Arts Attack!

It must be a quote taken from a newspaper article, a film or a book, or a radio show, but wherever it’s from it always makes me chuckle. Here goes my own rendition: imagine yourself to be an alien beholding the planet Earth from the sky. For a second your gaze cast upon a sport stadium, a football ground for instance, watching 23 bio-beings, divided into two teams, in a running frenzy up and down the field and chasing after a ball in front of a packed crowd. The purpose of the game seems to be kicking the ball into the net…except that no one does for the entire 90 minutes…four limps, arms specifically, are not utilised despite millions of years of evolution. There are even penalties for touching the ball, executed by the man with the whistle who has drawn a red card from his pocket and shows it to the yelling man in the torn jersey. Seconds later that the man in the fluorescent jersey and Mickey Mouse gloves not only touches the ball, but also grapples with it for a few good seconds before kicking it out. That’s just baffling. The whole thing hardly makes any sense…. ‘Classic example of an activity given birth and cradled by a low intelligent civilisation,’ the alien thinks to itself, ‘AI calling centre to withdraw troops.’
That it makes no sense at all is precisely the beauty of football—23 people and a ball, which is still being held dearly to the heart of an armchair football fan after nearly two decades.





Installation of a myriad of human faces. Every step you take onto the metal discs gives echoing auditory impressions that resemble the shackles and chains used to restrain captives.
It’s eerie, daunting and chilled me to the bone.




A maze in the courtyard, slanted and cobble-stone lined to make the hide-and-seek game doubly difficult. Perhaps it's purposely designed for you to get lost...


What, then, would an alien think of what is known collectively as arts institutions? Wouldn’t it think of us all as daft too? After all, galleries, museums, opera houses, concert halls, public spaces doubling as arts spaces, and archives—frequented by streams of visitors, some of them staring at (art) objects with blank emotion, some of them putting on a ‘I-know-it-all’ art connoisseur façade—are very abstract concepts to grasp.

But whatever purposes they serve, they are always at the very top of my travel itinerary and make my days.

In the age of jet travel, one is never far away from the world’s greatest museums and galleries, Louvre, Prado, Hermitage, the British Museum, MOMAs, Guggenheims (New York, Bilbao, etc), Tate, Tate Modern, the national gallery of a civilised state (ie Hong Kong excluded), and galleries devoted to a single prominent painter, van Gogh in Amsterdam for one. Been there? Done that? You wow at the paintings, amazed by their craftsmanship, but few really stand out and shine as true awe-inspiring experiences.

But there is no shortage of reasons to explain why the Jewish Museum in Berlin warranted two separate visits during my stay in the German capital. The database alone, accessible to visitors in inter-active formats on the terminals, boasts a corpus of tens and thousands of oral history interviews with Jewish Holocaust and WWII survivors, is the stuff that the Hong Kong Film Archive can only dream of. This was an experience to savour and ponder upon the best of humanity, and to reflect and learn from the atrocity of war committed by the worst of mankind.




The Munch trio: the artist, the painting, the cake


The Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo is a real gem that has sadly gone unnoticed. For years I was led to believe the man in ‘Scream’—the twisted, wrinkled face of a monster—is a persona of the artist himself. Judge for yourself.


Another often-neglected member of arts institutions, in the humble opinion of a non-church going but devout Christian, is chapels and churches, a tour of which will have to wait till the next blog.

The Babel Experience

Instant dictionary! Your name in Hebrew. (Jewish Museum, Berlin)


Travelling is a perfect time to meet and talk to strangers, often in a foreign language native to neither you nor the people you are conversing with. After five weeks in London, my third comfortable, almost too civilised Eurostar journey across the British Channel (the pleasant absence of the all-too-familiar scenes of mothers shouting at their running children in a carriage, obese/diabetic passengers binging on ultra-sugary Mars and Snikers bars on a British train), I arrived in a creepy, dodgy, seedy-looking EU capital Brussels train station deep in the night to catch my overnight train to Berlin. ‘Great, the ticket office was staffed.’I started queuing outside a ticket office booth waiting for my turn to get the rail-pass validated. ‘Bonsoir, Hmmm, Errr, Ummm… [mind goes blank and auto navigation of the English zone of my brain instantly on]…[Why ain’t I like that Asian girl at the front who speaks perfect French? What good do my first ten lessons of a self-learning French kit do if ‘la gare’ is the only word applicable to this scenario. Boy, Flemish is just beyond me]
Okey doke, I’ll settle with a greeting in the local language and a smile and nothing more before activating my ‘auto-languation’ system.
Three weeks later, I returned to Brussels at dawn after a 24-hour train journey and mustered the courage to order my petit dejeuner at a local Delifrance, in French!
The further up north the train went, the lesser the struggle to decide on the lingua franca, or so it seemed. Except in a bakery in Berlin when I, rather over-enthusiastically, started firing questions about the loaves on the shelves—all equally mouth-watering and irresistible—at the girl behind the counter, who turned to her colleagues and said moaningly, ‘She speaks English,’and turned away from me. ‘Danke!’ I left the bakery with my backpack loaded with bread supply that normally lasted for three full days but was consumed in one.

