city walls

all images, except this, by J

The walls of ancient cities mark their boundaries and serve to control traders, aliens, intruders and disease. Today's cities are marked instead by their porosity. They boast not of limits, but of - to use our island's governmentspeak - "possibilities" (or the super cringe-worthy "possibicities").

Maybe today's city walls are represented instead by our museum and gallery walls. While these walls face inward, they invite instead of deny and repel. They close off a room, but open up imaginative spaces and physical spaces for not only inhabitants of the city but all kinds of folks to question, critique, demand, contemplate, play. These walls hold up for its inhabitants and visitors to view the strength of a city's financial and intellectual currency with the world, its ability to talk above its domestic noise, and its vitality.

In fact, a mark of cities that are deemed to have arrived is that their museums and galleries are must-sees. So if you are in Tokyo, us amps recommend these art museums/galleries that we saw:

(1) The Mori Arts Centre on the 53rd flr of Mori's Roponggi Hills development. [Y1,500 for a combined ticket to the gallery & city view]

View just below the 53rd Flr Mori Art Centre

It is not a conventional gallery or museum in the sense that there is no permanent collection to speak of. When we were there, the gallery was showing the 2nd "Roponggi Crossings" (the first was in 2004). The team of curators had chosen artists whom they had produced the most exciting work and reflected the future of Japanese contemporary art. Another common idea was that of working across disciplines or having made some form of crossover. Hence there were artists who also produced manga, collaborated with musicians, or started in the field of photography or as an ironsmith! Visitors could vote for the most impactful work. Both J and I - aiyah, soulmates mah! - chose the same artist - a photographer who had taken these nightmarish yet strangely alluring shots of underground Tokyo and animals in test labs.

(2) Suntory Museum of Art at the Tokyo Midtown development. [ Y1,300 for entry]

tombuildings

(Enroute to Tokyo Midtown, we were distracted by the large peaceful cemetary grounds right in the middle of fashionable Aoyama. It's worth a restful 30min stroll. To get there, exit the Aoyama Itochome station, it is a 10min walk. You can spot the cemetary on the map outside the station. These marble obelisks of varying sizes and age are just like the buildings in the background, or should I compare instead the buildings of the cityscape to these tombstones?)

It's a small and elegant 2 storey corporate gallery in the new Tokyo Midtown development. The show it had on then was on these old Japanese screens. Not quite stuff we are normally excited about, but the pieces were exquisitely made and preserved. Suntory has another museum by the Osaka Harbour (there are tons of corporate galleries in Tokyo, such as the Shiseido Gallery, the Seibu Gallery, Parco Gallery, many of which had launched artists' careers. Ah why won't our Temasek Holdings or SIA, please, start a corporate collection and gallery? Even Korea's Samsung has, that's another mark of a nation!). The Suntory Museum is worth a 45min visit if it's the only thing in the upmarket Tokyo Midtownthat you can afford! There were troops of middle-aged Japanese visitors when we were there.

(3) The 21-21 Design Sight designed by Tadao Ando and buried in the garden of Tokyo Midtown [ Y2,000 for entry]

21-21 Design Sight by Tadao Ando right beside the Tokyo Midtown

When we were there, 21-21 Design Sight was showing a brilliantly curated, thought-provoking, engaging and enjoyable exhibition on "Water", presenting installations that interpreted this resource - its qualities, its forms in the landscape and weather, its textures and sounds, our memories and imagined experiences. The entry ticket was costly, but worth every yen.

(4) The new National Art Centre Tokyo (NACT) designed by the late Kurokawa 5min away from Tokyo Midtown


Kurokawa had passed away a week or so before we visited this museum. A few nights ago, we had also watched a documentary (probably a special re-run) of Kurokawa travelling somewhere in Eastern Europe (or was it Russia?) re-visiting an old friend and speaking about the architectural works in that city. We did not know then that he had just died. The NACT had several shows running concurrently - one on Vermeer, one showcasing 100 years of Nitten (a government-sponsored art competition that probably represented a particularly conventional and staid strain still present), and one of photographs by Shigeo Anzai. All the exhibitions were individually ticketed.

We caught the exhibition of Shigeo Anzai's (a ticket was Y1100, with a Y200 discount if you showed the stub for the Suntory Museum) photographs of various artists and their works/shows from the 1970s till today. It was chronologically presented, with photographs tacked on the walls organised as a timeline. No fancy curation - but as a document of documentation, it was apt and showed the sheer breadth and development of Japanese contemporary art.


The Omotesando Hills development and fashionable crowd are part of the pervasive art - spot the pattern!

