Tangible Traces: Dutch Architecture & Design in the making

這場展覽辦得真趕，不但時間短，經費缺，所有籌備工作基本上都由香港這邊一手包辦，還真沒聽聞過設計師會突然消失，好佩服老闆的臨場應變，最終還是搞得有聲有色，我都以為即食文化為香港獨有，原來歐洲也不賴。第一次到這個由工業中心改建而成的藝術中心，感覺不錯，只是每層的樓底太矮，氣勢遠不及國產798或1933，都怪香港空間少，但不也是我們的獨有特色乎？綜觀現場閃光燈的頻率，好評如潮耶！

失去了這個“專業”，我還剩下甚麼？

An Evening with Nick Vujicic

Well for sure it's been a much anticipated event of the month. His story has been around for few years already and i finally got the chance to meet him outside YouTube. What a loss that we couldn't hug him one by one as scheduled. His Hong Kong tour was just a bit too packed. Guess the organizer was making full use of the cost they spent on the event. But judging from Nick's sunshine smile all along, I think he felt complete in this trip. He definitely would not forget this brilliant translator of the night who even made sense of his every single body language which in turn added extra colours to such a formulated seminar. Just not to mention how many times tears had welled up in my eyes, Nick's speech was gorgeous. I've listened to the same content at least more than once online, but the live impact was not at all diminished. He's a true miracle and he creates miracles in others' life. Wish him all the best on the Mainland tour!

a book to share, a thousand look to bear...

努力了一年的書快將面世，心情有點複雜，兼任設計與助理編輯，更可於PageOne出售，該是樂極了的喜事，可我卻擔心其質量叫人失望。設計過程本來就千奇百怪，有人因一個突如其來的靈感一夜成名，有人十年寒窗為人類帶來無盡的福祉，更有人只為挑起你的物慾而不斷設計廢物... 諷刺地這本探討設計過程的書卻用上了同一個框架來處理六個不同的案例，加上單一的排版，把設計者的個性完全淹沒，造就了一本工具書，卻成不了一本兩者兼備的設計書，可惜。

再談設計一本書時功能上的考慮。近日因工作原故要翻印大量的藝術雙年展年刊，發現不同地方的設計師在構思這樣一本書籍時，往往忽略了我們這一類用家（研究員）。北京上海廣州把年刊的結構規格成有如《論語》一樣的典藏，笨拙得來嚴肅，翻閱時非常不便；新加坡與台灣就把年刊當商業書來設計，俗得很；最恰如其分的要算日本，不單在內容及排版上落足心思來突顯當年的展覽主題，紙質和尺寸亦恰如其分，極方便查閱及翻印；果然，日本的設計特別細心。

You're always on my mind.

Shanghai Biennale 2008 - Int'l Student Exhibition

這趟到上海辦展覽，看到國內同胞不一樣的面貌。除了愈見豐裕的生活質素外，還有那好客之道，是以往自由行時難得一遇的，大城市所具備的內涵，似乎漸漸地從她身上散發出來，老實說，我較上一次更愛上海。

友人紛說這是上海人的野心，「禮」是裝出來的。本就勢利的香港人不好說話，難道我們還嫌自己的面具造得不夠肖妙？人家才只不過是大專生，想得單純一點吧！我倒覺得他們有自信、願意交流，一點不怕給外人批評，渴想進步的動力遠超本土學生；這也難怪，國內的大城市本來就由不同省市的人才匯聚而成，兼容性之高難以比擬，自認多元的香港人多久了還容不下自己的同胞，更莫說其他小數族類在港的辛酸故事。也許，吃不到的葡萄總是酸的？

Impossibility in memory forgetting: Atonement (Part II)

The thin borderline between fantasy and memory was heightened with Briony constantly revisiting her childhood memory, consciously in the form of a letter asking for forgiveness from her sister and a novel draft based on the event she saw by the fountain; unconsciously in the form of day-to-day conversation with other nurses, from which we grasped bit by bit Briony's real feeling towards Robbie, and hence disclosing the part of memory she had screened off and repressed over the years. Lots of mirror shots were used throughout the film to associate the kind of vanity in story telling by exposing the ego in each of the character, if we recall Lacan's mirror stage of "I". Briony has constantly been splitting among her outer self and inner ego. Is not it the same for memory? How could we tell the truthfulness of our memory? Are they only fantasies or more accurately dreams?

