Sunday 22 March 2009

When did we lose our child like ability to see the world?

Currelty doing my research on Hundertwasser House in Vienna.

I'm responsible for looking at societies' response to it's construction and development over all these years since it's finishing in 1986.

I came across this article and it made me wonder why art and architecture had to be imbued with all these complex ideologies in order to have depth and culture. When did we begin to feed ourselves with the notion that because it has many folds of complexity and implicit meanings, that is what makes it beautiful and deeply mysterious?

A child never thinks like that. The world is beautiful in its own right no matter the colour, form or subject matter. Here's the opening sentence to the article:

"I picked up my niece at Vienna International Airport wondering what I would do with her. She is 22 years old, on her first visit to Vienna, and isn't interested in anything. You probably have relatives like this."

Which made me think a lot about why adults struggle so hard to find interesting things to do with people a generation below them. (It's not just Macdonald's Happy Meal / a playground or a concert that serves a growing child's burst of imaginative creativity, is it?)

It also reminded me of a TED video on "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" that mw urged me to watch awhile ago.

The article ended with this sentence:

"Even my niece was drawn to this magical place, waking up in surprise from her sleepy life to discover that there was at least one museum she actually liked."

Is it time architects go back to basics and think about how our inner childs look at buildings of tomorrow?

Tuesday 17 March 2009

My begging and Art HK09

Please please please, I beg HK make art more educational and integrate HK art and artists as part of the curriculum for all art classes in secondary schools. HK art and artists should also have at least a few mentions in Hong Kong history textbooks.

Art HK 09: Hong Kong International Art Fair Announces This Year's Exhibitor List

Hong Kong International Art Fair announced that 110 of the world’s leading galleries from 24 countries will exhibit at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) from 14-17 May (Preview and Vernissage 13 May).

New participants for 2009 include Tomio Koyama, White Cube, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE and Galleria Continua, as well as Lisson Gallery and Gagosian Gallery. Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor will both be present, alongside leading Asian artists such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang and Jitish Kallat. This year, ART HK 09 is also pleased to introduce ART FUTURES, an initiative to enable galleries under five years old to showcase one or two emerging artists and to encourage a presence of fresh, exciting new work at the Fair.

In addition to being the leading platform for buying art in the region, ART HK provides a much needed focal point for the art world in Asia for networking and discourse between curators, artists, collectors and critics.

Asia Art Archive will present a series of thought-provoking programmes with some of the leading experts and practitioners in the field. Backroom Conversations will include panel discussions, talks and screenings that touch on a number of prevalent issues, and offer a first-hand look into the contemporary art world today. Speakers include: Vasif Kortun, Director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Frances Morris, Permanent Collections Curator, Tate Modern; and Uli Sigg, collector of Chinese contemporary art.

Guided Tours will be available in both English and Cantonese organised by Para/Site Art Space.

Whether you are a seasoned collector, thinking of buying for the first time, or just keen to be part of one of the most significant cultural events in the international art calendar, we look forward to welcoming you to ART HK 09.

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=29603

Monday 16 March 2009

Why there will never be total equality between men and women

I'll keep this short and concise. The day we might be able to attain equality is when:

1) Men can get pregnant.

2) Men are not allowed to be topless / when women are allowed to be topless in public.

3) Women will open the door for men and it does not appear strange. (and the whole idea of being a gentleman for the ladies is discarded)

On a side note, you know how you always get people saying oh American English is for dumb people and they use simple words and phrases. That thought just came to me and then I realised why. Because traditionally, it began as a cultural melting pot. And you have people from all over the world with English as their second language. So the natural evolution of language will find its course along the most simplistic means. If you compare that to the evolution of British English which is used by native speakers for thousands of years, of course it has a much more complex system.

I bet somebody has found that out already, just that I've never read that article yet.

Why do people visit museums (6 theories)

Why museums have become our home from home

People are visiting our galleries and museums at a startling rate. Is it the cafés, the absence of swearing... maybe even the art?

Hugo Rifkind

Why do people go to museums? It's not easy to find out. Frankly, there's a lot of waffle. I've spent the past week in them, trotting up to people and saying: “According to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, museum and gallery attendance is rocketing in Britain. Why are you here?” Everybody is polite, because people always are in museums and galleries, but nobody really knows. “I was interested in the exhibition,” they might say, not all that helpfully. Or, “the kids like it”. It's hard, at first, to see the thread. People go for all sorts of reasons. Or so they think.