But what amazed me was (not unlike the Suntory Museum) the crowds that were present at the museum. It was a weekday afternoon, and even when we left at 6pm, with us was a group of about 100 visitors who had remained in the museum till closing time.

Hmmm. I know this is a vacation, but these visits to the various galleries and museums naturally led me to think about work and our tropical island 7 hours away by plane. What do our museums and galleries mean to us?


Tired salaried folks are the same everywhere in the world.

========
P/S. If you have the time, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is also well worth a visit. It is located beside Kiba park, which is a 30-45min train ride away from places like Shibuya. We were there 4 years and had gone there again this time, only to discover that it was shut for the installation of a new show on art and design due to open the next day!

sl/b/urp

We are at a lost for words after 10 tiring but inspiring days in Japan (also mostly because most evenings I've too much beer, sake or choya-soda in me to concentrate!), so here's some pseudo-manga:




what competiting in Tokyo looks like - click for larger view in fickr

it's a squeeze!

J spied upon this 1.4m tall Tokyo-ite all dressed in 70s gear 2 tables away from us.

We finally arrived in Tokyo this evening, having done all the touristy visits in the Kansai region, and now back doing what we probably would do at home too - having a coffee, watching the people go by and drawing in our books. On difference is Tokyo's late night TV. It is a strange humour, to have a detective series where the lead detective's special skill is flinging his wig (boomerange style) at criminals and the female detective has perfected the art of attacking using the suction power of those rubbery breast-enhancers.

J: Young people born in Tokyo or even Osaka are really lucky.
Y: Why do you say that?
J: I mean, look at all of them here - there's so much more they can do, the creativity and - .
Y: I don't know about that. It must be terribly competitive and pressurising. How do you stand out in a place like Tokyo?
J: [puzzled] I don't agree. Why is there a need to compete at all? You can just do whatever you are good at.
Y:... You know, you are not wrong... maybe it's my small pond mentality to say that. When you're not in a small pond, who cares about being a big fish? It's just the whole big ocean -

Space, physical space, is a previous commodity in Tokyo. The price of our hotel room - luxurious by Tokyo standards - is evidence. Unlike "global" Singapore which tries its darned best to remain "relevant" to the rest of world, there is an insularity here that comes from having a homogenous population and a fairly self-contained and sufficient domestic market. Similarly the Tokyo-ites seemed to have evolved and made good the limitations of space, and in their design responses, made this into an art. J calls this the "aesthetics of squeeze". Ah, a most Japlish term!

2 Days, 2 Creatures from the deep

atmospheric horizon. all images in this post by J - click for flickr view

The clouds were so low that even as we were already a minute or two from the runway it remained the same pale grey outside the window. Stare hard enough and the world will turn into a flat sheet of paper. Then emerging from the clouds, the runway suddenly appeared and we were there - the Kansai International Airport. But how different it was when we were above the clouds - day broke - the sun burnt through the atmosphere in a line. And it was almost possible to imagine how the world began.

We got off the plane by 6.30am. But it was not until almost 9 when we reached our hotel in central Osaka, the Namba area. There was no rush. We were lost a little figuring out the train to Namba as J struggled to recover from the claustrophobia of the last 7 hours and to recover some memory of his university Japanese. And when we got to Namba (by bus instead), we were a little lost figuring out the various maps to get to the hotel.

Being lost in a world that was not your usual was good. And since check in at the hotel wasn't till 3pm, what was there to do for 2 people eager to be lost in some other world? The Osaka Aquarium, of course.


2 jellyfish in their own world

There is much to marvel at the Osaka Aquarium. The giant rays, giant arowanas and giant whale shark just inches from your face, the surreal display of giant deep sea crabs, and amps' favourite (normal-sizes will do) jellyfish. They in their own world and us, protected from their watery world by inches of acrylic, using our human frameworks to understand theirs - here, a fish who looks like a grumpy old man, there another fish looking like the harassed salaryman. But the sense of marvel was obvious not only among the hordes of school children and giggly teenagers, but also the adults. If there was something about the Japanese, it was their ability to marvel - to "ooh", "aah" and "kawaii-nei" at things we so often take for granted.

The Aquarium is right by the harbour, and the walk from the Osakako subway station is a pleasant one. Beside the Aquarium is the Suntory Museum (which was having a special exhibition on Toulouse-Lautrec and another on Japanese outsider art), designed by Japanese architect Tandao Ando.


