Event Driven

Saturday I decided to take in some culture and headed down to the Hong Kong Arts Centre to watch a film about the Japanese Artist Yayoi Kusama.  The film, titled I Adore Myself, documents her current creative process as well as her continued artistic success and recognition. The film was shot while she was in the process of completing a set of 55 large drawing canvases.  As she drew, she would tell narrates her past through anecdotes; revealing her history throughout the film.  She is depicted as a very prolific and strong willed individual who is battling her age while continuing to be inspired and create. She drew with quick gestures using repetitive patterns that operated on both large and small scales. She filled the canvases with large designs of repeating themes.  It reminded of me how I used to go about drawing a number of years ago.  The film left me with a pleasant and mild swell of inspiration and enthusiasm.

After the film I road the star ferry across the harbor.  The boat rocked pleasantly while the evening sun ensured the impossibility of bad photographs.

I ate quickly on the street and took a cab to the opening at the Videotage in the Cattle Depot Artist Village.  The Artist Village lies behind the large brick walls of a reclaimed cattle slaughter yard in the Ma Tau Kok, Kowloon.  A number of contemporary and new media focused galleries have nestled themselves between concrete water troughs and large sliding doors. I browsed around chatting and seeing some of the other galleries.  As the evening closed, I was invited to join a group at one of the artist’s friend’s house. We spent the night discussing Hong Kong art community, culture and history.  I got a chance to bounce some of my impressions of Shanghai and Hong Kong off of people who had been living there a little longer.  Their perspective was really insightful and gave me a lot more to mull over.

The cab ride home was contemplative.  I feel that the amount of introspection time I have been given here is beginning to resolve into some more concrete decisions for the future.

I’m just settling back into Shanghai after an eventful three days in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is separated by a large harbor, dividing the city into Hong Kong Island and Kowloon District. I stayed on less touristy Kowloon side.  My hotel was in an interesting neighborhood surrounded by private schools. Each afternoon the streets surrounding would become plaid with various batches of identically dressed children flooding onto the streets out of school.  I explored the neighborhood a bit when I first arrived, walking around Hong Kong’s twisted winding and slopes streets.  For those of you familiar with San Francisco, imagine the hill-factored roughly doubled and you’ll have Hong Kong’s steepness.  The interesting difference between the two is that no major roads have a steep incline.  Instead they are built as complex series of slowly rising switch backs with the building nestled into the cliff sides between.  The planning has created fascinated array of concrete retaining walls, steep stair case walk ways, and buildings with multiple ground floors.

When I returned to the hotel I had the front desk person write down the address to a recommended restaurant district and directions how to get back. I jumped in a cab and sped off to the city.

Where I went for dinner managed to defy the reputation of Kowloon as being a local hang out.  The place was littered with internationally themed bars, restaurants and clubs. I ate my first pizza/beer dinner since being in Asia, and paid about twice that I would have in Seattle… I was definitely spoiled by Shanghai.

At dinner I met a fellow solo traveler. Originally from Italy, he was en route from Australia to begin studies at a school in Beijing. He was in town for a few nights so we exchanged info and agreed to meet up the following evening. I parted ways with him and then jumped in a cab to head home.  In Hong Kong the local language is Cantonese, not Mandarin. Although both use the same written characters, the pronunciation is distinct enough that for me communication reverted to pointing at addressed post-it notes.  I showed the driver the note the clerk had written, but he seemed puzzled.  He took my about one block and indicated that this is where I had asked to go.  I tried to explain that there were two addresses on the note, but he communicated that they were the same place.  Apparently when I told the clerk “this hotel” he had interpreted it as “that” hotel and had written down a hotel in the neighborhood as well as the intersection.  I had no link home.

Mildly frustrated I jumped out of the cab and began to walk in the direction my intuition led me.  I walked for a long time, occasionally stopping and asking cab drivers if they could understand the name of my hotel and road, the names for which I only knew in English.   The streets started getting quieter and darker, and fewer and fewer cabs were around.  I was lost.  For the first time in Asia I was actually lost.  “Check this one off the necessary travel experience list…” I thought while trying to keep my spirits up.  Around 3 AM I woke up an old cab driver sleeping in his car and monosyllabically enunciated the street I was staying on.  He got on the radio and asked around, received what seemed to be a confirming response and then asked me to get in the cab.  He took me straight back to the hotel without any problem.  Turns out I had walked straight passed my street, passing within one block of the hotel but had simply missed the street sign.  My intuition was good, I just can’t seem to read.  The driver spoke a bit of Mandarin, on the way home we made simple conversation about the comparisons in size and expense of Shanghai to Hong Kong.  It was a pleasant end to a disconcerting evening.

Friday I slept off my late night until about noon and woke up with a journey to a park in the neighborhood. It was a pleasant meditative garden called Kowloon Walled City Park.  I’ve attached a few photos.  In the evening I met up with my friend from the night before and we played tourist in the Soho district.  Did I mention that Hong Kong is expensive?

绿色的 (pronounced lǜsède, or kinda like loosuhduh) is the first experimental video project I’ve done in China that I would like to share.  The title means “green colored”, but is faintly homonymous with “Lucid”.

watch:

绿色的 [high res, QuickTime H.264 720p24 135Mb]

绿色的 [low res, QuickTime H.264 480p24 90Mb]

read:

The short is an attempt to capture the flow and cadence of moving within the city without concentrating on the details of individual events, people or activities.  I want to bring the attention to the color, pace, density and variety that moving over short distances can entail.  Only during moments of pause are we given specifics of what is around us, and they are brief.  The view taken is that of a backseat passenger; a participant in this large mass of shifting gestures.

I plan to do a number of studies using the technique found in the short here.  The effect has a pleasant tendency to do away with the baggage of certain camera language and specific symbols and replaces them with dampened movement, softened shapes, and a slower time scale.

My struggle with filming in the city comes from a hesitation to not put a wall between myself and those that live here.  I feel like when one takes out a camera out you cease to be a participant and become an observer. You put a person, a place, a culture on display.  That is acceptable for tourist photos, but I find myself stalled.  Instead of pointing at what is different, I find myself wanting to talk about the concepts things I see represent.  Every day in Shanghai I witness many brilliant instances of very compelling topics and themes.  Relationships between large and small, density, resourcefulness, contextual aesthetics.   I want to use these examples to get at the root point of interest, but find myself worried that I will instead but a culture on display as a westerner. In a word, my challenge is to use the images of China as a medium not as a subject.

Perhaps in this piece I am hiding behind obfsication and a flowy video filter, but it makes me more comfortable with my documentation.  The way I have composed and processed the piece it feels more like “mine” then “theirs”.  The cultureal images although present have been reduced and articulated by a process that is my own.