Pingyao ancient city China

The mysteries of centuries lie behind Pingyao's gates and walls.

When a city becomes both the subject and the host of an annual international photography competition you cannot fail to acknowledge that something magical has been discovered. Pingyao can claim its own distinct aesthetic. An aesthetic which chimes in the twist of bicycle spokes, the steely patterning of turning wheels and the soft tones and gradients of the city walls and its crumbling brick gateways. I was not free from its monochrome spell. Labyrinths of allies which drowned you in stone surfaces turned the play of light and shadow in to a game of photographic hide and seek. In Pingyao time slipped endlessly in to past and present at every corner and through every arch way. Hundreds of years passed in a single circuit of the city walls.

Shadows create alternative perspectives, Pingyao collapses in on itself.


The sense of a world still yet undiscovered, relic still coated with the dust of its discovery. Pingyao teeters between touristic manipulation and the genuinely undisturbed.

Pingyao, in the North of China in Shanxi Province, may not be found on your typical China-itinerary, but it is gradually developing a niche market for the Western tourist and is an enriching stop-over to make between Xi An and Beijing. The survival of the walled city has earnt it the status of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Pingyao remains as a relic of an ancient China which has largely been swallowed by industrialism and urbanisation in recent years. My advice would be that however long China has been depriving you of your Western comforts (coffees, English breakfasts, pancakes and Spaghetti bolognese) you resist being enthralled by Pingyao's central axis of tourist honey-traps. There is little charm in the courtyards which have been painted and converted in to luxury hotels and inconsequential museums; it is the crumbling and derelict outskirts of Pingyao which are truly magnetic. For a pound a day you can cycle its streets and allies exhaustively and learn more about China than the entire Lonely Planet guide book can offer...While we are on the subject of the Lonely Planet, be wary of its advice and instructions when it comes to the often neglected province of Shanxi. While Hostels like the Harmony guesthouse appears to offer an Oasis to the traveller in China (which includes access to all those beautiful yet oh-so-difficult to get to places in Shanxi and a hand in the black-market of train tickets,) the Deng's don't always hand over these things graciously and will always put profit first....They are not like the harmless old couple who owned the B&B you always go to on your family holiday!

Valparaiso, hopes of getting to Chile

>Drifts and Derivations was a small exhibition I stumbled upon in the Reina Sofia, Madrid at the beginning of the summer. At first it appeared as a visionary idea for a dissertation, I showed everybody the exhibition leaflet and planned trips to South America as research and gasped with the beauty of it all, but eventually it just became the inspiration for the kind of dissertation I wanted to write. Anyway, I have been thinking of what I would like to fill my gap year with and teaching in South America seems to be a strong option, a friend recommended Chile and now I have discovered that there are teaching positions in the port city of Valparaiso. Amongst my notes from the exhibition I have scribbled next to the annotation 'Valparaiso School', 'If only I could go to South America!'. Somehow all of this now seems to be prophetic coincidence, I have a forgotten motivation for travels in South America.

Remember to click on the images for a larger view!

'the relationship between public space and collective life' was the idea that struck me, the Valparaiso School used architecture to create spaces which encouraged a particular kind of lifestyle. An artistic Utopialand was made possible through the aesthetics of everyday life. Valparaiso thinking lives by the maxim that an artistic philosophy can inform a way of life.

The 'poetic acts' which are recorded in two of these images suggest that the experience and activity of humans leaves a visual and artistic trace. That everything which man might do is an act of artistic creation. The marked sand records the journey of the people in celebration of the inauguration, but the school took this idea further producing contraptions which would purposefully leave an artistic mark behind.

Here we find art which has its own geography and topography, it occupies and manifests itself in physical space rather than just visual form. It has is its own immanence within 'place' and landscape. The emerging forms of modern architecture in South America were professing and selling a lifestyle. Drifts and Derivations was a brilliant exhibition, a window in to concepts, movements and ideas. Perhaps I will choose to apply for teaching positions in Valparaiso, and sit in town squares dreaming that I am living the architect's and the artist's vision.

My Art History

I am in London today, so here is a bit of a rushed post, apologies for picture quality, it's my blackberry it doesn't do anything justice!

The beginnings of an art book sculpture

While I am back Home, Home and have my whole life in boxes before me I have decided to organise some of the many things I have collected over the years. I am beginning to trip over postcards of artworks, gallery maps, exhibition leaflets and posters and so I am going to try and make a scrapbook of them all. So they don't go to waste but also to preserve them amongst my thoughts. Here are a few pictures of the chaos.

