Michel de Montaigne

Who is Michel de Montaige?

           a French writer who was born in 1533, An avantgarde in Renaissance in the field of education. Regonitzed by many great thinkers as the pioneer who first, in modern language, philosophized on the most common concerns of men and the ordinary subjects of private relection and converstaion. His point of view of education is of important value even in today. His writings contains various subjects, the complete collection of his essays include in total 107 chapters.

What else about him?
     
            he was saying.....

   “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
   “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. "
   “Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.”
   “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”

            and he also said that....
    "A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband."

    Yeah, right???!! A seriously smart and funny guy!!!

 Some nice websites to check out here
          Collection of his essay (In french) , here
          Website of tour of his castle, here
         

Journey to the Old Summer Palace

Here I am, ready to talk about another digital process project.

Here is the link to my youtube video click meeeeee <3

For this one I specifically reflected on my culture, I wanted it to be something of China. So I chose a very old traditional song and imput through garageband (by using the keyboard), and then added several effects on top of that. What I wanted to achieve is to give the illusion that one is in a old chinese garden and just all of sudden the image of the thousands years of history revealed in front of him. I specifically thought of the Old Summer Palace. Here is a short of intro on wikipedia of the Summer palace: (here is a picture of the original view of the garden before it got ruined)

The Old Summer Palace, known in Chinese as Yuan Ming Yuan (the Gardens of Perfect Brightness), and originally called the Imperial Gardens, was a complex of palaces and gardens in Beijing. It is located 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) northwest of the walls of the Imperial City and was built in the 18th and early 19th century as the place where the emperors of the Qing Dynasty resided and handled government affairs (theForbidden City was used for formal ceremonies). The Old Summer Palace was known for its extensive collection of garden and building architectures and other works of art (a popular name in China was the "Garden of Gardens", simplified Chinese: 万园之园; traditional Chinese: 萬園之園; pinyin: wàn yuán zhī yuán).

When I learned about the old summer palace on the textbook when I was 14, I was so stunned. Because it would be the most gorgeous garden of all if it hadn't been ruined and rubbed in the second Opium war. I felt very sad. 

So I created this audio piece as If I walked into the garden, and I hear the sounds of thousand years ago, I hear the traditional song, the birds, the trees, the waters, going through my ears. In the beginning I chose to add the sound of striking the old bronze bell so that the imagination begins, and the final sound just drags one out to reality. I pretty much think of it as a movie soundtrack. go check it out! and don't forget to close your eyes!

And as for the ideas of Mcluhan, this particular sentence speaks to me in a way that really helped me through the process of making this project, " Sounds come from "above", from "below", from "in front" of us, from "behind" us, from our "right, from our "left".. where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships." I played with the panning effect in this audio a lot, and it really did render a nice 3D effect. I could feel the space, from the different directions of the sound. I think what sound can do is more than music, and I feel like for now its pretty much under-appreciated, But again,  everything we do is music!

also there is another fun remix I made, check it out here! click me!!! 
For this one I only wanted it to be fun and easy to dance to, or at least, easy to shake one's body with!

thanks!
I love music!
Long way to go!

antisocial ?

what is anti-social? I am a very social person on most of times

this is what I thought about this project at first. 

But if I have to tell a story with pictures to express the theme of antisocial, I will use pictures of food I took everywhere around the world.

Why?
I travel alone sometimes, I go dine alone, and I really enjoy it, maybe that's me being antisocial a bit?
I take photos of food with extensive carefulness, I think at one point they are talking to me through it.
When I do feel like being alone, I almost always eat, so food represents that antisocial part of me.
Then I think of all the weight issues and bulimia nervosa, I think food sometimes make people feel alone, and helpless.

Those are just my interpretations.
When I look at some really fine dishes, I feel happy. I know it has been made with full heart. I know a chef who has been cooking for over 40 years, he has won many awards in the field, he owned a big french restaurant in the U.S once, but now after retiring, he still wakes up every morning at 6 am to go shop for the best freshest ingredients of the day for customers of his little fusion restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan. He does not need to do it for money, or survival, he simply make food for customers because he likes to do.

From the photos you could possibly tell my obsession for all kinds of food, among one, there is japanese food. For that I'd elaborate a bit more, there is this most stunning documentary I've ever seen called "Jiro dreams of Sushi". There is this man who opened a sushi restaurant in Japan, and he makes possibly the best sushi in the world. He has been making sushi for his whole life now he is more than 90 years old, he still does it everyday. I think that's just where it touched me, the aspect of knowing to not take food for granted. Those delicate, warming, nutrient, delicious, pretty food are made with efforts and times. We should always appreciate them, even when alone!

So much to be said, here is the link to my flickr account : click me!
For the snapfish photobook layout, click here!

A fantasy with Lynda Barry

Ever since I attended Lawrence, I have been to three convocations in total. the last two were merely memorable, but this recent one with Lynda Barry is definitely staying in my memory.

anyways, How could I not like this convocation when it started with such a beautiful piece of of music?

