READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西)

Form and Actuality 形象與現實

Posted June 11, 2021

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” … ‘Inter-Corporeity’ … Nitobe Memorial Garden …”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.) 
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Pattern recognition becomes the sole means of learning in an electronic age of speed: you have to spot patterns immediately.
— Marshall McLuhan (1967)
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When images or identity, private or corporate, are confused, the natural response is blind violence. Such violence is never a quest for a goal but for an image.

— Marshall McLuhan (1969) 

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Al Jazeera news channel (Doha and London), 10 June 2021 

China’s far western region of Xinjiang has become a “dystopian hellscape” where Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethic minorities face systematic and state-organized “mass internment and torture amounting to crimes against humanity’, Amnesty International said in a new report, citing dozens of eyewitness accounts from former detainees.
In a study published on Thursday [10 June] Amnesty International said the minority had been forced to abandon their religious traditions, language and culture, and subjected to mass surveillance, supporting previous allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing committed within a network of hundreds of detention centres.

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

Form and Actuality 形象與現實

Posted June 5, 2021

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” … Time-Being … Nitobe Memorial Garden …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)
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Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time.

— Eihei Dogen (1240 CE) 

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BBC News … June 2, 2021
Xi Jinping calls for more ‘lovable image’ for China in bid to make friends
China’s president has said he wants the country to “expand its circle of friends” by revamping its image.
Xi Jinping told senior Communist Party officials it was important to present an image of a “credible, loveable and respectable China,” according to a report by state-run news agency Xinhua.
The comments come amid deteriorating relations with key global powers. 
China has faced criticism over human rights abuses … among other issues.

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bill bissett

2021

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

Form and Actuality 形象與現實

Posted May 30, 2021

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Skull (Carrara marble), 1665. 
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Taylor Dafoe, Arnet News, May 28, 2021:
A life-size marble skull that has for years sat in plain sight at a German castle turns out to actually be the work of artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini [who is renowned for having created the Baroque style of sculpture in Western art].
Further [recent] research revealed that the skull [which went on view under the artist’s name for the first time on 28 May 2021 – in an exhibition at the State Museum, Dresden] was indeed made by the Italian master for Pope Alexander VII in the mid-17th century. 
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” … ‘Projection’ … Nitobe Memorial Garden …”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)

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The Nuclear Age in which the human race is living, and may soon be dying, began for the general public with the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima on April 6, 1945.
— Bertrand Russell (1961) 
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Muso Soseki
(1275 – 1351)
Causes are complex and have different time scales. The efforts of the individual are not the sole determining factor in the individual’s condition in life, because everyone is part of the nexus of society and nature and the continuum of time. It is common for people to attribute causes wrongly because of misperception of real relationships. 
Every cause is the effect of something else, and every effect is the cause of something else. What may seem a curse may be a blessing, and what may seem a blessing may be a curse. Hardship is a blessing when it spurs effort and development; ease is a curse when it increases complacency and self-indulgence.

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

Form and Actuality 形象與現實

Posted May 22, 2021

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bill bissett 

2021 

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” … ‘Unitary Structure’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.) 

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To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience.
— Marshall McLuhan (1964)
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One of the peculiarities of the electric age is that we live simultaneously in all the cultures of the past. All of the past is here and all of the future is here. 

— Marshall McLuhan (1973)

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Concerns grow over China nuclear reactors shrouded in mystery 

Aljazeera, 19 May 2021 

Like many of the over 5,000 small islands dotting China’s coastline, the islet of Changbiao is unremarkable in its history and geography. Jutting out from the shoreline of Fujian province like a small right-handed footprint, it has gained recognition recently – and even then among a small handful of experts – for being China’s first two CFR-600 sodium-cooled fast neutron nuclear reactors.

The two reactors being built on Chiangbiao are closed fuel cycle nuclear breeder reactors. They produce plutonium. That plutonium could be reproduced and used as a [non-fossil-fuel] source for other nuclear reactors [producing renewable energy]. It could also be used to produce nuclear warheads, a lot of nuclear warheads, and produce them very quickly.

