his promise was kept exactly for 12 hours.
Finally, I think I understood. The money talk is part of the social fiber now in China so we must face it. It is largely a reflection of the politics that focused on getting wealthy, aka, making money, for the past three decades. At the same time, deep down, the Chinese attitude toward money is nothing but practical. Credit card debt is a rare thing there and saving is still a fortunate national virtue given how much allures out there in that huge bedazzling commercial market. It may be a natural step of the so called market economy, a term coined by the government. Where is it heading? I am not so sure, but hopefully not to a place where money is speculated and air-castled, like in this country.