China White/White China – Porcelain and Opiate Research

The art of ceramics is so entwined with Chinese culture that porcelain is also called ‘China’ in English. China is well known in the world for porcelain and the city of Jingdezhen is spoken about with a passion in the ceramic industries and the contemporary ceramic art scene. Jingdezhen is the most renowned centre for global ceramics, with the highest quality porcelain in China. From many blogs and conversations regarding this city, people say it is not a tourist city. It’s an intense city, vibrating with ageless rhythm; where life there exists as suspended between ancient layers of history and modern times. Day and night fires are put out, burning mud into utility and art, the air is full of industrial grit and transformative ideals.

I want to be charged up by the city, visit master potters with years of experience and a desire for a fresh start. I want to talk to educational activists, philosophers and artists and walk through the gritty streets and porcelain markets. I hear ceramic artists exchange stories of Jingdezhen, as a place to center yourself in this world full of ceramics, where porcelain in all forms is constantly caught in your vision. It’s seen stacked on bikes that are travelling through back alleys, huge vases are packed with straw, displayed, wet mounds turning, throwing and embracing, focussing, firing, glistening dust and glossed finishes, all tended to with care. I’ve watched countless YouTube videos and read endless books and blogs. I aim to experience these places first hand to further understand how porcelain can be used in a contemporary context.

Before I reach Jingdezhen I will tell you my plans and experiences prior to travelling. At times my blog will be intense with some disturbing imagery, so this is a warning. I hope you will all follow my thoughts and experiences.

A few days before travelling Hong Kong I sit in a sexual health clinic and I am shaking. For those of you who know me, life has dealt me some rough cards recently. In the waiting room the news headline is ‘Crash jet made sharp turns and plunged’. Greece’s defense minister stated that the Egypt Air flight from Paris to Cairo plunged into the Mediterranean sea. I’m really nervous. I write the reason for visiting the sexual health clinic in the box. My partner is a heroin addict. The relevance of this will all make sense later.

How did it come to this? I have tried to detox him several times after finding out. I had no idea and was then going in to teach, it was heavy. My mother is also a heroin addict. None of it makes any sense. How can this drug be so involved in my life, yet I am not a heroin addict? I feel alone and in a really dark headspace, fearing travelling alone for three months around Asia.

My mother has been in hospital, a heroin overdose and she has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she won’t stop using opiates and drinking. My partner is deep in a raging smack and crack habit, drinking and angry at life. I feel like I’m abandoning them and they don’t even care. People say subconsciously I chose to be with a heroin addict to try and understand my mother issues, some Freudian thing. Who knows.

It’s a sunny day here in the UK and I’m full of anxiety about being apart from him, not knowing if he is ok or even if he has woken up alive. Every day I am apart from him, lets call him E, and my mother; I dread the idea of them laying dead in their beds. Somewhere along the line I have forgotten who I am and what I like doing. People say travelling will be good for that.

After graduating from Goldsmiths, from the Fine Art MFA course in 2011, I partied hard in the London art scene. After a good run of exhibitions I got funding to go to the US for three months. The British Council and the Arts Council England funded a solo show at INOVA, Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, US, through the Artists’ International Development Fund. This was a part of the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts 48th Annual Conference, US. I had developed a love of porcelain from studying at Goldsmiths. In my practice, ceramic elements play a big part; they reference the delicate and precious nature of the self in the domestic and in society at large. After the US I travelled around Europe in a van with my boyfriend at the time. Through Skype, I managed to secure a job as a Fine Art Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts, while I was at a music festival in Croatia!

I moved into a lovely apartment. It was quiet and calm, I didn’t know anyone but life felt so full of potential. I developed a huge drinking problem over the years and it was only since I was in the flat alone and the partying was over, that I realised. I was drinking and smoking and pacing around the big lonely apartment. I’d sit at the window smoking, looking into the YMCA opposite and remember being younger. There is always so much drama over there, lots of arguments in the street. I began to feel really low and out of control of my drinking. I’d sit at the window, holding onto the ledge to stop myself jumping from the 3rd floor. This continued for some time until I looked up a local Alcoholics Anonymous group and ran across the park to my first meeting. As I said earlier, all this personal outpouring will make sense later.