In the first part of the story, we might well be thinking that Briony experienced tremendous shock from what she saw happening between Robbie and her sister Cecilia by the fountain. She immediately expressed her shock through the narrative of her play, in which she rhetorically paralleled Robbie to the character of her story and described him as "the most dangerous man in the world", which led to her preconceived "mistake" in accusing Robbie for the molestation after the second shock in the library. Fantasy and memory again intertwined within little Briony's mind. It was through memory that Briony's fantasy got nourished, while from the other way round, it was through fantasy that Briony's memory got revived and relived. As Deleuze described, "writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience." (1) Briony's writing (fantasy) was constantly refining and redefining her personal experience that lived through memory. It was never formed in a chronological and ontological way.

It was not until the flashback of Robbie saving Briony by the river bank were we able to know the true feeling of little Briony. She has been repressing her love towards Robbie whom she regarded as a "crush" when she was 18. By then, it would make full sense to interpret the accusation as repulsion out of jealousy. That "mistake" made in remembering the assault was to a certain extent quasi-deliberative. As Briony watched the incident, we were immediately flashbacked to the actual scene from the perspective of this "two figures by the fountain", learning the true story behind. With a smooth transition from the previous to the present scene, this part of flashback worked as a holistic structure of the story rather than a distinctive intervention. One might realize that it was a flashback very lately if he or she missed a second of attention to the details. It not only brought us back to the past just a moment ago, but at the same time challenged our conventional way of looking at past events. Was it really past or simply living along with our ongoing memory? When we perceived it as something that followed, it might turn out to have happened before. "Memory is of the past" as historians put it but here we could see the linear temporality of memory being broken down and challenged by cinematic approaches.

Impossibility in memory forgetting: Atonement (Part I)

According to Freud in the Uncanny, the notion of screen memory was defined as one that "owes its value as a memory not to its intrinsic content, but to the relation obtaining between this content and some other, which has been suppressed." (19) When impression of a particular experience is retained in our memory, the content of such an experience may have no meaning to us, yet the content related to it which has been absent so far may be important to us. There are basically two psychical forces involved in producing these memories–one as wanting that experience to be remembered while the other resisting this choice. In this film we shall see how a novelist has been struggling with her memory of the past because of guilt and trying to resist her own forgetfulness of these memories due to physical abnormity conquering her dying body.

The whole story was basically structured into four main parts:
I) England 1935 – The Tallis House
II) North Western France. Four years later – The Retreat of Dunkirk
III) London. Three weeks earlier – The Hospital of London
IV) An interview of truth

Due to the disclosure of part IV, I am tempted to interpret the first three parts of the story as the mind–memory and creation–of the novelist, Briony Tallis and throughout the film sufficient hints were suggested for audiences to associate to such allegory. As Ian McEwan reminded us in the Making-of Atonement, "what you must never lose touch of, is that this is all being reinvented for us by Briony." The opening frames kicked off with "a kind of dynamism in the camera" which showed us the creative energy and confidence of a 13-year-old bourgeois Briony who had been the subject dragging the camera around the big Tallis House. It should be noted that from then on, a particular background music composed of typewriter clacking sound appeared throughout the story, which not only on one hand expressed the unanimous creativity of little Briony, but on the other hand also suggesting consciously to us that we were indeed going through the creation process of 77-year-old Briony's novel, which had in a sense rendered it impossible to differentiate the truthful part of the memory–things that did happen–and the fantasy part–things that did not happen at all. Was the memory working as part of the plot she created for her new novel? The clacking typewriting sound served as an obvious medium to connect this narrative time of the past with the present reality of the novelist who had been doing her best to record what she did and amend what she did not. The truth was unveiled at the last part of the film in form of an interview that largely enhanced the authenticity of the film by suggesting a sense of present established through first person interaction with the character. As Wright mentioned in the Making-of, "the cinematic equivalent of first person is interview. This is as close as one gets to talking directly to an audience, to remove the veil of fiction."

The intertwining or inseparability of memory and fantasy has been discussed further by Freud in his another essay called The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, from which he tried to associate a writer's creativity with his or her childhood memory. When children enter adolescent, they will cease playing to give up the link with real objects and turn their mind to fantasies, or daydreams. How these fantasies are formed relates so much to the one's memory of the past. (28, Uncanny) If this were the case, the first part of the movie, which focused on the childhood of Briony, has been the crucial source for drafting her fantasies over the other parts of the film. The most obvious content was the one in hospital where nurse Tallis were ordered to comfort a dying French soldier. Based on the story from this hallucinated soldier, Briony responded with her own memory of the past–something about the story between Cecilia and Robbie–intertwining with her current fantasies with this soldier that pointed towards their future marriage. This present experience–encounter with the soldier–has evoked Briony's recollection of childhood memory from which she always desired the love of Robbie but unsuccessful, and so she tried to fantasize a future marriage as an implicated way to fulfill such desire.

