The sporty Chang Jiang motorbike – a tragedy that never made it onto Australian roads
While modern China has rarely been known for quality engineering, hope springs eternal – as you can see from the story below. An optimistic Australian importer got a shock when he opened this factory-fresh motorbike pictured here:
NB: This was back in 1994.
Photos taken by me at Australia’s National Motorbike Museum
Photo taken while trekking in Sapa, Vietnam, 2008
Yesterday, as on most days, I sat down to work on my paper book at 9am. In the The Artists Place cafe I lit a mosquito coil, turned on the fan, and got typing.
Dengue-ridden mosquitoes swarmed over me all day long and the temperature soared. Midday I went to escape the heat in an airconditioned hotel lobby with wifi, but still I stuck to their pleather seats.
Crazy from the heat, I booked a last-minute ticket for today to Chiang Rai in the north.
Tonight I fly to Chiang Rai, and tomorrow I’ll catch a bus to Mae Salong where I’ll write, practice my Mandarin, and cool down while drinking hot tea from the hills nearby. Mae Salong is a very unusual Thai town: a little piece of forgotten China near the Golden Triangle.
Painting with Thai blood, the calligrapher writes: “Pouring the People’s blood onto the ground”
This is what’s happening on the other side of the Chao Phraya river, a muddy waterway that splits the Bangkok region into two parts: the old city of Thonburi where I work in my studio, and newer Bangkok, the brasher, brighter half of this city torn in two.
Photo and more info on the Thai protests from VOA website
Last week I took a train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-biggest city.
In my trusty notebook I had a page that read:
“SHOPPING LIST
“15 pieces of Banana Paper for the paper book,”
[Last year I'd tried to buy it but apparently it was out of season by May]
“As much paper-tree bark as I can carry for a handmade artists book,”
I ended up buying a kilo of the stuff and carrying it on the train home. Lots of funny looks from fellow passengers at the station, I’ll tell you.
“Interesting handwoven cotton for new painting, 2+ meters,”
Cotton dyed with ebony fruit
“Bleached and unbleached thick mulberry paper for ******,”
” ****** ” is a secret project. You’ll hear about it here first – well, after my collectors and facebook fans
and
“The thinnest paper of all for artists proofs”
On this tissue-thin mulberry paper I’ll test a series of very special Vietnamese cyanotypes. I can’t wait to see how they turn out – and to start sending them to galleries and art spaces – hopefully to one near you.
Catching up with the NYC artworld from a beach bungalow in Thailand – discussions with artists via Jerry Saltz [art critic] on Facebook, and Edward Winkleman’s blog [gallerist]
Ten years ago as I finished my last year of art school, I realized that to ‘make it’ as an artist, whatever that meant, I had to move to New York City. And a few years later, I did, though I’d never even visited before.
I did a few things right once I got there: worked with artists and photographers in the gallery-filled Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, went to museums and openings all over town, lived in the hipster neighborhood of South Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
And I did a lot wrong: didn’t make an effort to meet other artists, didn’t make any memorable work in the claustrophobic apartment I shared with two tense roommates, a place we’d rented sight unseen, where bars sliced up the view from our bedroom windows and fat cockroaches wandered our halls.
But really, I wanted to be somewhere else. Not back in the midwest with my family, but somewhere different, somewhere outside the Americas. I’d studied and worked in Europe and wanted to go back there for more. I dreamed of going to Morocco. Was intrigued by Asia.
But New York was where I was supposed to be. That was the only place to make it, went the refrain in my head. Then I lost my job in Chelsea after two planes hit two buildings downtown, and along with thousands of others I walked down Manhattan over the Williamsburg bridge to my home, which I now knew could never be home again.
I knew my future lay elsewhere, was finally able to admit that I’d never really been interested in climbing the Artworld Ladder. It’s a rat-race like any other, starting with University –> to Group shows –> to Solo shows –> to Gallery representation –> to Museum shows and Retrospectives and if you’re lucky, a spot in the art history books.
There are a lot of rules and assumptions along the way, and the most fundamental is that you live where the biggest art scenes are. Right now, that’s London, Berlin, New York and Beijing. But I’m not interested in following rules if they don’t match my priorities, and don’t plan to live full-time in any of those places.
So where’s my future? Eventually it’ll be in many places, but for now it’s on the internet, where I can talk to artists in New York and Melbourne and Shanghai, artists I might never meet otherwise. Best of all, thanks to Google Translate, I can communicate with people in dozens of languages that I can’t even speak – yet. It’s the next-best thing to Esperanto.
And best of all, it lets me work from different studios, anywhere in the world.
[Click to see photos of past studios here]
Gouache, Acrylic and Ink on handmade paper
Last week my sister and I were distracted by a TV ad as we rode the skytrain back to our hotel. Our car was cool and we relaxed after a hot afternoon visiting Bangkok’s Old City. We shared seats with locals from all over Thailand, in a range of sizes, shapes and shades: a few Isaan girls from the Northeast, wearing miniskirts and spaghetti string tanktops on their way to work in girlie bars; southerners who showed South Asian traces in their features; and Chinese-Thais from the city’s merchant class.
The TVs held everyone’s attention; no one in the car spoke as an ad extolled the virtues of an expensive whitening cream. On a half-dozen screens light radiated from the fingertip of a Eurasian model who leaned leggily against a heavenly background.
“Why do all the people on TV here look the same?” my sister asked, “when there are so many different kinds of Thais?”
Whitening creams are everywhere in Southeast Asia- there are even whitening deodorants.
But the TV ad we saw was nothing compared to one I saw the next day. It shows you how to get an engagement ring in a single week: use Pond’s Flawless White[ning] Cream, work as a painter’s model, and you’ll seduce a guy as he mixes in more and more white with your flesh tones.
Watch the ad Here.
Entry to The Artists Place, the studio where I’m currently working in Bangkok
Cynthia Morris at Original Impulse recently interviewed me about how I manage to live this crazy creative life that I do. We talk about paper, people, places, and more. ”Take a tea break,” she says, “and join the conversation below”.
You can listen to the audio interview here.
Holiday Hangover, cyanotype photogram on velvet from the Workaholics series. Click image to see more.
Two weeks ago I hopped in a car for the 12-hour drive from Sydney to Brisbane,
spent a day at the Asia Pacific Triennial in Queensland,
flew up to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
caught a train to the seedy town of Hat Yai, Thailand,
then another to Bangkok for meetings with my editor and creative friends,
and for the past week I’ve been offline to take my sister to our first and last Full Moon party ever, on the infamous Thai island of Koh Phangan.
Back to blogging and all the rest in a few days….
I'm an american artist with an Asian focus.
I paint sharp-witted women.
I print blue photos of disappearing places. Sometimes I work in Sydney, sometimes I work in Asia. You can keep up and connect with me on Twitter, and Facebook, and Flickr
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