I met E at AA. He had told me he had a past with heroin but he was clean and working a program. I wanted someone to live a clean and sober life with, going for Norfolk country walks and making strawberry jam with. We connected immediately and he moved in. He was a Stone Mason and a musician. It was perfect. My huge art studio, apartment and work were all 10 minutes from each other. You never get that in London. We didn’t own a TV, watched films, lay under blankets, had baths together in candlelight and wrote songs together.

Then he told me he had been using heroin and life went completely nuts. It felt like he had a mistress. I moved him out a couple of times after trying to emotionally support him and several detox attempts. It took over our lives. I was watching him inject and then going to work to teach. I had no control over the situation so he had to go. This left me with huge debts from supporting him, rent and bills. All before the big trip to China. How could porcelain, heroin, the UK and Hong Kong all be connected? I started to read about the Opium Wars.

Having secured funding for a performance and film in Hong Kong, Wing Platform funded by Firstsite Gallery in Colchester, I then secured funding from the A-N Travel Bursary for the second half of this research trip to travel to historical cities. My work contract in Norwich ended. I packed up my flat into a storage container, what was left unbroken from the chaos, and left.

At the airport E messaged me asking for a bank transfer for food. I will not give him any more money. I was hoping he was getting in contact to wish me good luck. The flight  was long. I sat next to a Chinese lady called ‘Fun’ who works in a home for the elderly in Wales. She was going to visit her Mum in China. We are planning to go to the Chinese Opera. I hope that actually happens. She was reading a news article about the plane crash. The lady on the other side of me worked for a print publishing company. She was flying out to China to live in a print factory for the upcoming illustrated version of a Harry Potter book. She talked about staying in dorms and being woken up three or four times a night to check the next batch of prints. I felt calm around these women.

I watched three movies, The Martian with Matt Damon, The Room and a Peggy Guggenheim documentary. I was surprised that was on there. She really was an incredible woman. Almost single-handedly, she introduced American Abstract Expressionism to Europe, culminating in her last-minute rescue of her personal collection of Nazi-termed “degenerate art” as the Second World War began. Her father died in the Titanic. The Martian was about Matt Damon trying to survive on Mars alone. For the first time in a long time I was aware of smiling to myself. He was surviving on his own, happy at times. I was aware of this cheesy parallel to my life and I revelled in it. The two ladies either side of me were asleep, in fact most people on the plane were asleep. I had this odd sensation of the world passing by underneath my feet. I looked out of the window and the moon was like a bright pink spotlight. Excitedly I woke the two ladies and we clambered over each other trying to take a photo that would do the scene justice. The photos looked like printing errors.  I ordered kosher food as it felt nostalgic and usually it’s the best option in hospitals.

The plane landed at HK International Airport and I said goodbye to my flight companions. I had an overwhelming desire to smoke and needed to get outside. The curator for my show and a good friend Craig Cooper had given me clear instructions on how to get to him. As soon as I got outside, I felt the intensity of the heat. It felt like a fan heater blowing straight in my face. I bought an Octopus card, which is the equivalent to an Oyster card, except you can use it to purchase things almost everywhere in Hong Kong. Craig describes it as a cash card with anonymous credentials.

I get the Airport Express train to Hong Kong Station, which was spacious and the air conditioning was blasting out. I arrived at HK station and got confused about where I was supposed to meet Craig. It was packed. I walked really far away from where we were supposed to meet and by chance we bumped into each other! It was reassuring to see a familiar friendly face. We took the MTR to Macau HK Ferry terminal. It was busy with colourfully dressed groups of Mainland Chinese tourists everywhere.

It was here that I realised I was going to be stared at a lot during my trip. People stare and don’t look away when you look up. We got the ferry, went through customs and were greeted by uniformed ladies promoting the Casino shuttle buses.

I got some cigarettes. Forget the usual rotten lungs warnings, here it’s all about vanity.

The lift in apartment building felt like one you’d find in a London Mayfair hotel. We arrived at Craig’s apartment and I met his girlfriend Isobel and their housemates. The view from their balcony is of Mainland China across the Pearl River delta.

