Log

I have been intending to write a bit about the aesthetic of Menga (漫畫) recently because the important role it plays in the drawing technique that I have been practicing with. Especially in the series Infinite Ruin.

Drawing with ball pen is rudimentary and direct. Unlike oil paint, whose painting process involves canvas building, paint ground preparation, color mixing , drying time.. there is a certain bluntness to black ink drawing that one just poke the pen needle onto the fiber of paper and the result is almost 100% of the time just unapologetically black. It is an immediate action that creates in an instance a permeant effect.

In many ways it is a more naked way of visual expression. In comparison to digital drawing, there are much less distance built between you (the creator) and the artifact (your drawing). When working in computer, your creative process is programmed and presupposed: how the canvas space is defined with grid of pixel, color numberized and the action “paint” or “stroke” programmed. It is with no double that digital tools are extremely powerful, I often feel a lack of authorship to my digital works despite the numerous hours spent on making them.

That is perhaps the reason why I circle back to simple ink drawing, after having learnt to paint, build and render digitally. It’s aesthetic connection to Manga in the 90s is also endearing to me. The style and drawing technique applied in Mange is the first art style that I truly appreciate and felt inspired towards. It is not high art, if you may. It doesn’t fit into art history or the larger part of the art world. But it is something I truly find beautiful without an art museum tell me to feel so. Thus there must be some truth to this aesthetic that is worth exploring.

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Takeo City, Saga

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home for september

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his precious

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this hair salon looks like a retro game console

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𓆸

photos shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

向上市場, 台中

Traditional market in Taichung City, TW

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photos shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

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she’s darker than her own shadows

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These photos are taken in my home city Taichung , the city of eternal sunshine.

She* locates in the middle of Taiwan, where she got her name from: Tai 台= Taiwan, Chung 中= middle, the middle of Taiwan is thus “Taichung”. As you can see, the name is not especially original nor poetic. It is straight as an arrow. 

The city has somehow lived up to her name perfectly- she’s just about middle of everything. She’s not the hottest, nor the coldest, not the most populated, nor the sparsest. When an earthquake of the century hit mid-Taiwan area 20 years ago, she got hit bad, but not the worst. She didn’t even get to be the biggest victim in the catastrophe that later on became a national holiday. 

She is like one of your old schoolmate, living a fairly mundane but logical life. She works 9-5 in a travel agency, in a city 45 minutes drive away from her hometown. She clams her hobby as photography, but she takes pictures with iPhones. She is the one who’d tell you passionately about the new Cafés that just opened 5 minutes away from her work, which has “ the best maple syrup Cappuccino and sourdough pancakes”.  

She is the one who remembers your birthday every year, but always gives you a postcard with a drawing of generic-looking-but-supposedly-cute rabbit on it. You can’t help but imagine that she has a big wooden drawer filled with carefully curated generic looking postcards at home. 

* I use the famine pronoun because the german word for city die Stadt is famine. Alternatively this could be read as a vague, uncommitted attempt toward feminism, interprete it as you please.

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I spent most of my adult life escaping her. 

Through traveling and making a living far away from her, I attempt to escape the inevitable march into mundaneness. However, is it at all possible to escape averageness? Averageness is a mathematical concept that describes the representative middle, the universal reference point. If you want to be in the demographic majority, stay in the peripheral of this point is somewhat inevitable.  

Every time I visit home, it is as if I entered the model town in The Truman Show. The comic book rental store from my childhood still stands, with the exact same interior and pricing as 30 years ago. The swimming pool, where all the slides have long lost their colours to the sun, still has the same open hours and the same local crowd. 

The sun shines with the palm leaves swinging softly, life goes on. 

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Mom and my silly dad

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photos shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

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Fern master

(this is the street I grew up on)

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Conversation piece

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By food she means Taiwanese food

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By spicy she means tropical spicy

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oasis

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Just a little spiky

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photo shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

A Day as Good as Any Other Days

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” All of us who do creative works, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple of years, what you’re making isn’t so good. It has ambition to be good, but it is not quite that good. But your taste is good enough that you can tell, that what you’re making is a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get passed that phase, a lot of people quit. 

Almost everybody I know, who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years, where they knew their work felt short, and it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.  

If you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal. The most important thing that you can do, is do a lot of work. Because it’s actually only by going through a volume of work that you actually going to close that gap. And the work you’re making will be finally as good as your ambitions. ” — verbal quote from Ira Glass

(note to self : ))

One in, one out

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A House only for Blurry Plants

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photo shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

last minute flower

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For me, being an artist is about finding one’s position in the world. To act with honest intentions, making genuine attempts. In adult lives, there are millions of reasons and motivations to be bind to some work contracts, relationships or insurance schemes. Eventually, you act only in ways that are rational to these systems; you become the system, it rules over your life.

“You read their notes and crumple them into a ball. They make plans with you that you don’t go. You lie on your narrow bench, with your arms behind your neck and knees pulled up. You look at the ceiling and discover cracks, scales, stains, reliefs. You don’t want to see anyone, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to think, you don’t want to go out, you don’t want to move.

On a day like this, a little later, a little earlier, you discover without being surprised, that something is not working, that, to put it carelessly, you don’t know how to live, and you will never understand.” — A Man Who Sleeps, Georges Perec, 1967

I remember looking forward to growing up as a kid. Growing into the freedom of being an adult: having ice cream for breakfast, fake calling in sick for school to spend the day swimming. Somewhere in the middle (likely at the moment when you realised you need to pay for health insurance) this vision was lost. Life has became the daily march into offices and the adrenaline high into weekends.

Years ago I was an architectural student in New York. One night I left my studio at 2 a.m. . I decided to walk home and save the subway fare. The night was deadly still and pitch dark, I raised my head and a full sky of stars gracefully unfolded in front of my tired eyes.

” beautiful, huh? ”

Says an old lady with a shopping cart filled with trash, wobbling by.

” yes ” I smiled.

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photo shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

rear window

(once unwillingly saw my neighbour’s naked behind and am still traumatised)

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the magic flute

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Where are you going?

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Kotti

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shot with Fuji XT-3, 35mm f 1.4

July 24-31, 2023