Psychoanalisys - Draw a Pig

You should try this fun psychoanalysis test... "Draw a Pig."

http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/drawApig.asp

And here is my pig. How's yours? :)

FRB Part III

Today I went to the forest Flat Rock Brook in my town and got lost again...
I found these plants look like some sort of vegetables, wild lettuce..?

Art in Tokyo, very very briefly.

To be honest, I don’t like Tokyo at all… Maybe because I grew up in Kanagawa prefecture (Yokohama, Kamakura, Shona, Hakone… please refer to the previous post) or simply I am a country bum. First, Tokyo intimidates me with its subway system.. Don’t expect the one like New York’s Times Square. It’s an ever-lost maze. How many times I ask people to reach one destination every time I go to Tokyo!





This is the National Art Center in Roppongi where I always get lost. What amazed me most was the number of the exhibitions concurrently on view.. You really have to pay attention to the sign of the gallery entrance, otherwise you’ll end up seeing a wrong exhibit.. I don’t know how to describe…It’s like a cinema complex, It’s huge.



I was also able to make it to some galleries in Kiyosumi Shirakawa. After passing through the Kiyosumi Park, make a left turn at the parking lot and then go right towards the gallery building that looks like a shipping company. The elevator is kind of cool.



Paintings by Daisuke Fukunaga at Tomio Koyama Gallery on the top floor.


The entrance of Taka Ishii Gallery. They were showcasing recent works by Tomoo Gokita.


There are a lot of things I definitely need to study but the next gallery district in Tokyo could be Bakuro Yokoyama. This is the entrance of Gallery Hashimoto. They just started their new exhibition of Miyuki Tsugami. Beautiful!

Where I used to hang out

I hate school. I barely graduated from my high school with my attendance record that didn’t look good. Because of the school location, Kamakura and Yokohama were the places I used to hang out when I snuck out from the classes.

Enoden Line is the very old, short distance line between Fujisawa (Shonan area known for the beach) and Kamakura (historical city with many temples..) and my favorite train.
They have added more modern technology cars but the one I took was pretty classic, consisted of only three wooden floored train cars.


The Enoden runs among the residential areas, literary 1.5-2 feet away from houses.
When it reaches Shichiri gahama in Shonan area, you see the Pacific Ocean right below your nose through the train window. The beach was so quiet with low waves, one surfer was just floating in the ocean (the black thing on the left in the second photo).



Actually if we want to visit the seated giant Buddha in Kamakura, Hase station is the stop we get off the train. After about 8 minutes walk, we find the tourist spot.


Yokohama is where I heavily hang out and always one of my favorite cities in the world. I think this metropolitan harbor city has a certain charm differenciated from Tokyo, Kobe or Nagasaki. My dad used to take us out to the baseball games of Yokohama Baystars, that might be equivalent to Seattle Mariners in terms of their scores.. This is their home ground.


Minato Mirai (The Harbor of the Future) district is the most developed and where my dad and I also used to work. This is the inside the Landmark Plaza, the shopping mall so to speak.



My mom and I had a late lunch at a restaurant in its sub basement. The bright green drink is called Cream Soda, supposedly honeydew flavored soda with a vanilla scoop floating in the glass. It is the most common drink you can find throughout this country.

One Day Kanazawa

My brother and I hit the road to make the day trip to Kanazawa (a city in the west, Ishikawa Prefecture in the Hokuriku region along the Sea of Japan). It was a pretty much last minutes plan however we made it out by taking an overnight express bus and flew back to Tokyo at the end of the day.

Again there were worth visiting cherry blossoms along the main road between the Kanazawa Castle and the famous huge park Kenroku-en. We were very fortunate that rain stopped by the late morning. Tokyo had a terrible storm on the same day…




The main reason we decided to visit Kanazawa was that we wanted to check out the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum, one of the public museums dedicated to contemporary art.


The museum is round, glass-walled and has one story on the ground and another floor in the basement. Amazingly, we only find a few thin columns to support the structure. So the atmosphere is very airy and open. For me this is the second architecture designed by SANAA and I truly liked both the Kanazawa 21st and the New Museum in New York.




Me in front of Michael Lin’s installation.


They have a cool elevator, which doesn’t have any suspensions from the top as you see in these three photos. The box is pushed up by the cylinder from the bottom.




The most popular installation Leandro Erlich’s Leandoro’s Pool is located right in the first front yard next to the admission counters. See the people looking each other through the water in the pool. How come?
The second photo tells the trick.



My brother was happy with his souvenir T-shirt. It has a reproduction of Makoto Aida’s drawing of Harakiri (Disembowelment) School Girls. FYI, its original large painting was sold for $100,000 last December. He will surely show off when he goes to surf!


Actually we arrived first at Kanazawa’s fish market Ohmi Town Market around 6am. The people were busy preparing for the next wave of ordinary shoppers after the first crowds of their vendors such as restaurant owners..



These are not aliens but long legged crabs..


When we went back to the market for lunch, the market was quite busy and fun to hang around. We bought local fish and shrimps for our parents, expecting a feast of fruits de mer when we get back home.

Of course, we never forgot to indulge ourselves. Even the kaiten zushi place (conveyor belt sushi bar) serves really fresh fish… Yummy!

The Day of Cherry Blossoms

Unexpectedly I am now in Japan. It’s been over 10 years not to see cherry blossoms in Japan since I had left. It’s a blessing to be visiting this country in spring.

My parents’ home, where I grew up, is located in the small town called “Thousands cherry trees” (sen bon zakura). I kept missing its peak time as I am not a frequent traveler to this country, I was again blown away its fleeting beauty.

Having been called Thousands Cherry Trees, the township official has acknowledged there would be about 750 trees exsist.. Along the small river 30 seconds from my parents’ home, soft breeze blows the flowering cherries into the air like pale pink snow.. Quite a view.


All the fallen cherry blossoms make beds of petals both on the ground and on the banks of the river. It’s usually a banal, quiet suburb but only this season there are many people flooding into this tiny town to enjoy walking and having picnics day and night..

I didn’t know that its flowers can bloom coming right out from its trunk. My dad told me that cherry tree can grow into a decent size in 10-15 years, quicker than other trees.

You see how these cherry trees form such a gorgeous arch across the river. My dad and Shin-Shin, westy girl are seen in this photograph. I like this photo as it also shows a little blue graffiti on the left as an old remark to tell the story once this town was known as part of the turf of a local unhelmetted biker kids Bousou zoku back in 1970s and 1980s… It’s sort of nostalgia for me..

Armory Show 2008

As for art-related openings and events in New York, it's been like no end since the Asian art week thing started in the mid March. The contemporary art fairs and some auction previews and sales immediately followed. I only could catch the Armory Show and Bridge Art Fair.. Some photos from the Armory. This is Nicole Cherubini's new work at D'amelio Terras. Sold.

I love Grayson Perry. At Victoria Miro of London, there was a bunch of his ceramic works on view after his retrospective at the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum.. This plate says Welcome those who hate contemporary art... I suppose this is Kutani ware, right? Ha ha cute but the price is no joke - USD35,000.

!! I was almost fainting by seeing the recent work (wood sculpture) by Katsura Funakoshi.. Of course it was sold.. There would be his solo exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery starting from tomorrow April 3rd. Must-see!