We discussed the different laws and currencies separated politically by the residue of colonialism and physically by a small section of water. There’s a large pool connected to the apartments and lots of construction going on. We ate some spicy food and went to sleep.

There are some interesting construction projects going on.

24.05.2016

In the morning I showed Craig some raw footage of my mother, E and an encounter with some radical born again Christians, who work with addicts and the homeless in Norwich. My good friend and artist Patrick Goddard helped me to film some difficult scenes in London.

I also filmed Craig and Isobel’s terrapins HaHa and WaWa. Coincidently it was national turtle day.

Craig said what really struck him was the contrast between the show he has just curated, being about bodies, architecture and space and my work, was so different. He said the footage showed how addiction can make you withdraw from society and how politics and information itself can strangle its view and relationship. Although it’s still essentially a body, or a space as a body, being manipulated by a person or a ‘thing’.

It’s very accessible because of the way I approached it. I’ve permitted an access into a world that many of us can only imagine. We talked about the ideas of editing and the questions that the work could be proposing in connection to a British Artist exhibiting in HK. I am not shying away from HK being a former colony of the UK but considering the impacts of the past, in relation to now. The sensitive approach to filming gives enough space for the viewer to enter the work without making the viewer feel pity or sorrow. It also isn’t about it being exploitative, stylised or an egotistical project. We are still in discussion. What I am really doing is trying to avoid all the inevitable foreclosures that come with handling a such sensitive subject matters. I talked about Allan Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ and Craig spoke about Harmony Korine’s films.

This afternoon we got the bus to Macau Central to Grand Lisboa. Then we went to the historical part of central Macau and ate some dumplings and waffles with peanut sauce from a stall. We went to the ruins, a remaining facade of St Pauls Cathedral, which is a big tourist attraction. Portuguese architecture, paving, houses and churches are mainly located here.

We began talking about superstitious architecture. The building below is meant to look like an orchid but actually it represents knives hanging over the doorways. This is representative of the plethora of symbolism in Feng shui used with sinister undertones, a blade that will cut off your money in the Casino. There are lots of different versions of this in Chinese culture employed by the casinos that bring them good fortune and customer bad fortune. It’s subtle and disguised by seductive extravagance.

Gambling is forbidden in mainland China because of communism, apart from In Macau. You can gamble in HK but only horseracing. We visited The Vanetian casino, which is the largest casino in Macau.  I secretly filmed inside and they asked for my passport, which meant they thought I looked under the age of 21!

This casino is venice themed and feels like a set from the Truman show. It’s open 24 hours a day and has no windows, so it looks like daytime all the time. This is to disorientate the customers. It is filled with high end retail shops so customers can spend their money immediately in the complex. There are gondolas with Chinese opera singers entertaining the customers.

Their marketing campaign has a photo of David Beckham looking pensive in a gondola. Then we had dinner in a Thai restaurant. Everything is about Feng Shui here, the restaurant tied bags of water to the railings by the river outside. This is to bring good fortune. We got a free Uber car home.

25.05.2016

Jetlag hit me today so the day really started in the afternoon.

The weather changes so quickly as you move across a small amount of space, from a diffused filter to HD. Everything is covered in a layer of pollution today, I can hardly see the buildings opposite, it’s as if a thin sheet of tracing paper is being held up in front of me. The sun doesn’t look real, it looks like a projection and I can stare straight at it. The Asian moon looks like a reflection of a moon on water. Stepping outside onto the balcony feels like the moment you step out of the changing rooms and into a heated indoor swimming pool.

In the afternoon we popped over the border into Zhuhai, Mainland China for food and to pick up a TV. We walked across the border and explored the area. In the market we saw rows of large decapitated, fish heads having spasms due to their nerves being severed. After we crossed back over the border Isobel gave me a lift on her bike. It felt incredible, like a moment in a film with the hot fragrant Asian air brushing past us.

When I got back to Macau, E called for the first time in ages to let me know that he has started his script. Hopefully this means he will be clean at some point soon. I need to focus on what makes me feel good as I feel traumatised by life with an addicts.

Yesterday morning I met John for coffee and toast. We talked about places to go in China and he’s connecting me with someone who runs the pottery workshop. We went to a few local art spaces. He’s a charming man and I’ve really warmed to him. I walked down the river and took a tour boat to see a floating restaurant and we weaved in and out of rows of fishing boats. Then I walked around town and sorted out a new sim card.

