Posted October 16, 2019

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Zhao Yuan, LANDSCAPE (CHINA), late 14th century. Handscroll –ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Late Yuan scholar-artists saw painting as a vehicle for personal expression: painting, it was said, should be like handwriting –a “heart print” of the artist.

Executed during a period of political and social turmoil, Zhao’s handscroll reflects a common theme in paintings of his time: the reclusive life.

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HONG KONG STREETSCAPE … 13 October 2019….

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Reuters … 14 October 2019:

Violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have escalated to a “life-threatening level,” police have said, after a small bomb exploded and a police officer was stabbed in clashes overnight.

Peaceful rallies descended into chaos in the Chinese-ruled city on Sunday with running skirmishes between protestors and police in shopping malls and on streets.

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“Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.”

— President Xi Jinping … statement reported by CCTV (China’s state broadcaster) … 13 October 2019….

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The cultivated person bases his association with friends on cultural refinement and promotes his cultivation of humanity through the support of friendship.

— Confucius (d. 479 BCE)

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Shao Yung (1011-1077):

By viewing things is not meant viewing them with one’s physical eyes but with one’s mind.

[ … ]

Names come from language, while concepts come from function.

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” … ‘Dead Image’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019).

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Robert Musil (1933):

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn’t take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

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Posted October 10, 2019

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“Freedoms are not without limits.”

— Carrie Lam, Chief Executive of Hong Kong

(press conference statement –4 Oct. 2019)

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It is not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind his time.

— Robert Musil (1930)

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” … ‘Eclipse of Reason’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evan’s, 2019.)

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“Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.”

— Max Horkheimer (1947)

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ALL PHENOMENA ARE INTRICATELY AND DYNAMICALLY RELATED

— Tung Chung-shu (d. 104 BCE)

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Exhibition Announcement … HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2013.

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Joseph Beuys (d. 1986):

I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fixed only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.

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Heaven and Earth abolish the old and bring about the new. Then the four seasons complete their changes.

– Confucius (551-479 BCE)

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” … Alarm … “. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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“Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.”

— Max Horkheimer (1947)

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Posted October 3, 2019

Deal with things in their state of not-yet being,
Put them in order before they have got into confusion.

— Lao Tzu (fl. 6th cent. BCE)

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Show me a man of violence that came to a good end, and I will take him as my teacher.

— Lao Tzu (Fl. Sixth Century BCE)

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“Unity is iron and steel; unity is a source of strength.”

— Chinese President Xi Jinping (October 1, 2019)

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Uncertainty ought to be the true province of thought. The mind should ask its questions in uncertainty; brood in uncertainty; despair in uncertainty.

— Elias Canetti (1944)

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I do not know its name, so style it Tao. Forced to utter it a name, I call it the Great. Great means passing by, passing by means going far away, and going far away means returning.

– Lao Tzu (Fl. Sixth Century BCE)

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STANDING ROOM ONLY?

M. K. Morton

Tipped as one of the finer out-of-town opening morsels,

The big bang arranged for all of this operetta and dance

Production–sneak preview tomorrow–

Billions of years ago.

Bypassing black hole rants,

Allowing for extinction reversals,

While gasses swirled and asteroids swerved,

Space-time theatrically curved

And planets settled instead of dorsals

For rings or satellites, that great initial prodigal gong

Switched a lead performer’s song;

As well as a backer’s advance

Lined up arts council grants.

Rumoured to have had the chorus’s chance to prance

Increased. Even scheduled the rehearsals.

Least I can do now is show

Up convivially front row

Centre and in good cosmic time for the performance.

Are the acoustics well preserved?

Come to think of it, when was my seat reserved?

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Ba Jin (1904-2005):

A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976 [during the ‘Cultural Revolution’]. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.

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Posted September 28, 2019

Looking into an abyss, one senses the gigantic form of the void only in comparison to one’s own minute stature. It is almost incomprehensible that only a few billion years ago our galaxy was born in a giant bomb-flash of nuclear energy.

