一和零之間

存在，真的很虛無。
開了是一，關了是零。
但這一和零之間竟藴藏着無限的可能性。
有時，無限的可能性，比甚麼都沒有，更可怕。
奇怪，原本是想慶祝我們一週年。

Another encounter

Was walking down the road on my way to supermarket, and on came three pigeons flying quite low then "BOOM!". The pigeons rammed their heads onto a glass panel while the third missed it just by inches. One fell on the floor and died immediately, the other struggled on for a few minutes and then died. Then fresh red blood started gushing out of their eyes and beak.

Funny how animals, people die everyday and you can feel so distant about it, but when you actually see one dying right in front of you, it still send shocks your system a lot. I don't know how we can justify ourselves in killing other animals to fill our stomach, but as it occurs, we do that everyday and we barely ever see the poor creature being killed.

It's a strange world we live in.

Interesting encounter

I went downstairs to get some cash from the machine.
Lady came up to me, trying to hand me a flier and asked, 'Do you go to church?'
'No.......' (come on cash, come out....)
'Jesus loves you!'

....... 'Thank you.'

Somebody whose dead 2000 years ago loves me?
Great, thanks, to be honest, I felt really flattered.

難喔

自己以為老實，不行！
那正是不老實，自以為老實就是不老實。
什麼是老實人？
道理真正明白，一個妄念都沒有，才叫老實！

－－－－－淨空法师

Thoughts on a deathbed

Smiles & Regrets

The Book of Eli

I have always thought Christians to be naive but have a sense of happiness, purpose and wholesomeness that is deep within and is radiated from within their soul.

Their naiveness comes from giving all glory to their God. Referencing all purpose of human lives, all origins of beauty to an artificially constructed figure/wisdom.
Can we not appreciate the beauties of the earth in their own right? Why must we explain the unattainable, the unexplainable? Are we incapable of being amazed by mystery for mysteries sake?

Admittedly, I am jealous of those who have attained their enlightenment. There is an air of resolution, of satisfactory and harmony with their surrounding that makes living for them such a joyous experience. I feel that my soul still has a gap of enlightenment waiting to be attained.

Whatever the future may bring. A few things stays true:
In order to be Buddha, one must be human.
In order to learn the teachings of the Bible, one must be humble and unbiased.
It is the harmony of my space and the space around me that I am concerned with.

I hope that one day, a voice will speak to me as clearly as I am speaking to you now, 'you have found peace and you may rest now'.

Gosh, I miss my brother, whereever he may be, may he find peace and happiness that I have yet to find.

Gosh, I miss him...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKfZrbS79To

Art from 0725-0846 in the morning

1.

Blue Flower
Georgia O’Keeffe
1918
Pastel on paper mounted on cardboard
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico Gift, The Burnett Foundation 

Is it just me, or...?
Nice colour anyways.
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=210&p=1&id=437#inicio

2.

Cloverleaf Quadruple Housing (project) Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1942.
Interior perspective. Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper,
28 1/8 x 34 3/4 inches.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation FLLW FDN

Steel Cathedral (project) New York, 1926. Plan.
Graphite pencil and colored pencil on paper,
23 7/16 x 31 inches.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation FLLW FDN

Steel Cathedral (project) New York, 1926. Plan.
Graphite pencil and colored pencil on paper
23 7/16 x 31 inches
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation FLLW FDN


http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=210&p=0&id=429&fid=0
Personally, Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture is about surprising you by constricting your human scale upon entry and then open up the exterior to surprise your senses with the dramatic change of scale and opening.
More than anything, he build his architecture with light.
My architecture friends, have a look at FLD's plans and section.
This is what I call drawing. It almost has a J.M.W. Turner quality.

'The beauty of Guggenheim is in its folding of the New York streets and turning the language of a long stretched street into a twirling gallery.' A.H.

 

The Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth, 1838,  William Turner (1775-1851).
National Gallery, London, UK.

3.
Kapoor!!

'I am no silly Barbie Doll'
Kareena Kapoor
Age 30
 
No, not her... people say beauty lies in the beholder's eyes...

...
.......
............

...oops, I forgot what I was looking for...

Anish Kapoor!
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=38536

4.
The New Porsche Museum.
I'll spare you photos of Peter Eisenmann's building. Forget the building, I want to see the cars!!
Damn, I thought I was already turned on.....
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=210&p=0&id=414&fid

5.