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

Form and Actuality 形象與現實

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Western powers clash with China over Xinjiang Aljazeera, 13 May 2020 
The United States, Germany and Britain [in a United Nations event co-sponsored by Canada, Australia and several other European nations] have clashed with China over its treatment of the Uighurs and people from mostly Muslim groups in Xinjiang. 
“We will keep standing up and speaking out until China’s government stops its crimes against humanity and the genocide of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang,” US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the event, which was attended by about 50 countries on Wednesday [12 May].
Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamand told the event there were an estimated one million Uighirs and predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities being arbitrarily detained.
In a note to UN States last week, China’s UN Mission rejected the accusations as “lies and fake accusations” and accused the organising countries with provoking confrontation with China.
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Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
— George Orwell (1949)

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”  … ‘Point/Periphery’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog Evans.)●
Nature is at the first day; it is there today.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964)
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Shiva and Devi on Cajasura’s Hide – India, 17th century. Gum tempera and silver on paper. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.
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Curatorial Record:
These divine lovers embody the duality of opposites: male/female, yogi/princess, death/birth, and destruction/creation. Their gazes are locked on each other, linking them in loving unity as they float on the skin of an elephant demon through swirling monsoon clouds above the earth.
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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

CAPACITY/INTENSITY 容量/烈度

Posted May 7, 2021

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The United States tests a thermonuclear bomb on November 1, 1952, in the Marshall Islands. (Los Alamos National Laboratory/AP)
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Benoît Pelopidas and Alex Wellerstein, The Washington Post, August 10, 2020:
The agencies and organizations that manage nuclear stockpiles tend to rely on narratives of total control. They reassure us nuclear weapons have an excellent safety record, nuclear deterrence will present nuclear war from happening, and these large expenditures on warheads are not only a good idea, but also necessary to preserve a world in which nuclear weapons won’t be used.
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The world is fortunate to have avoided nuclear war … since the bombing of Nagasaki – in more than one sense of the word. That the nuclear bomb dropped on August 9, 1945, was the last one used in conflict has been a matter of chance rather than design.
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” … ‘At One’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)
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It is a profound misfortune that the whole question of nuclear warfare has become entangled in the age-old conflicts of power politics…. it must be viewed, as some new epidemic would be viewed, as a common peril.
— Bertrand Russell (1959)

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

CAPACITY/INTENSITY 容量/烈度

Posted May 1, 2021

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bill bissett
2020 

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Chorus

Mokurai 

2021

one voice could have said this:

“too few versions abound 

as if to make less clear 

an invariable 

progression/concision

without pictures/patterns”

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but such as is as such 

may never again be 

placed so as to complete 

a (fore)seen or not seen 

preposition (complete)

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in multiple: never 

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” … ‘Impetus’…”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)
The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations that they regenerate.
— Gilles Deleuze (1972)
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Luce Irigaray
(2008) 
Intimacy allows itself neither to be seen nor to be seized. Nevertheless it is probably the core of our being. And any attempt to appropriate it risks annihilating being itself. However, it is not a question of magic, or irrationality, or madness – it is a question of touch.

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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

CAPACITY/INTENSITY 容量/烈度

Posted April 22, 2021

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György Lukàcs
(1968)
Bourgeois thought judges social phenomena … naively or subtly, consistently from the standpoint of the individual. No path leads from the individual to the totality.
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D.H.Lawrence
(1913)
To be rid of individuality, which is our will, which is our effort – to live effortless, a kind of conscious sleep – that is very beautiful I think – that is our after-life – our immortality.

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stanley brouwn, this way brouwn, 1964.Felt-tip pen ink on paper. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

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Artist’s Statement 
(1971)
stanley brouwn has been gathering this way brouwn answers since 1960. He picks at random a pedestrian and asks him to explain [on paper] the way to another point in a town. 
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A this way brouwn is produced in the time it takes the pedestrian to give his explanation. There are no good this way brouwns. There are no bad this way brouwns. 
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The result of a this way brouwn does not depend on the pedestrian selected. … The fleet of streets, lanes, etc. is sinking deeper in a network of this way brouwns. All direction is being drained from it. They are leading nowhere. They are already involved, captured in my work. I am concentrating the direction of all possible ways in my work. I am the only way; the only direction. I have become direction.
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” … Message and Counter-Message…”.(Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)
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Everyday life is too much affected by the speculative activities that are renewing and transvaluing our world, for it to be able to survive in ignorance of those speculations.
— Wyndham Lewis (1928)
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bill bissett, being 2gethr – acrylik on canvas, 2021.

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Mount Fuji Cherry Tree, Nitobe Memorial Garden, University of British Columbia (Vancouver) — April 20, 2021. Photo: Ryo Sugiyama.
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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

CAPACITY/INTENSITY 容量/烈度

Posted April 15, 2021

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The earth is the honey (madhu/the effect) of all beings, and all beings are the honey (madhu/the effect) of the earth.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad [a key scripture to various schools of Hinduism], India (9th to 6th century BCE) 

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Photo:

Joseph Beuys, ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, 26 November 1965. [For this ‘action’ the artist covered his head with honey –and fifty dollars worth of gold leaf.]

