F0001 - A Game: Finding Chair F0001 at the Jardin de Tuileries

There are three different types of chairs in the Jardin de Tulleries - Type B (upright with arms), Type C (upright without arms) and Type F (tilted inclined). These chairs seem to move in the night. You can see their sneaky little track marks in the ground. They are all over the place, behind bushes, next to the fountain, on slopes, under trees, next to the jeu de paume - they are everywhere in the gardens where you least expect them! They are also surprisingly well-loved and well-kept. Very few have graffiti marks or damage to them, which is a remarkable thing in Paris. Because the chairs are constantly moving, or being moved by people, it makes it a challenge to find the exact same chair on another visit to the gardens. Hence we propose this game:

FINDING CHAIR F0001

This is a game for any number of players of any ages.


Instructions:

Assemble at the Jardin de Tulleries at the start of the day.

All chairs in the gardens have a unique number cut into them.

The first person to find the chair F 0001 wins!

We tried our best but we only found F 0002.
Do you know where is chair F 0001?





***BONUS ROUND!!!***

Find chairs with abnormalities. Such as upside down numbers.

The Grande Arches at La Défense

Grande Arches at La Défense
After accidentally seeing a Sash! video a few years ago, I have always wanted to visit La Défense because it encapsulated the ultimate image of slick, polished, generic central business district façades (albeit in Europe) to me. Is it bad of me to say that my mental picture of "home" is culturally blank? Strangely enough, I am ever-so-slightly attracted to this "international central business district" look because it reminds me of Singapore.



The Steps to the Grande Arches
So, some weeks ago we went to visit La Défense, and I took a picture of the Grande Arches. When I went home, I oddly discovered that back in 2009, the pic I posted on my old blog was framed almost exactly the same as the first picture I had just taken. A mere coincidence, but I am amazed to have produced almost the same picture by chance. It just fit the mental image in my mind, which was mostly abetted by having seen the Sash! video one too many times.



The Sash! video itself feels very dated today and of course it is not quite so blue as it was in the video. Instead, La Défense is really kind of gray and airy. Its a big empty plaza of nothingness, yet on a Sunday it was full of families and couples and young people visiting the blindingly boring malls that lined its neverending concrete promenades.



Glass Walls
The lyrics of a Sash! song were probably not written for any serious analysis but I have to say that I have always thought far too much about the "walls" mentioned in the lyrics and subsequently associated it with the architectures in the video. Because the thing that makes it really interesting for me is that while La Trec sings "tear down these walls", the actors are interweaving between glass walls and separated by glass boxes; glass walls being transparent, reflective, and seemingly fragile all at the same time... And let's just say that after watching the video one too many times in the past, I feverishly began to imagine the song as some paean to an "architectural experience". A human response, to architecture! And fittingly, the song even began with "I had a dream last night", and don't most cities begin with a dream?



Japan Bridge
We also spent a few hours searching for the bridge that La Trec stands and sings on, a search hampered by my mistaken notion that the bridge would be mostly blue with red edges (due to photographs and videos I had seen of it... dating from ten years ago). Naturally, it turned out to be neither of the above. Oh the perplexing looks we got as as we went around asking "DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE BIG BLUE GLASS BRIDGE IS? IT IS ALSO SLIGHTLY RED? NO? NEVER HEARD OF IT? BUT ITS REALLY FAMOUS? BY A JAPANESE ARCHITECT?"

Eventually we found out it was called the Japan Bridge (WHAT??), and if you come out of the metro facing the arches, its a long way off to the left from there, not the right where we walked for a long while searching for it.

Here are a whole lot of other images of the area which is strikingly empty in many parts. I think I have always loved it when I go to a part of a city that is usually busy during the weekdays, or basically used for some functional purpose, and to explore it when it is empty on the offdays. I find it strange that huge areas of cities are not used for the better part of the day and have such segregated spheres of use. Sometimes, after thinking about it too long, the notion of work in the sense that it has been structured today (physically and timewise) is even strange. Why do people go to "work" like this? Why are places like La Defense built on the end of the metro line to create a whole dedicated "working" zone where nothing but "work" and business occurs?





















