Saturday, January 29, 2005

Subversive beauty

Today we visited the Mika Kato exhibition at London's White Cube gallery. Sumptuous, fantastical and hallucinatory oil paintings of the kinds of young doleful girls fetishised by Japanese Manga, but subverted by bloodshot eyes and scabby eyebrows. Kato does not paint from drawings, but from clay models which she sculpts and then dresses herself. The close-cropping of the faces is unsettling and all-absorbing. A gorgeous exhibition and highly recommended.

Also on show were beautiful paintings by Masako Ando - her first exhibition outside of Japan. Her doll-like girls are also subversive. In one, the girl suckles a piglet and is covered with bugs; in another the girl has an abdominal bump and assumes the pose of the Virgin Mary. See my photos of Ando's work on Flickr.

We ate some great food. We had an eclectic lunch at Shish on Old Street: lamb koftas, lamb dumplings, and a delicious fried radish cake with soy and chilli dipping sauce and Asian pear. Shish serves food from the diverse cultures of the Silk Road - the old trading route that stretched from Rome to China. It's fusion food, but it works. They also have a chilled-out bar in the basement.

In the evening, we drank at the Vibe bar on Brick Lane, then wandered up and down looking for a place to eat. You would think we'd be spoiled for choice, but I always have trouble deciding where to eat here and get put off by all the men standing outside their restaurants urging you to come inside before you get a chance to look at their menus. There are also alot of trendy restaurants on Brick Lane that look much better than their food tastes. In the end, we were enticed by the restaurant with flock wallpaper and dark and gaudy decor. I think it was called, simply, Balti House. How reassuringly high street, anytown. The food didn't try to woo us and its averageness was just what we needed.

Other links today:

+ Wandering around today reminded me just how much I love this part of London's East End. It's so eclectic and diverse, with different cultures jostling each other. I remembered Jack London's trek into the wilds of Whitechapel and the East End at the turn of the last century, and although the area is no longer so wretched, his account of the "screaming streets" is wonderful:

"The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels, but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot." People of the Abyss.

+ Revenge of the right brain. "Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion."

Now that we are increasingly outsourcing grunt-work or left-brain work - that focusses on reason, logic, speed and precision - to the East or automated computer programs, we need to focus more on right-brain thinking - innovation, creativity, context, emotional expression, synthesis, seeing the big picture - to survive.

+ The age of egocasting. A critique of our increasing reliance on personal media technologies:

"We talk about our technologies in a way (and grant to them the power over our imagination) that used to be reserved for art and religion. TiVo is God's machine, the iPod plays our own personal symphonies, and each device brings with it its own series of individualized rituals. What we don't seem to realize is that ritual thoroughly personalized is no longer religion or art. It is fetish. And unlike religion and art, which encourage us to transcend our own experience, fetish urges us to return obsessively to the sounds and images of an arrested stage of development.

"We haven't become more like machines. We've made the machines more like us. In the process we are encouraging the flourishing of some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption."

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