DON'T YOU FORGET?

http://student2.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~z3126120/dyf/

友人的畢業習作，覺得很有意思。

他把廢紙再造並聚疊起來，形成了有如木一樣堅硬的質料，然後將其裁成字母，組成"DON'T YOU FORGET?"的凸版印刷，在懷緬已逝的工藝技術之餘，教人思考現代科技所銷毀的生活質感：一樣的字體、一樣的內容、一樣的產品...我們還會記得那份由人手所造而帶來的驚喜與悸動嗎？

記得有日哥從家附近的市場買來兩個久違了的“菠羅包”，不亦樂乎，我還以為是價廉的原故...“你在美心買不到這麼新鮮的，而且每個都不一樣！”令他開懷的原來是那份漸漸被埋沒的人情味，是多少句“謝謝光臨”都比不上的。透過友人親手的製作，作品被賦予感情，獨一無二之餘，更力證時間的考驗，而值得深思的，是整個資本主義社會的麻木不仁。

"a woman's whole life in a single day..."

許久沒看過這樣悲的電影，赤祼祼地彰顯了人在面對生命中各種起跌更迭時的無能為力。一本看來平凡不過的小說把三個女人的生命連結在一起，探討的是人與生俱來最根本的問題 — 生命為何？

當付上了一生所愛的人認為你的犧牲微不足道；當註定要跟一個永遠活在自己過去的人共渡餘生；當你再無法與眼前的這個世界溝通時…你，會如何自處？大抵我們都覺得Laura太狠心，也無從理解一個全然活在自己創作世界裡的人的痛苦，但我們或多或少也曾經質疑過自己所做的事情有何意義，這可是花一輩子也想不通的問題，天生的惰性會叫我們把問題擱置一旁，但當其猛然來襲時，卻足以動搖我們生的念頭。

三位女主角分別作了她們的決定，只有一人選擇把生命結束，可說是這部電影至為積極的一環，畢竟我們對生命仍有期盼。很喜歡電影中的氣氛，那一天、那一刻，似是即將來臨，卻又凝結了，並且無限擴張…"a woman's whole life in a single day -- just one day -- and in that day, her whole life." 三個女人的一天，教你思考你的一生。

旁觀者 II

a piece of sharing in Newsweek which talks about how a youngster looks at his American identity in this "post-Americanism" world. It is not as egoistic as we used to think. And his fleshy cultural experience in Asia could not be more intriguing...

"I've been backpacking through India for the past six months, and one of the most fascinating parts of my travels has been the responses I get when I say I am from America. In villages and smaller towns, people react with either awe or anger. Whether positive or negative, the response is usually so passionate that it is sometimes difficult to answer the barrage of questions about anything from Britney Spears to George W. Bush to Las Vegas. However, when I travel to places like Delhi, Mumbai and Singapore, the response is much different. The jet-setting, speak-five-languages, work-hard, party-hard crowds in these Asian cities are unlike any group of people I've ever met. They're more elegant than the Upper East Side, hipper than Williamsburg and faster than Chelsea. While Americans are disdained for being imperialist consumers in the villages, Americans are simply behind the times in the fancy enclaves of cities. Anti-Americanism is difficult to handle, but apathy toward America might be even more unsettling. As a child of the 1980s, I've never known America to be anything but an unmatched superpower. It's particularly strange to be in the part of the world that is considered the next frontier. Maybe this is why Americans don't travel as much as others around the globe. It's not easy finding out you're not at the center of the universe anymore. That said, it's amazing to be traveling at this moment in history; being out here has given me a humbled perspective to bring home. In the end, that's not such a bad thing."

- Sara Weston at New Delhi, India (Newsweek, Jul 7/ Jul 14, 2008)

"When you're down to nothing, God is up to something."

a bit of life...

read this on John Chris Jones' designing designing some time ago. as i revisited it today i was touched again.

