Installing Ubuntu

So, as I mentioned yesterday, now I am officially running Ubuntu 8.10!

I made the semi-switch (still running Windows as well), because I felt like it, really just felt like doing it. I gotta admit, I’m still not completely used to it. I need to start using terminal and command lines. I recall some of it from like way back when I first learned MS-DOS, but who remembers that stuff, right? Also, I realized how easily stuff get manipulated on this platform. I accidentally erased everything on an entire petition on my harddrive while trying to resize, so I had to go through the installation process twice. It doesn’t even ask the ‘do you really want to shut down?’ option when you do press shut down. It just shuts down; I like that. I cuts down a lot of redundant idiotic stuff I was so used to.

One REAL lag…iPhone sychronization! Good thing I never synced all that often, but still. There’s a way to jailbreak and sync wirelessly, but I do not wish to jailbreak my phone nor sync data wireless. There’s also the lack of Photoshop & other stuff, but I think I can pass on that. I still have minesweeper, and that’s all I really need.

It is so much neater than Windows, and the system design is much more comprehensible. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of people in the linux community willing to give useful help whenever. I fretted having to install Arduino, but that went pretty smooth too with help from the forums. :) So far so good.

Oh, I have been eyeing this laptop all night: Dell Studio XPS 16. Possibly my next labtop when I save the money. ;)

Finished tiger print

12″x11″ an edition of 12

I wish I could’ve used different colors/ or a third color, but inks are like $25 per tub, so for now…I live with a limited palette. ;(

That’s a burning dead forest with tree stumps and a tiger stepping on a circus podium, in case it’s not so easy to tell. I don’t know exactly how I arrived at this narrative, but I like it quite a bit. The thing with tigers in old Korean folktales are that they were real stuff living in that forest behind your village. They came to eat the livestocks and snatch little children. I’m glad I didn’t get mauled by a tiger, but I still kinda wish there was a forest where you can find a tiger. They don’t seem very happy in zoos or circuses. They’re kinda like boogie-man equivalent of Eastern fairytales, except that they used to be real. Now we have to scare children with Swipper the fox or Teletubbies(They ARE meant to scare). That’s just not as much fun as tigers.

working in my room

Today, I brought my painting stuff to my room to work at home. It usually gets really messy, but at least I’m warm. So I decided to post some pictures of how I would work in my room.

That’s what the space between my closet and my bed would look like.

…and the only time I use those dumbbells.

Last year I tried to do plaster casting in my room. By far, that has been the messiest thing that has ever happened to my poor room. I’m glad there are no photo records of it. (My floor was completely white and dusty…)

print update

Okay, so my first linoleum cut got printed, tada~

some editions were really crappy, and lots of details were lost due to my lack of knowledge about how detailed relief prints can get, but overall satisfactory.

While I wasn’t writing in my blog, I was still doing work, so here’s a picture of the second block, which got printed already with two colors:

This is in the verry beginning of cutting, so the final print has lots more in it. I’ll post when I get the prints back home and take pictures of it.

I started another reduction print which will have three colors. Here’s a spoiler: it’s very weird and cute :)

Life update part II

Okay, so the promise was not kept on my part. I’m terrible with updating. I’ve been a little down lately. I just wanted to be home and not do anything for once. So I did that yesterday. I stayed home and partitioned my hardrive and installed linux, and now I feel slightly better. :)

That’s not exactly doing nothing, but it’s a pretty mindless task compared to painting. Thanks to yesterday, I think my mind’s a bit more loose now. It’s a good thing. Now if I could just fix this weird sleeping pattern…

life update!

Okay, I haven’t really blogged any of this week’s shinanigans.

so, here’s a life-update.

I finished that one-layer block print with a bunch of hands. Looks…meh~ first tries, first tries…I’m doing a pretty slick two-layer print this weekend though, hopefully, I’ll put some pictures up:)!

