without hesitation or ambiguity, he said, ‘it is like going to war.’ and almost as surely, i understood. through three generations, fifty-eight years, one thousand four hundred and twenty-one miles, thick as molasses blood, steady hospital landline, yuan fen. sometimes, all it takes is a little reminder and good time spent together. 
we are here and we are where | where to…
[taken on the evening of the first day of the year, 2008]
the horizon, the sea, yuko, the polar bear club
[photo by ran, morning of the first day of the year, 2008]
resort ’08 (the texans and then some)
notes on love and writing, turning thirty again, obachans grin
To write is to permit others to conclude one’s own discourse, and writing is only a proposition whose answer one never knows. One writes in order to be loved, one is read without being able to be loved, it is doubtless this distance which constitutes the writer. (Roland Barthes)
::writing about writing, between shanghai and beijing, 2 December
today i become a writer. written self reading a purple journal like being in this airplane, oh i fucked up fucked up so many times, “it’s just that this year has been so full of small, stupid, non-descript disasters, not the big ones that could at least be identified as crisis.” sometimes in reading their words i describe my own surroundings, the small spaces around the page being written as we read others: (please fall in love with me). He is nonchalant about loose trivia on japanese aesthetics like mentioning the names of people he knows.
“The proximity of two differing individuals can become too intense.” (Arnold Barkus)
They are all your friends. And the more old friends that keep popping up in magazines, oh, we must be doing okay. And all the ones that don’t, that come up instead in cafés, in the airplane a couple rows ahead, on someone’s facebook friend list or just in my memory, well… we’re all sorry it turned out this way, we haven’t turned out at all, or against all, or we’re just turning…
so many things happened this year, i lose sight of the things that matter most.
but i’ll love you through the pages of a matte-papered magazine, and maybe that’s enough for today.
“30”, Binna Choi, from The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories, ed. Melissa Lim and Heman Chong:
Perhaps this sudden consciousness of my turning thirty has become entangled with my untamed anxiety, which stems from my own difficulty in being myself when with others. In other words, what mattered, bothered and concerned me can be summed up as my “relationality” with her, him, another me, different me, disappearing me or whatever, or the air, time, space or something. With her leaving and being. With him next to me or with him annoying me. With the density or stuffiness of air. With speed. With intensity…
I am writing about turning thirty, but in doing so, I could be seeking to deny or erase it. This piece is written in the present, about a somewhat unknown future that we are in the process of progressing towards. I hope that the significance of turning thirty will surface later on. You know, I will never be thirty – I will only be two thousand, two hundred and and seven years old next year, I bet.
Hence “writing about turning thirty” is a means of pulling myself out of the preconceived position one has as part of one’s culture or society. It is also a way for me to create an interstice for myself without deliberate avoidance of particular cultural or temporal frameworks. I am trying to prevent these aspects from governing me or my being with “others” within and outside of these frames. I want to take responsibility for my life or lives of others in mine, and ultimately grin — rather than laugh with sound — in the face of my struggles, strengths, delights – like that mad girl on a bus who glared at me as I stared back at her years ago.
Before I can reach this state that allows me to “grin”, let me pose a fundamental question: why do I write? I’d asked this same question quite a few times before, and I know that I have a problem with delving into it. Actually I even doubt that I had ever “written” in the most idealistic sense of that word. I reckon my fantasy is that writing for me is an opportunity to communicate in silence, to compose and liberate what is a part of me, be it my fascination, wonder, despair, concern, joy, beliefs, thoughts and so on — without being dogmatic. I want to believe that I make friends and love through writing.
writing having been written, between beijing and tokyo and los angeles and dallas/fort worth, 22 december
today, before leaving Beijing, it was written: “yes!”
There is no fear in that. No fear, no fear. Its beauty is impressed upon my skin as much as it distances. it was like looking again into the past. Every new realisation is also recognition of all that past in which you did not know it before! Linda didn’t get it at the time. Now she’s married and has dogs, surely she knows something we do not?
It was brought up again over dinner that that desire to cut off was as much the fear of being disconnected from. He cannot understand the difference between the cup there, or here, or there… And I thought we bought this salad. Well, you certainly didn’t buy me. But it’s the cup and the salad and the me and the you, and if we acknowledge no distinctions between any or all, how far can we go in attempt of love? Should we be left formless? Where would we go, and how would we know who we are anymore?
He reminds her that they are all connected. Of course, all these things are written into the body. Past is future is present, so just watch. I watch what i do not see: the big-eyed girl crying in secret, the small-eyed girl crying all day. I wish you could see more so that i wouldn’t have to explain anymore.
“Giorgio Agamben claims that the most important political goal is to find new ways to make the human body inoperative, in the sense that poetry makes language inoperative, to find new uses for the human body.” Would you want that I gave myself completely to you? Would you want that i agreed with everything you said, that everything that you wanted was what i wanted, too? I keep trying to think with those words, read from a monk when I was in Japan: “utmost reverence”. I try to say “yes!” too. But it’s not what I want. So please stop telling me everything you know about me. Because you don’t. And you won’t so long as your eyes stay wanting.