Lynda Barry herself was hilarious of course. But what I really liked is that she conveyed important ideas through funny and easy-to-understand manners, not many people could have done as well as her.  She talked about what is an image,  what has art done for us and so on. I especially remembers when she mentioned that, when a adult engages in creating art, his brain looks the same as a child who is in deep play. That stroke me at first, but then it makes so much sense. Honest artists bring the most innocent and primary parts of their senses and ideas to their work, that is exactly the same as a child in deep play, nothing else bothers him, nothing else interests him, it's only him and his fantasy world. That really touched me.

Another part that intrigues me is when Lynda told the story of asking people who gave up drawing in their early years to draw some simple patterns. She showed and described how the lines of their drawings were filled with thrill and terror. Somehow that silenced the whole audiences. That made me think about what art can do. And I do not think there is a simple answer, what I felt is complicated, and that sort of attached, shocking, melancholy feeling still remains. I probably have to ask myself about this for a while.

So I'd like to end this post with my favorite quote of this wonderful convocation, as for the same hearts of the art-loving folks out there

"we don't create a fantasy to escape form reality, we create them to stay."

Dream - a sense of losing space and time

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past" ---- Marshall Mcluhan

as I read the part where Mcluhan talked about time and space, this was the sentence that I related to the most. It is so true, that every time when I am dealing with something or someone new, I always got so attached to it, and just put everything behind. And ONLY when the new "thing" came to me, I could really let bygones be bygones. But this is just a very personal interpretation of what Mcluhan said.

As for the video, I tried hard to approach the sense of losing track of space and time visually in the first place. I used video camera in a completely dark space and then added the smoke and lightening aside, then filmed how the smoke goes around in the air. I named it dream because that was how I came up with the idea. Whenever I tried to recall a dream, I got this dizzy and smoky image of the scenes, and the pieces of images were usually not as vivid as the actual world, more grey and white. I used smoke as my primary medium because it really gives me that sense of dreamy feeling. How I achieved this is by using a lightening diffuser. I also added one of my all-time favorite "weird" song to the background, because it evokes the same sort of dreamy and dizzy feeling out of me. Also I added the sound of waters flowing and tides waving to the video, so it feels like something is going on in this " dream", but because it is so blurry and dark one just could not tell what it is. And that is exactly what happened to me when I recall a dream that's so distant to me. And I deliberately made the music stop all of sudden, leaving only the smoke floating and the sound of water, for me that is the moment when one wakes up, just one second and the dream world is gone, but our thoughts still linger on it.

How the video relates to this particular assignment is a bit complicated. When we dream, our senses get distorted. there is no sense of time, sometimes people dream for 5 minutes but when they wake up, they would feel like just had a long day. Of course there is no track of space either, because everything was not real.

Hope this video makes whomever's watching feel the same way!  And I hope you like the sound too!

Winter is really pretty

if you just see it from there

"confession of this blog"

as for me, photos are a way of recording what I see and how I feel in a silent motion. And it is probably my closest relationship with art.

I have used several different kinds of tools,  SLRs, digital cameras, film cameras, instant cameras and of course, cell phones. But my favorite of all ,  is digital cameras. They are small, portable, handy, and with the right choice they capture the moment just as amazing as expensive single lens reflex would do.  Most of times, they do render a rather plain image, but I love that simple texture too. I think they have a sense of reality.

I took photos for fun, never learned and studied anything about photography.  However, I do think my perspective of photography came from several resources that I was exposed to when I was young.

I was not a fan of photography when I was a kid, but I was very attracted by pictures in fairy tale books, traditional chinese water colors, Ghibli movies, and any kinds of watery color images. Now I think of Chritian Anderson's fairy tales, the pictures that accompanied the stories pop up on my mind. And I will be posting about all kinds of inspirational works I've encountered earlier in the blog.

However, most of time I prefer the view not the people.
(Well if people just happen to be in the picture, that is fine）
I love it when the picture reminds me of feelings I had at a specific moment.
As I consider all of my pictures sort of intimate, what I appreciate best is how pictures can provoke different interpretations when shared..

There was one time that my friend just had a break up and she saw one of my pictures on a social websites, later she told me that somehow that picture made her feel better and she used it as her pc's wallpaper. That one picture somehow had a healing power for her. That was the first time that I realized that the picture I've taken is mine, but it can also be more than that. And that is exactly what I am interested in for now--- the power of an image to speak for itself in ways that's open to interpretations and make people feel able to relate to. But the most important part it, the image has to be honest. I am not referring to photoshop or other kinds of post editing, but the part that it was taken in an honest way. That's a bit hard to explain, so I'll let my pictures speak for themselves.

And another reason that I prefer taking pictures of the "nature" rather than people is that I think any places look best when it's natural. People pose, but the nature always stay the same. yet, everybody would have taken different pictures even if they were asked to take photos of the exact same thing on the same spot. That is where the intimacy of the picture taker and the nature itself blends in. I could not explain clearly how I feel about it--- but in a nutshell, I love exploring all that.