I filmed a lot today and became especially excited about a t-shirt and a pair of shorts on a hanger each, drying by the side of the main road. Each time a vehicle passed, the clothes would sway in the wind. It’s cheesy, like the paper bag moment in American Beauty. Sometimes you just have to embrace the cheese and crank it up.

I’ve also been taking photos of the trees here for my tree surgeon friend Robert. I know he’s going to love them. I stumbled across this scene:

Translated this means ‘Tree Cutting Party’.

Yesterday evening I met Dan and we went to Kowloon on his motorbike. I’ve never been on a motorbike before. Blasts of hot air kept smashing me in the face. The neon skyscrapers flashed before me like a 1980’s graphic equalizer. This was a ride to remember. The sweet smells changed rapidly. It’s all about trust, going with the movements of the driver and the bike. It reminds me of sticky hands in Kung Fu. I don’t want this to end as I’m suddenly growing fonder of HK.

Everyone loves dabbling in a bit of long exposure. Art for snazzy trendy offices.

The billionaire with the fast cars messaged me and I’m going to send him some photos of his cars and invite him to the exhibition. I’ve noticed the car and number plate trend continuing.

The Irish poet Robert messaged me and we are going to a poetry reading night soon. I’m making friends and feeling more content. Now I need to pack up my things, as as I want to get out of the studio. This is all possible now that I have funding to be able to financially move around.

I danced around the studio in a pink cape and knickers, whilst dying my hair.

Things were looking up, until I had contact with E, who told me he was going to use and that he can’t take any pressure. I told him I must cut contact as it’s only making me anxious. Then he blocked me. I suppose this is punishment or him trying to have some power over something in his life.

This morning I met John again for coffee and toast, then we went to Blindspot Gallery. Martin Parr had a show and publication with this space. The people are so lovely and we discussed the current exhibition ‘Shikijo: eroticism in Japanese photography’.

‘The 7,000 square foot gallery space, one of the largest in Hong Kong, is located in Wong Chuk Hang, an industrial area in the south side of Hong Kong island.’

Permission granted by the gallery to use their photographs of the space.

I’ve been naked a lot in the studio as the heat is unbearable. Flies and mosquitoes are sticking to me and I’m sticking to everything else. Insect repellent is burning my skin and it’s really greasy. I have the runs and I feel sick and lonely.

Today I just want to hide away. I’m trying all these exhilarating things to take over the trauma I’ve been going through, to placate the heavy low inside. Nothing is working, roller coasters, motorbike rides, being away from the UK, hopefully there will be a turn in my thinking soon. There’s something called ‘letting go with love’, when dealing with addicts. I’ve been in contact with E as he’s been doing a cold turkey detox. I don’t have much hope for him, he never makes it past day two. I sense when he’s going to use because he is angry with me, abrupt and makes excuses to stop contact. He says it’s because I’m heavy and it’s emotional stress. He says he will be dead when I get back and then blocks me. I know he will read this, so somehow I will talk to him through this. This is how it has been on and off for months.

Being a heroin addict is so self-indulgent and full of lies. I have been trying to help him but everything is about him using or not using. I feel somewhat relieved because nobody can make someone give up. They have to decide that it’s time to give up the turbulent life they are leading. It’s easier to give someone up than to give heroin up, I know that from not growing up with my mother. My exhibition is revolved around their using, so you will understand the context as I explore the relevance of being here. This trip wasn’t meant to be for three months, initially I was planning up to four weeks. Then E wanted to come with me, so we planned for longer. As soon as all the drama unfolded I booked to be away for even longer. I can’t find answers for why I chose to stay in it when I’m focusing on them and they can’t reach their rock bottom, if they ever do, with me around. It feels cruel but I have to detach.

My mother shows me that a happy ending isn’t always possible, as she is dying. Regarding E, he is young and not done. No nurturing mother and no knight in shining armour for me. I tried to fix them wanting to fix. Ultimately it ends with them lying and abruptly cutting me off because only they can they be alone with their one true love, heroin. Heroin is the mistress and the pull is far too great. Their brains need reprogramming through rehab and/or Narcotics Anonymous. Step one: We admitted we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives have become unmanageable.

