- Must art be confined to museums or galleries or on walls? How is it evolving?

- Politics is a huge part in the art world and awareness of that is great, but focus always on ideas, narratives, meaning and social capital instead

- Homework is great too, but don’t take things too seriously in this world of hyperbole. Mayo Martin’s blog always reminds me to keep it all light and fat-free!

- A roundtable sounds like a great idea :-). Everyone should be friends!

- Art is to move, communicate and/or educate

- Artists are important, and should be honoured with tangibles like cold hard cash, space and time

^{JOHN 6: 70} Then Jesus replied, “Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!” ⁷¹ (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)

How amazing is it that Jesus still chose Judas as a disciple, knowing that Judas would betray him in the end?

This is taken from PBS.org. The photograph features Lobo the legendary leader of a band of cattle-killing wolves that had been terrorizing cattle ranchers and their livestock. Click to see the story.

My time was recently spent with wolves. I wish I could say that the experience was real and wild, but it was largely a literary one. Still wild, though.

There are many ways of looking at the animal. Biblically, wolves are sly and destructive creatures. In nature, they share an ancestry with dogs and are seen as the more majestic cousin. In other mythologies and folklore, they are highly revered.

But the past few days were spent looking at wolves through the eyes of Jiang Rong, a Chinese novelist (whose real name is Lu Jiamin and was once a political scientist). Jiang Rong wrote Wolf Totem, an ambitious tale of Mongolians in the 1960s, as a critic to his own culture — that of the Han Chinese.

Because the Mongolians’ lifestyle is so much interweaved with that of the grassland wolf, Jiang Rong uses the animal as a metaphor to symbolise them. As opposed to the wolf-like nature of the Mongolians, the Han Chinese are seen as sheep with a muted, emotionless herd-like mentality borne from the Cultural Revolution.

I used to think that wolves are sly creatures — and they are. But Jiang Rong redeems them by emphasizing their loyal character and ability to display human-like emotions. They feel sad when one of them dies. They avenge. They protect. These are the traits of the Mongolians. Though the wolves destroy the horse herds of the people, the Mongolians never form a naive deduction to render them as mere attackers. This is because wolves are also guardians of the environment and Mongolian livelihood — they hunt for gazelles who eat away or destroy the grasslands.

For the Mongolians, the wolf becomes both friend and foe. The Mongolians’ ability to understand nature’s intelligence, power and cyclical renewals means that wolves are meant to be respected as part of nature’s plan. In this light, the Mongolians never wear a dead wolf’s hide or hunt them meaninglessly (the Han Chinese do, according to Jiang Rong) — if they do, they think only for themselves and disrespect the bigger picture, that is, the ecology of the grassland.

All these ideas are told through the tale of Chen Zhen, a Han Chinese student from Beijing who obeys Chairman Mao’s urging to go to the countryside. Chen chooses to live in the Mongolian grasslands with nomadic herders. As he becomes a part of them, he grows fascinated with their lifestyle and especially with the cleverness of wolves. And hence the whole novel’s fascination with the creature (it sometimes reads like a never-ending National Geographic article, though).

Halfway through the novel, I am reminded of Cai Guo-Qiang’s glorious piece, Head On. This larger-than-life installation sculpture carves 99 wolves where, in a ferocious force of herd mentality, they crash into a glass wall. Cai, a prominent artist also from China, certainly has a very different conclusion about wolves.

He describes his work: “I tried to find an animal that represents a collective heroism, an animal that likes company, that lives in a pack. I wanted to portray the universal human tragedy resulting from this blind urge to press forward, the way we try to attain our goals without compromise. This is something that keeps repeating itself all throughout human history. In Zen philosophy, there is this idea of tragic beauty based on the notion that most of what happens has no meaning whatsoever.”

I wonder what Jiang Rong would think about that. Certainly, for the author, wolves are not blind followers but are in fact, clever planners that move in perfect unity.

It is simplistic to relate both Jiang Rong and Cai Guo-Qiang’s work to each other just because both feature the wolf as centrepiece. Yet, in spite of this and the different views of both artists, there are obvious similarities in lessons from their ideas.

For one, people, like animals, exist as a collective whether we like it or not. Therein lies a fine line in balancing this collectivism — how much of each other can we protect or avenge before it becomes blind support or group-think that is eventually dangerous? And as part of a collective, each of our actions ultimately impacts one another no matter how modern society alienates us or endorses individualism.

Here’s how I look at wolves these days — they’re just like us humans, complex in nature, both prey and predator, no lesser a warm-blooded creature than what we are, capable of both crime and compassion. To understand wolves is to understand men, and vice-versa. Man and nature are irrevocably interdependent, a reflection of each other. Jiang Rong writes: “That must mean that if there’d been no wolves, those great war counselors and leaders, there’d have been no Genghis Khan, no golden tribe, and of course no wise and brave Mongol fighting horsemen.”

Tim Buckley (who wrote the original) and Robert Plant have fantastic versions, but Susheela Raman’s Hindustani voice hits the sweet spot of remembrance for me. This is the last number off her album Salt Rain — it leaves a lingering whisper and longing in the heart, and is simply divine even as a poem.

