Wednesday, February 22, 2006

skewers

I'm in this funny korean town, Daejeon, surrounded by strip malls and what seems to be forests. I'm here to teach a class this semester. yesterday I went to lunch with some students and while one was explaining the menu to me he started making this gesture with his hands which was creating a circle with his forefinger and thumb on one hand and sticking his index finger of his other hand into the circle, in other words, the fucking gesture. I was watching him do this and trying really hard to hold it together and understand what he was trying to communicate until somebody stepped in and said that he was trying to say that it was chicken skewers on the menu. then I just lost it. and then everyone lost it. apparently that is the universal symbol for fucking, or chicken skewers if you're korean.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

a very brief update

so TWO action packed months have gone by without a single posting. lame. here's a brief summary:

for the December holidays we ended up on Hainan Island with a horde of Russian tourists. very funny. my dad kept making jokes like, "10,000 Russians can't be wrong." Despite the tourism, it's still a really nice place to visit and just be a beach bum. There was one beach we found that was about 4 miles long and had only fisherman pulling in the day's catch on it. Amazing, and kind of scary. I think that's what happens when you are in densly populated places for too long. The idea of being the ONLY ONE OUT THERE inspires panic.

Mid-january Wang Wei had an exhibition at the Walsh Gallery in Chicago. I stayed with my Aunt Pei-lee, whose house is worth documenting.

What's good about living in China is that after some kind of xmas-like holidays you also get Chinese New Year, which lasts about a few weeks. So I stayed in California while Wang Wei came back to the fireworks war zone that Beijing had become.

I stayed in California to do a show with the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors in Los Angeles to mass critical acclaim. Well anyway, some people came to see it and liked it. There is talk of a re-mount. Stay posted.

now I'm in Daejeon, Korea teaching a class at KAIST called Making Things where we will, ahem, make... things.