— Patrick M. Hurley (1959)

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Josh Dehaas, McLEAN’S, June 21, 2011:

When he first heard from a university administrator about a new Confucious Institute (CI) proposed at the University of Manitoba, Asian Studies professor Terry Russell asked for a meeting with the dean in charge. At that meeting he asked her to carefully consider who was offering to pay for it. The money would come from the HANBAN, an arm of the Chinese government that’s chaired by the minister of education. That’s the same government that employs 50,000 citizens to scour the Internet in search of dissent.

Less than six months later, the university has announced that it will join a short-but-growing list of institutions that have decided against taking Chinese government money to set up CI’s. […] But more than 320 exist worldwide. China says that the funding of CI’s –$150,00 initially and up to $200,000 per year after– is meant to promote cultural understanding.

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Lily Kuo (in Beijing), THE GUARDIAN, 26 September 2019:

Kites. Balloons. Pigeons. Drones. The list of things that have been banned in the run up to the 70th anniversary of the founding of [Communist] China keeps growing.

As Beijing seeks to ensure the special day on 1 October goes off without a hint of a hitch, motorists have been told they must not refuel their cars or motorbikes on their own. There must be no use of walkie-talkies and other devices using radio waves. During rehearsals for a military parade to mark the day, those living near Tiananmem Square have been instructed “not to approach the windows” and to keep their curtains closed.

The crackdown is fiercest among those who criticize the government.

[ … ]

The popular microblog Weibo has also launched a “special clean-up operation” against “harmful political information” and any accounts or posts that “distort the history of the party and the country,” according to a statement issued earlier this month.

The [October 1, 2019] holiday is as much about impressing Chinese citizens as it is about projecting Chinese strength abroad. The milestone will be marked with a military parade, fireworks and a speech by president Xi Jinping. Some 100,000 people “from all walks of life” will be attending the events, according to state media. To ensure those not invited still watch, authorities have given out 620,000 television sets.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964)

The Cartesian idea of the human body as a human NON-CLOSED, open in as much as governed by thought –is perhaps the most profound idea of the unison of the soul and the body. It is the soul intervening in a body that is NOT OF THE IN ITSELF … that can be a body and living –human only by reaching completion in “view of itself” which is thought….

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Posted September 26, 2019

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Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools –with yesterday’s concepts.

— Marshall McLuhan (1967)

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Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond, THE ATLANTIC, 2 February 2018:

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you everywhere.

[ … ]

This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: it may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behaviour.

A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety”, it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.

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If an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic.

— Andrew Lobaczewski (1984)

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Shannon Tiezzi, THE DIPLOMAT, 4 July 2019:

In January 2013, Beijing –along with dozens of other Chinese cities– was in the middle of an air pollution crisis that exceeded the maximum measurement numbers.

China’s air pollution has long been an open secret, despite state media’s preference for referring to such episodes as “fog”. But the high-profile global coverage of the 2013 “airpocalypse”, coupled with the outrage from Chinese people suffering in the smog, finally forced the Chinese government to take action. Beijing declared a “war on pollution”.

[ … ]

A recent study from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011) estimated there were 1.1 million premature deaths in China linked to air pollution each year.

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REUTERS (Shanghai), 16 May 2019:

Air pollution in major regions of northern China increased during the first four months of 2019, the environment ministry said on Friday [10 May], raising fears that regions have ceased curbs on industry to halt the smog amidst concerns about a slowing economy.

Laura Myllyvirta, senior analyst with environmental group Greenpeace, said in an email that pollution in Beijing and surrounding regions had rebounded largely as a result of the relaxation of industrial restrictions and a 60 million tonne surge in coal consumption over the 2018-2019 winter period.

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Andrew Lobaczewski (1984):

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us, who must live on this planet, too, even those who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who contribute this 4 per cent drain our relationships … our achievements … our very peace on earth.

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Joseph Beuys, 7000 EICHEN [7000 OAKS], 1982.

[ Note:

In 1982, Beuys proposed a plan to plant 7000 oaks –throughout the city of Kassel. Each tree was intended to be paired with a (standing) basalt stone.