A friend and I, for example, once went to the Saatchi Gallery, drunk, to understand how our other friend Jez had ruined his shoes. He'd been a few weeks before, also drunk, and he'd blundered into Richard Wilson's 20:50. Do you know it? Big room full of reflective engine oil, with a walkway down the middle. Totally disorientating. Amazing. Jez had flailed around, bewildered, and scooped the stuff on to his feet. Art all over his Nikes. We went to see if we could replicate it. It sounded, like, mind-expanding. Hey, we were students.

It turns out that this was actually a very old-fashioned way to behave. According to the various histories of museums into which I have delved (Giles Waterfield's Palaces of Art is particularly good on this), I was buying into the German Romantic idea of the museum as a temple, in which the visitor “should enjoy a quasi-mystical experience”. Sounds about right. None of the many museum-goers to whom I spoke in the past week was doing anything like this. So, here's theory No1: museum numbers are up, because, quite suddenly, museums aren't much like museums.

I've a few theories to come, but this one makes a lot of sense. It certainly does in Liverpool, which, as 2008's EU Capital of Culture, saw museum and gallery attendances soar by something like 400 per cent.

“We decided to take a real look at the audience,” says Phil Redmond, who was the creative director of Liverpool 2008 and also, just so it clicks, the guy who created Grange Hill, Brookside and Hollyoaks. He says: “If you have people who are used to bright and breezy entertainment with TV, you have to make the venues a lot more bright and breezy too. You make them more kid-friendly. Have a kid zone. Education workshops. Follow the dinosaur prints.”

Redmond adds that you need to balance this with the ability for people to sit quietly in museums and reflect, and that some things should be family-friendly and some perhaps not. It's notable, though, that when it comes to attendances, family-friendly is what works. Consider: Tate Liverpool (bright, breezy) up 67 per cent; Merseyside Maritime Museum (likewise) up 69 per cent; The Lady Lever Art Gallery (austere, heavyweight) down 16 per cent.

You could call theory No1 the “dumbing down” theory, only none of the punters I met was dumb. There was Sean Barron, the bar manager from Brighton, who was up to see the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery and was “particularly pleased to see Picasso's interpretation of the Las Meninas” because he liked the Velásquez original. There was the Carter/House/Downing family from Woking and surrounds, all three generations, who were in the British Museum only because little Abigail, 8, was doing a project on the Egyptians, but knew their stuff about the mummies and had been to St Albans the other week when she was studying the Romans.

Quite un-dumb, in fact, which allows me to sluice neatly into theory No2, as expounded by the likes of Melvyn Bragg, the broadcaster, and Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum. This is what you might call the “dumbing up” theory. In other words, museum numbers are up because people are getting cleverer.

There's a lot to be said for this. This is the Britain where everybody loves watching Stephen Fry on QI, and more people listen to Radio 4 than Radio 1. “There is a huge desire,” MacGregor says, “to understand and to address complexity, and to spend the time that it takes to do so.” For the museum's Babylon exhibition (which ends tomorrow), the average dwell-time was an hour. For Hadrian, it was an hour and 40 minutes. For the current exhibition on Shah Abbas, it is about an hour and a half. It is not true, MacGregor says, that we live in an era of dropping attention spans.

Nicholas Kenyon, formerly the controller of the Proms and now managing director of the Barbican, reckons that there is something very British about the pace of a museum: “There is something in our culture that is free-flowing. People can take as long as they want.” He notices it particularly, he says, coming from a background in the performing arts.

The British Museum, perhaps, sits bang in the centre of competing notions about what a museum should be. There are cafés and a restaurant, and it's certainly family-friendly. But there's a dose of mystery here, too. In Liverpool, Redmond insisted that the whole point of collections is that “they are there to contextualise our past”. We have to view them, he said, “in terms of the stories they can tell. People often think that collections themselves are the point, and don't need to be explained.”

This sits uneasily with more oldfashioned notions of custodianship, which many still feel is the purpose of a museum. Still, he has a point. I thought of his words when I went through to the Duveen Gallery to see the Elgin Marbles and hunted in vain for a sign to told me that, yes, these actually were the Elgin Marbles.

I walked through the V&A on a Monday afternoon, and in some sections - South- East Asia, Japan, European Textiles - I didn't see a soul. This is your proper quasi-mystical museum experience. Take your German Romantic friends, if you have any. They'll love it. To stand alone in half-light on a polished floor, staring up at a 16thcentury tapestry of men with crazy beards, lambs in armour and a soldier shaking the hand of a bear is a bewildering experience. You can feel the ticking in your head. It's not what crowds want. The V&A was down last year by 15 per cent - although perhaps that's because they did so well the year before with the Kylie exhibition.