I'm driving along on the road
and I always have a sense of gratitude that the road continues

it was an amazing moment for me in my life
driving across America for the first time and realizing that

"I kept going"

that no one

that the road didn't stop because people went to have dinner or
it didn't stop because people got tired of digging and hauling
and living for other people

it just continued

and i was able to follow that
just like that old image of the king
being walking down the path that is unrolled for him
by the servants

the amazing thing about life is that
when it functions best
each of us is a king for all the other servants
and each of us is a servant for all the other kings

it's one of the reasons that I've gotton very sensitive
to the thought that the only goal worth pursuing is to

love people very much

and that requests for new ideas

and new ways of thinking
and new things to make
is just part of breathing
part of my biological process
but that

the thing that isn't part of my biological process

which is most human

and the most difficult to ascertain and to attain
is this feeling of being really loved
being in love
by someone else

with someone else

that most old idea
seemingly of being in love
probably is the newest idea

and not an idea at all

又一年六四

「中國無數計非正常死亡多半是死於一種制度、一種觀念。中國政治制度維護的是權力和金錢，除了權力和金錢，不存在更需要維護的東西；觀念中缺少一個對生命的尊重和關愛，一個對死亡的敬畏與戒懼。」

-「天安門母親運動」成員徐玨《明報6月5日》

雷聲太大

Conquering the last terrain of analog - Amazon's Kindle (Part II)

No windows persuading me to make all sorts of consumption pop up from my book. And no one knows that I am reading at a particular time in a particular place. But once the device is stuck onto your body, you are constantly under tracking by these big brands. Every body is accessible. They learn about your movement, your next stop and your next encounter. They hold the key to your minds. Readers will only be blinded with the ideological excitement of possessing this so-called freedom of connection to the infinite space of knowledge. You think you are now communicating with many more people around the world at any time any space but on the other side of the coin, you are actually being barred from connecting with groups that are less up-to-date. The immediacy of update widens our information lapse from person to person. Information one possesses easily deteriorates. The common ground for discussions is gradually shrinking due to this temporal difference in information reception.

"Book clubs could meet inside of a book." (Newsweek, 70) To a certain extent, yes, readers are no longer confined to a physical space for book salon or discussions but in turn, they are now confined to that virtual space which is highly manipulated by the space administrator, which is Amazon in this case. Instead of "making the entire works of humankind available to all people", they are now only available to those born in the digital age, more affiliated and knowledgeable mass. The rich poor gap is constantly widening, not only between the analog and digital camp, but also among those in the digital net. It is no longer a fair game. Within a global scale, those living in the third world will never get a taste of such technology. Even they are willing to read, their knowledge simply depreciates compared to other parts of the globe. Capital thus flows from around the world to those knowledgeable elites who are now connecting among themselves and sharing all sorts of information at an ever accelerating speed.

The whole evolution from analog to digital is a coercion that builds upon excessive needs and constantly making one feels that he or she is out-of-date. They will not point a gun at your head to force you to buy the new edition. Yet by gradually limiting and finally ceasing to release that previous edition, buyers had no choice but to switch to the newer one. This will certainly happen to the production of books in the near future. Books will not extinct but perhaps not each and every piece of writings will have the chance to release a book version. As Amazon's database expands, fewer and fewer publishers could resist the entire digitization movement.

Conquering the last terrain of analog - Amazon's Kindle (Part I)

Last Christmas Amazon has released its first electronic book (e-book) which is already the 2nd generation of its kind into the market. Newsweek has devoted a total of 6 pages to cover this story on November 26, making a sound feature on The Future of Reading that might be shaped by the attempt of this device. How revolutionary is this Kindle? Is it really going to "change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish?"

As claimed by the CEO of this online bookstore giant, Jeff Bezos, their mission is to digitize entire libraries of the world, to create "the world's only book" so as to "make the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time." (Newsweek, 70) What he meant by "all the time" refers to their newly developed wireless connectivity which surpasses all its ancestors including Sony Reader, the pioneer of e-book. With just a glimpse, one can hardly tell what makes the device so different from the PDA or mobile phones from which we read our everyday news and documents in transports. And what makes these big corporations so sure that they will be able to conquer this last terrain of analog, the print media which has been the bedrock of our civilization for centuries, but not another fashionable product that roars in the short run?

We were told that the product is in fact no different from an actual book. It can even lead you into the state of ludic reading – the rabbit hole that heavy readers enter when consuming books for pleasure. (Newsweek, 68) What Bezos was trying to convince readers was that it is not the medium that brings one into that hypnotic state. What have been paramount are in fact the ideas of writers. The aura of a book can be substituted by any medium and this time, this device, this machine. Instead of mingling with papers – static and 3-dimensional, now we were told to mingle with all sorts of screens – interactive and 4-dimensional. With their power in the media (they are in fact the media), they stir up noises and create talking points through platforms like blogs and forums, and thus slowly immerse oneself into the need for change. But how could the two mediums be possibly the same?

