I am so lazy theses days and I have not written anything about my trip to Chicago yet. Before all the beautiful moments leave me, I should have done something. I wrote something in a local cafe in Diversy when Linshi and I spent the night there, she worked on her project and I reviewed some proposals. That night was quite, comfort and enjoyable. We talked about boys, works, dreams and most of all, nonsense. I wrote down a piece and wondered how life could be so relaxed and smooth?! With a coffee latte, but no deadline? Such an unbearable lightness of being! The days in Chicago were wonderful. The conference went well and I had very nice chat with Anna and Rong. We spent a night a West Lakeshore, a modern designed hotel. I enjoyed the pool on 7th floor, with a view of the Chicago downtown area and the Lake. The water was warm and nobody was around. I got an awful lot of time to spare. The glass wall, a typical Chicago creation, created a unrealistic sense of being: you see the city, the staring sky and you are in the mid of quite water. The sense of peacefulness was so powerful and transformative, I can not help thinking the life is worthy of living. The weather was unpredictable and it rained for a while and then cleared again. So L and I decided not to wait for the good weather and just tried out luck. We took an Architecture Tour on boat over Chicago River. We seated on the open deck initially and quickly move to the lower level with free coffee and cookies. The guide was an old gentleman with a sense of humor. In his view, many of the Chicago buildings and history should re-do with his magic touch. He introduced the buildings and history of architectural development of the city since 1850s, and I read more about the topic from a book on Chicago's buildings. The most amazing part of the city is its endless innovation and imagination in terms of building and human's relationship with their environment. Chicago is not a good site for developing skyscraper as it is famous for. The city locates on mud and the high-rises have to drill down about 60 feet to reach the rock. But they did it anyway. Chicago is a city with character; it is not like New York or San Francisco. It develops its own charm, in terms of its idiosyncratic way of worship the American dream and spirit. It is not about being higher and taller, but it is more about reach the limits of man. The buildings are measures of man's creativity, the measure of man's encourage reaching the impossible. It exemplifies American's sense of educated man: with order, symmetry, go beyond the limit. Although New York city is also on the seashore, Chicago develops its unique relationship with the great Lake and uses it an organic part of its design. The relationship is not one defined in our culture, which focuses on harmony and complementary. The relationship is more of competition and contrast. Its underlying theme emulates the idea of modern art, especially those developed in the past century—to show the great tension between human beings and their environment, to show the absurdity of nowadays life, and remind you the retreat of nature from our lives. The Lake provides you a perfect view of the city and vice versa. However, the intimate relationship between the two has lost long time ago. The city could appear in any part of the globe, like all other anonymous cosmopolitan on the earth, like Shang Hai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York. People around the world learn to build their own Chicago style skyscrapers, nevertheless, they forget to observe the sacrifice Chicago made to adore such a modern design. I watched Mission Impossible III the other day. There was nothing to say about the movie, bad enough for film review. However, the title somehow makes some sense. Are we humans longing for something impossible in our lives? If you visit the Field Museum, you will see a lonely dinosaur at the corner of the west side of museum. It looks over the city with millions of years behind it. The time is wrong, the location is wrong, its presence is wrong. It can not find its way home and because there is no such thing such as its home. Is it the fate of a modern man, too? A modern man designed by Da Vinci, endorsed by all the big names of Renaissance and Enlightenment? In this city of dilemma, I lost as always. The trip raised more questions than it answered. By chance, I run into Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art at Chicago. It was a quiet Sunday morning. The museum is in simple white, clean and fresh. It overlooks the Lake Michigan and sets in a corner near Michigan Avenue. The exhibition is very unique in a way that you feel such an intimate contact with the artist. It is not about the nude models he shot quite often, but the way those models look at you. Their bodies are in pain, agony, regret and lost. Tillman shot ordinary stuffs, like a rainy window, men in seashores, some scrap of papers, moon, still life, and human organs. He is very skillful to use visual images to address social issues, while keeps a delicate distance from the world he observed. Even in the ultimate moment of truth, there is still a sense of playfulness and humor and alienation in his works. Here is a brief introduction of the artist. “One of the most important and distinctive artists to emerge in the 1990s, his work is internationally recognized for its richly evocative and stylishly intimate reflection on the often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life. Much of his work concentrates on deceptively casual and unforced views of friends and acquaintances, catching them off-guard and at their most unguardedly “human.”” Another exhibition is by Patty Chang, a video work about her trip to Tibet and search for Shangri-La. It is a work of irony and reflection, on the way how western pictured China in 1930s and how a Chinese-American artist reflects on the subjective misunderstanding of western novelist about China. She directs an encounter of east and west in such a comic way, that you can help laughing when she arranged a wedding picture taken scene. She played Chinese bride from 1930s with a foreign groom. The popular songs of love in late 1990s accompanied the video, adding another layer of ridiculous and satire to the already laughable scene. It reveals the impossibility of understanding and the huge divide in people’s view of environment. For the people of ZhongDian and Diqing, the Shangri-La is where they lived, where they raised children and where they tried to build up their semi-modern lives as in other places in China. But for foreigners who are with their dreams of a divine place, they looked for something extraordinary, something exotic and something unreal. The exhibition introduces Patty Chang as “New York-based artist Patty Chang examines the idea of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon” which has come to represent a romanticized, exotic paradise in the English-speaking world. Chang’s video installation will document and explore her journey to an imaginary place– and to a town recently named Shangri-La by the Chinese government to exploit its touristic potential”. For both Chinese and Americans, the Shangri-La means opportunity, but with different meanings: for Chinese, it is an opportunity to a future with money and quality life; but for Americans, it is an opportunity to back to the past, to find their lost innocence in post-modern society. I can not tell which cause is more justifiable and I have no intent to do so. The only thing I know is Kundera’s motto “when people start to think, God can not help laughing”.
I was so lucky to find a moment of peace in Art Institute of Chicago in a busy Friday. The Chinese pottery collection of the Institute is well organized and displayed by time period and origin. By chance, I walked into a room for donations from Xu ZhanTang’s family. In the corner of that room, I found a slide door to a dark room for new acquisitions of Asian Art. There are 16 columns in the front of the room which occupied half of the room and create a sense of a shrine or temple. The lights are very dark, to protect the ancient paintings and calligraphies. I sat on the bench for a while, and enjoyed the emptiness of mind and eyes. There was not much to see, a couple of ancient Japan vases, a scroll of Chinese calligraphy, painting of a Korean artist and a small sculpture of Muslim temple. In the dark, my memories of good times rushed into my mind, also the tearful moments. As one approach 30s, he or she can not help thinking what he or she has done in the past years and wondering what comes next. I am at the edge of 30 and there is much to remember and to forget as well. Life has been treated me nicely and I have much to thank than to ask for. Indeed, I am alone and live an independent adult life. Life is smooth and I am quite content with what I am. Goal is clear, to be a professional and take care of my family. Somehow, there is still something missing. Love, I suppose. At least once, I pray. I feel I have so much to share and there is no one there to hear and smile. I watched Maggie Cheung’s Clean and the very touching moment of the film came in the end. When she finally settled down in Paris, her friend found she cried in her room and regretted her boyfriend was dead and she got nobody to hold onto. She had to clean her life, her addition to drug and her addition to love. Olivier Assayas put Maggie in such an emotional turbulence only in the end, and shows no signs of emotional attachment of Maggie to her bog friend in the beginning of the film. He knew her and she knew him and the film was a farewell to each other. Chicago is a mysterious city and it shows different faces to different people. I wonder how Italo Calvino will write about Chicago, or he already did? In this city, people run into their past quite often. It is a trip inward.