You might be alone, but you don't worry about getting mugged. The V&A says that it rarely has more than a couple of security incidents a year. The National Gallery is bang on Trafalgar Square, but even they need to kick people out only every couple of months. That brings me to theory No3. Museum numbers are up because museums are safe. “They attract only a certain type of person, let's face it,” says Margaret Child, 79, from Essex, visiting the National with a group of older ladies and then heading off to see Sunset Boulevard: “In any museum, do you ever hear the F-word? You hear it up and down every high street. In the cafeteria, all ages, all denominations, no one swearing.”

I meet Debbie Norton and Sarah O'Connell, both from Haringey, in the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, which is part museum, part playground. They are with their respective two-year-olds, Jessie and Leila. “It's a safe space to play,” Debbie says: “We can have something to eat, they can entertain themselves.” Sarah says that the kids can run off and she can wait a minute or two before having to chase them. “It's also safe as in health-and-safety safe,” she says. In Tate Modern, I was struck by the number of disabled folk in buggies.

Aside from me and my drunk friends, people really do behave themselves in museums. Redmond jokes that this is because there is “more security per square metre than anywhere else on Earth”. He agrees, though, that there is something about museums that people respect. Neil MacGregor , at the British Museum, agrees. “The Great Court has become London's village green,” he says. “It's where you bring the children. It's where you meet a friend. It's the space that belongs to everyone.”

Free entry has a huge amount to do with this. That should probably be Theory 4, the credit-crunch theory. People are going to museums because museums are free. Most of Britain's biggest museums have been free for years, but, as MacGregor puts it, it's the rhetoric of free admission since 2001 that has had an impact, as much as the fact. When the Tory culture spokesman, Hugo Swire, spoke of reintroducing entry charges in 2007 there was national uproar, and a few months later David Cameron sacked him.

When I asked Redmond his best tip for getting people into museums, he snorted and said “create a recession”. Everybody going to a museum approves of free entry, even if (and this is the crucial bit) they are then paying extra to see a special exhibition, such as Picasso at the National (£12.50) or Shah Abbas at the British Museum (£12). Free admission to museums has given the public a sense of ownership over them. This ties into Theory1, and the way that many museums no longer feel like somebody else's country house. They feel like they are ours.

And so to Theory5. They're coming thick and fast now, these theories, but this, I think, is my favourite. People are flocking to museums because museums are the best public space we have. Britain is too secular to value its churches and too divorced from local governance to give a damn about town halls. Schools are not the social hubs they once were. Museums fill a gap.

All the other theories, I reckon, trickle into this one. Museums are as much about activities, these days, as collections. Debates at the British Museum. DJs at the Royal Academy. The Museum of Childhood, as discussed, being used as a playpark. In East London, galleries stay open late every Thursday, as nightlife. The V&A does the same on Fridays. Cafés. Restaurants. Places to go.

The National Wool Museum in Wales had 24,344 visitors last year. That's a bad Saturday morning for the British Museum, but it is 11 per cent up on last year. Ann Whittall, the museum's manager, tells me why. “We've got a very successful family trail,” she says. “The Woolly Trail. It helps families to understand what they are seeing. It's interactive and you get thread at the end. We've a café that sells local produce, and mills. We're 16 miles north of Carmarthen, so in the winter we rely on our local audience. We have a carol concert and a craft fair at Christmas time. We have a knitting club, and nursery groups meet here, too.”

That's almost every theory, in a single tiny package. See how they all work? Only the German Romantics need feel left out.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5901145.ece

Saturday 14 March 2009

六四大和解, Will it happen this year?

「六四和解不應受害者提出」
王丹回應放下對立建議

【明報專訊】今年是「六四事件」20周年紀念，作家戴晴早前表示現在是時候尋求「大和解」，讓中共與民運人士放低對立，但當年的學生領袖王丹形容要求事件受害者提出和解實屬「可笑」：「打傷了人，還要受傷一方提出和解，哪有這種事情？」他說：「我有我的底線——我可以和解，但絕不可能是由我提出來。當下還未見到任何東西，讓我可接受和解。」

去年於美國哈佛取得博士銜的王丹，今年到英國牛津大學聖安東尼學院作一年的博士後研究。英國時間周五下午，王丹在牛津舉行了一場主題圍繞六四的演講。他表示，當年的學生運動主要爭取反貪腐，相信透過政治改革尋求民主政體，是達到目的之唯一方法，即使現在回看，他仍然相信當年確是中國展開和平民主演變的契機，但「六四的崩塌，不單只代表極權的勝利，還有貪腐的勝利」。

