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Fang Xiang Spring season, in the room watercolor Image: Yang Gallery

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A Beautiful Catastrophe by Bruce Gilden. powerHouse books, 2005.

I've been unpacking my bookshelf, trying to decide if I should downsize my collection. I received this one from a colleague in 2013. I can't say I like the pictures much, but I do love the design.

First of all, it's got a weightiness to it. Like, the thing is physically big and the paper is ultra thick. So thick that the binding can't handle it and is separating from the block at the back. From reading Amazon reviews, many others have had the same structural issue with their copies. But even so, the proportions of the book feel just right and suited to the images, which gain some drama by the scale of the package.

Next, the typography. An absolute perfect pairing to the images. The text comprises quotes from notable authors on the pleasures and evils of being a New Yorker, but because of the styling—all uppercase, excessive spacing between words, zero leading between lines—they read more like poetry. The words are visuals too. To get metaphorical about it, maybe the stacked typesetting mirrors the rows of people walking down a crowded sidewalk of the Big Apple?

There are two variations: black text on a white background (pictured above), and white text on a black background (which I think is less effective). There is even a page of white text on black that faces a completely black page. Which I think is kind of crazy, to have a whole black page when you could have had an image there? But I get it because there really is this nice rhythm to the book.

And then the pictures. Gilden makes people look deranged, possessed, caught off-guard, upset (perhaps not even at New York but at the invasiveness of the camera). I am sure these people have reason to look miserable, as the quotes lead you to believe, New York is an unforgiving place, Manhattan is "a wicked and wild bitch in her old age." Under Gilden's eye, people become plain weird. His close angles trap the subjects (they are marching straight into the camera as they navigate the sidewalk), distort bodies, foreshorten, create enlarged heads. No doubt it takes skill to get these framed shots in a constant stream of pedestrian movement. This is the kind of series that I'd love to see the contact sheets for. But Gilden's take is too pessimistic for me.

These poor people with their immortalized chins. It's not an attractive angle on anyone. The emotional side of it is that I do feel sorry for the subjects. In the progress of the book, I am convinced that these New Yorkers do exist in a rather unpleasant situation. Not as extreme as a catastrophe or "Hell" as one writer puts it, but certainly something chaotic, pushy, and unsympathetic. Is Gilden with a camera the personification of Manhattan herself?

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By Xiao Yue Shan

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Restshop

Gathering some thoughts after a dreaming together, listening, learning, presence-full restshop with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko & TO Love-in. I often struggle with the workshop format. My voice feels intrusive in my body. To not verbally share also feels like a withholding. Deep down, I know that part of me resists leaning on people. I am still learning how to be patient with how long it takes for me to digest energies and conversations. This writing encompasses some of the listening and digesting.

The theme is rest. First, there is softening. An invitation to vulnerability. A cozy portal. Hesitant steps into something furry in the beyond. I set my pen to page to flow write, a way to chart the journey. I always feel better when I have a map. But I think the point of this gathering was to get a little lost. Be destabilized. I felt that too. Jaamil was gently leading us into other possibilities. The portals were multiplying at the end of caves and at the lips of horizons. I was experiencing the way rest can activate the imagination and resound with the deepest self. How rest is catalyst for other ways of being.

when rest touches reality

In my meditative state, an awful vision of myself floated to the surface. When I feel stressed and I am furiously going about washing dishes, there is this thing I sometimes do: I will consciously waste the water. I let the tap run. I watch it go, knowing I would normally feel bad about it. I am usually careful to use the water in a specific way, I plan and choreograph the dishes in order to use as little water as possible. But when I am stressed, my not caring overcomes me. I want to waste. I don't know why I thought of this. But as someone who normally cares deeply about my human impact, I regard it as a small violence.

For a moment, I am ugly and uncaring. I believe I am in control of the water. How lovely it sounds. Yet, how pathetic to think that just because I have the privilege of access that I have control over whether water runs from the tap. Let's be clear. Water decides for itself. It is running through my body, it is the reason for all life on earth and beyond earth, it is life knowledge, it is bigger than us and it is part of us.

I don't think it is any coincidence that what comes forward in a moment of deep listening and rest is a situation of power and powerlessness. I also do not find it a coincidence that what my memory manifested was a ritual object, one that I reach out for daily to prepare my food and from which I eat. In ancient and medieval times, across many cultures, dishware was often inscribed with poetry, stories, and incantations.