2 posers taking a break in the neon world

The other colourful watery world in Osaka is that of the Dotomburi district. Like aquarium tanks in darkness, the neon lights and giant automated mascots on the buildings compete for attention. Running parallel to the Tomburi canal, the district or series of arcades comprises restaurants, street tako-pachi stalls, bars, theatres, pachinko/game parlors, karaokes, boutiques and sex shops. And those very creatues we saw in the aquarium were not only magnified and replicated above shop entrances, they were cooked and eaten, and seemed almost instantly reincarnated as the folks milling around Dotomburi iteself - tourists, salarymen, OLs, students or young women decked up with fake lashes and high boots (some with suited old men), young men hawking for the parlors and looking out for girls they could match to potential jobs, and homeless folks.


2 daydreamers re-learning how to daydream

And if Osaka was too crass and loud an introduction, then its genteel half Kyoto beckoned the next day. Those quaint cobble-stone lanes with expensive inns and restaurants, endless shrines and temples (ditto churches for Europe I guess!), the lovely Kodaiji grounds where you could wander through a bamboo growth and a 17th century Japanese woman's patronage of craftsmen in memory of her husband, and finally of course - Gion.

At Gion, tourists treat Geisha sightings as paparazzi would rock stars. These white-faced women would emerge for seconds from the low wooden houses onto the one-laned street where a taxi awaited; and in those few seconds, the streets were alight with camera flashes going off. They don't smile. They certainly don't make any eye contact with these lower beings. Perhaps kept in their own world by the white paste on their faces, the Geishas and tourists could have been in parallel universes or some 300-year time warp, if not for the Toyotas they enter.


2 geishas in the floating world

I don't know if J and I are like creatures entering or emerging from the deep - whichever, our day/night visions are still not quite attuned and the rhythmns of our island world are still being slowed down for this holiday. But right now I've got too much beer, tako-pachi (we had 26 just between the 2 of us yesterday!), ramen and some amazing pancake thing in me to ponder this.

time online

I haven't quite organised my thoughts, but somewhere I think a pattern or some meaning will emerge. Or maybe not. Still, here goes...

Last weekend my sister left Singapore to start her undergraduate studies at York. I have not spoken to her since, but I've read a little of her life at York from her facebook. That same day, I met ru. The next day she would be getting back to the UK. Our parting words were - "see you online!"

It has been almost 2 years when I wrote this on the blog the day before J and I left for a holiday in Taipei. Tomorrow we leave for a holiday in Japan. Reading that post, I wonder what had changed. This evening I stepped out of the office at 11.15pm.

It's getting clearer that in the last 10months, the 3 things that matter most to me - God, sweet J (and by some extension, family and friends) and writing (not blogposts!) - have in fact suffered the most from the demands of my work. It's of course not right. Something must give. And it can't be any of the 3. Still I've tried to take it, one small step at a time - trying to keep in my mind's eye on some kind of ideal state after 5 years. It's becoming less clear if the trouble of getting there this particular way is worth it,

Finally! Some good news after a pretty demoralising (is that over-dramatising?) year - the short story mentioned here got accepted for the Malaysian anthology Silverfish New Writing 7. Yay!

Is there a common thread then? I am still not sure. Maybe it is just this, the blogposts - these markers of time.

On that note, even if it is a stray note from another octave, here is a most excellent blog discovered by J - reviewing not so much books, but their design! All form and all substance. And another here.

give the public the public star

image by J

Sunday J and I caught the last performance for the 2nd run of W!ldrice's The Campaign to Confer the Public Star on JBJ. A simple 2 act structure with 2 actors, each playing multiple roles in 1 of the 2 acts - the first act on the unintentional public life of a private individual, the other on the private life of an unintentional public servant - both martyred, relunctantly or unwittingly, by their own play in the system.

Described as a satire, the humour is biting, intelligent and knowing, yet also accessible, owing to Pam Oei's dynamo-like costume changes and everyone's favourite digs at the dynastic Lees/politicians/complicit civil service. In this way, the play's also a romance. A romance about that other JBJ, the hapless Singaporean, the undead Lee, the absent father, heck, the system, the clueless public, the clued-in repressed media...

Still, it was an enjoyable, well-conceived play with the wordless ending (finally, quiet in a hyper-wordy play!) so aptly capturing the sense of 無奈 (what will the equivalent of this be? frustration?) amidst images of fireworks.

For all the global posturing, what has proven to work - 881 as a good example - is defining a vernacular, a folk theatre. Even if it is a vernacular where the senior civil servant character (unless I heard wrong) in a post-coital tiff with her journalist boyfriend, exclaims - "Tis not enough?" And on an island where English is an adopted "first" language, a Shakespearean "tis" is part of our vernacular, however stilted.

don't forget

big kid J - image by J

I almost forgot, but J left me a reminder this morning with this image. Us amps don't have too many words to this post, except Happy Children's Day, don't ever forget!