Search
This show still give me goosebumps, one of my best piece for sure.
#Videography by @instaden & @ifanana
#Choreography by #zerotang #HighmateProductionLimited
#Art #Live #Show #Popart #Contemporary #Hiphop #fusion #PerformingArt #Dance #London #HongKong #StageArt #Production #Creative
城市研究2014，期待2015年的香港城市研究
【黃宇軒：2014年二十本城市學之書】
http://goo.gl/4lX9jF
----------------------------------------
大約從 2010 年起，城市研究 (urban studies) 在全球知識界有復興之勢，近年本地學院也相繼開創城市研究課程。在出版界，這個跨學科領域也連年教人興奮，重要的都市理論著作持續出版，原本難以定義的「城市學」儼然被重新確立為當代顯學。
2014 年，也是這一浪對城市研究的興趣，由學院走到媒體的重要一年。本年初，Guardian （《衛報》）在成熟與已確立多年的新聞版面分類中，加插了 Cities 這大類，獨立成版，也讓城市版有自己的 twitter ，instagram 和 facebook page ，高調地給予都市資訊重要位置，至今 Guardian Cities 已運作一週年了，一直好評如潮。
同時，大力發展網媒的新聞集團 Atlantic 也在 2014 年把原屬 The Atlantic 的城市新聞版面獨立開來，自成一網，開辦名為 CityLab 的城市新聞網，重點報道有關都市未來的新資訊和評論分析。網民普遍對這網站的內容，尤其是它處理圖像資訊和選題方面，讚譽有加，初步看來是非常成功的發展。
筆者的學術研究範疇及個人志趣皆是當代城市研究，當然喜見上述媒體趨勢，同時也深信城市學是在該當在我城被推廣和普及化的知識領域，而這些知識應能在學院與大眾媒體間來回進出。見到 Guardian Cities 選出本年十本最好的城市著作，筆者也心癢癢，聯同 Hong Kong Urban Laboratory 的朋友和前輩，另外選了十本這年出版的城市研究佳作，略為引介，藉此呈現當下城市研究的精采面貌。
（雖然這些書未必都在香港找得到，但不少有心的書店，其實都願意代讀者訂書或入貨。）
1. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization
Neil Brenner (editor)
(Jovis Verlag, 2014)
先是兩本比較宏觀的都市理論著作，它們都在意確立什麼是二十一世紀的新型城市研究。先是近年高調地在哈佛大學 Graduate school of design 開創了 Urban Theory Lab 的學者 Neil Brenner ，編輯了大部頭（500 多頁）的 Implosions/Explosions ，集合近年最活躍的城市研究學者，以短文探討何謂「全面都市化」 (planetary urbanization) 下的世界。這本書交由德國的 Jovis Verlag 出版，這出版社繼前年出版精彩的 Urban Constellations 一書，再次帶來印刷與設計俱極精美的重要都市理論讀本。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
2. The new urban question
Andy Merrifield
(Pluto Press, 2014)
Andy Merrifield 是離開學院多年，但持續著書立說的獨立學者，他是 David Harvey 的學生，也是重要的左翼都市理論學者。「新都市問題」顯然是向 1979 年出版，社會學大師 Manuel Castells 的 The urban question 一書對話。35 年後，城市學從興起到衰微再復興，此書有標誌性之餘，也在意探討這知識領域起落的意義。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
3. Africa's urban revolution
Susan Parnell & Edgar Pieterse (editors)
(Zed books, 2014)
Guardian 和許多年度書單都有選上的 Radical Cities 一書，主力談拉美城市的創新。另一個近年受關注、迅速都市化的大陸，定當是非洲，當中的特大城市 (megacities) 不斷誕生，被認為是歷史上最重要的都市革命之一。年前多有著作探試中非之間的政經關係，也是時候多認知非洲城市是何許模樣。這本相關文集，就由兩位一直研究這領域的學者所編。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
4. Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China
Bianca Bosker
(University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
（中譯本：《誰把艾菲爾鐵塔搬到了中國》, 2014）
當下談城市，不能不讀有關中國城市的書，而這本專談中國如何複制他國建築，圖文並茂的書，不是談大理論和大趨勢，卻又精準地捕捉了中國城市化的重要一面。此書在 2014 年出版了中譯本，特意推介。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
5. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment
Henri Lefebvre, Lukasz Stanek (Editor)
(University Of Minnesota Press, 2014)
為人熟知、書寫空間理論的法國哲學家 Henri Lefebvre ，著作近年不斷被發掘再出版。瑞士學者 Lukasz Stanek 在 Lefebvre 的文獻遺產中，找到未出版過的，他唯一專門討論建築的著作，當中論及以「快感」作為建築想像的內涵，與近年多被題及的都市想像力，不謀而合。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
6. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture
Stephen Cairns & Jane M Jacobs
(MIT press, 2014)
這本迷人的都市理論，把我們慣常對城市和建築的焦點，從發展和興建的角度，轉向它物質上必然衰老和永恆地需要維護、甚至變成廢物的一面。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
7. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
Keller Easterling
(Verso, 2014)
承接近年關於都市探祕和隱密空間的討論與著作，這本書也希望轉移我們思考城市的角度——從外層轉移都決定城市如何運作的基建空間。Keller Easterling 是在耶魯大學建築系任教的學者，也是近年最活躍的城市學公共知識份子之一。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
8. Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
Alastair Bonnett
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
地理學家 Alastair Bonnett 出名文筆好，散文每有詩意，這本書特意書寫在仿似一切都有高度透明度的年代裡，秘密和「古怪」的空間。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
9. Empower! Essays On The Political Economy Of Urban Form Vol.3
Rainer Hehl & Marc Angelil (editors)
(Ruby Press, 2014)
這系列小書，都是易讀的短文集，是認識城市政治經濟學的理想讀物，每一本都以有趣的主題輯文，vol. 1 名為 'informalize!' ，vol. 2 名為 'collectivize' ，2014 年出版的 vol 3. 名為 'empower!' 。書印得精美，由新起的獨立出版社 Ruby Press 出版，值得支持。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
10. 《城市造反》&《反造城市》
侯志仁
(左岸文化, 2013)
在華盛頓大學當地景建築學系系主任的 Jeffrey Hou 非常有心，把他對由下而上建造城市的理論論述和案例成書，交由台灣出版社出版，不直接翻譯已寫成的英文著作，而是重編兩冊中文書。這種來回於英文學術和華文出版界的公共知識份子，對推廣城市研究的普及化，貢獻良多。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
以上介紹的多為城市理論及學術出版，以下多包納一些跨界的文本，包括在國際受關注、與都市相關的展覽，紀錄片，以及比較為大眾市場而寫的普及書籍，例如是旅遊指南。另外，下篇介紹的十個文本，也較側重城市研究的藝文面向與及由下而上創造城市的實踐，同時加入了一本關於香港的書。
11. Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages
Heben Andrew
(the Village Collaborative, 2014)
這本「奇書」對經歷過雨傘運動後的香港人可能特別吸引，它探討了美國無家者以帳蓬創村運動，如何帶動了另類住屋和建村的想像。不用多解釋，此書對香港異常 relevant 。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
12. The Acoustic City
Matthew Gandy & Benny Nilsen (Editors)
(Jovis Verlag, 2014)
Matthew Gandy 是我最喜歡的城市研究學者，經常帶來新的跨學科嘗試，這本他與 Benny Nilsen 所編的文集裡，文章作者有來自藝術界、學界和聲音專業的人，隨書還有一張唱片光碟，補文字的不足。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
13. Blue urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans
Timothy Beatley
(Island Press, 2014)
此書大概專為生活在海港城市的人、或同時喜歡城市與海洋而寫，論及倚海而建的城市，在設計和運作上的獨特性。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
14. Kowloon Cultural District: An Investigation into Spatial Capabilities in Hong Kong
Esther Lorenz & Shiqiao Li
(MCCM creations, 2014)
這本書名字故意喚作「九龍文化區」，由兩位在 University of Virginia 建築系任教的學者所寫，在西九文化區拔地而起之時，他們研究在這附近的「原生」 (indigenous) 文化實踐和創造力，可啟發什麼比較在地的建設計劃。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
15. Citi x 60: 60 Creatives Show You the Best of the City (Paris, New York, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo)
Viction Workshop
(Victionary, 2014)
這是一套六本，非常精美的城市旅遊指南，它所選的城市，都是被公認為最有魅力(雖然最「大路」的地方)，每本小書都讓六十位住在當地、在裡面工作的「文化人」推薦他們最喜歡的城市角落，絕不落俗套。讓人欣喜的是，香港三聯同步取得了這套書的中文版權，讓我們可在大部份書店找到這六本小書。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
16. Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age (展覽圖錄)
