Merry Christmas...



...and Happy New Year!

Of night and light and the half-light

Untitled, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W. B. Yeast

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

We spend very large part of our life working. Yet very often (and more emphatically when it sucks) we ask: What's the point of it? In truth, maybe it's not work that we cannot make sense of, but life.

When one works in advertising, the question comes more imminent and paramount with the package offers of long hours, overtime, underpay, the enmity of clients and the stress of deadlines. As the moan and groan are getting heavier and more frequent around, I find myself drawing my thought to the last page of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. The perplexity of our question may not be answered, but at least it offers a perspective in which we could find a sense of consolation, albeit tinted with irony.

To see ourselves as the centre of the the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15.: coffee break', to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle, to work frantically through the night for a million-billing account pitch (or worse just a thousand one) [My addition] – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let it surprise us while we are shipping wood pulp across the Baltic Sea, removing the heads of tuna, developing a nauseating variety of biscuit, advising a client on a change of career, firing a satellite with which to beguile a generation of Japanese schoolgirls, painting an oak tree in a field, laying an electricity line, doing the accounts, inventing a deodorant dispenser or making an extended-strength coil tube for an airline or brainstorming an advertising campaign for a skincare brand [My addition]. Let death find us we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

If we could witness the eventful fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to the immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes' army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Tai Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuén, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, or David Ogilvy briefing his account executives on how to make Dove the best selling soap in the U.S. [My addition], had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts?

Our work will at least distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table, It will have misled us to complain about our unreasonable malicious manipulative over-demanding ungrateful clients (or/and bosses) as our worse nightmare [My addition]. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.  

Revelation No.3

Revelation No.3, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

I see
I find
I feel
I wonder
I think
I guess
I suspect
I suppose
I realize
I reckon
I believe
I doubt
I believe

The Cinematic Orchestra

Stumbled upon this band, The Cinematic Orchestra (the "orchestra" is misleading, what you see in the above video is just the supporting act for the live performance, they are actually a British electronic outfit). It's hard to categorize them. I can only say their music possess a soundtrack-like quality as their name suggests. When I searched for the lyrics of "To Build A Home", a casual post under the comments touched me unexpectedly, like something struck you and transported you beyond your daily thoughts.

"a man, his life settled, with others in tow, feels like a solitary figure in a lonely world. then he meets her. she, from the first glance, is strangely like home to him. against the stigma, against the odds, he embraces her. he builds a home away from home with her. he sees world like never before. he lives, but in his descent, he grasps the details for what they are. entirely real yet unreal. sadness grips him. the road diverges. he stands at the fork with two tragic paths before him. either way, a part of him will leave and turn to dust."





These led me to the singer Patrick Watson. Here's his "The Great Escape". With this a little enigmatic MV as a backdrop, it could well be a secular hymn for the modern work life, I suppose.

Revelation No.2

Revelation No.2, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind

Ode: Intimations of Immortality, X
William Wordsworth

Status: In a relationship with Virginia Woolf

...He heard her quick step above, heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at the mats, tea caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked forward eagerly to the walk home, determined to carry her bag; then heard her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the door shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking to a child), when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of Garter; and all at once he realised that it was this; it was this – she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

It's just one of many very long lines (or rather flows of rhythmic narrative) in her writings like minutes of uncut cinematic shot coming to a revelatory end.

Considered to be Woolf's most autobiographical novel, words became floods of intense observation of human psychology and creative impetus that was so masterfully composed and orchestrated to the threshold of either to irrigate or to destroy. It's exhilarating. But at the same time you inevitably feel a bit disturbed and sympathize with the burden of her genius (she suffered depression through her life and in the end walked into a river near her home and drowned). You see a mind at work, a soul ventured, lamented and unfortunately despaired, some eighty years ago. It reaffirms my belief: Great art is transcendent, in the loosest possible sense of the word.

George Shaw shortlisted for the Turner Prize

George Shaw, Scenes from The Passion: The Cop Shop (1999-2000)
Humbrol enamel on board

The nominees for this year's Turner Prize announced, they are Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw. I am excited by the news. Two years ago, I posted about my accidental encounter with Shaw's paintings and how they reignited my passion to paint again. And here you are, his seemingly conservative art has entered onto the big (if not the biggest) stage in the art world. I hope he can win it, for paintings, for people who still believe in paintings, for artists who keep true to themselves and ignore the hip and the glamourous of the mainstream while humbly dabbing paints and dirtying their pants.

a very small painting – no. 1

Shirinat, Oil on Canvas, 4.5cm x 4.5cm

if less is more,
small can be big,
like a whisper
"i love u."

Revelation No.1

Revelation No.1, Oil on Canvas, 8"x10"

Want, try, think, say, things.

Martin Creed, Work No. 338 THINGS, 2004

I don't know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying.

- Martin Creed

He said the thing I want to say but don't know how to say it.

Chance or Destiny?

One night into the disappearing Autumn days, I finished work when it's already ten and I had not eaten anything since lunch. I was waiting outside one of those typical Hong Kong style eateries for my takeaway. The road was damp from a shower earlier and painted an amber gloss by the street lamps. My mind and body were in a state between numbness and angst from the tiredness of a day's work and the hungriness which was worsening to a stomach ache. My eyes were following aimlessly on the passersby. The darkness around framed within my slightly blurry vision, a couple was approaching with the breeze like in a movie, cuddling and their gaze fixing on no other. They must have just fallen in love, my instinct told. Their complete absorption in their own emotional world contrasted an analytical question raised in my head from nowhere.

From the possibility of complete randomness to inescapable destiny, what do you believe?