The stones were piled up on the lawn in front of the Museum Fridericanum; the pile could be seen to shrink every time a tree was planted.

— CAUSA Research Curators ]

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I am interested in transformation, change, revolution –transforming chaos, through movement, into a new order.

— Joseph Beuys (d. 1986)

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In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.

— George Bernard Shaw (1903)

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Posted September 19, 2019

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— Elias Canetti (d. 1994)

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Latent nostalgia’s store

Of too wisely misinterpreted dialects

Almost eludes memory.

Even if a few among its best fatuous whirligigs teasingly to stripen

Paper yet tempt pen, sometimes on chronological glimmeratilotteryti

Smarts short, a recollection lackadaisical takes years to ripen.

Since, having gone to ground back in the day early-on,

Many ingredients from youth’s ballad haze

Still laze; their only move:

Thread maze

To steepen.

All left to be is the question

Or not. In the zig-zag. ragged pig-pen

Of the spun-top heart, duration may prove

Abandoned expectation from digestion

Unchasered can benefit. Then the long given-up-on,

Unapologetically behind time even once contact resumed,

Almost fossil-phoenix, but flash-plumed,

Surges by kingfisher-peacock. The chiaroscure album skies deepen.

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— Marshall McLuhan (1973)

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Good and evil are the same.

— Heraclitus (active about 500 BCE)

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” … ‘Information War’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans, 2019.)

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Marshall McLuhan (1967):

In the 19th century the knowledge inside the school room was higher than the knowledge outside. Today it is reversed; the child knows that in going to school he is in a sense interrupting his education.

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Steven Feldstein, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 17, 2019:

Artificial intelligence [AI] technology is rapidly proliferating around the world. Startling developments keep emerging, from the onset of deepfake videos that blur the line between truth and falsehood, to advanced algorithms that can beat the best players in the world in multiplayer poker.

[ … ]

Unsurprisingly, countries with authoritarian and low levels of political rights are investing heavily in AI surveillance techniques.

Technology linked to Chinese companies are found in at least sixty-three countries worldwide. … However, China is not the only country supplying advanced suveillance technology. France, Germany, Japan and the United States are also major players in this sector.

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Posted September 11, 2019

Reversal is the motion of the Tao.

— Lao Tzu (sixth century BCE)

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Bill Reid, SALMON, 1974. Book cover design … Environment Canada, Fisheries and Marine Service, Ottawa,1974.

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If weakness and indecision allow the salmons, in their abundance, to disappear from the rivers and the oceans, what hope can there be for the future of life itself?

— Roderick Haig-Brown (1974)

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The Way is to beings of the universe

what the seas are to the rivers.

— Lao Tzu (sixth century BCE)

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I do not know its name, so style it Tao. Forced to utter it a name, I call it the Great. Great means passing by, passing by means going far away, and going far away means returning.

– Lao Tzu (sixth century BCE)

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Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal –each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.

— Rachel Carson (1951)

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The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

— Lao Tzu (sixth century BCE)

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Posted September 5, 2019

We will say of immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanent to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life.

– Gilles Deleuze (1995)

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Standing four-armed VISHNU –second half of the 7th century– Vietnam (Mekong Delta Region). Stone. H: 38 in. (96.5 cm). W: 17 in. (43.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Vishnu holds a conch/”cleanser of sin” (SHANKA) in his raised left hand and a “disc of auspicious vision” (CHAKRA) in his right. His lowered right hand rests on the remains of a mace/”stupefier of the mind” (GADA). His fourth hand would have held a lotus (PADMA) –symbol of “the enlightened mind”.

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The drive behind life has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the destroyer.

— George Amos Dorey (1925)

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“Tonquin” … Royal Staffordshire Dinnerware (side plate) by Clarice Cliff, England, c. 1930. Photo: CAUSA Curatorial Research Archives.

[Etymology: TONKIN … from Vietnamese … a former name for HANOI.]

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“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America.”

— Marshall McLuhan (1975)

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“Remember that the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability.”

