Walking August 7, 2007
Posted by newshufa in Everyday.add a comment
Ma On Shan Park is next to the building where I live beside Tolo Harbour & in the mornings around 7am if I go walking, amongst the hundreds of others who do the same, there will always be groups of people doing tai chi & it’s the loveliest thing, the sight of flowing movement and the sound of the Chinese music which you come upon in numerous little corners of the park & you can hear it wafting towards you, drawing you in its direction.
Manufactured Landscape August 5, 2007
Posted by newshufa in Movies, Techno-sublime.1 comment so far
Went last night to Manufactured Landscapes , a documentary about the work of Edward Burtynsky. (There’s a trailer of the film on the movie’s website)
Incredible images of China & the impact of development & then we dissolve neatly to the opening of an exhibition of these beautiful prints of ugliness and waste, with nice concerned people, as we all are, & I’m filled with a sense of the immensity of contradictions, sitting in the agnes b cinema at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, in a program called ‘Reel Asia’ organised by the Asia Society with a grant from JP Morgan .
All these monumental images of the disasters of capital, from Salgado to Sekula , from Darwin’s Nightmare to Workingman’s Death !
Towards the end of the film, there’s a troubling juxtaposition between an old woman in Shanghai, resisting real estate development & a younger woman who’s clearly profited immensely from it, as she walks us through her fabulous house & huge garden, requiring three gardeners and now taking up the space where a whole community would previously have lived. The old woman is presented in an empty building, a kind of shell, a decidedly unhomely space, while the real estate developer lives in this gloriously comfortable home (even though the audience laughs & sneers at her, as the image of rapacious development) – but we’re really torn between the two women, because we can admire the old woman’s resilience & resistance, but the emptiness of her surroundings doesn’t suggest any future, while the real estate developer’s contention that Shanghai is a place for young people is hard to deny. The image of woman still serves to condense the contradictions – plus ça change.
Let’s see if this will work … August 5, 2007
Posted by newshufa in Everyday.1 comment so far
OK, this is supposed to be easy, so let’s start. It’s 30 degrees outside with 80% humidity here in Hong Kong today & I’m inside keeping cool. I promised myself I’ll start a blog this summer on the way to a website & getting REALLY organised & connected before the chaos of teaching a new programme takes over. I’ve tried this before, signing up once or twice at least to blog sites but losing passwords & usernames & giving up. I’ll give up again if I can’t figure a way of easily putting pictures & videos into this. Oh look, there’s a box below & all I have to do is click & I can put in an image! Let’s try that, with the view outside:
OK, after a few goes, this seems to have worked.
