Monthly Highlights
- TATE MODERN
- SKILLZ WEEK
- Performance Art Inspirations
- Diamond Sūtra & Prose： WILL YOU PAINT A BUTTERFLY
Other：FILM，DRAWING LAB，Performance Inspiration
The Wandering Earth
–WEEK 15
Feelings: the joy of watching a Chinese film in London, the vision of loving peace, the mission of a world community, the brevity and insignificance of human life, the rationality and uncontrollability of technology, cherishing the present moment to make a difference.
Tate Modern– Week 16
Having seen many exhibitions at TATE MODERN, including MARIA BARTUSZOVA and CEZANNE, I did some sketching and tried to paint colours that did not exist.
I found a number of inspirational references, including the English version of Carrington’s Illustration book The Milk o f Dream Milk, a collection of blue ceramic shards, performance art costumes and the displacement of Dora Maurer’s system drawing Displacements.
I realised that my inspiration tends to be simple, plain and Zen-like, perhaps related to the WABI-SABI style I have been studying recently.
SKILLZ WEEK–Week17
Closing The Hole
In this workshop Closing The Hole， I learnt some basic methods of embroidery, and on the same day I sourced some sewing tools and continued to learn different techniques online, planning to add these skills to my dress designs.
Relatable Content workshop
The Camberwell “Tarrot”
Butterfly book inspiration found in a bookbinding workshop.
Drawing Lab
Arts and Drafts
Hours of drawing a repetitive pattern has greatly honed my observation skills and drawing precision, I have even used mathematical calculations to make the hand-drawn patterns more accurate.
Art Inspiration:
food | RULES | design Week18
honey & bunny(Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter)
Sonja & Martin try to change eating habits – table manners, those cultural rules, which imprison us (from the very childhood) at every single meal. They want to create (humorous) sustainable table manners and show these ideas within 5 videos.
At the beginning, honey & bunny “spit” an egg into the huge ceramic shelf of the V&A. Before, they had rearranged on part of the shelf. They have replaced yesterdays table culture (cups, plates,…) by todays packed industrialized food. Another video shows Sonja & Martin at a toilet, which was originally built for Queen Victoria. They do a sandwich operation. Sonja takes the meat out of a sandwich and implant cucumber. That is as difficult, as the real reduction of meat consumption. At the V&A you find the very first museum café, which has ever opened. At this historic monument, honey & bunny present their newly designed table manners. During afternoon tea they use the fat of ham, the crust of bread, the skin of cucumber for something else than food waste. They show elaborate (ironic) circular economy.
Yasumasa Morimura does not subscribe to the notion that truth is found by stripping oneself bare, In fact, he has spent his entire career donning ornate costuming and thick make-up, in an effort to understand his own image through the embodiment of others. These delicate mirages have transformed him into everyone from Frida Kahlo to Brigitte Bardot, and while his versions of famed paintings and photographs might seem truthful on first glance, they are often filled with playful, subversive symbolism.
Morimura considers every uncanny masquerade to be a self-portrait; an opportunity to interrogate not only his obsession with Western art history and pop culture, but furthermore the murky waters of authorship, identity and gender. He is not telling us what to see, he is taking us on a journey of discovery. In his version of Manet’s Olympia (1863), the layers run deep. Archetypes of race, femininity and sexuality are made pliable as Morimura presents his nude form in place of a Caucasian prostitute, while simultaneously donning a wig and surrounding himself with objects that speak to the fetishization of lapanese culture. Meanwhile, he replatss was to tine lensina black maidservant by dressing as a white, middle-class male suitor, greedy consuming his alternate self with a lascivious gaze. This image is both disorientating and delightful. It compels you to cast aside your preconceptions and look again.
Diamond Sūtra & Prose： WILL YOU PAINT A BUTTERFLY Week18-19
Front line of the Chinese Diamond Sūtra, printed in the 9th year of Xiantong Era of the Tang Dynasty, i.e. 868 CE, the oldest known dated printed book in the world. British Library
“This old monk, thirty years ago, when yet to practise meditation, [1] saw mountains as mountains, and saw rivers as rivers. Up until later, when personally seeing to know, that there is an entrance point, [2] to see mountain not as mountains, and see rivers not as rivers. Yet now, having attained a resting point, accordingly as before, [3] saw mountains only as mountains, and saw waters only as waters. Great assembly, of these three kinds of views and understanding, are they the same or are they different? If there are people, be they monastics or lay practitioners, who can arrive at a conclusion, perhaps you”
Three ways to see mountains and rivers:
1 saw mountains as mountains, and saw rivers as rivers [Constructing]-caterpillar stage
2 to see mountain not as mountains, and see rivers not as rivers [Deconstruction]-chrysalis stage
3 saw mountains only as mountains, and saw waters only as waters [Reconstruction]-adult butterflies stage
Egg ( Sisi)-Primal Chaos / Unconsciousness
Caterpillar (Anran)-Seeing- clearly for the first time/Have a memory
Chrysalis (Szilvia Zhou)-The second chaos/reorganisation of ideas and structures
Adult (ÁLOM)-Seeing once more/being reborn
Egg stage-- Primal|Divine| No self-awareness
The stage of the natural, divine journey at the beginning of life and before it was born.【Ice/installation/sculpture】（To be determined）
Water and ice are the forms that I believe are closest to the original form of life emerging from water. Ice melting into water is like the entropy increase in physics, becoming fluid life, so I have tried to show the state of the worm egg in the form of ice, and as it ‘melts’, the inner life is born.
Caterpillar stage-- Memorized|Accumulated|Growing【prints/booklet】（To be determined）
Chrysalis stage--Chaos|Finding|Self-Questioning
In the chaos of the intertwined past, rethinking and re-feeling the meaning of life and moving towards a new life.WILL YOU PAINT A BUTTERFLY 【Prose/video】
Will you paint a butterfly?
If the brush is your consciousness.
Unique, omnipotent ,boundless.
All corners of the blockchain can see this mind mapping, Like the laws of the universe manifested in concrete form.
Will you paint a butterfly?
Born in an instant spirit, emotion, physics， and inner energy of life
Become a three-dimensional living thing in a two-dimensional world.
Will it be like placid sacred water? Or like a burning desire?
Will you paint a mask on a butterfly?
If it can have a different identity.
Bird, bear, and elephant.
Will it become a commodity? Will it become a desire? Will it fight? Will it die?
Will you paint a butterfly?
If you don’t know where it came from or where it will go.
It can watch countless sunsets, and it can go far away where it has never flown in all its life.
Will it fly to bliss or be destroyed and reborn again and again?
Will you paint a butterfly?
As I have a lot of footage of video experiments that are relevant to the content of this poem, I will be making a video of these to show the chrysalis stage.
Adult Butterfly Stage-- Dreamlike|Transcendental|Spiritual
Awareness of the insignificance of existence, its transience and total acceptance of it and all existence, like a dream, without ego, without obsession.【Costume / Performance / Video】（To be determined）
「一切有為法，如夢幻泡影，
如露亦如電，應作如是觀。」
《Diamond Sutra》
Everything in existence is
Like a dream, an illusion;
Like a tiny drop of dew,
Or a flash of lightning.
This is how we should contemplate our conditioned existence.
Performance Inspiration： Fish Kiss
Created by:
Alexander Ekman, Rubi Pronk, Joeri Dubbe.
Edit by ：
Alexander Ekman.
The film is a lively, funny and direct representation of the role of animals in human behavior. It made me think of the possibilities of visual expression of the butterfly element in performance art.