I recorded my mother, her ex boyfriend and E together and I’m playing it back now. E said ‘Helen’s right though, once you go to opiates, you forget about everything else though, don’t you?’. My mother admitted she sold a portrait I had painted of her for a bag of smack. E looks fit and well, as he was on a subutex script, although he does look uncomfortable. The conversation revolves around all kinds drugs and blockers. ‘I used to look down on junkies when I was a junkie. In the gutter looking down at people’. He smiles and my mothers ex agrees. Patrick and I exchange looks. He has an insight into all I have to deal with. I didn’t know why I was recording, I just knew that I wanted to get some footage in case one of them dies. You begin to come to terms with death, knowing that the chances of it happening through overdosing, are high. My mother, I call her Helen, tells me ‘I like your boyfriend’ and ‘I LOVE heroin’. They go on to compare collapsed veins. This was the first time they met and most likely the last time.

Heroin addicted stars make the headlines, look at Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty. Lots of us felt sorry for Amy and not for Pete. We watched her demise and wanted to help.

This is how I’ve felt towards E. I wanted to help him but every option punched me in the gut. There is nothing good about living with addicts, who go missing for days on end. I remember our first Christmas togther, we were decorating our tree. Half way through he said ‘I need to go and score’. I finished decorating the tree alone, turned the lights on and sunk low. This wasn’t that perfect moment you see in films. He came home and injected, with the tree as a backdrop.

You give them money that you can’t really afford, lie for them and drive yourself into insanity, for little or no rescue or rewards. They are the stars of the show until we begin saying no. Your life becomes about obsessing about them and their addiction. You are there to pick them up and they are not there to pick you up, there’s no exchange due to it being ‘emotionally heavy’. Loved ones usually stay and wait for a change, it’s a lonely place to be, because you are the only person fighting for their sobriety. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

I’ve often thought about the word ‘Sonder’.

‘The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.’

Oh yeah, a bird fell from a tall building and landed in front of me with a thud. Friends are sending me photos and videos of it raining back in England. I miss the cold rain. It needs to rain here. I should get on with editing but I can’t face the footage today. If all else fails I can always hang the greased up body stained bed sheet in the gallery. I might try to play some Nirvana on Jimmy’s electric guitar.

In the morning, Jimmy came over to paint and I met his Irish poet friend Robert Kiely. He studied English Literature and began hanging out poets.He’s interested in poets like Frances Kruk, Sean Bonney, Posie Rider and Tim Atkins and other small press, often politically active, poets. He did his PhD in English literature and set up some small presses. He sometimes blogs at lithopaedion.blogspot.co.uk. He just organised a conference yesterday on post-crash Irish literature, trying to bring Marxist literary criticism more deeply into Irish Studies, which is too interested in Ireland as a brand. His pamphlets How to Read and Killing the Cop in your Head are out this summer. He teaches Modernism and Romanticism in Hong Kong.

‘Writing for me is an exercise in perpetual disappointment’.

He told me about the rapper Slug Christ. What a name.

Jimmy has taken the zebra he was painting off of the floor and hung it up on the floor. This has changed my view of it, from laying down to being hung. It’s being hung by its shank like a pig. He’s looking into exotic animals being sacrificed as status symbols.

I decided to head out to find something to eat, Jimmy told me about a local food market in the industrial back streets of Wong Chuk Hang. On the way I asked directions and stopped to talk to an interesting man. I asked how he came to be in HK and he said he’d been here for years. I probed a little further and he told me he was a writer an art critic and a number of other things. We talked about the area and the art scene whilst standing under some scaffolding. Look at this typical bamboo scaffolding here. I’m going to meet him for coffee in the morning.

Then I went to the local food Hall. The dish I chose wasn’t too nice.