I haven’t updated any of my drawing/painting/ceramic stuff. Reason is…I usually have to work in the school studio & I don’t carry my camera. Plus, I’m very critical of my own paintings, so I never really like showing people my paintings. (painting major, huh)

I just got back from the painting studio & gotta wake up at 9, so I’ll try to catch up with my blogging on the weekend, promise.

TED Talks by Elizabeth Gilbert & Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s books used to be my favorite reads during my early highschool years. It’s really something to hear one of your favorite authors talk about the process of creativity. There’s a part in the following video (at about 3/4 the way…) where she talks about a National Geography article she had to write about a small village in China. I totally remember the article, and now I know, it was Amy Tan.

>Amy Tan on Creativity<

Elizabeth Gilbert is known for her recent best seller Eat, Pray, Love. I haven’t read any of her stuff yet, but I really like this speech.

>Elizabeth Gilert on Genius<

I apologize for not being able to directly upload the video on my blog. I just can’t figure out how to embed this flash file; it just won’t show up :(

But definitely, check these out, they’re both worth 18 minutes.

On a slightly related note, I am now almost done reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Great book, the same guy who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point. The book even succeeded to gather interest from strangers who were riding next to me on the subway.

edit: the Amy Tan talk is actually from 2008.

Chelsea Gallery Day

So, I spent around three hours in Chelsea today lurking through galleries. (mostly within 20th~25th st, b/w 10th & 11th ave) Below is the list of places I went to today. The bold ones are the ones I liked.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: 7 Days / 7 Nights (~3/7/09)_Gagosian Gallery

Dirk Stewen: Paper Eye Collection (~2/21/09)_Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Charles Long (~2/21/09)_Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Group show: Every Rebolution is a Roll of the Dice (~2/14/09)_Paula Cooper Gallery

Mary Heilmann (~2/21/09)_030 Gallery

Robert Irwin: Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting (~2/28/09)_Pace Wildenstein

Candida Höfer: Philadephia (~2/14/09)_Sonnabend

Jim Dine: Hot Dream (52 Books) (~3/1/09)_Pace Wildenstein

Robert Taplin: Everything Imagined is Real (After Dante) (~2/21/09)_Winston Wachter Fine Art

Nancy Spero: Un Coup de Dent (~2/21/09)_Galerie Lelong

Group show: Shaping Space_Jones Cohan Gallery

Paul Miller: North/South (~2/7/09)_Robert Miller Gallery

James Jean: Kindling (~12/15/09)_Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Kenichi Hoshine: The Night Before (~2/7/09)_Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Nobuyoshi Araki: 1960s Photography (~2/7/09)_Anton Kern Gallery

Both the 7 Days / 7 Nights and Robert Irwin shows are large, installation/site-specific works. I loved both of them. I guess that’s what I’m into now. A large, conceptual work that takes up the entire gallery space. The 7 Days/ 7 Nights, I went by myself, and I’m glad I did. The Robert Irwin show, I went with my seminar class. The experience of walking into 7 Days/ 7 Nights was just a stellar experience. Especially the 7 Nights part, if you’re completelly alone in the gallery. I assume the Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting could’ve felt similar, but still it was a good piece.

I guess you could also say the Jim Dine show is also installation/ site-specific. It’s more like a walk-through storybook. I must say it’s a bit confusing and there’s alot of stuff gathered together, but it’s still enjoyable. You really get a sense coherence and that really cozy workshop-ish feel.

The Night Before is a simple show with few small paintings in a room, shown in the next room of the James Jean’s Kindling show. There are far more works and detail oriented drawings and paintings at the James Jean side, but I really prefer works like the paintings from The Night Before. They’re all really blurry, mostly gray or black. What’s special about them is that wax-like layer of semi-opaque material laid on top of the painting. It gives the paintings that nostalgic, ’something in my head that I can’t quite articulate visually’ kind of quality. I’ve never heard of Kenichi Hoshine before, so I will keep my eyes out for his upcomming stuff.

