从前,竹林里住着三只熊猫.  他们的房子又大又漂亮.  他们是熊猫爸爸, 熊猫妈妈, 和熊猫宝宝.  在一个晴朗的下午他们把粥做好后, 就出去散步,等粥晾凉.  过了一会儿一个叫缕金帝的小女孩儿走到了这幢房子.  她走了好久, 又饿又累.   她敲了敲门,不过没人答应. 她就走了进去. 她先进了厨房, 看到桌子上有三碗粥, 一碗大的, 一碗中的, 和一碗小的. 她饿极了! 她先尝了尝大碗的, 可是太烫了.  然后她尝了尝中碗的, 可是太凉了. 最后他尝了尝小碗的, 这碗正好, 不冷不热. 她就都喝完了.  喝完后她走进客厅, 看到三把大小不同的椅子. 她先坐了坐大的, 可是太高了. 然后她坐了坐中的, 可是太宽了. 最后她坐了坐小的, 可是椅子坏了!  后来, 她觉得有点儿困, 所以她就上楼去休息.  卧室里也有三张大小不同的床.  她先躺在大床上, 可是太硬了. 然后她试了试中床, 可是太软了.  最后她试了试小床, 她觉得很舒服, 不软不硬.  她一躺下就睡着了.  然后熊猫回家了.  在厨房他们发现有人进来过.  熊猫爸爸说 “有人喝过我的粥”.  熊猫妈妈说 “也有人喝过我的粥”.  熊猫宝宝说 “ 我的粥也被喝了,而且被喝光了!”  然后他们进客厅去.  熊猫爸爸说 “有人坐过我的椅子”.  熊猫妈妈说 “也有人坐过我的椅子”.  熊猫宝宝说 “ 我的椅子也被坐过,而且被坐坏了.”  他们很担心.  然后到楼上的卧室去.  熊猫爸爸说 “有人睡过我的床”. 熊猫妈妈说 “也有人睡过我的床.”  熊猫宝宝说 “也有人睡过我的床, 而且她还睡在这里!”  缕金帝一听到有声音就起来了, 但不幸的是, 熊猫把她吃了! 完!

I’ve been back in Shanghai and living with a bit of a slower pace.  Concentrating on studying Mandarin and just enjoying being in the city.  I have relaxed a lot since coming back from my second trip.  I am not so concerned with trying to “see everything” and “do everything”, especially with creative projects.  I have decided that right now is a time for reflections and observation.  The future holds many more opportunities for more directed creative pursuits.  For now with my time I want to just take it in and give it time to soak up into the rest of my life experience.  I can make sense of things later.

But this reflective time now is the calm before the storm because tomorrow I’m leaving for 云南 (Yunnan) province to see a few cities 昆明 (Kunming) and 丽江 (Lijiang).  I’ve been really itching to get out of cities and see what a bit more of the Chinese country side has to offer. My Chinese instructor will be accompanying me so I am sure that there will be a whole plethora of cultural knowledge to be found that I would otherwise miss without such a knowledgeable companion.

After the Yunnan trip I’ll be heading to meet up with Billion, my roommate, who is back in Malaysia for a few weeks.  While there I’ll hop a train down to Singapore to the SIGGRAPH ASIA conference and to visit with a former DXARTS grad who is living there, Hiroki.

Beyond that there are 3 days left in Shanghai before it’s home for the holidays.  But I’m already looking at air tickets for June…

Coming into Tokyo last night and finding my way to the youth hostel was a smooth, organized, and peaceful experience.  People were very friendly and helpful when I was a bit lost.  Everything is well labeled transportation is reliable and on time.  The air smelled clean and everything was stark, discrete, and thoughtfully placed.

I spent the day today at galleries and filming a bit around the city.  In observing the way people and streets are organized, information is laid out, and aesthetic choices throughout the city I felt a strange sense of familiarity.  I realized that it is due to a large part of my youth being exposed to Japanese media.  From video games to animation to electronics, I can think of many examples of my childhood that was spent interacting with Japanese objects.  This struck me in a strange way as it made the culture I encountered seem not foreign but in a way, complete. As if it was a pure version of all the semi-localized versions of things I had experienced before.  From electronic shops to sushi bars, it all felt like the real-deal versions of familiar systems and ideas.  The fact that the streets resembled those I had seen in all my video games growing up made the whole city feel a bit like LEGO land.  This was a humorous thing to contemplate while riding the metro around and watching people and cars fly by.