It seems frivolous to judge the washing of dishes, but how can I be in right relationship if I cannot first face myself? What I identify about my reactive state is an embedded supremacy—the need to control—and a micro metaphor for the destruction humans cause when we are in constant production mode. When we fail to take rest. When what we really should be doing is sitting down and taking stock of our inner landscapes. The doing can wait another hour, another day. As Maxine Hong Kingston says in The Woman Warrior, "I let the dirty dishes rot."

How do we learn to sit with rotting? Learn to be comfortable with the smell of mold and decomposition, the multi-colored palette of bacterial life and death? Learn to release our need to improve upon and to control?

For Hong Kingston, rotting is her rebellion against prescriptive gender roles and domestic labor. Rotting is refusal. But rotting also restores balance. The rotting of dishes is necessary, at least for a moment, in order for Hong Kingston to preserve self.

on refusal

Jaamil's guidance also ushered us towards the idea of refusal, and together, we discussed refusal in relation to fugitivity, what Kosoko spoke to as "constant running." I am not really familiar with fugitivity as a concept, but I believe it is rooted in Jaamil's thinking around Marronage and the work of Bayo Akomolafe. Bear with me as I wander and ponder with these relatively new concepts here.

One of the lines of our host's inquiry was, In what ways can refusal operate outside of the fugitive framework? I summarize his question here. And I take some liberty to re-interpret it: How might refusal be seen as generative rather than fugitive? My words are not entirely aligned with Jaamil's questioning, but sometimes I need approximations to get me to the next place.

The first thing that came to mind was perhaps that refusal only occurs in systems of control. In a society based on control—the reforming, conforming, and forced obedience of bodies—any behavior outside of these expectations would be considered to be a resistance or refusal by a figure in power.

But let's imagine a world where control does not exist (we are not in that world, much imagination needed here). There is nothing to "be against" or "disobey" or "refuse" or run away from if bodies are not coerced. Perhaps what is regarded in the current system as refusal is just an expression of preference, of self. Or just an action, Jaamil added. I am in uncertain territory here and I want to be careful, because I am aware that naive ponderings can be neglectful of the lived experience of ancestors and historically marginalized folks. But I appreciate that Restshop held space for this kind of hypothetical and directionless musing without landing, a willingness to entertain the what ifs and travel alongside the learner.

From this, I might imagine that in a world very different from Hong Kingston's world, perhaps she simply preferred not to do the washing. She preferred to use her time to rest, to think, to write. Without her doing those things, we wouldn't have the gift of her books. So we may be glad that she let those dishes rot.

"the approach to the problem is the problem"

This is one teaching I am carrying forward with me from the workshop. It is from an audio recording of Akomolafe that Jaamil played for us during the session. For me, it points to the limited nature of our current thought paradigms (science, empiricism, sight-dominant perception, fixing, capitalism etc.) and in the context of the Restshop, suggests that engaging other approaches—moving, resting, walking, dancing, questioning, gathering reading, dreaming, deep listening, praying—might be more attuned to problem solving.

I can directly relate this to wanting to evolve the energies around my own creative practice, to move away from a feeling of forced production and of wanting too much. How might I change my approach and release my need to create within institutionalized forms of language and knowledge?

I am truly grateful to Jaamil for his work because it pushes towards feeling what it is unknown and limitless. I feel invited to play with the possibility of redefining doing on the level of individual existence, which is also the interpersonal, relational, and ecological levels. In the last session today, during a live sound conjuring by the artist Mlondi Dubazane, I wrote:

Walking backwards is returning to a womb-like state. Here, we have less to worry about. When we know less with the mind, we know more with the body. What are my stories? The rest exposes pre-existing knowledge. It liberates us from linear time. Taking care of the self is taking care of the stories. The stories are the pre-existing knowledge of our bodies.

I don't know if any of these things are true but that doesn't seem so important now. I am trying to listen deeply to the things that don't make sense as much as to the things that do, and just linger in their frequency.

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"There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos." - Lili Loofbourow

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I've had this exact conversation with a different ending. Salt arguments could be a whole genre.

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Nathalie du Pasquier, 2019

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I just watched Maison Margiela's SS24 show by Galliano. And wow, just wow. Corsets, mannequins, Parisian prostitutes. Horst P. Horst and Brassai were cited as influences in a couple reviews. But it reminded me of the Paris captured by photographer Eugene Atget. This corset shop photo titled "Boulevard Strasbourg" was taken by him in 1912.

The show opener Lucky Love gave big Moulin Rouge! energy. His dark mustache was reminiscent of John Leguizamo playing Toulouse-Lautrec in Luhrmann's film.