I can already see some interesting things collaged here; Miquel Barcelo's watercolours, Goya's bullfighting etchings, and a bit of Sonia Delaney!

I am going to make a scrapbook, but I need to buy photo-corners first so that I don't destroy anything with glue. I hope that some more interesting posts will come out of this excursion in re-discovery. My mother informs me we do in fact have a scanner, so expect more beautiful, good quality images, soon.

Meanwhile in London. Today I am going on my Eric Gill Pilgrimage; to see the Prospero and Ariel sculpture on the exterior of BBC's Broadcasting House and The Fourteen Stations of the cross at Westminster Cathedral.

AND if I don't get lost I might wander to the V&A to see the exhibition of Camera-less photography which is reviewed beautifully here;
http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/2010/12/camera-less-photography-at-ingleby.html
and an even bigger if, I happen to be at the V&A at the right time I will go see this;
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/mat-collishaw/index.html
having discovered Matt Collishaw at the Fitz the other day.

Travels in Graffiti

Graffiti has been vindicated in recent years as Banksy has brought his work off the streets and in to gallery spaces. There is a lot more appreciation for the talent and thought which informs this underground culture. On my European travels I have always been interested in documenting, with my camera, the particular graffiti-culture of the cities I visit. It seems that each country and each city has a different approach to their medium and a unique motivation.

Madrid- characterised by bright, vibrant graphics, powerful letters, explosions of colour.

Yesterday when I wrote that sculpture more than any art form is in dialogue with its surroundings, I was not considering graffiti. Graffiti doesn't simply furnish buildings, roads and pavements; when we visit a city we absorb its graffiti as an integral part of its vista. But graffiti is not a permanent feature, its power is in its transience. While architecture remains an archaism, a monument to the past, graffiti is that part of the city which adapts with its people, with the moving, breathing, developing culture.

Bucharest- Romania, 'Women! Don't tolerate misogyny' in Romania graffiti appeared to have a bitter political ambition, scrawled with a fire and an urgency or stencilled with powerful irony.

Prague-Czech Republic, appeared to me to be obsessed with stencil graffiti, with repeating patterns across the city.

Portugal

Budapest, Hungary

Rome was all about the effortless scribble, as if the entire city were a notepad for the scrawls of its people.

Ju Ming Sculpture

Here is a bright, surreal post to brighten up your day and mine. More retrospective memories of China. I was really struggling in Beijing until I decided to take a day to myself and make the trip to the China Modern Art Gallery. It offered me my first real reason to love China. In the Modern Art gallery you have to navigate your way through countless displays of traditional-style Chinese painting but there are really exciting things to be discovered too. Here are the sculptures of Taiwanese artist, Ju Ming.

Ju Ming painting sculpture for the Living World Series

Mostly carving in wood, Ming's sculptures can appear at first glance to be western-style pieces of garden furniture, the kind of thing you might find in a children's playground. But his sculptures should neither be dismissed nor ignored. Ju Ming's sculptures had an incredible and surprising emotional intensity for me.

Initially I did dismiss them but they commanded my attention and I realised that they transcended the possibilities of the medium. Sculpted in wood, stainless steel and polystyrene these figures should have remained firmly in the realm of unreality. But when I looked at them through my camera lens I realised how human they were. Ming's Living World Series seemed to be an anthropological storybook of human life. Polystyrene communicated anger, pain, frustration, illuminated in dark and light. Human expression became living theatre before my eyes- Kaleidoscopic Humanity.

Hi stainless steel synchronised swimmers had incredible lyrical fluidity and grace of movement.

"I do not imbue my sculpture with any one particular story; rather, interpretation is solely the domain of the viewer. I neither intend to tell a story while sculpting, nor do I go back and write a story to fit the final product. "

The whole thing astounded me, so here are some images for you:

'The abstract technique is a synthetic one, both concrete and abstract, trying to lead the viewers into a charming realm. The journey brings them into contact with snow mountains, oceans, cliffs, sands, deep valleys, remote antiquity, clouds, and springs. More importantly, the vastness, undulation and surge of the picture satisfy viewers with a sense of majesty.'

Doesn't Chinese just sound amazing in translation?