Alona Pardo (Curator & catalogue editor)
(Prestel, 2014) An exhibition at Barbican
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp…
兩個今年富深度而有趣的、與城市相關的展覽，定必包括倫敦Barbican探討建築攝影的專題展，它的題旨是，拍攝空間的方法，深刻地影響了我們感知和創造空間的想法。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
17. Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities (展覽圖錄)
(The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014) An exhibition at MoMA, New York
http://uneven-growth.moma.org/
另一個大受談論和關注的，是在紐約現代藝術館，深入探討「城市不均發展」的展覽，帶來六個大城市應付人口暴增和貧富不均時，所取的策略，其中也多介紹非正規住屋的問題。Tactical Urbanism 這術語發展多年，終於進入主流和政策話語之中。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
18. Human Scale (Documentary)
Andreas Møl Dalsgaard (Dir.)
http://thehumanscale.dk/
也介紹兩齣紀錄片。來自丹麥 Human Scale 引介了著名的都市規劃學者 Jan Gehl 的思想，Gehl 著重行人感受、人本的城市規劃實踐，近十數年大受讚揚，這齣影片可說來得太遲了！
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
19. Growing Cities (Documentary)
Dan Susman (Dir.)
http://www.growingcitiesmovie.com/
Growing Cities 的製作團隊走遍美國不同城市，追訪形形式式的都市農耕的實踐和抗爭，整全地介紹全美國不同城市，都有有心人希望改變食物生產和運送，跟自己居住之地的關係。本片在當下當然對香港也很有參考價值。
⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯⋯
20. Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism
Peter Hall
(Routledge, 2013)
最後，選上此書，是為了特別向本年離世的學者 Peter Hall 致敬，這是他最後一本著作，在去年底面世。如果說 Peter Hall 是英國最重要的城市規劃學者，他一定當之無愧，尤其是他對城市重建研究著力極深，為英國帶來不少成功的城市重建案例。這本書綜合了他多年來的思考，先談當代城市每每遇上的問題，再說明不同歐洲城市如何創出較好的方法處理一籃子的問題，理性的進路反映了 Peter Hall 堅信的理念，也是二十世紀最大的遺產：好的城市，通過規劃，能造就好的生活——看來如斯簡單，卻又窮上許多代人的生命，思索如何落實。
-----------------------------------
香港民間學院課程
【POL 101 法治作為政治】
http://goo.gl/4TZJXz
【AGR 101 邁向本土農業世紀】
http://goo.gl/Y4KNJo
報名表格｜http://goo.gl/tEoHxK
Nobody’s Fool ( January 2011 )
Yoshitomo Nara
Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.
But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.
While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.
As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.
In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.
Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.
Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!
I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.
Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.
By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.
After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.
And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.
Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.
But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.
The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.
Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.
After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.
Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.
After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.
I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….