Germany is the baking capital of Europe. There is always a decent bakery round the corner in train and metro stations, so it’s hard to avoid one. Breads are more rustic and wholesome, which are to my taste than French baguettes and croissants. There’s nothing that beats the kebab that's imported alongside Turkish immigrants like the kebab shop across the road where my hostel was. I had loadsa fun pointing to every side veggie and sauce that swelled my kebab to a balloon, desperately trying to keep my drooling in check which was returned with a faint smile and a vague suggestion of greed from the Turk.) Anyway, I’ll let my fingers do the talking.



Words as graphics: a multi-language panel (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo)


I used to sit through (literally) three years of Potunghua lessons during my undergraduate studies and still couldn’t make any sense out of the whole pinyin system by the time I graduated. Countless hours were wasted and truancy exploited to the maximum, it was Mandarin songs that saved the day.
I am just very glad to be able to talk to the mainland Chinese I met on my trip: the dignified, intellectual middle-aged woman who served me breakfast in an Oslo hotel, the twenty-something girl who emerged from the closed doors after business hours and sold me the ‘life-saving’ adapter near the Temppeliaukio church (the one that has been built into the rocks) in Helsinki, and more. It's no coincidence that they are all women, well educated, and making an honest, albeit hard living abroad. We rubbed shoulders but I am sure there are long, telling stories to be learned.

God's imposition of divergent languages at Babel is a punishment for mankind. In fact, the demand for translation service at the EU has soared, straining its already tight budget as number of official EU languages grows from 11 to 20 following its eastern expansion this year.
One world, one language? It's a probably a far-fetched dream. God's sentence, so it seems, is a life sentence without parole.

A Day in Eden

Eve at Eden. Adam still eluded me despite a frantic search. Anyway, she's much better off alone.


If you wonder whether a day of feasting on the angelic beauty of the secret garden first conceived by God, or a replica of it constructed by some visionaries in a place called St Austell, Cornwall on the British Isle can sustain you through the most challenging moments of your life, the usual miserable days of a traffic jam when you're already late, a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break (quotes taken from 'Ironic’ by Alanis MORISSETTE), the answer is yes and no.
The secret garden is a publicly funded project called Eden, a place ‘that is a sanctuary for all who think the future too precious to leave to the few - because it belongs to us all.
When’s the last time your five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing are brought to good, and full use? In Eden, your eyes are treated to a kaleidoscopic palette of colours offered exclusively by a botanical wonderland. Here, roses are red, and violets are blue, and black-and-white/yellow-tainted nostalgic fifties/sixties classics are outcasts. The fragrance permeates the air, oozing a distinct aura from the different terrains: the hobs exude a yeasty smell (or was it by the easy association with lager?), the lavenders and herb garden prompt an image of a roasted leg of lamb, or a loaf of focaccia (for a chef), or the all-purpose essential oil you are so familiar of and pampered by during spa therapy sessions. Oh, the touch of soft breezes caressing the visitors in the low valley. The buzzes of bees dancing and embracing/embraced by the sea of lavender, the wind rustling in leaves... .All amazing yet real, as if the first week of God’s creations have indeed been encapsulated in the multi-tiered sci-fi domes, the memories of which still cool me down from the brink of melting down on a fiery-tempered day, and warm me up in the cold, cold hours.

It was 31st July, 2004.


A bee-infested lavender bed.


Spotted an Alan Smith lookalike. A gal companion too few?



11 am, 11th August 2005
Had my daily dose of English papers. Dominanting the front page of the Guardian is a serene ice-blanketed Siberia proudly parading its miles of clear sky and marshmallow-shaped clouds . But hang on, something is not quite right. There’s a single flaw to this idyllic landscape, betraying its almost benign-looking disguise. The snow blanket is dotted with uncharacteristic brown patches. The headline warns: 'Warming Hits "Tipping Point"'. ...'today Siberia feels the heat. It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting.’
Nothing lasts a lifetime long. Let alone our delicate, fragile earth whose longevity is reducing by seconds and minutes. (To be continued)


Trivia: There is a place called St Agnes on the Cornwall map, which I believe has been mislocated judging from a Christian name of Scottish descent)

baking in baking hot weather

If there's something I would sweat for in this baking hot summer, it's gotta be this breadroll, which drew its inspiration from a basic Jamie Oliver bread recipe with my own twist.
And I am proud of it. It tastes as great as it looks!

testing

1. testing, for the sake of it!