I realized there’s quite a number of Japanese artists on view right now; Araki is one of them. The show’s pretty straight forward, it’s rows of black and white photography taken on the streets of Japan during the 1960s. The series of pictures capture such realistic, humane sides of the subjects at various daily-life settings (subways, shopping districts, etc), that they feel like people you know, from the 60s, which is ridiculous, because I wasn’t even born back then. The pictures all seem so mundane, yet they’re quite distant from the time we’re in.

I rarely dislike a gallery show, so it’s easier for me to find things i like, and talk about those things. All the shows above today were alright. In other words, in my opinion, nothing was completely tasteless or ugly. I do have a really big knot of muscles on my shoulders from carrying a textbook in my bag all the while, but other than that, it was a pretty satisfying gallery day.:)

MoMA/ 2-2-09

I went to the MoMA in between my history and calc class today, because it was the last day of the Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out. Also, I’ve been itching to go see the Marlene Dumas show. I saw both, and also saw the Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art.

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave [Through Feb, 16]

I like. very much. Unfortunately, photos not are allowed beyond this point, but googling her name once should give you a pretty good idea what her paintings are like.

Her paintings are figurative, distored, but still figurative. As I was walking into the exhibition with this painting hanging to my left, the security guy warns me, “yo, it’s scary, jus warnin you, it’s creepy as hell.” What a delightful thing to hear. This means it left an impression on him; it’s very important, because it means it’s not boring. Which is what I told the guy, “better than a boring show.” Thanks for the heads-up, though I wouldn’t say he’s promoting his work place very much.

Yes, some people might consider them creepy, but that makes it that much more interesting to see. These are very heavy-set, explicit subjects painted with such lightness in the strokes, it’s downright delightful.

I’d say the exhibition itself was pretty well planned out. It wasn’t just chronologically stacked, “walk this way in a straight line” kind of a show. It’s much more pleasant to see couple of her paintings next to each other. There’s even a small room with more than thirty or fourty quick wash portraits in a grid pattern. Dumas doesn’t use much to render out the face, but it’s funny how you can tell they’re all different people.

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) [Through Feb 16]

This seemed much bigger than I expected, maybe because there were so many people there today. For the same reason, I wasn’t quite able to absorb the video & sound environment of Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist. The whole video is a 16 minute loop, and I wasn’t able to watch the whole th

ing.

Here’s a better feel for what I think it’s supposed to feel like. I wish I could be there all by m

yself. That sofa looked real comfortable too, except it was covered with what looked like a linen woven from people. Watch the video on MoMA’s site, I think it captures pretty well the intent of the artist. When I get sponsors, I’m totally making a giant digital installation.

Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art [Through Mar 23]

I think this was a decent collection of various different contemporary arts. It’s very hard to remember all the contemporaray artists’ names, because there just seems so many of them still alive, who aren’t very well known to normal people, because they’re not dead yet. Despite the fact, the Modern does manage to get its hands on some really good stuff. I got to experience my first dibs on a Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation. I’ve heard about his pile of candies and licorice, but the MoMA has a pile of copies of a large poster with a list of people who died from a gun shot. Like the candies, his piece has an endless supply which means you take one, which I did. Funny thing is, I really don’t want a list of dead people on my wall. I might have preferred the licorice.

still a hero of mine

don't cry...;(

Okay, Rafa beat Roger. I watched Roger cry, but what can I do; this proved that this was definitely more than just a game for Federer.  I think Rafa’s advantage is that he doesn’t seem to like to think too deep; he just goes for it with as much muscles as he has. This is such a bad opponent for Roger who plans out the psychology of his opponent in his game plan. I’m still rooting for Federer. He’s the one who really plays with his brains. I decided not to really care if he wins or not, because his games are just too stylish and kickass.

Since AO is over now, I can finally write my blog like an intelligent being.