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Drinking poem

Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day By Li Po (Tang Dynasty). Translation by Arthur Haley.

"Life in the World is but a big dream; I will not spoil it by any labour or care." So saying, I was drunk all the day, Lying helpless at the porch in front of my door. When I woke up, I blinked at the garden-lawn; A lonely bird was singing amid the flowers. I asked myself, had the day been wet or fine? The Spring wind was telling the mango-bird. Moved by its song I soon began to sigh, And as wine was there I filled my own cup. Wildly singing I waited for the moon to rise; When my song was over, all my senses had gone.

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From The Lost Writings, Franz Kafka:

“It is always very early morning in this city, the sky is a level, barely broken grey, the streets are empty, pure and silent, somewhere an unfixed shutter is slowly stirring, somewhere the ends of a cloth that has been laid over the rail of a balcony on one last story are shifting, somewhere in an open window, a curtain is billowing, otherwise there is nothing moving.” 

Kafka might have been writing about Prague, his birth city. Or no city at all, as this was a work of fiction. I think of nineteenth century Glasgow seen through the lens of Scottish photographer Thomas Annan. The streets were not always empty in Annan’s photographs. He also documented people going about their daily life.  But perhaps it is too early in the morning and people are still sleeping in “Low Green Street.” 

Image: Thomas Annan, Low Green Street [Glasgow], 1868, photogravure, National Galleries of Scotland.

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Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad tea, as we have good and bad paintings—generally the latter.

Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea

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A German writer on an Italian painter

A wonderfully mystical introduction:

On 10th July 1888, when Giorgio de Chirico was born of Italian parents in the Greek port of Volos, the constellation of Cancer was rising in the east, and the Moon, its lord, was hidden in the shadows of darkness with the Sun and Mercury.

Destined to be self-indulgent by this constellation, Chirico’s life was to be spent between sensual pleasure and the desire for death, since one inevitably depends upon the other. Cancer’s partner in mythology is Medusa, who foretells glory and banishment for him. One is compensated by the other. He who is born under the sign of Cancer must assume the role of Hercules and overcome continual threats: he must seek them out and go forth to meet them.

- Werner Helwig, from De Chirico, Metaphysical Paintings

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A snapshot from this year’s Fifth Wall Fest. Behold one of my favourite combinations - dance and concrete.

Beast  Dir. Henrique Pina (Portugal, 2021). Choreographed by Victor Hugo Pontes. Filmed at the Braga Municipal Stadium, Portugal.

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Sitting with this gorgeous text entitled “Worm Holes” by Canadian interdisciplinary artist and writer Lou Sheppard. 

In this piece, Sheppard imagines an ultimate phase change of the human body from flesh to dirt to atoms, oscillating effortlessly between the micro and macro to illuminate the harmful machinations of a capitalist industrial complex on our ecology - and ultimately ourselves. I find myself slipping too easily into the fullness of the writing through the darker passages that render the cyclical violence of our economies. Perhaps that experience is the most revelatory for me; it is ironic that no matter how aware I am of the destructiveness of our current economic system, there is also an undeniable appeal. We are all more than a bit complicit.   

I’ll be meeting Lou soon as part of a studio visit for the Virtual Summer Abroad Artist Residency Program run by the Centre for Art Tapes, Halifax.

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No transparency

Has ever hardened us before

To long piers of silence

John Ashbery, “If the Birds Knew”

Image: Stefanie Schneider, Felix and Dominique (California Blue Screen), 1997. Analog C-print, handprinted, based on an expired polaroid. 44 x 57 cm.

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Ward 11  Dir. Jessey Tsui-Shan Tsang  (Singapore/Hong Kong, 2019) Dance and choreography: Aaron Ah Hock Khek and Ix Thien-pau Wong

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“The Asian diasporic experience is longing.” 

This film review by Christopher Yip touched my soul. The Asian diasporic experience feels like a lot of things you just can’t put into words because you’ve been separated from your language, cultural identity, and family. 

Lately, I have been sitting with the discomfort of (be)longing. If the one who left his backyard didn’t have ambition or greed or a curiosity for the world or a sense of entitlement, if West didn’t seek out the East, I wouldn’t exist as I do today. That larger set of circumstances has its own version of longing. It led to smaller, tumbling events of love and encounter and difference. 

When the pandemic started, I travelled to the past with my father. At first, asking him questions about (be)longing felt like an invasion of sorts. I wondered how he would feel letting me into the territory of his memory and I crossed there on unsure footing.