V&A
Finally emerged from the house today for my weekly outing with ex-classmates and ritual moan about the difficulty of finding work. Mona was back from a week in the Lebanon, and had very kindly brought me some lovely olive-oil soap that I can bring with me to the hospital. We went to see the V&A's China Design Now exhibition.
The show is divided into three sections, each based around a city in China. The first section, Shenzan, was the least interesting for me, partly because I was developing a very short migraine. The second section, Shanghai, was much more to our taste, with some very interesting clothing designs, especially some ornamented with a sophisticated version of what I would call Suffolk puff patchwork (it seems to be called YoYo in America). There were also some architect's models of houses, in the Californian, English and (oh yes) modern Chinese styles, and an amusing pair of photographs of similar models into which the artist had added little figures living in the houses. The third section was more architectural models, of new buildings in Beijing this time. This part was essentially a plug for the the Olympics, culminating in a rather spiffy 3D fly-through animation of the Olympic site. All in all, a bit disappointing, with far fewer actual things than they usually have in that exhibition space. As Mona pointed out, if you saw the exhibition shop, you wouldn't really need to see the exhibition. No sign of the neon character thingies on the museum website, either. For our next visit, we plan to look at Blood on Paper, the (free) show of art books. I'd been put off this by the name but changed my mind after seeing two beautiful examples in the main shop. One was a book of wild flowers, where the pictures had been cut out and pulled up vertically to the plane of the open book, with the whole mounted in a little vitrine, like a clod of flowering turf.
When I got home, still nothing from the hospital, but at least the moth pheromone traps had arrived. Clothes moth sex pheromone smells remarkably like maraschino cherries, a bit like Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs' Seraglio.
The show is divided into three sections, each based around a city in China. The first section, Shenzan, was the least interesting for me, partly because I was developing a very short migraine. The second section, Shanghai, was much more to our taste, with some very interesting clothing designs, especially some ornamented with a sophisticated version of what I would call Suffolk puff patchwork (it seems to be called YoYo in America). There were also some architect's models of houses, in the Californian, English and (oh yes) modern Chinese styles, and an amusing pair of photographs of similar models into which the artist had added little figures living in the houses. The third section was more architectural models, of new buildings in Beijing this time. This part was essentially a plug for the the Olympics, culminating in a rather spiffy 3D fly-through animation of the Olympic site. All in all, a bit disappointing, with far fewer actual things than they usually have in that exhibition space. As Mona pointed out, if you saw the exhibition shop, you wouldn't really need to see the exhibition. No sign of the neon character thingies on the museum website, either. For our next visit, we plan to look at Blood on Paper, the (free) show of art books. I'd been put off this by the name but changed my mind after seeing two beautiful examples in the main shop. One was a book of wild flowers, where the pictures had been cut out and pulled up vertically to the plane of the open book, with the whole mounted in a little vitrine, like a clod of flowering turf.
When I got home, still nothing from the hospital, but at least the moth pheromone traps had arrived. Clothes moth sex pheromone smells remarkably like maraschino cherries, a bit like Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs' Seraglio.