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“Using honey on my head and face I am naturally doing something that is concerned with thought. The human capacity is not to give honey, but to think –to give ideas. In this way the deathlike character of thought is made living again. Honey is doubtless a living substance.”

— Joseph Beuys

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Rudolph Steiner
(1923)

The life of the bees … in the bee-hive … is a very special and remarkable life.
One can only arrive at a right understanding of what the life of the bee truly is, when one takes into account that the whole environment of the earth has a very special influence on the colony.
That life within the hive rests upon the fact that the bees work so completely together, so arranging their whole activity that everything is in harmony.

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”   ‘No Connections … Only Interfaces’ …”. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)
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There is never a Utopia that copes with the present, any present.
— Marshall McLuhan (1967)
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Into deep darkness fall those who follow action. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow knowledge.
Into deep darkness fall those who follow the immanent. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow the transcendent. 

— Isha Upanishad (Hindu tradition, 1st millennium BCE)

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Sudipita Sen [Yale University Press blog, 2019]
On March 20, 2017, the high court in the state of Uttarakchanda, India declared the river Ganges (known as the Ganga in India) and its main tributary Yamuma as rights-bearing “living entities,” effectively granting them the legal status of personhood.
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This move to protect the Ganges, a river that has been worshipped across the subcontinent from time immemorial seems particularly ironic. Under normal circumstances, divine entities do not require such rights from ordinary human beings. The celestial and the mortal, nevertheless, are still vexingly intertwined in the popular Hindu and Indian imagination, and this scaling down of the river-goddess to human dimensions is an admission of the fact that she is perilously and manifestly polluted.

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Vishnu – dated August 12, 1105. Nepal (Kathmandu Valley). Copper Alloy with gilding. H. 16‐7/8 in. (42.9cm); W. 6-1/8 in. (18.1 cm); D. 3-1/2 in. (8.9 cm).
Curatorial Record:
This heroic representation of Vishnu wearing an elaborate crown stands on a plinth depicting the donor and his family flanking an auspicious vase of plenty (purnaghata).The dedicatory inscription identifies the donor as a minister of state, names the king he served, Simhadeva, and gives the place and date of dedication. The date coincides with Vishnu’s awakening after the end of the monsoon – an auspicious day to make a religious donation.
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bill bissett, th rivr mooving thru us, acrylik on canvas, 2021.
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READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西）

CAPACITY/INTENSITY 容量/烈度

Posted April 7, 2021

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bill bissett 

1999 

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IAIN BAXTER&/CAUSA, “… ‘Off & On’ • ‘Yùn/Motion’… &…”. Scroll paintings – ink on paper. Installation: Hall of One Hundred Rivers, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver, 2013. (Photo: M. Cynog-Evans.)
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Three alternate views of The Bodhisattva Guanyin, China, 17th century. Late Ming (1368-1644)–early Qing (1644-1911) dynasty. Porcelain with ivory glaze. H. 16-1/4 in. (41.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Curatorial Record:

Guanyin (in Sanskrit, Avalokiteshvara), the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, is traditionally believed to have the ability to bless every suffering person in the mortal world. Although in India the bodhisattva was originally understood to be either genderless or male, in China, the female manifestations such as this one are common.
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Image:  

Dish with design of fruiting peach tree, its trunk twisted to form the Chinese character shou 壽 [‘longevity’]. Ming dynasty, Jiajing mark and period (1521-1567). Porcelain – green enamel on yellow ground. H. 3.1 cm. Diam. 14.6 cm, base 8.7 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. 
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Society occupies the circumference, the individual is at the center; from the center to the circumference are arranged, like so many ever-widening concentric circles, the various groups to which the individual belongs. From the circumference to the center, as the center grows smaller, objections are added to objections and the individual ends by finding himself confronted with all of them together.
— Henri Bergson (1932)
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Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz

(1697)

I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tshina (as they call it), which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant people stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better life.

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Gilles Deleuze 

(1988)

The characteristic of the Baroque is the fold that goes on to infinity.

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bill bissett 

2021

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The Guardian, London [Agence France Presse], 3 April 2021

•  China launches musical in bid to counter Uyghur abuse allegations • 

A new state produced musical set in Xinjiang (inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster “La La Land”) has hit China’s cinemas, portraying a rural idyll of ethnic cohesion devoid of repression, mass surveillance and even the Islam of its majority Uyghur population.

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