I'm amazed at how crisp and almost unreal my photos turned out.

And for the curious and the masochists... here is that old Sash! video set against the backdrop of La Défense:

Geologising on Lyme Regis

Last weekend was the most beautiful weekend ever. I finally went to see Lyme Regis and the Cobb. The skies were beautiful and so very kind and blue, and a smashing good time was had, in more than one sense of the word.

The journey down from London was generally supposed to be straightforward - we took the train from Waterloo to Weymouth (£19), was delayed for two hours with a clinically depressed train driver who murmured his way through the delays and finally, unceremoniously deposited everyone in Bournemouth while they went to fix some signal problems on the tracks, and a few hours later, we finally got to Weymouth, spent the night there in a strange house, and from there FINALLY we got the Jurassic Coast bus (X53) (£7.50 Day ticket) to Lyme Regis!

I had read a guidebook to Lyme Regis (Thanks to Rich!) and it advised us we had to acquire the following before getting to the bay:

a geological hammer
some form of wrapping material
some glue for on the spot repairs
a notebook and pen
AND
a stout bag in which to put the collecting kit and fossil finds
And so we did! The shop on the corner of Lyme Regis gladly sold us a "geological hammer". Although after that helpful instruction of telling us to get a geological hammer, the book didn't say exactly what we had to do with the hammer. This was proving to be a complete mystery to us city folks. What type of rocks were we supposed to look out for? How should we hold the hammer? And how should we hit the rocks to split them? Why was no one else walking around with a big hammer in hand on the beach? Where were all the other fossilers?



In the picture above, we festooned it with decorative seaweed to celebrate the arrival of the new Geological Hammer at one of Lyme Regis' many beaches and bays.


We approached the Cobb. No, we did not try to take the Cobb apart. But I did see what I presumed had to be one of the stairs that Louisa Musgrove fell off. Which was very exciting to see. Need I tell you of the historical, wait I mean, literary significance of all this? I have been talking about this for years. If you had spoken to me in the last few weeks while I was getting excited about going to the Cobb, you probably would have heard nothing but this from me: STAIRS! COBB! MUSGROVE! FOWLES! BOOK! ROCKS! FOSSILS! ENGLAND! SEA! SAND! FRANCE! LYME REGIS! COBB! COBB! COBB!



A Stair on the Cobb
The other day I looked in my purchase history on book depository.co.uk and I noticed that in the last one year alone I have bought copies of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman four times already and given all four copies away to different people. Yes, I am that obsessed. And there I was about to buy another copy again... I often wonder, why does this novel fascinate me so?



The Cobb
I know, on instinct that my fascination with this book must have something to do with the idea of unknowing, or never knowing. Like Bataille's L'impossible. It encapsulates the idea of never fully knowing. I've given it to the people whom I have been close to or to the people whom I've loved because I wanted to explain this idea but of course there was no way to explain it adequately sometime. Except in this way. Which then, unfortunately and fortunately also opens it up to other readings. So will I ever express it adequately by giving someone the book then?



Another stairs, this one more barebones, harder to ascend...
When planning this trip to Lyme Bay, I also thought about the location of England with France since I was coming in from Paris and thinking very very hard about Paris as a city in the last few weeks. In the book, Sarah sits on the Cobb, seemingly waiting for the French Lieutenant whom she is rumoured to have had an affair with and who had returned to France. But is she really waiting for him? She's not, is she? But why does she sit there? But why is she inventing the mystery? And where is France? What is France? France is still strange to me, I guess I need to step up the french studying a bit so that it will begin to make more sense to me.



The ocean was fantastic and deep blue...



On top of the cobb



The author of this blog, on the Cobb
After sitting and experiencing the Cobb, we wandered to the utterly gorgeous Monmouth Beach, where we decided we would try our hand at "fossiling".