Of billions of people in the world, how many we meet in our life? Suppose we meet a new friend a week and we're granted 80 years on earth, we would be able to know 4320 people. A somewhat regrettably small number in an age when we expect so much. How many friends on your Facebook's friend list? The average is about three to four hundreds, I observed. But how many are those we can truly call friend? How many people whose path we crossed, go on to be someone we truly know and love? How even more scarcely possible is someone who can be the love of our life?

In the first chapter of Essays On Love by Alain de Botton, the main character is calculating the probability of his encounter with his lover Chole on the flight from Paris to London. The answer is one in 989.727. He's being generous when what considered are within the events leading up to that decisive moment. What if they were born in a different country, a different time and even into another sex? We could push the question further back to the meetings of their parents, grandparents, passing cavemen and dinosaurs and on to the beginning of time and fathom the cosmic consequences before life ever appeared on earth. We can rehearse a slight heartache to merely imagine the improbability alone: a bigger big bang, a smaller sun, a different chromosome, a tyranny, a war, a car crash, an unanswered call, a discarded plan, a change of mind, a flight delay, a distraction from otherwise the meeting of eyes and the waltz of two heartbeats.

"...But my fatalistic interpretation of the start of our story was at least the proof of one thing: that I was in love with Chole. The moment when I would feel that our meeting or not meeting was in the end only an accident, only a probability of one in 989.727, would also be the moment when I would have ceased to feel the absolute necessity of a life with her – and thereby have ceased to love her."

When we are in love, we tend to believe that we were made for one and other. I met my wife at work. I remember seeing her name on the company phone list for the first time without having met her, a strange feeling was bestowed upon me for a fraction of a second. I looked back and took it as a sign of predestination after we fell in love few months later. (She had her sign as well.) You could argue it's just a freak sensation, the effect of a chill from the over-cold air-conditioning or the sugar burning from the digestion of the morning's breakfast. I doubt it may be so. But that's not really the point. Love is simply too powerful to make us consign such life-changing event to the hands of mere coincidence. Love makes us into a believer – at last, a higher being has intervened and granted us the miracle of love: the glances exchanged, the mutual longings, the reciprocation of tastes, the fulfillment of your ideals ("she does not only finish my sentence, she complete my life").

I often wonder what atheists and naturalists think when they fall in love. Would they reconsider their world view? (But I suspect not. Actually few of us would have the clear mind and still heart to reason when we're in the hands of Eros. Love has the reputation to be harmful to our sight.) Would they too have a moment of doubting their faith and a "Thank God" slipped out? Would they still hold on to their belief that all things were solely the making of pure chance plus infinite time? They meet their lover like dust gets in their eyes? Even so, isn't it paradoxically miraculous considering the magnitude of causes and consequences that all connect and intertwine like a record-breaking extravaganza of domino display. It takes only a misplacement, a miscalculation, a strong wind, a shake, an overlooked obstacle to ruin the show.

? An impersonal universe without God, implies a closed system where everything is happening in a mechanical way, only monumentally more complicated than the metaphor of a domino set.
? We can imagine a freak twitch triggered the very first cause (well, what caused the twitch to cause the first cause...? It's really the third???...) and what followed an exponential web (and sub-webs) of chain reactions, one after another, until a particular domino piece fall - one so happened to be the love one encountered.
? Doesn't that mean the first predestinated the second, the third and the uncountable inevitable?
? So we come full circle. To believe in chance we are left with no choice but to also believe in destiny?

Where am I? I'm lost in a tangle of hypo-anti-syn-thesis. But what are these really to do with love? A Nobel-prized logician can be the worst lover. Am I predetermined to love differently, had I happened to solve the mystery of fate?

I carried this mass/mess of thought into this unusually cold winter. A time when the passion of the couple I met by chance could have cooled. When the enzyme of love slows, habits gradually replace novelties, differences appear, faults are discovered, the first fight duly arrives, we are not so sure anymore. Our thankfulness turns sore. The conviction of our unmistakable destiny even degrades to the very opposite – total denial. What do we go from here? Is my choice itself also by chance or by destiny? The question seems ridiculous.

Perhaps my very first question is also ridiculous. We human have the tendency to fall from one extreme to the other. Our love is neither the sole making of chance nor destiny, but equally critical if not more, also our own doing. Otherwise, what is love when we are deprived of our freedom to love?

I realized the question sprung were not of any intellectual interest, but the raw feeling of amazement. It triggered a stream of thoughts not to answer, but simply to remind – the lost feeling of falling in love.

To ask such questions, to take this mental voyage to the limit of what we can comprehend, is like shooting us high into the stratosphere where we can glimpse the vast space beyond, the possibility and yet the incapability of going further. For a momentary ecstasy and the confrontation of the sublime, we're pulled, albeit reluctantly, back to earth. But at least, we've been there. We have witnessed the wonder but also its fragility. We have contemplated all the what-ifs, not necessarily to regret but to appreciate the scheme of things:

At the end of the novel Love In A Fallen City (傾城之戀), the author Eileen Chang (張愛玲) marveled that it might take the fall of a city to fulfill the love of her heroine. She might underestimate. It could have taken the working of the entire universe, and perhaps more.



I wrote the song two hours before we met.
I didn't know your name or what you looked like yet.
Oh I could have stayed at home and gone to bed.
I could have gone to see a film instead.
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends.
Life could have been very different but then,
something changed.
Do you believe that there's someone up above?
Does he have a timetable directing acts of love?
Why did I write this song on that one day?
Why did you touch my hand and softly say.
Stop asking questions that don't matter anyway.
Just give us a kiss to celebrate here today.
Something changed.
When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing,
that in a matter of hours we'd change the way we were going.
Where would I be now if we'd never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?
I dunno but like you said
something changed.

[I remembered this forgotten song as I wrote. A song of my youth. It was out when things were about to changed.]