Of the places I went today one place really stood out: The ICC had a large collection of very well done and engaging interactive works.  Definitely the most high-production interactive work I’ve seen in Asia, and a lot of the conceptual grounding was well laid out.  I also visited the “Second Nature” exhibit at the 21_21 space.  It exhibit a small number of more “design” oriented art.  The work I found to be refreshing in it’s practicality and ingenuity but frustrating in it’s lack of conceptual grounding or probing of interesting questions.  Worth seeing to get a better idea of the state of high end Japanese art-design.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Yokohama Trienniale, the 3rd stop in my impromptu tour of the Asian exhibitions.  After the visit I will with the Tokyo University of the Arts professor to discuss the new media and film program.  After today I have a lot more directed questions to ask him about Japan as a context for new media.

Just a few tourist photos to boot:

The first day was an art chase first to the Ceramics Biennial and then to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the Taipei Biennial. The Ceramics Biennial was an inspiring departure from my usual taste of new media oriented work.  The second stop was the Taipei 2008 Biennial.  It was an amazing contrast between the Shanghai Biennial in that a large majority of the work in Taipei was focused on world politics and subculture. The  Shanghai exhibition in contrast  focused on glorification of China and national progress.  Undoubtedly a product of the government’s influence of curation and content in mainland China versus a more progressive and political active population in Taipei..

The second day we first went to the MOCA Taipei for the Digital Arts festival.  About half of the work was interactive video while the other was animation screenings.  The majority of the animation felt juvenile, with content unreasonably emotional or gruesome. The interactive art was very well fabricated, but a lot of the work lacked any significant level of innovation and felt more like repeats of common interactive art techniques.

After the festival we hopped a little bus and headed up out of town for a bit of scenery.  The bus climbed and wound around to the peak of the mountain.  We hiked down a mountain side with the puffs of a steaming volcano in the distance.  It’s always nice to be reminded where the earth you standing on originated from.

The third day we rose early and the whole family headed down to 台中 (Tai Chung) to get out of town.  I really wanted to see the country side and taste the different flavor outside of a city.  South of Taipei feels very tropical, reminding me that we are indeed on an island in the pacific.  淇璎’s family was so accommodating and accepting I felt like one of their own.  We made several stop, one at  some incredible geological formations from the 1999 earthquake.  We went to a Buddhist temple to donate food to the monks and pay homage to the idols. Since Taiwan escaped the religious repression that China experienced the organized religion is far more developed.  I hadn’t really noticed its absense in China until I saw it so estalished in Taipei.

My first impression of Taipei is clean and organized! A very stark contrast to Shanghai.  People actually form lines for things like food and transportation.  But more importantly, it’s known that when Taipei comes up in conversation it must be mentioned that Taipei has the best 小吃 (xiao chi) in the world. Literally meaning “little eats”, 小吃 refers to the food sold at markets and open air stalls in various locations throughout the city.  Appropriately enough our first stop off of the light rail was into a night market for a bit of grazing.  Bubble tea in hand, we found a couple spots and ate a little here and a little there.  We sat in a park near an open air concert and chatted.  Even though I know I still have a long way to go, I’m excited at my increasing ability to express myself in Mandarin.  In China learning Mandarin is wonderful as everyone is excited to be your teacher.

We have a few things planned for these few days I’ll be here.  One is to see the Taipei Biennial, which should be a good point of contrast to the Shanghai Biennial.  Next is to see a little bit of scenery.  Other than that we will decide on the fly.

After Taipei I will spend a short while in Tokyo where, among other things, I plan to look into the Tokyo University of the Arts New Media and Film program.  I have been considering graduate schools and want to decide if for one Asia is a place to go and secondly if I want to take a Fine Arts degree.  The professor and practicing artist Masaki Fujihata has agreed to meet with me and I’m quite excited about the opportunity.