Unfortunately we still did not know if we were doing it right. However, it was pretty cathartic. There was no one else on the beach smashing up stones so perhaps our technique or choice of location was not quite correct. The thing about this trip and acquiring a geological hammer was that, prior to this point, it felt like all this while I had been nurturing and protecting stones (cradling them, wrapping them in soft cloths, and treating them like pet animals and speaking to them) and this new fossiling activity was very much so different, so violent. It was almost like perpetuating violence against all these little stones whom I had just met, which I had never thought of doing before. I was afraid and almost apologetic to these lovely rocks! Yet there was such a thrill in smashing them. I mean these were the rocks I had always wanted to see! Yet here I was smashing them up into tiny pieces! But I mean, I could have just walked on the coast and left them all alone and the rocks would never bear my mark despite my great interest in them. But now, taking a hammer to them...



Alright, so in the end we didn't find any fossils, but we did get to see the insides of many nice rocks.



Back on Lyme Bay



Team Fire on Lyme Bay, with Geological Hammer


After we had spent the afternoon making some abortive attempts at geologising, it seemed only proper to taste some Lyme Gold, on Lyme Bay.

Actually, I wrote the previous sentence just so that I could use the word "geologising". It is one of my favourite words (in theory), except maybe not to pronounce it.



The ocean that faces France, as seen from Lyme Bay.



And to top it off, a rainbow on Lyme Bay!
I know I am often very hyperbolic so it is hard for people to know when I am REALLY SERIOUSLY EXCITED about something, but, this, this, I can't describe how this was truly the BEST WEEKEND I've had in a very very long time.

Can we have more adventures like this, please?

Hayward Gallery - Art of Change

Last week I was up in London and I managed to catch Art of Change, an exhibition of Chinese art, at the Hayward Gallery on the south bank.

Now the reason that I had come to see it was because a friend had told me about an interesting work about rock castings at this show, but one thing that amused me when I first stepped in was the number of Chinese visitors coming to see this. When I made a visit to the Hayward, I would say that at least 75% of the people walking through its galleries were young chinese people. Was the intention to make this body of Chinese art accessible to english audiences, or had they also anticipated the interest of sufficient numbers of Chinese artists/art students dwelling in London who would visit this show?

If one were to make a superficial judgement from the appearance of their relative youthfulness, one would have to assume that they were still studying at school (probably art school). Many seemed and behaved like shy (but hipster-hairdoed) undergraduates in London. I imagined that their educations might not be complete, and in fact might just only be starting; and then i thought about how funny it was that it seemed as if they had to be sent all the way to England to be given a lesson on Chinese art rather than encountering it at home.

Eventually, I also realised, that I myself was also small and Chinese and easily mistaken for a Chinese undergraduate. The lady at the door had given me a student discount on seeing me, despite my not having a student card. But of course, I didn't have a student card because I haven't been a student for years now and technically I was teaching staff now. Neither was I really "Chinese Chinese", because Singapore Chinese people have little in common with China Chinese people, plus I'm an obsessive english-speaking-only anglophile……..

But, with my presence gracing this lovely show, it seems I had just perpetuated the illusion of "all these young chinese artists coming to the West to study about Chinese Art"…

THE HORRORS! OH THE HORRORS! SURELY NOT THAT!

But on with the show.

The show is accompanied by a great archive of Chinese art (available at a few terminals scattered around the exhibition spaces), with essays and suggested links between articles, grouped by themes and issues. I spent a good half hour sitting there reading through the archive, which was useful because I started to see certain links between the Beijing East Village and Artist Village in Singapore. The show is truly ripe territory for anyone who is interested in chinese contemporary art, avant gardism, performance art, shock art or art about the body as it has developed since the 90s in China. Many of the artists are very mobile and make works that involve a great deal of human participation.



The first work that greets you is a set of plaster castings of rocks that were supposedly from revolutions. A "social activity" produced by the "MadeIn" Company, visitors were also invited to contribute "stones that represent their cause", and casts would be made of these rocks.





Xu Zhen - Untitled (2007) (Gym machine, remote control)

The artist formerly known as Xu Zhen, is now MadeIn Company. This is a simple piece that is a prelude to Xu Zhen's other far more (conceptually) impressive works (including the "cover image" of the work that presents you with the image of the person about to fall). I liked this but not the museum staff hawking over nervously to make sure you didn't completely spazz out on the controls and overwork the remote controlled exercise machine.



