l'exposition d'art, or 美術展 (Bijutsu-ten)

I got a Kindle for Christmas but was halfway through a book ('The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen) so didn't start using it until this week. There are a lot of older books which are no longer under copyright on a website called 'Project Gutenburg' available as ebooks. So I downloaded 'The Brothers Karamazov', 'The Odyssey', 'Don Quixote', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'The Count of Monte Cristo', and a few others all for free!

I'm about half way through 'A Tale of Two Cities' at the moment and reading that on the train was part of my cultured day today. The other activity which made me a culture vulture was a visit to the National Art Center in Roppongi. They have a Surrealism exhibition on at the moment which is one of the few art movements I have an interest in. I don't pretend to know a lot about art and rarely visit galleries, but I like art that makes you think a bit. Basically people used to paint to capture images, and whilst I can appreciate that they look nice and the artists have a lot of skill they don't really hold my attention....I guess it would be slightly different if it was a place or a person I had a connection to though, then it would be like a photograph - reminding me of the person or the place.

When art doesn't imitate what you see then I tend to think about it a bit more. I can attach my own story or interpretation, or in some cases it just seems like a bit of fun and makes me smile. I wasn't that impressed by the exhibition to be honest, but there were a few interesting paintings and sculptures. I think I spent more time trying to work out what the titles were. The art was on loan from France and so all the information was in Japanese and French. Occasionally if it was an English or Spanish speaking artist the title was printed in the original language and Japanese, but most of the time I struggled. This isn't much of a problem with landscapes, unless you particularly want to know where the scene is, but when the painting doesn't replicate real life then the title often holds a lot of clues and can help you to understand it more.

It was another occasion which highlighted how bad my Japanese is. I've never studied French and can't speak it, but could often make more sense of the French explanations than the Japanese (despite being here for over 4 years!). Of course there are more similarities between the English and French language but, in the written form at least, it's a bit of a poor show that I can't understand a lot of Japanese. Anyway, here are some images from the internet of a few of the pieces I saw and thought were interesting...

'Loup Table' by Victor Brauner. I guessed this was 'fox table' but it seems to be 'wolf table'. Not sure why, looks like a fox to me. Maybe there's another level of meaning that I'm too dim to understand , or it makes sense in French.
Thought it was quite funny that he's included fox balls on the table, but nobody else tittered when they were examining it (the sculpture, that is...not the balls. Nobody paid them any particular attention while I was there).


'Lion, Cheval, Dormeuse invisibles' by Salvador Dali. This is where the language difference causes problems. I could understand the 'Lion' and 'invisibles' bit, and guessed that 'Cheval' was horse after studying the painting a bit. I couldn't see anything that looked like a door mouse though, which was my guess for the final word. Apparently, in English it's 'Invisible sleeping woman, horse, lion' in English. Wasted my time looking for a door mouse then...

Next we have 'Le Labyrinth' by Andre Masson. Nice and easy to understand this one. If you look closely you can see David Bowie with his crystal balls and the Bog of Eternal Stench. Only joking! it's nothing to do with the film. Slight Minotauric (I just made that adjective) feel to this one.


'Le Modele Rouge' by Rene Magritte, or 'The Red Model'. Another nice easy title. I could even understand this one in Japanese! It's difficult to see in this image, but the feet have laces like boots.

Anyway, that's the end of my presentation. There were lots more and I actually bought quite a few postcards. Not sure if I'll keep them or send them, but I'm sure some of these cheerful pictures would brighten most people's day if they popped through the letterbox.

Singapore

I hadn't been abroad for about a year and had massive travel withdrawal. So over the winter holidays we visited Singapore. I didn't know much about it and had the image that it was a sterile city with no character. Not to let preconceptions get the better of me and tempted by the warm temperatures even in December, I went for 5 days between Christmas and New Year.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. It was like a mini-Tokyo but more international. There were Chinese, Arab, and Indian areas of the city. Food was a mixture from these places and surrounding countries, like Thailand. There were even shops and brands you see in the U.K, and most of them weren't 10x the price as they seem to be in Japan. Everything worked efficiently (not really the norm in S.E Asia), there didn't seem to be any kind of crime or social disorder, and as English is (the?, an?) official language it was easy to communicate. Food was cheap too and it was nice to be able to eat a lot of fruit and veg for pennies.

Some of these features highlighted that despite the advances in technology it seems that Japan's geographical isolation still plays a major part in the country's economy and culture. There's not much space and no surrounding countries which produce a lot of fruit and so the costs are much higher due to transportation costs. Boo to high priced fruit!

As with most cities I've ever visited, about 3-4 days seemed to be about enough time so we struggled to find things to do towards the end of the trip. Not a big problem though. It was quite nice to do a bit of shopping and just wander around a bit more.

Do you remember how to see more photos? No? Pshhhh....just click the title of this blog post dummy!