After lunch I just walked and walked without a destination in mind. I popped into a local sports centre to inquire about Kung Fu classes (I used to love Wing Chun) and swimming. There were crowds of people heading in one direction so I followed them. I arrived at a huge theme park, Ocean Park, with a mountainous backdrop. Why not? I headed in. It’s not often you go to a theme park on your own. The only way I can describe it was Hong Kong on acid. I took a cable car up the mountain with an odd Chinese man. He just sat and smiled at me the whole way. At one point he thumped his chest hard and said ‘Jesus’, then pointed at his wrists. I nodded and continued filming the view. I saw so many wild animals and felt bad for them. I met a Russian man called Sergy and we communicated mainly through Google Translate.We went on a huge roller coaster over the sea. As you can see, we were really excited.

I woke up anxious today. I think being in the studio is getting to me, as it has no hot water or air conditioning, the latter being the worst. When Jimmy comes in he uses oil paint and turps. I like seeing Jimmy but when he works I know i’m going to have a hard night breathing. It’s his studio, I shouldn’t really be here. I’m getting badly bitten and I can’t breathe (it’s raining and it’s 31 degrees C). I’m afraid to step out of the locked up room (so I hold it in, lovely) to go to the toilet at night, as the building is so huge and empty. The toilets remind me of the film ‘Let the right one in’. At night, depending on my mood, it can feel like an isolated prison cell on a deserted island or a tropical greenhouse. There are a few other major issues that I can’t discuss right now. The studio doesn’t have a MTR train link so I have to get a bus, which is on the way into town but it’s a nightmare trying to find a bus back ‘home’. I’m getting so confused. I lay in bed until lunchtime today.

So here’s a major and genuine problem in my life. I have Dyscalculia. There I said it. It has been explained as Dyslexia but with numbers and a whole new set of issues. Dyscalculia involves frequent difficulties with everyday arithmetic tasks like the following (Wiki):

• Difficulty reading analogue clocks
• Difficulty stating which of two numbers is larger
• Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a check book
• Difficulty with multiplication tables, and subtraction-tables, addition tables, division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
• Difficulty with conceptualising time and judging the passing of time. May be chronically late or early
• Problems with differentiating between left and right
• Inability to visualize mentally
• Difficulty reading musical notation
• Difficulty with choreographed dance steps
• Difficulty working backwards in time, (e.g. What time to leave if needing to be somewhere at ‘X’ time)
• Difficulty comprehending things relating to occurrences in different time zones
• Difficulty navigating or mentally “turning” the map to face the current direction rather than the common North=Top usage
• Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 10 or 20 feet (3 or 6 meters) away).
• Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences
• Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks
• Mistaken recollection of names. Poor name/face retrieval. May substitute names beginning with same letter.

Now you will see issues that will probably appear later in the blog. I panic with numbers, directions, times and most of the above. I’ve written on my currency in permanent marker, so I can try and understand it. I got diagnosed with this, always being aware of the above. Over the years I have developed certain unique learning strategies, when I was younger I’d feel my heart for my left. I still do this. The other strategies are harder to explain. I see numbers as shapes that are disconnected to their content. People have called me thick, dumb or lose patience explaining things to me. I panic splitting bills in case people think I’m trying to scam them or reading directions, even on Google Maps. Now I have all these new ways of learning I can budget, write funding applications and a whole number of new things have opened up but it takes time and new approaches. My friends and family patiently break things down very slowly.

This morning I went into Aberdeen town to attempt to find some moisturiser and to collect my laundry. Both were successful missions. I wandered around the streets breathing in all the unfamiliar smells. I wanted some food but most places didn’t have photos or any English writing.

Below is a photo of the local shop. The old lady who owns it apparently never leaves and often sleeps at the counter. She’s grumpy but she gives me hot water for pot noodles, most places won’t. I’m hoping we will have a kind of daily silent ritual together now. It looks like the shop was built around a tree. Look at it inside the shop and coming out of the top of the roof!

It’s raining heavily and I’m on the bus to town. There are no stops indicated on the screen of the bus so I have no idea where to get off. I decide to get off and get the MTR, at least I know where to get off. The Bank of China tower is asserting its power using Feng Shui by putting a building that looks like this. I get off the MTR and buy an umbrella, I’ve never seen rain this heavy, it falls hard on you. I got very lost, even using Google maps I go the wrong way consistently due to my Dyscalculia. I decide to take a taxi and he decides that he will pretend to know where the gallery is and take me miles away. I get out and cry in the rain. Dramatic. I get the MTR back and ask some school children the way to the gallery address. Apparently school children are the best people to ask as they are most likely learning English to a good level at school.