— Ho Chi Minh (d. 1964)

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Ho served as Prime Minister of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1955; he was  President of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1969. He died (at his home in Hanoi) on the morning of 2 September 1969.

The communist state of North Vietnam –consisting of Tonkin and northern Annam– was formed in 1954 (after French defeat at the Battle of Diem Bien Phu in Western Tonkin). The Vietnam War [known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America] developed from 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975.

— CAUSA Research Curators

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BUDDHA (in meditation), 8th – 9th century, Southern Vietnam. Sandstone. H: 18-5/16 in. (46.5 cm). W: 12-15/16 in. (32.8 cm). D: 7-1/16 in. (18 cm). National Museum of Vietnamese History, Ho Chi Minh City.

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In a world where nothing exists by itself, where every division of one thing from another is a misperception –or misconception– of the way things really are, there are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body or mouth.

— Heart Sutra (661 CE –earliest extant dated text)

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SAIGON (1963)

In June of 1963, Thich Quang Duc –a Vietnamese Mahayana priest– burned himself to death at a busy intersection  in Saigon.

His self-immolation was a protest to the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem (with its pro-Catholic Church policies of discriminatory anti-Buddhist laws).

Diem was President of South Vietnam from 1955 until he was deposed and killed during a military coup in 1963.

Quang Duc’s last words (left in a letter of 1963) stated: “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha … I call the venerable, reverends, members of the sangha and lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to preserve Buddhism.”

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Anarchism is order, government is civil war.

— Anselme Bellegarrique (1850)

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The anarchists believe in civil society; only they insist that the freedom of civil society shall be complete instead of partial.

— Benjamin R. Tucker (1926)

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GETTING OUR BEARINGS

M.K. Morton

Underpinning subtly the world,

It may be the ultimate infrastructure;

Or let’s just say an eternal dimension

That was there before the cooling gasses swirled:

Between those two shores a perplexing incandescent tension,

A subject for endless teasing conjecture.

A porous boundary and buffer zone;

The great undiscovered labyrinth featuring floating dances.

Where winds unknown to meteorology have blown.

Pitfall for those who neither dog’s-leg-stepped nor leapt,

A hunkering down realm beyond the sciences

Closed to efforts to excavate; inaccessible to research except

Where the creative take barely intelligible chances.

For there, more transient than the mildest dew,

Compelling by its absent presences

And not exactly oblivious to the senses,

The inconceivable with the familiar balances.

All art aspires to the condition of music,

But what does music itself aspire to?

Not quite alone, music and other peak experiences

Bring back inklings of that at best peripherally visited venue

Never even hoveringly travelled manifestly through.

Of seasonally herded melodies, unmelted, the wellspring acoustic.

The closest we can get to making manageable

The intangible.

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To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed.

— Simone de Beauvoir (1947)

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Head of SHIVA (linga kosha), late 9th – 10th century, Vietnam (Champa, probably Nam Province). Gold and silver repoussé. H: 6-3/4 in. (171 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

This head was originally attached to a silver LINGA cover.

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Whatever is form is impermanent. And whatever is impermanent is suffering.

— Heart Sutra (661 BCE –earliest dated text)

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Counter-images, not always obvious, are more important than model images.

— Elias Canetti (1970)

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Posted August 27, 2019

” … ‘Nikkei Garden’ … Burnaby, British Columbia … 25 August 2019…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evan’s.)

” … ‘Stopping … Seeing’ … Nitobe Memorial Garden … University of British Columbia, Vancouver…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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The nature of essence appears in nothing better than in the beautiful, when this is a positive presence to the spirit and not a vague title conventionally bestowed. In a form felt to be beautiful, an obvious complexity composes an obvious unity; a marked intensity and individuality are seen to belong to a reality utterly immaterial and incapable of existing otherwise than speciously. This divine [prophetic] beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable and nameless in the world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished; for it visits time, but belongs to eternity.

– George Santayana (1937)

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” … ‘Stopping … Seeing’ … Nitobe Memorial Garden … University of British Columbia, Vancouver…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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Four and fifty years

I’ve hung the sky with stars.

