To school and back - image by JBesides learning
how not to make a pretty picture, I learned that:
(1) Everyone likes feeling like an artistThere are 8 of us in the printmaking class: 3 designer-types, 1 teacher, and 3 others whom I haven't gotten round to asking about their daytime job.
One of my favourite classmates is Earnest. That's not his real name, of course. E is one of those young guys you think of as being 50. He wears oval gold-rimmed glasses, his grey polo T-shirt is loose over his skinny frame and tapered faded jeans, and he speaks a Mandarin-accented Singlish. E makes all of us in class smile and, sometimes, laugh with his nervous earnestness.
In the beginning, E would turn up for class often not knowing what to draw or produce on a print. He would laugh ashamedly, "don't know what to draw leh. No inspiration." And even after he has set pencil to paper, he would ask nervously, "teacher, how ah? I draw like this can or not?" (He was the only one in class who called N, our young artist- teacher "teacher"). When told by N that we would need to hand in assignments that would be graded, he grew even more nervous about his splotchy prints (well, we all made splotchy prints!) and would ask loudly - "er, teacher, how ah, this one can pass or not? Aiyah, sure fail one lah. If fail, then how ah?"
After almost 2 months, E remains just as earnest, but more confident.
"So how do you find the class now?" N the teacher asked E one day just as he settled down by his workspace. "Better? Are you enjoying it or not?"
"Better, better," he smiled and declared loudly, "yah, now, actually I like coming here every week. It's very good. Every week come here, can be very creative, very good. I like. Somehow, don't know why, when I come here, like feel like an artist! Very good."
So do I.
2 of my recent batch of collograph prints from class(2) Not everyone has what it takes to be one.A couple of days ago I read an old complaint about digital photography(kind of ironic, given that it's
Wired magazine). So what if all these digital tools has allowed everyone to create a photographic or graphic image or a video,
it's still not art - the writer insists.
So what does it really take? What defines that sacred circle where, even if you
feel like an artist, you are not entitled to step into.
Two weeks ago, having messed up a
collograph print, I looked at it and told N that maybe I would scan it and digitally work in new layers to the image, including a text overlay. She suggested instead that I could create a stencil template using gesso for the text, and print it on. She described the entire process which, to me, sounded way too complex.
"Wah, that's way too much work!"
"Well," N smiled, "that's art."
I've been thinking. Yes, that's why N is an artist, and I am not. But perhaps that's also why we all want to feel like an artist - to feel, even if it is for a day, that we must pursue this one thing to perfection regardless of what it takes. Better still, that we have it in us, that in fact it is ours alone, to accomplish it.
Yambo is the protagonist in Umberto Eco's new book The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. He is a 60 year-old trader in old books wakes up from a coma with a memory only of "public" things and ideas. At the beginning he expresses feelings only in hackneyed phrases, but also extended metaphors and phrases from all the books he has read. Like a child who already has a stock knowledge of the world and an entire literary encyclopedia, he nonetheless has to re-create his relationships with these words and ideas. And beyond negotiating the world through these residual words, there are also tastes, smells, sights, habits, family, friends and loves and - ultimately - himself. What is a person but the sum of his memories - experiences not only stored but also constantly re-created and re-lived as we continue to think and act?
2 days ago I was reminded, not of a book, but of a film I have watched and re-watched at least 10 times. J during one of his free afternoons had dug out and watched an old DVD of mine - Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage. It was a film that showed as much of Kwan's love for film making and the early years of Chinese cinema as it did of the lives of one of China's earliest and most tragic movie stars Ruan Lingyu. 
I think it is still top on the list of my favourite films. The first time I watched it was alone at the old Broadway cinema at Ang Mo Kio in 1992. That cinema is now no longer. Although it must have been almost 10 years since I last saw the film, as J told me about his experience, I was surprised I could still remember almost every scene and its lines. The names of the Chinese directors who were featured, their expressions, their gestures, the gorgeous wallpaper and cheongsum (what art direction!), the sounds and Shanghainese chatter, the old movie stills and snippets, the inspired instances of meta-cinema, the beautiful Maggie Cheung, and that slightly bleached light in the film that is memory.
But what happens when you don't know what you don't know? His answer was that you would start to do some scenario planning, prototyping, environment survey etc. And his conclusion was that radical, paradigm-changing innovation starts from this quadrant of investigation. Instinctively, I doubted his neat categorisation. I mean, if you don't know what you don't know, how will you even know that you don't know something, much less embark on any kind of scenario planning or prototyping or experimentation or...
One of my favourite short stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" is "Where I'm likely to Find It". A man suddenly goes missing and his wife enlists the help of a private investigator, the narrator, who takes a special interest in such disappearing folks. The investigator finds out that the man dislikes taking the lift and prefers taking the stairs to his expensive 26th floor apartment. The narrator is ultimately drawn to the landing between the 25th and 26th floor, where the landlord has placed a sofa and mirror, and suspects a relationship between the landing and the man's disappearance. As he investigates the landing, he speaks to a jogger who runs up the stairs, an elderly man and a young girl. The man is found 20 days later in another city. 