Para Site Gallery was on the 22nd floor. I’ve wanted to go there as they work with domestic service workers (maids for rich people). Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.

Here is the show blurb:

‘Para Site is pleased to present Afterwork, a major group exhibition exploring issues of class, race, labor, and migration in Hong Kong, its surrounding region, and beyond. It is part of Para Site’s ongoing Hong Kong’s Migrant Domestic Workers Project, a long-term initiative aimed at engaging the domestic worker community through collaboratively organised public programmes and commissioned artist research. As an exhibition, Afterwork is nevertheless an autonomous proposition, including the often ambivalent and polychromatic aspects of the social and cultural mosaic of Hong Kong, Philippines, Indonesia, as well as of other contexts.

Afterwork includes the work of artists of different practices, contexts, and generations dealing with the issues, aesthetics, and histories of migrant labor. Several artists venture into the personal implications of the presence of domestic workers in households, the public sphere, and the artists’ lives. Other artists create abstract landscapes that bring a different and necessary vocabulary in an exhibition that tries to address such a wide and contradictory array of topics and perspectives, from personal desires and dreams to historical processes. And by this exercise of imagination, we hope to reimagine just what it means to be a Hong Konger and who is entitled to speak for Hong Kong.’

After the exhibition I heard from E. He wasn’t happy about the first blog entry. He’s not clean, deep in addiction. I’m worried about my mother too as I can only contact her by phone. I have only have Internet data on my mobile phone. I hope she hasn’t overdosed again.

After seeing the exhibition I decided to take the plunge into a café, this one had photos of dishes, so I pointed and hoped for the best. I’ve avoided most cafes as all the writing is in Chinese with no photos, so you never really know what you’re getting. This is the equivalent to a greasy spoon café. Eating with chopsticks all the time is a chore; it takes me twice as long. I’m persisting, as I need to prepare for mainland China, where they won’t have a knife and fork option. I see other people requesting knives and forks and I find it quite rude. Give it a go. People sneeze loudly here, which is an abrupt end to my dreamy thoughts. Water is always served boiling hot. I met a Canadian guy and he’s daughter is some big shot curator. He told me China would be safe; I was worried as I heard stories of people being killed for their organs.

I miss home comforts. I miss cuddles and jokes. I don’t want to go back to the studio and be alone. I want to go home, wherever that is these days. I met Ricky and we went to Soho and drank mocktails. Soho is where the bars are, it reminds me a bit of Shoreditch, London. I can’t believe I’ve not had a drink for over a year. We talked about people back home and we also talked about love and addictions. A friend of ours died on New Years day. Ricky found out while travelling and said ‘I can’t believe that when I get home, he won’t be there’. We all loved you so much Amos.

I got a taxi ‘home’. The studio was dark and hot. I paced around and felt low. My dad messaged me and told me some good news. I got funding from the the big guys (not allowed to say it yet until it’s all signed but you know who I mean). I’ve applied twice and got it both times now, plus the A-N funding for this blog.

Up yours Dyscalculia.

Here’s my view out of the studio window today. I was meant to go to the beach with Ricky today but it was raining too much so we cancelled our plans. He also got stuck while in the rain while looking at 1000 Buddha’s.  Here are his photos.

Apparently a typhoon is coming and I’m meant to be going to the Fine Art Degree show at HK Baptist University.

I met artist James W Hedges today, who is an artist and shares the studio I’m living in with Craig. At the moment he is painting a Zebra. He just said ‘Typhoons are rubbish. I’ve been here a year and I’ve never seen a good typhoon. The rainstorms are pretty impressive’.  I am essentially living with his paintings. I will discuss his work later in the blog. I met his girlfriend Janice at the degree show too.

I’m really tired today so I will just post some photos of the degree show. They have a graduation dinner, which is a lovely idea. One piece was by Nicole Tsui Uen Yee crystallised tears in specific situations such as worshipping God and sorrow felt at humans who damage nature. Today I managed to get a bus home on my own, hoping I wasn’t being driven in the dark to the other end of the earth.