798的神話

剛看過今屆的香港國際藝術展，更參與了其中的一場研討會─時移勢易：博物館與文化慾望，沒有太多的驚喜，卻有許多值得思考的地方。

雖說這是一個藝術展，但現場的佈局跟展銷會沒多大分別，參展的畫廊也不介意把售價一併展出，務求盡用那百餘尺的空間。根據官方的資料，現場有來自二十國的畫廊，但在我看來，主要來自歐美及亞洲主要城市，國內的佔上大多數，推介的作品也源自這些發展中的大都會，少有中東甚至非洲等地的作品，不無可借。值得一提的是我國作品滲透率之高叫人訝異，隨處可見岳敏君、焦興濤的作品，還有許多帶有濃厚政治色彩的畫作，中國風吹得還真盛。

就連研討會本身也是面向中國的說，期望從來自世界各地的策展人身上取經，帶動香港與國內的文化工業，說是工業一點不為過，可不都是各國建構自我形象的一個手段？博物館的建築成了國際都市的必然象徵，高傲地佔據着逐漸萎縮的公共空間，扭曲的不止是文化本身的意義，更是人類生活的根本自然，很認同Tate Modern的首席策展人Sheena Wagstaff的一席話：Museum is not built for profit-making。是的，香港的政客就是不大願意去接受這個事實，所以不斷地追問如何經營一個自給自足的博物館，老實點說，還不是當爸爸的不願意負上這沉重的擔子，生下來了，就自己學會獨立吧！難怪做兒女的天天都在鬧，不大長進。北京的798藝術園地卻恰好相反，太獨立了，還闖出了點名氣，老父也就不得不支持，順勢叨點光。

看來，香港還得花上一段頗長的時間，才會學好走路這一課。

"A-Glow-Glow" Interactive Media Arts

早前看過兩件互動裝置，第一件來自英國的United Visual Artists (UVA)，名為Volume，一眾由LED組成的感應柱因應觀眾的行動作出反應。當觀眾遊走於柱子之間時，聲音的跌踫奏出一陣和諧的共鳴，然而LED的反應卻沒有預期的理想，似是被過多的預設程式操控着，自顧自地發揮；又因現場觀眾太多，反應欠缺即時性；相對地，觀眾得停留較長的時間來觀察裝置的反應，尋找當中的語言，沒多少耐性的或把裝置當作玩意兒的總不得要領，很快便離了場。

同樣的情況亦出現於第二件裝置上─Teddy Lo的《稀孔》，這個的情況更糟，皆因玩法太複雜，需要你手機的藍芽之餘（較落後的可沒份兒了），七條的訊息發放頻道亦未能滿足眾多好奇的觀眾，等待不久便宣佈放棄，就是收到訊號的也搞不懂當中的意思，失望而回的佔了大多數。

相信這仍是創作互動裝置的一大挑戰，得在觀眾失去興趣前引導對方進入與作品自行溝通的狀態，從而進行對話、交流。當然，首要的是觀眾願意進行對話，藝術品不是商品，它不強迫你來簇擁它，而是靜靜地待在那兒，等你來接近，收穫多少，全看你願意在它跟前付上多少的時間。

快啦快啦...

一年就這麼過去了

時間

美漢24年冤獄獲賠逾百萬

美國佛羅里達州當局因為錯誤作一名男子定罪，令他坐了24年冤獄，向該男子賠償125萬美元。該名現年46歲的男子，在1982年被法庭裁定2項強姦及1項持械行劫罪，被判入獄130年。但到了2006年，透過脫氧核糖核酸（DNA）測試，證實他跟案件無關，當庭釋放。佛州州長克里斯特在簽署賠償令時表示，明白到無論多少錢也不能彌補對方失去的時間。該名男子在獄中修畢一個教育學位，並且擔當園丁，獲得滅蟲牌照。（明報2008/4/18）

今天看到這則新聞，想起了早前在電影節看過一套由周防正行執導的電影《儘管如此我沒做過》，引起了我一些回響。不禁到處問身邊的朋友：作為一位法官，釋放了一名罪犯罪大還是冤枉了一個無辜的人罪大？大部份的答案均是後者，因為大都認為犯罪者脫了罪，有二分一機會不再重犯，但捉了一個無辜的人，罪犯仍舊可以逍遙法外，那為何要多害一人？

對於受害者來說，誤以為罪犯已經繩之以法當然感到安慰，但對於無辜者來說，失去的不單是自由，還有那永遠追不回的時間，是無論多少錢也補償不了的生命。我想，這才是一位法官最罪無可逭的；而可悲的是今天有多少人，不是時間給剝奪了，而是自己甘願捨棄。

Cultural Revolution

Perhaps it is not so much about hauntology that we had discussed in class but I really wonder why the three films (The Blue Kite, Peacock, The Sun Also Rises) about Cultural Revolution we have discussed so far were structured in such a similar way that each of them was clearly divided into at least three main parts. When I thought it was telling a different story from time to time, it would then hint on me that the story was going on within the same circle of people and both the temporal and spatial settings had intertwined so closely that they actually came together as a holistic piece of work finally. But why it was like a formula that the 5th generation Chinese directors had to split their films in parts?