Posted by 丫 | more »You are watching. I am watching, too. We just don’t always see the same thing.
installation, the morning after
As creators, we can say that there is an audience for our work, whereby “public” is both an excuse and a reason. And yet as creators within a social sphere, our unabashed ability to colonialise spaces, and even publics, actually distances us from any notion of real interaction rather than that of working context-specific, conscientiously and in cohesion with those collaborating with us.In the example of the bi/tri-ennial, the clearest cut form of discourse seems to lie not within the vocabulary of the host city, not within the realm of “the work” and at times hardly even within the actual processes of production. As recently overheard from an independent curator about the opening night party of the 2007 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, “Well, that’s what we came for.”Chief curator of the Biennale Ma Qingyun is at a loss. “But we worked so hard…”The bi/tri-ennial are event-based phenomenona, as new technology, “our latest project”, and another friday night scene. Critical exchange, then, takes a cue, as a breather after all that hard work—-at bars, the after-parties and nestled within the snide comments made during other people’s speeches. It is hard to understand what sort of feedback and interaction one can stimulate or expect from an event involving a mass public audience. “I hope they’ll collect the press clippings,” says one architect in the back of the taxi, on the way to a bar after the after-party. And yes, these traditional forms of review may still be helpful and necessary within a larger system of creative production. But the formality of a critic’s theoretical opinion or a blogger’s on-the-scene action shots bely the stagnancy of the actuality. The sponsor hotel where most exhibitors stay always makes for a much more active and dynamic space than that last exhibition hall.Where are the relationships between work, audience and creator within the framework of the art event? Are we merely using ideas as a way of colonialising the spectacle space? Working carries over into presentation carries over into documentation carries over into publicisation. And where again is the space for the work? Somewhere between making contacts and trying to catch hold of the installation team to get the right equipment.
This is not meant to bemoan the poor artist who tries to be simultaneously active in all of these areas of art production. Nor can we blame the event structure alone. But is it naïve to still long for project-based work that does not neglect the need for post-planning, responsibility and respect for the other?Would it be possible to leave an event of this kind without a feeling of the morning-after?
your name is not here 你的名字不在
秘秘的 what is a bit hidden these days
感谢… but thank you…[taken from DEADEND 总站 project | new uniforms for pedicab drivers 三轮车新工服, Shenzhen-Hong Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism, 深圳香港城市建筑双城双年展, December 2007, 2007年12月 …hk-丫-BAO]
frequency of journey: daily (more or less), duration: 20min, means of transport: bicycle
out of the door, you turn right. the first store is the lawyer’s office, the danish couple (or maybe only he is danish) with the big white dog. they helped you when your car battery was flat last summer, but you haven’t seen them since september (did they move away?). next to them, the architects. you still can’t understand what that sign on the window means. they are there at all times, especially the guy with the glasses sitting at the end of the room, looking towards the window. you wonder if he ever sees you going by, more so when you go to the bakery in the early morning, wearing your coat over your pyjamas. you ride towards senefelderstrasse. multicolour fish made out of paper are still hanging on the trees since the kids made them during the neighborhood gathering in the summer. you arrive at the corner. on the right hand, the strange building that doesn’t look like a residential building but you swear you’ve seen someone behind that curtain. you wonder who lives here. on the left corner the new café. they’ve been working on it for so long and it just opened. you don’t like it at all. you turn left and ride all the way to danziger, past the greek grocery store, you wave to yorgos. you cross danziger and continue on kollwitzstrasse. this is your new route. till last month you used to take a right on danziger, but then she suggested that you try new routes, explore the area a bit more. they are still doing construction work and you turn right into sredzkistrasse. one café at each corner. he says he prefers the brunch at the northwest corner, but that’s only because of free coffee refill. you ride on sredzkistrasse, past the store that she is planning on buying (long-term plans..). you pass the kulturbrauerei on your right, cross schönhauser and then go right onto oderberger. the bar that you wanted to go and then you went, the night before she left. you turn left on kastanienallee. the constant fear of falling into the tram lines. horrible images passing in front of your eyes, every time. not so much looking around here, you have to be careful. you only notice that poster that looks a bit like him, as your father pointed out. you were embarrassed at the time, but now you think it actually does look like him, in a funny kind of way. then right on zionskirchstrasse. if it’s a thursday then the market will be there. veteranenstrasse, the fun part, riding down the hill, but you’re always a bit scared, keeping your hands on the brakes. you go past the park where you were planning to have that picnic. maybe you will in a few months, when the weather gets better again. you continue on invalidenstrasse. it’s your other neighborhood but you still feel like you haven’t explored it enough. you remember when you visited that may, before you moved here, the nordbahnhof seemed so different then and you had no idea that you would be returning to that same place only a few months later. past the nordbahnhof, the tricky part of crossing the road, you try a different approach each time depending on traffic. and then you cross. and then you are there. (click here to see more everyday routes and the points where they cross, overlap, run parallel or tangent to each other. and if you happen to be living in berlin, we’d love to read about your daily journey)
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