After Tokyo I have added another leg to my journey.  It’s back to Hong Kong to see the opening of the Microwave Festival.  During the eARTS shows in Shanghai, I met up with a few of my acquaintances from the Videotage show in Hong Kong last month.  They are organizing a portion of the festival and I decided it would be worth it to go check it out.  It should still be an interesting point of contrast to the eARTS Shanghai festival.

And now of course the obligatory en route travel pictures:

more later…

Here is the first installment.

小猫

This cat and her owner live next to the bike shop and both are always quite curious what we are up to.  The cat is very famous on Fuxing Lu as being friendly and photogenic.

I’ve included a few photos of the new place.  It’s pretty nice to move out of the hotel.  I didn’t realize how much living in such a temporary-feeling living arrangement was bothering me until I felt the comfort of a real home.  I spent the whole afternoon lying on the bed listening to sounds of life around me.  Children playing, people talking, dishes clanking from within open windows.  It was a decompression from the mental stress of the past week of decision making.

Billion, my new roommate, definitely went out of his way to make my birthday special.  First he surprised me with a ridiculous a present (see photo).

In the evening he had arranged a little get together at a friend’s cafe.  She had a cooked a big dinner for everybody.  They even had a birthday cake waiting for me. We chatted for a hours, swapping stories and culture.  It was a quite evening and  a perfect beginning of new things.

As I struggle to learn to communicate in Mandarin here I keep feeling as if I have struggled this way before.  It is sort of a lingering familiarity that I couldn’t put my finger on.  But today it hit me - learning a language is in many ways similar to when I was teaching myself to skate switch!

For those of you aren’t familiar, skating switch is where you begin doing skateboard tricks in opposite of your more comfortable stance.  So for me, I would always ride my skateboard one way, with my left foot on the tail and my right foot forward.  But if I were to reverse that stance it is like starting over, like writing left handed in a way.

Let me explain why I feel these two pursuits are analogous.  When learning a new language, or learning to skate switch, you are in both cases attempting to recreate a previous skill under new constraints.  I already know how to kickflip, but can I do it switch?  I already know how to describe what I did yesterday but can I do it in Chinese?  In both cases one must translate a previous behavior but using a foreign and uncomfortable method.  By forcing yourself to work under these constraints you are achieving something that allows you to strengthen your skill in the general sense.  Skating switch informs your regular skateboarding and makes you more well rounded.  Learning a foreign language informs your first language and gives you more insight into the nature of language itself.

There is more to this than a whimsical analogy.  Because I’ve gone through the struggle of learning to skate switch and see the analogy, I can then apply somethings I learned to this new situation.  The first is the learning curve.  Starting to skate switch is the most difficult step, because you already know how to skate and you are forced to humble yourself back to being able to do almost nothing.  But once you get over the initial steepness of the curve and learn the basics you begin to have fun skating switch.  Once this happens you are motivated to spend more time in that stance and learning accelerates.  In the same way, when beginning to speak Mandarin it is so incredibly difficult that you would rather just speak English, or not say anything at all!  But once you get to be mildly conversational and communicate, you start to have a lot of fun learning new words and new things from the people you meet.  The same process is at work, as a basis of learning begits more and more learning.  It just takes confidence and persistence to get past that initial hump.  With my language practice, I just new feel like I am rounding the hill to begin to learn more from having conversations outside of the classroom in daily life.

Beyond this, another interesting phenomenon occurs.  You learn that somethings are easier switch than regular.  I remember when I learned switch frontside flips, and they were incredibly smooth and natural, way more so than my regular stance frontside flips.  The reason is somewhat inexplicable, but many people have felt the same thing in different ways.  Although I haven’t experienced it yet Mandarin, I can see where there are places where certain types of communication are simply easier or more eloquent.  I believe through understanding areas where certain languages are more capable, we are given insight into the culture of the language, our own culture, and communication of ideas in general.

I look forward to seeing these principles manifest themselves as I continue to learn Mandarin.  I think my choice of picking one of the most distant languages to English was a challenge, but because of this difference I feel I will learn more about the nature of language in general.