Each time when a new part began, a different perspective was suggested. For example in Peacock, the story was basically told through the perspectives of two brothers and their sister. Above this layer of three stories was another onionskin made of the memory of the youngest brother who happened to be the narrator to wrap up this entire bluish memory. As the surface slowly peeled off, we not only learnt about the grow-up stories of the three but also the daily trivial life of ordinary Chinese people after the Cultural Revolution, which could only be made objective and significant through multiple points of narrative. Simply no one caught a full picture of the incident and that any single point of view towards such an important traumatic history would be a disregard.

Changes take time. In order to capture the visible, the temporal framework of the films had to be expanded to, say, at least one year in The Sun Also Rises and 10 years in Peacock so as to pick up some diamonds in this spectrum of social change.

美國人心中的第三大敵人

是有點兒鋒芒太露吧…

Newsweek

Mar24, 2008

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1636_chinadesignnow/

《孔雀》﹣顧長衛

Readymade Magazine

January/February

2007 Vol.08

千年善禱

While I was still thinking of the way Ann Hui constructed memory and cultural identity in Song of the Exile, another newly released film by Wayne Wang titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which is screened in this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival, served as a good reference for me to think out of the box.

Both of the films were about parent-child relationship but instead of using lots of flashbacks, this later film by the director of Joy Luck Club talked about memory basically through dialogues and the acting of the father and daughter only. They were all being told in the present tense, which seemed to convey the fact that past is already past. Though it shaped what we are now, there is no use to be troubled by those bygone memories. Instead, we should think of the better side, just like what the father has said to the old lady in the park.

We used to think that conflicts between generations were mainly created by cultural differences and it is. Yet apart from this aspect, Wang's film has highlighted other aspects that could best parallel to Hui's film. The heroines in both films were situated to receive education abroad which provided a preconceived base of difference between their mindset and that of their last generation. Stuart Hall's idea of "diaspora identity" was mentioned as one "produces and is produced by a specific cultural environment." However, these external social factors are often emphasized to such an extent that other moral or psychological factors have been undermined. These factors had been the main focus in shaping one's memory in another recommended film for discussion–Atonement, in which the heroine's memory is constantly struggling between real and constructed fragments due to her guilt for her sister. The real and unreal interlaces each other in a way that even the heroine is gradually losing hold of her true memory.

Both Hueyin (Song of the Exile) and Yilan (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) refused to talk to their parents face to face due to their guilt of misconduct in the past (basically their own character), not necessarily about their country, their homeland.

我的復活節假期

10:08am

我正在工作。

這是復活節假期的最後一天，
得為自私的時間安排作點補償。

腦袋是這般想的

卻是千萬個不情願。

數天下來
時間    是怎麼過的？

完成了最磨人的功課，
慶祝了主的復活，
除了電影節
還有《客途秋恨》和《愛、誘、罪》
認識了新朋友，也會了舊的，
沒有真正的休息，

卻在光與影之間

找到了真實。

The 5th paper this year

I finally came up with the film I want to analyse for the coming paper - The Brave One - with one of my most admired actresses of the day Jodie Foster. Though not many positive reviews were found over this film, it stirred up my mind for quite a while as it's actually justifying, at least trying to, what Amercia has done after the 911 assault. Yet this time my focus will be on its nostalgic sentiments...right, sth that no critics had even mentioned and hopefully I'm not going in a wrong direction for my paper. After all, it's about my persuasion skill, right? Language plays.

最近的心情爛透了

休息沒多久又到新一季paper的死線，總覺沒完沒了的，幾天下來腦袋依舊空空的，情況嚴峻得很...工作嘛，也不太順利，東西翻來覆去仍是老樣子，沒絲毫進展，難纏透了；很想離開這個環境，歇一歇，卻又理性地知道問題不在於環境本身，而是自己的心態...我想：得找個機會讓腦袋輕鬆一下了......