中國留學生﹕民主保證得了我的學費？

演講會吸引了近300名學生和各地學者，擠滿現場座位之餘，有人更要坐在梯級，聽眾一般對中國學生當年表現予以肯定，也有來自內地的學生持不同意見，有年輕的博士生問王丹：「中國為什麼需要民主？餵飽13億人並不容易，若我選了你，你能保證我的父母有能力支付我來這裏讀書的學費嗎？」個別中國學生隨即報以掌聲，王丹回應說：「人除了吃飯以外還要有尊嚴，民主就像讓你到超市購物可以有選擇，我認為中國人配得上選擇。」

席上亦討論到近20年經濟上的「中國奇蹟」，成為中共領導迴避民主改革的藉口，被問到目前更複雜的利益關係會否成為政治改革的阻力，王丹說，內地目前的問題比1989年之時還要複雜，一場金融危機令到千萬計的民工失去工作，無論在農村或城市都無法維生。他雖然預期未來難以再出現由學生發起的民主運動，但壓力有可能會來自老百姓、農民工甚或是退休軍人，「他們對政府的訴求是具大的，這問題胡溫和中共領導肯定比我更緊張，因為他們比我更掌握問題所在」。

不寄望現領導平反六四

王丹說，無論對現屆領導人或下屆領導人，都不旨望他們會平反六四或推動民主改革，「我們把希望放在趙紫陽、朱鎔基、胡錦濤和溫家寶，但只能換來一次又一次的失望……(中國還未具備民主條件？)你看香港，有穩定和龐大的中產階級，為何2007年還不肯讓他們普選？」他說，現在只對習近平、李克強之後、曾經歷六四的一代抱有一點希望。

對於另一經歷民運的作家戴晴早前接受訪問時提出仿效南非模式的大和解方案，通過調查真相讓雙方放下對立，王丹認為不可能由受害一方提出，「他們(中共)強，我們(民運人士與家屬)弱，怎可能要受害的一方先提出和解？」、「我可以接受和解，但不可能由我先提出，亦要有和解的條件，讓流亡人士回國，讓受難者家屬得到賠償。」他又說，即使現在提出和解，亦不會得到中共實際回應。

對於中國民主改革，王丹一再強調要保持「由下而上」的壓力，他寄望近年在內地冒起的公民社會能夠發揮作用，迫使政府必須變革，呼籲西方社會支持中國民間社會和非政府組織發展。由於香港曾拒絕王丹入境，王丹表示，在牛津完成研究後，計劃返回美國求職。

特約記者羅永聰英國牛津報道

閱後感：有穩定和龐大的中產階級，就是香港2007普選的先決條件？

Friday 13 March 2009

A bit of Hong Kong's History

A Curious Case in City of Victoria

Thursday 12 March 2009

Watch it if you want to be moved to tears

I cried a bit, don't know if you did.

La Maison en Petits Cubes

Here's some background information

And my brother's reaction to it

Monday 9 March 2009

How art killed our culture

A nice piece of article that perhaps points out part of the origins of evil and how it has build a strangle hold on our society.

The modern world has screwed itself and art led the way.

But even if we agree or partially agree to his observations, it will take a monumental force to change our perception. Which is way I have faith in Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial... and more Echigo Tsumari Art Triennal.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

BBC: Child Drawings of Darfur

Heart wrenching sketches displaying the plight in Darfur, the power of art and its responsibility.

The International Criminal Court is accepting supporting evidence of children's drawings of the alleged crimes committed in Darfur. This sketch by Abdul Maggit depicts a typical scene of destruction.

Rights group Waging Peace collected the drawings from refugees in Chad. Abduljabbar's picture shows someone being thrown into a fire and a soldier who appears to be cutting off a man’s head.

This picture by Mohamat shows another village attack. Next to each civilian who has been shot is the word "Morts", which means dead people in French.

Mohammed's drawing shows Janjaweed militia in two pick-up trucks using machine guns on civilians. He also shows a tank. The Sudanese government has always denied using heavy artillery in Darfur.

Adam, 15, shows shot civilians' bodies being tossed into the river. On the back of the drawing, he wrote: "Look at these pictures carefully, and you will see what happened in Darfur. Thank you."

Ismael, also 15, drew a Sudanese helicopter bombing his village, torching houses and killing civilians and a donkey. He said the armed men on horseback were Janjaweed.

Bakhid was eight years old when he saw his village being attacked and burned by Janjaweed forces on horse back and Sudanese forces in vehicles and tanks.

One young artist named Aisha said: "It is very kind to send us food, but this is Africa and we are used to being hungry. What I ask is that you please take the guns away from the people who are killing us."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7923247.stm

Stokes Croft in Bristol

Stoke Croft is like no other places. It is special, a hotbed of the creativity that abounds Bristol. The relative "poverty" of Stoke Croft meant that its character has remained unique, and has not been swallowed up by the forces of mass media and consumerism.

Here's two paintings I pulled from the items sold there.