And I leap through —

What shattering!

— Eihei Dogen (d. 1253 CE)

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” … ‘Nikkei Garden’ … 25 August 2019…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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” … ‘Stopping … Seeing’ … Nitobe Memorial Garden … University of British Columbia, Vancouver…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)

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No bomb that ever burst

Shatters the crystal spirit.

— George Orwell (1942)

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August 21, 2019

BUDDHA SHAKYAMUNI –Ngong Ping, Lantau Island, Hong KONG. Height: 34 meters (112 feet).

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“Form is empty.”

— The Heart Sutra (661 CE –earliest extant dated text)

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Image:

Billy Tung, Hong Kong resident (2019), wearing the safety goggles and gas mask he brings to protests. (Photographer: Chan Long Hei.)

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Commentary … (Karen Soo Lindberg, Shawna Kwan, Edna Curran, BLOOMBERG BUSINESS WEEK, 20 August 2019):

Billy Tung, a 28-year old accountant, lives on Hong Kong Island in a tiny apartment that’s been partitioned to accommodate six renters. His bosses expect him to work most Saturdays and Sundays, but recently he’s had another weekend activity: taking to the streets to join thousands of other Hong Kongers in protests. The demonstrations were triggered by a government proposal that would allow China to extradite those accused of crimes but have since morphed to include a broader set of demands, including the right for universal suffrage. … “Citizens are willing to sacrifice the economy to fight,” says Tung.

Hong Kong has long been a land of contrasts in which glittering skyscrapers and chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces are juxtaposed with decrepit apartment blocks and “cardboard grannies” picking through rubbish in search of recyclables.

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Image:

1.7 million people defy police to march in pouring rain –Hong Kong, 18 August, 2019.

Commentary … (Verna Yu and Lily Kuo, THE GUARDIAN, 18 August 2019):

An estimated 1.7 million people in Hong Kong –a quarter of the population– defied police orders to stage a peaceful march after a rally in a downtown park, after two months of increasingly violent clashes and have prompted severe warnings from Beijing.

“China is taking over Hong Kong. Our society has no justice and no future. We’re making a last-ditch attempt to do something amid our despondency,” said Carol Lui, a teacher in her 30s.

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As we investigate the meaning of not moving, does it mean to cast aside motion (activity) in order to seek rest (tranquility)? No, rest must be sought right in motion. As rest must be sought right in motion, therefore there is eternal rest in spite of motion, and as motion is not to be cast aside in order to seek rest, therefore although there is rest, it is never separated from motion.

— Seng-chao (384-414 BCE)

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” … ‘Ghost Month … Judge Begby Monument (Removed)’ … New Westminster, British Columbia…”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evan’s, 2019.)

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“There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually.”

— The Heart Sutra (661 CE –earliest extant dated text)

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Though the reflections of the moon are many, the real moon is only one. … There are myriad phenomena in the universe, but empty space is only one. There are many principles that are spoken of, but “unobstructed wisdom” is only one.

— Mazu Daoyi (709-788)

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Joseph Beuys, IRON CHEST FROM “VACUUM MASS” –Cologne, October 14, 1968. Iron, felt and bicycle pumps. 22 x 43 x 21-1/4 in. (55.9 x 109.2 x 54 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Hidden inside this object are bicycle pumps and fat. … During an “action,” as he called his performances, he piped fat through the bicycle pumps, then encased the pumps inside this iron structure shaped like a halved cross [‘tau’ cross] and finally sealed it shut using a blow torch.

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Peter van der Hayden (ca. 1525-1569), THE BATTLE ABOUT MONEY. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Pieter Breughel the Elder [ca. 1525-1569], executed the original drawing after which this was engraved. Strongboxes, piggy banks, money bags, barrels of coins, and treasure chests –most of them heavily armed with swords, knives and lances– attack each other in a ferocious display of chaotic, all-out warfare.

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The un-carved block is small but no one dares claim it.

– Laozi/Lao Tzu (sixth century BCE)

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