HK Film Festival 2008

it's the annual gathering for all film enthusiasts again. every year there're just too many good films you wanna watch that time crash seems unavoidable. i've tried not to be influenced by those film excerpts but you just can't select one among the pool without a glimpse of the catalog. surprise only happens when you don't have too much knowledge or expectation on the event.

anyway here's my schedule this year, not too much but enough for me already. see if we can bump into each other in any one of the occasions :) see you all~~

18th, 7:15pm 儘管如此我沒做過, p23
21th, 8:00pm 我們的天父, p60
22th, 9:30pm 翠絲的碎片人生, p55
23th, 6:00pm 鐵木真, p10
24th, 6:00pm 警察樂隊來訪時, p62
25th, 7:15pm 千年善禱, p24
27th, 7:15pm 華麗安琪兒, p16
3rd, 7:00pm 出入人口, p22
6th, 8:45pm 電光滾石, p9

More on "Lust, Caution"

I am not a fan of Eileen Chang, nor am I a student with strong Chinese literary base, but Lust, Caution gave me a feeling that Chang was trying to play down, not to say 'hide', some parts of the content deliberately, particularly the sentiments between Chia-chih and Mr. Yee. The original story was largely narrated from the perspective of the heroine Chia-chih and basically only about an assassination. Other events within the story were part of Chia-chih's memory. We can hardly know the breast of the hero Mr. Yee, except the later fraction which contributed the only hint of his emotions towards Chia-chih. We were told that the two got two meetings before this last one but what has been done besides sex? And what has constituted to their intimacy in the very last scene that even hindered Chia-chih from her long awaited plan? How come such an old hand like Mr. Yee would fall into this trap of femme fatale? What has Chia-chih done to win over his trust? And above all why did Chang choose to omit these episodes? Obviously Ang Lee has tried to fill up the gaps with his own propositions, from which I would say most of them were reasonable and had in turn enriched the original story.

I agree with what Robert Stam mentioned at last in Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation that as critics 'our statements about films based on novels or other sources need to be less moralistic, less panicked, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies,' but 'more rooted in contextual and intertextual history,' and above all 'less concerned with inchoate notions of fidelity.' (75) There could always be accuses for being unfaithful to a source text if one has to be picky on every single difference found under direct comparison, not to mention the two mediums are intrinsically different in nature. In fact, I found the cinematic version a more thorough reading and interpretation to Chang's story from the focalization of Ang Lee, which has added more ingredients to the text but of course certain kinds of ideological transformations were suggested at the same time constituting the major difference between the two.

Mr. Yee has been a more humanistic person in the film, at least from the way he reminisced Chia-chih in the final scene. She certainly was not the one and only femme fatale in his life. We did not have such a bad feeling towards traitors–primarily with Tony Leung's long established positive image–which might probably not be the initial idea of Chang. The most controversial of all for sure is the three 'extra' sex scenes supplemented by Lee. They had amplified the fear of Mr. Yee as a traitor, which made the violence of the first sex scene perfectly sensible. He could trust nobody because everyone wants his head off for patriotism. The fear of death has tortured him to such an extent that only through sex could he find his true self, his own existence. Whether the sex scenes were a must is beyond our discussion because it was by and large a personal decision of Lee and what we as audiences have been confronted with is this text–already presented publicly and is now the only base for our criticism.

HK Poster Triennial 2007

Poster Triennial this year is more or less the same as previous years'. Perhaps the more your database expands, the less surprise you get from 'new' candidates. Who can defy that creativity does not bear the burden of history? Interestingly, I read the following article on a site the time I draft this post, featuring a small exhibition Typo China around two years ago. What this German said was actually phenomenon found in our Chinese design arena for long. For those who haven't been to the show yet, I hope after reading the passage you take another perspective in looking at these all-too-similar artworks and figure out a 'global picture' which is highly obvious if you do pay attention to them holistically. 'A poster is intended first and foremost to be seen, not read.' Perhaps anything analytical is just extra but I do believe a poster possesses its own power. After drawing your first sight, it wants you to walk away with something in mind and that is the enchantment of it.

Typo China - zeitgenössische Schriftplakate aus China, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatraum, 3. Mai - 4. August 2006
Chinese posters had caught our attention some time before, as a satisfying contradiction of ideologically driven rigidity. The development of the poster in Hongkong and Taiwan may be ahead of the People's Republic, but seen overall this is a very recent years. Various international poster competitions have been instituted in China since the late 1990s, and here the designers want to lay themselves open to Western judgment as well. It is striking how frequently their posters focus on the characters, showing their desire to keep up with the times in terms of the unique richness of their own typographical culture. This was not the only reason why it seemed right to us to concentrate on choosing typographical posters. Chinese characters have a visual quality and a semantic complexity that go far beyond the possibilities our alphabet affords.