Duan Yingmei - Happy Yingmei

Next, there were a few works by Duan Yingmei, including a small room with a small door in the wall of the gallery ("Happy Yingmei"). In that room, Yingmei sits in the room filled with small tree branches, singing a little song, and when you enter she gives you a small piece of paper containing a wish for you to carry out. If you want to find out what it is, you'll have to go inside and see it for yourself.



Duan Yingmei - Sleeping (2004/2012)

In the other room, there is a sleeping person. I saw a volunteer being led in by staff, and being helped up into the blue sleeping bag. After she was all wrapped up she turned to face outside. I looked at her. She blinked.



Xu Zhen - Untitled (2008/2011)

This work is of a kind of white wet paint that covers the wall of the gallery and it does not dry. The wall text suggested that a non-drying pigment was selected because if one touched it to see what it was, then one would leave a mark on the wet wall. I wanted to touch it but there was a "DO NOT TOUCH" sign, and I also recalled the last time I saw a big artwork in Palais de Tokyo of a big block of lipstick and… (oops! I better not say too much about that time?) But anyway, I think it would be great if there was no "DO NOT TOUCH" signs. It would be ambiguous like the block of lipstick that would end up being touched and gently palpated by the fingers of curious people.





Xu Zhen - In Just A Blink Of An Eye (2007)



(Archive) Xu Zhen - 8848-1.86

Xu Zhen also allegedly scaled Mount Everest in August 2005, sawed off 1.86 metros (Xu Zhen's height) and then brought it back and exhibited the icy peak in a customized fridge along with photographic materials from the trip. In September 2005, the People's Republic of China sent another team with the latest technology to re-evaluate the height of Everest and revised it downwards to 8844m.







Liang Shaoji - Various works with silk and silkworms - Whirl (Stones and silk), Windows (Cocoons and windows), Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Iron chains and silk)

Born 1945, Liang Shaoji has worked for decades on works with silkworms, living and working in isolation in a village in the Tiantai Mountains - the silkworms being a symbol of generosity and the thread also representing human life and history.



The silkworms are alive in this room on the work with the windows, and in the next room behind, you can hear the live sounds of silkworms eating crunchy leaves and audibly growing and moulting and turning into silkworm moths that flap their wings. It is most fantastic but one must be gentle with them.





Sun Yuan and Peng Yu - Civilisation Pillar

This is a pillar of human fat retrieved from liposuction clinics, made by the infamous duo who have been making extreme works incorporating human body parts, corpses, animal carcasses in order to confront a world that they perceive to be desensitized by images of violence through commercialism. In the background they also show two animals, a rhinosaurus and a Triceratops, as part of another work "I Didn't Notice What I Was Doing".











Various oddities abound in this upstairs gallery, but no wall text though or explanation though. So I just wandered through.





Wang Jianwei - Surplus Value

In a strangely darkened room there was Wang Jianwei's modified pingpong table which results in most balls ending up in the same well on this perilous pingpong table.




Gu Dexin - 1997-6-16 - 1998-6-13

Gu Dexin is apparently famous for working with materials that are unusual in that they are usually perishable. This is a work in which he squeezes water out of pieces of raw pork every day and then keeps them like archaeological remains.





Chen Zhen - Purification Room

Chen Zhen covers a normal room with mud which cracks and changes color over the course of time. The red clay mud is supposed to "purify and disinfect the materialist culture of objects" and by being covered in mud, give the objects a new future destiny.



Chen Zhen - Un-interrupted Voice

Part of a larger installation that Chen Zhen had created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, where peace talks are at a crucial or difficult stage, as it were, these are animal skins stretched over chairs to make drums which exhibition visitors are welcome to hit. The artist explains: "Instead of striking people, one beats the drums, drumming an awakening into the mind"

Here ends the Chinese Art adventure. A very good show indeed. But my parting comment would be that I wish the archive was made available online and not just on the computers at the gallery itself. I could have read it for hours...