For more information about Ju Ming, take a look at this article; http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/2688

Madrid- From Bosch to Barcelo

Madrid is a vibrant city and veritable capital of art culture. I could fill this post with hundreds of art stories, but I'm going to limit myself to just a few. When I was ten years old my Grandma took me to Madrid to stay with my Aunt. It was the first time I had been abroad without my parents, it was my first time dancing on the streets until 1am, it was my first time really getting to know my Aunt and Grandma, it was my first time tasting the world as it would be. I returned when I was 12, 16 and 20, each time discovering new things about the city and returning to some of the same. Most of these things, new and old, are centred around what the art galleries, exhibitions and installations have to offer my love of art.
As I come to apply for jobs and consider why I want to work in the Arts sector, it is my memories of that first trip to the Prado which I return to. For a long time afterwards I believed that all of art history was contained within the walls of that museum; Rubens, El Greco, Heronimus Bosch, Goya and Picasso, this was the art of the world, not just of Spain. I had so much passion for the voluptuous forms of Ruben's goddesses, the elongated silhouettes of El Greco, the chaotic detail of Bosch's Heaven and Hell triptych, the tortured nightmares of Black Goya and the unrealised possibilities of Picasso. As a ten year old in a foreign country I took my Grandma and my aunt on a tour of the unexplored gallery and gained an occasional audience in the process.

Jamon, that gorgeous Spanish treat! And some of Madrid's graffiti that decorates the streets. I think this inspired an obsession with graffiti for a long time, if you could see my art and photography sketchbooks from school you would understand!

At 16 I was lucky enough to see Picasso's Guernica on its return to Spain. Its exhibition amongst sketches and preparatory paintings proved Guernica to be a powerful work as it encompassed all in its gravitational field. This exhibition in the Reina Sofia was accompanied by an exhibition at the Prado which showed Picasso playing with the very traditions and artworks that I had learnt about at ten. I came home with a heavy exhibition catalogue and a love for Picasso. On this trip I also saw the Movida exhibition about Spanish underground art culture in the 80's which has fuelled a fascination with the film maker Almodovar that you can read about here; http://wandering-the-dream-space.blogspot.com/2010/11/pedro-almodovar-yo-queiro-ser-una-chica.html.

This summer I returned to Spain for my Aunt's wedding and decided to extend my stay so that I could have some time in the city which seems to have become so familiar. I returned to the Reina Sofia and took my mother to see it for the first time. It was here that I saw the Valparaiso exhibition (http://wandering-the-dream-space.blogspot.com/2010/11/valparaiso-hopes-of-getting-to-chile.html) which initially inspired ideas about my dissertation. I was also drawn to the Caixa forum, pictured above, by the upside down elephant balancing on its trunk and the vertical walled garden. The Caixa is an amazing art space and its exhibition of Miquel Barcelo was another revelation about Spanish art. Barcelo has a wonderful feel for texture and the physical qualities of paint. He could manipulate paint in to pumpkin pulp, sand drifts, vegetable matter and the greasy relics of a Spanish feast. In contrast his watercolours exploit the medium's delicate qualities, suggesting shapes like shadows or moving water. Take a look here: http://www.miquelbarcelo.org/

I am sorry that this post has flitted between so many things, but I want to explain how much the city of Madrid has inspired me and my interests. This post is for my Grandma and my Aunt, because it's true, without that first trip to Madrid I'm not sure where my passion for art would have come from.

The Beauty of Lettering

Travels combined with dissertation research has given me an appreciation for the beauty of lettering. It is particularly striking when you go to a country or a experience a language with an entirely different alphabet. The inability to recognise these forms or read them leads to an appreciation of their form and music alone. Letters contain an inherent beauty in their function, and Eric Gill certainly approved of this. Here are a few photographs to stir your own interest. In China I saw a few examples of people writing on the streets in water, it is still a mystery to me why they were doing it, although I like to imagine it was spontaneous park-poetry! Above you can see a calligrapher in the Temple of Heaven park and below in Beihai Park, Beijing.
Unfortunately in this picture you can see the spots of rain threatening to erase the whole work of art and labour before its time. But this poetry has to be fast and fleeting because in the heat of Beijing it quickly disappears. Words in to air without a trace.
In Marrakech I discovered an appreciation for the incantatory forms of Arabic lettering, mysteriously marking walls and the sides of buildings. I experience these letters as the deaf do, blind to the richness of intonation and suggestive meaning, left soothed by their most basic aesthetic appeal and grasping nothing more.
There is a kind of magic to these unexplained letters, perhaps they are as mundane as road signs and shop fronts, but while I don't understand and can't know the answers they hold all the power in the world.