Our appeal to submit new works met with considerable enthusiasm. This gives a sense of the vitality of a group, small as yet, of young designers who are discovering international competition mechanisms. It is typical that many of the posters shown were produced on the designers' own initiative, because China still lacks clients who are prepared to commission posters; and thus has no real poster culture. So this selection is as welcome as it is provisional, and fits in with our attentively skeptical yet hopeful view of "booming China".It goes without saying that the fascination with Chinese typography we have succumbed to is fed on ignorance. Chinese text often affects us simply as a texture, because we do not have the necessary translations skills to be aware of the posters' expressive quality.

So can we do justice to these posters at all if we submit them to our usual selective scrutiny? Yes, if we are prepared to play by poster competition rules. For there too we make what we should see into what we want to see. And there too every poster operates by taking mutual clichés and expectations into account. Something that is part of the essence of a poster is always the perfect concession to positive misunderstandings: a poster is intended first and foremost to be seen, not read.
Felix Studinka [www.hesign.com]

看過的華語同志電影

也許是我看的不夠，為什麼同志愛戀都被描述為一種遺憾？從這幾套電影中，我感受到的是一種不確定性，一種把同性戀者視為既值得同情又充滿勇氣的一群的意識形態；只要他們仍然把自己當作受害者、革命家，他們所期望的公平是永遠不會來臨的，更何況這個世界根本沒有絕對的公平？

木顏色盒的一點啟示

數天前哥從文儀店買來了一盒LUNA的木顏色筆，許久沒用了，驚訝盒面的設計依舊，很有親切感…看着看着，總覺得哪裡不對勁，於是從箱底翻出了舊的一盒求證一下（相信也有十多年的歷史），原來構圖一點都沒變，只是圖像由2D改成了3D的樣式罷了，這叫作與時並進吧？不知從甚麼時候時開始，我們都認為立體的圖像才夠現代化（這下我又想到廸氏的動畫了）圖案為的是簡化人類世界的複雜性，而不是重構現實，要是這樣的話，倒不如把男人／女人的相片直接掛到洗手間門上好了。當影像越趨真實的同時，容讓我們大腦思考和幻想的空間就越見狹隘；當法律不容許的事情都可以從影像上攝取時，人無時無刻都可以犯罪；最後，當虛擬與現實難以被區分時，精神層面的罪行將進一步化作真實行動。

Religious allegory in "I AM LEGEND"

Not to say entirely but almost, this is an evangelical film. New York City–the most materialistic place that best represents our world at the moment–has turned into a hell due to a devastating plague 'invented' by human in the development of cancer cure. The evil spreads when human beings think that they have conquered the most thrilling threat in life and that they no longer need God.

The hero, Robert Neville, best represents one of the kinds. After three years of lonely and desperate scientific research in search of the cure, he has already defied the existence of God. He treats himself as the only one that can prevent the clan from distinction. An arena is again set to allow the born of a hero and this time to its full limits because, unlike Spiderman or Batman or whatever you can find in patriarchal Hollywood cinema, there is no other helper, no romance, except the company of a dog. Neville not only needs to fight the Infected but also to stand the everyday erosion of loneliness which seems to be the most intolerable of all. What could be more frustrating when dummies are the only one you can talk to and that DVDs become the last memory you can feed on? Not to mention how well Baudrillard's ideas have been illustrated, the self-reflexivity of the story upon our present world is nothing but painstaking. We know that they are not real, simply as fake as a dummy, but we just can't help coming back to them everyday. When Neville cried for his dog in front of those dummies, I wanted to cry too–for the stupidity of our reliance upon consumer products, for the only and pitiful role that women play in our society, and last but never the least, the vulnerability of human nature. We can never live alone.

The image of God reifies as the film progresses. Light is the shield against the devils and it's taking an increasingly imperative role in the live-or-die moment of the hero. 'Where do you live?' perhaps is not so much a question addressing Neville in his coma where heaven and earth is indistinguishable. We as audience had better asked ourselves what a life we are living–where are we now? Can we save ourselves from the dark? Or once again we fell into the trap of the evil, who simply knows what our weaknesses are and what we have long hoped for. The salvation of Jesus Christ is nothing more apparent when Neville sacrifices finally and the formula of cure is hidden in the blood of that infected sample.

Anyone noticed the environment shown in the last scene when Anna arrived at the reservation camp? It's a church. It's worship.

3/1, 7:20pm, 終於有得瞓......