Guess what people told Tim Burton while he was drawing in his youth.
'You can't draw'.

Hey, mum, I can't draw too, want to become my patron?
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=210&p=1&id=440#inicio

I missed the show, but no worries, something exciting in MOMA as well!
Let's reclaim the water instead of the land, shall we?
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1031

6.

George Lois American, born 1931
Cover for Esquire Magazine, Issue no. 414, May 1968, 1968.
Offset lithography.
12 5/8 x 9 7/8" (32.1 x 25.1 cm).
Gift of the designer.

Does it remind you of any politicians in Hong Kong?
He will look great on a magazine cover like this.
Catholics, please pray for June 4th.

7.

Georg Baselitz, "Portrait Dr. Ulbricht".
Oil on canvas, 1970, 250 x 200 cm.
Galerie Springer + Winckler, Berlin.
Art Cologne: 2010

For some reason, this painting really scares me.
For art Festivals, I'd stick to Setouchi International Art Festival 2010 and Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial 2012 if I were you.
And if you were really me, you better check out the place where I work.
Sense Art Studio in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

8.
Oops, no time and space for Shanghai World Expo 2010. Well, I don't want my blog censored, so I better keep my mouth shut.

'Long live WOW! architecture. Yay!'
...with a few brilliant exceptions, of course, one being the Danish Pavilion... OMG!
Real water, real mermaid and the return of the bikes... the Danes must be laughing their Frikadeller's off.

One nice comparison between Shanghai and Copenhagen:

- Shanghai planning department are proud to present their high speed complex road networks, boasting the fact that any car, once you get on the high way, you can reach any corner of the city within 2 hours drive.

- Copenhagen government, 'our plan is to allow bikes to arrive at the sea front within 15 minutes journey from any point within the city'.

Score: Shanghai 1, Copenhagen 0.
Who wants bikes in this industrial, civilised, developed world, right?

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

On Religion (Christianity mostly)

Never really believed in institutional religions, with it's heavy text and divine guidance making us all sinners before we even know how to pronounce that word and let alone understand it.

I used to be very skeptical about Christianity (be it Protestant, Catholic), Judeism or Islam. Not that I favour Buddhism, Hinduism or Zen, because the level of knowledge I have on all parties is pretty slim, but my skepticism is built around how worshippers of faith can be so blinded by the churches wrong doing in the past.

The crusades, buddhist monks slaughtering nonbelievers, the inquisitions, bishops going to Africa and telling Africans not to wear anti contraceptive devises (which results in the wider spread of aids).

I understand the God's / gods' words, once they touch down on earth, it is interpreted by earthly people who twist the wisdom into its own use and benefit. But again, how can believers be so blind about how corrupted institutions use it to its own benefit in the past. They may have apologised and made people who were real defenders of faith, saints, but that does not make their wrongdoing in the past correct and people should really stop donating their money to churches so they can continue with their elaborate decorations and ride around in nice cars.

But a recent conversation with friends and professors have changed my rushed criticism on institutional religion.

L: "It's basically a good teacher / good friend, I actually can think more rationally and critically of things around me when I attend church services, plus we can never know all the truths and follow our moral principles when tested, so it is nice to have rules in life that governs us."

I agree to a certain extent, as long as its not used on a macro level so that wars will be sparked by religious zealots, I'm fine with it. Easier said than done, like many things in life...

I then asked my history of art lecturer how she reconciles her faith with all the corruption and wrongdoings of the church which is so explicitly placed before her research material.

Dr. B: "We Christians know about the mistakes the church made in the past, but this is like the Nazi and the Germans. The Germans acknowledge that they've made mistakes in the past, but they still live on, being proud to be Germans."

So I guess born a Christianity in a European setting is similar to having filial piety in Chinese families. As Chinese, it is a cultural thing to have close ties with your family and you're meant to take care of them until they die of old age. And as Chinese, we know well that Confucius was adopted simply because one Han emperor decided to embrace it into state 'religion' / ways of living and got rid of all the hundreds of philosophical thinking at the time solely because it would be easier to govern people if we all believed in Confucius thinking. Yet we still appreciate Confucius concepts of governance, family, friendships and work ethics to a certain extent in the contemporary world.

For some sensitive religious humour (my friend's recommendation)

Go for Billy Connelly on religion.

Spoiler alert on swearing about religion.