A little research has yielded an answer to the mystery of water-park-calligraphy in China; http://www.thememagazine.com/stories/yang-yingshi/

It seems my instinct wasn't so far off when I guessed it might be poetry, but this isn't intended as performance art, but just practice! Just another example of why parks in Beijing are so beautiful, hives of afternoon activity.

Chinese Vogue- 5th anniversary September Issue

My blog got a hit from a google search for Chinese Vogue. I was the fourth search result, this excites me a lot but also made me realise how unsatisfying my first post may have been. Here are some sneak peak scans from the issue to satisfy any searches a little more sufficiently. Here is a sneak peak at some of the pages inside the issue, remember you can click on the scans to see a bigger image.

The issue features some gorgeous photoshoots which really explore asian identity and beauty.

This picture reminds me of some of the numerous fabric markets that were dotted around Beijing, in China tailored clothing is affordable to just about any Western tourist as long as they have savvy bartering skills.

This scan shows the full-range of a make-up shoot featured in the magazine, i love the way the chinese characters look on the page.

This scan didn't come out very well, you can still see the rainbow of the laser as it moves across the page. But I couldn't resist trying to show you this page, the black and white photoshoot of female Chinese celebrities is my favourite in the magazine. It really plays with ideas of western elegance and glamour. I think Asian beauty wins out in the end though.

Wu Guanzhong- retrospective

First of all I have to apologise for the extremely cropped scans, it is difficult trying to get good scans whilst protecting the spine of your book! When I was in China I saw a retrospective of the this giant of Chinese Modern Art, Wu Guanzhong. These examples may look like fairly typical of Chinese painting but placing them within the context of the rest of the museum it becomes evident that Guanzhong's delicate diversions from the traditional model make him stunningly modern.

'Exploring in the world of art is just like hunting tigers and panthers in deep mountains or shooting eagles. If they do not catch their preys, both artists and hunters will be greatly depressed and have nothing to fall back on. An artist may use up all of his energy for persistent hunting in the field of art. But his spirit is reviving.' Wu Guanzhong.

Only the Chinese can get away with being quite so imagistically poetic.

After I saw his exhibition I couldn't look at China without seeing it through the lyrical brush strokes of Guanzhong. His paintings have come to represent for me what I love about that country.

798 Art District Postcards

Just more random scribbles on the backs of postcards!

Vogue China- 5th Anniversary

I'm going to write another retrospective post about China, internet censorship meant that a lot of this wasn't possible while I was there, so there are things to catch up on.




During our last few days in Beijing we tried desperately to get in to the newly opened exhibition for Vogue China's 5th anniversary. One night we were turned away, 'This is just for press!' they chided us and on another occasion they allowed us only a glimpse of the first floor, but eventually we made it in! All of this added to the mystique of the exhibition and the sensation that we were witnessing something vital in Chinese culture. Perhaps you don't think fashion is particularly important, but in Beijing's Chaoyang it is certainly beginning to dominant and direct the cultural atmosphere.



Vogue China is incredibly modern, the exhibition was the ultimate symbol of modernity and the rising power of the East. The exhibition, encased in a kind of space-age pod with white elevators and mirrored walkways, transported you in to a new elegance which celebrated Asian models and the Asian aesthetic. For a country which worships the strange power of western beauty and sells skin bleaching moisturiser at an alarming rate, the exhibition had a powerful resonance.


The exhibition was fabulously curated, so that every display curled in to elegance.

The Western dream may be pasted across the glass shop windows of Sanlitun and occupying empty shops which announce the imminent arrival of Chanel and Dolce &Gabbana, but at the heart of the shopping complex there is a sense of rebellion, of independence. The Chinese fashion industry has a power and momentum of its own.


Computer screens displayed some of the hundreds of photographs from the history of Vogue China's photoshoots.

China's fashion world is ultimately exclusive. As a Westerner I had access to a growing culture which would be completely alien to a large proportion of the Chinese population. 20 kwai or 2 pounds seems like a small price to pay for a fashion magazine in England, but in China it could buy four meals or a new item of clothing for your wardrobe. If you think British Vogue promotes impossible lifestyles then Chinese Vogue is the ultimate hyperbole!


The heavy tomes which tipped my luggage over the limit; Vogue China's 5th anniversary september edition and the special collection of photographs from the exhbition. For four pounds I couldn't resist sacrificing a few ragged clothes and well-leafed books to own two pieces of luxurious China.