Susheela Raman – Song to the Siren

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
Till your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your eyes

And you sang “Sail to me, sail to me
Let me enfold you”

Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?

Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
For you sang, “Touch me not
Touch me not, come back tomorrow”
Oh my heart, oh my heart shys from the sorrow

I’m as puzzled as a newborn child
I’m as riddled as the tide
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or should I lie with death my bride?

Hear me sing: “Swim to me
Swim to me, let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you”

Perhaps it’s the condition of our world today. With so many mediums that help us create and remember in no time, we are engaged and enthralled with the medium and what it produces, rather than the moment. McLuhan was spot-on. We find an easy  way out to use the medium to engage, rather than engage with our senses, and more importantly, engage through time. We rather know bite-size information about people, about things and situations, and create works out of that, than go deep with them. Going deep is inconvenience.

How much of these fly-by-night creations can truly make an impact? How much of such documentation or creation is art?

The one thing that struck me at the Art Stage recently was the sheer number of hours/years spent being involved in and creating a breathtaking piece of work. The beauty of such pieces is partially the artist’s discipline and devotion in spending years understanding and engaging in that one idea or subject, and in the process, creating his one piece. Time — is so much a part of the authenticity of an artist. Barbara Kingsolver took 10 years to write the Poisonwood Bible because she wanted to know Congo, where the novel was set, through and through. Michelangelo took more than 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel, and could only do so with tremendous detail knowing the Book of Genesis so well.

I’m all for speeding things up, don’t get me wrong. But perhaps in our greed to create and make our names in our own right, think about the moment, the idea and the people that are reflected in our creation. Have we given them a gift in return — perhaps the greatest gift that’s time?

Christine Nguyen, The Colorbands, 2010

Norberto Roldan, Quelques Fleur 2, 2010

I do admire NK’s work. For one, I don’t think  he tries too hard to get a very interesting or different story. He simply has specific issues he cares about deeply and gets to the core of the matter, presenting the reality as is. He’s also an optimist at heart — otherwise, why cover on the eternal problems of poverty and injustice? Realists know that these are things that can’t be solved completely. But an optimist takes the chance to solve whatever he can anyway. He strikes a balance of both — knowing, but not giving up.

NK dares to be wrong. With a platform like the Internet, he is open to being corrected and edited. He is willing to change his mind about something if he’s given the right facts. This sort of transparency is refreshing as an expert’s opinion is still an opinion after all. There’re too many ways to interpret a fact. NK’s openness is objectivity at its best.

Following his entry of a glance into 2011, I decided to do a list too, though on a more intimate level. These are the themes I’m looking forward to this new year in life:

Jesus
One of the areas that is still closest to my heart is that of faith. The more I think about it, the more the terminology “faith” gets lacklustre in describing my journey with Jesus. When I’m learning to love, and that concerns Jesus, is it really a “faith” journey? When I’m learning to be patient, and that concerns Jesus, is it really a “faith” journey? When I’m learning to be wise in the ways of Jesus, is it really a “faith” journey? I think, having been through the ups and downs and dealing with the different seasons and faces of Jesus, “faith” becomes a pretty limiting word. I don’t mean to be linguistic and pin down a word to encompass this journey — I can’t think of one anyway — so I’ll just stick with Jesus. 2011 will be about Jesus. It’ll be about understanding the human side of God, or the sacrifice and love of God.

Humility
Perhaps in this day and age, being heard or voicing an opinion has become an important thing. As I think back about the things I said in the past year, I wonder if I’ve ever said anything of great significance. Have I been more critical than constructive? More heard than having heard? Have I said more than what I could do? I would like to give much more space to the people who are conversing with me. I would love to practise restraint or to hold back an opinion even if it seems right. Nothing is completely right if it happens at the wrong time.

Generosity
Not just in terms of the moolah, but also in terms of time. I hope to practise giving my time away to people when that’s needed. I hope to be generous in valuing someone’s presence, character and personality. I hope to be generous in being a part of something, even if it is at the least of my agenda. I simply hope to be a gift to people.

Design
Still something I can’t escape from! In 2010, I was drawn to producing things by hand, perhaps because I was mostly doing work for friends. I did not want to produce something corporate-ish for people whom I love. Looking back, I didn’t create much due to a day job. But with the little I could do, I began to understand the importance of connecting with non-designers for ideas.  Two important lessons emerged and stuck: 1) I learnt that a non-designer can have a much more sophisticated level of aesthetics than a designer. 2) I learnt that a non-designer can contribute so much more to adding an experience to a flat design. This year, I’ll like to learn more about the way things work, the designing of systems, the behind-the-scenes, the cogs in the machinery. Something deeper, and not necessarily a process that might produce a designed product or an aesthetic outcome.

Travel
This year, I hope to go to Nepal or New York. Nepal for the memories, New York for the future. I want to be uncomfortable. To be placed in challenging contexts. To fill a gap. To have fun. To connect. To discover. To unravel different ways of living. For me, travel is important for people in a country like Singapore because our lives seem to be placed so much in certain stereotypes and systems. Travelling makes me question, “Do we have to believe in these systems?”

So! 5 themes to look forward to this year!

What kind of wisdom or experiences can the young give the old?

“The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is their gray head.” – Proverbs 20:29