November 2015

Makeup
Xitang, China
2015

Lectio #60
Shanghai, China
2015

Chinese Checkers
Shanghai, China
2015

The game being played here isn’t actually Chinese Checkers. I just called it that because some Chinese are playing the game and it involved the jumping of and capturing of pieces like the American checkers game does. However after watching for a bit it was clear that it was a lot more complicated than checkers; so much so that the players were taking a long time to make each move. They were also getting pretty continual advice from their audience as to what to do next.

This Machine Runs on Capitalism
Shanghai, China
2015

The communist party may run the country but it’s pretty clear that the economy runs on capitalism. Business is bustling and entrepreneurism abounds.

Illiteracy is Bliss
Shanghai, China
2015

Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. I have no idea what this says. They are characters from a bus stop advertisement so I’m sure it’s something mundane or uninteresting. But the eloquent script characters caused me to stop and admire their graceful flowing strokes. This is one instance where there is a true advantage to being illiterate.

Still Life With Boots and Twine
Shanghai, China
2015

I took this in one of the exhibit rooms at the 188Art Gallery where the joint China-American exhibit is being hung in another part of the building. I don’t think the boots and twine were actually intended to be a work of art, but in a contemporary gallery you just never know. I once saw a nicely arranged array of thermostats on a wall in an American museum that was mounted at the same level as a number of pieces of abstract two and three dimensional art pieces on the same wall. It fit right in so I took a photo of it too.

Shanghai Waterfront
Shanghai, China
2015

I couldn’t find any tires on the waterfront to photograph here in Shanghai like I did with the first shot I posted from our Scotland trip last month, so I decided on something more indicative of China than that tire shot was of Scotland. This is the newer downtown district of Shanghai, taken across the Yangtze River. Nothing special about this shot, I was standing on a promenade with a few thousand other folks, mostly Chinese, who had their cameras pointed in the same direction.

While the Chinese were quite enamored with the scene across the river, many of them were also quite enamored with us fifteen or so American artists. (The fact that we were artists was unknown to them.) We had to pose for a number of photos with various groups of them. We wondered if they took the photos so they could go home and show off their new American “buddies” to all their friends.

But that interpretation of their motivation is probably too egocentric. More likely they were taking those photos for the same reason they take selfies with a buffalo or elk in the background when they tour Yellowstone National Park–just another unusual sighting on their vacation. I can just hear them telling their friends “Look, here’s me posing with some of those goofball American tourists in Shanghai. I like it almost as much as the one of me and the World’s largest ball of twine.”

Trademarks
Loch Buie, Scotland
2015

Sheep are probably the most ubiquitous feature of the Scottish landscape, appearing here adjacent to another common sight–an ancient stone circle. We saw quite a number of stone circles in western Scotland. They are certainly not on the scale of Stonehenge or anything close, but quietly impressive in their own right. They are not typically marked by signage or otherwise made a big deal of, likely because of their diminutive size and the lack of any significant historical  information about them.

Crab Cages
Tobermory, Scotland
2015

Splice
Tobermory, Scotland
2015