Last leg last leg

I am offering libations to all friendly cosmic and earthly energies, supplications to forces great and small... please give me energy and steady nerves to finish my exhibition and trip to Myanmar during the next two weeks.

Amen amen amen.

Killing Jars series

This is an old work I made in... let's see now, 2005! Zooks! That's 3 years ago. I've been thinking about these lately, I don't know why. They remind me of a time when I thought about art differently. This is one of the few works of mine I really like, and wouldn't mind seeing again. But it's in some collector's cave of treasures now. If I could buy them back...

Enjoy!

City Scurvy, Acrylic on glass, 2005
Individual jars painted with teeth, a jawbone on the outside. At the time I was full of angst - the city was eating me up inside, and I was suffering from an impacted wisdom tooth!

N.o. Substance : Disc 1 Disc 2, Acrylic on glass, 2005
My boss at the time gave me a copy of New Order's double disc album Substance. It was a revelation! Numbers are the time for each song on the album, inside is the list of song titles. I remember I would drive alone to the airport with this playing, feeling quite sorry for myself. Yes, I was an emo little thing.

Dream, Acrylic on glass & folded acetate, 2005
The text on the outside indicates the parts of a full-rigged sailing ship, minus the ship itself. Trapped in the inner bottle is a little boat folded from acetate. The ship obsession began even then...

Lover, Acrylic on glass & windshield fragments, 2005
Two fragments from a broken windscreen stuck in their respective timezones. This is the saddest work in the world. Heartache, heartbreak and woe! I found the windscreen dumped by the side of the road - I had a friend with me who rolled her eyes at my 'zup lap sap' (trash-picking) habits but helped me find a plastic bag to put it in anyway. Time weals all hounds - but everytime I see this work I remember...

*All these images are copyright Sharon Chin, 2005. If you use them, please ask for permission, or at least credit.

An imperfect art

Snapshot of Chinary Ung's Spiral IX, taken from Malaysiancomposers.com

Crunch time has come to visit again. The show is 3 weeks away and counting, with all the usual sicknesses in full attendance - heart beating faster, intense anxiety, fatigue. If you visited my mind, what you'd find there is a blinking neon sign.

I won't be posting often, but please read *this* lecture by Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung. I searched him out after reading a wondefully moving interview with him and Malaysian composer CH Loh in this month's Off The Edge (which by the way, is an excellent issue overall).

He talks about how art (music) is imperfect, and speaks soulfully about the creative process as a spiritual quest that is 'not about position, it's about expression and liberation'. Yes, yes, you've heard it all before. But for me, I find that I can never hear enough of this sort of wisdom, and in fact I DON'T hear enough of it. I think no matter what sort of artist you are, whether successful or washed-out, you are always waiting for a teacher to show you the path again... that path... which shimmers tenously, blown in and out of sight by fear and... what else but a lack of faith?

At this point, I'll whisper to you my deepest dream: I want to live by the sea doing what I love to do, and build a community around that. The end of 2008 will mark 4 years since I started living and working as an artist. I think all this time I was (have been) struggling madly (fiercely!) to spiral from the outside into the center. Next year, when I begin my new job, I WILL be at the 'center' - it's the logical conclusion of my quest so far. The path I began on can't go much further than that, I think. So after that time (how long will it take? 1 year? 2?) in the center... I'll start spiralling out again... reaching for the ocean, my home.

But yeah, go read that lecture. And wish me luck for my show!

Soooo... what kind of art do you do?

Is a question that poses a real conundrum.

I feel as though I'm never more boring as when I try to answer it. I blather on... verbal subterfuges 'uh, conceptual artist... all kinds of media... no no, not a traditional sculptor IN THAT SENSE but...'; mumbled jargon followed by a quick change of subject. Hardly doing myself any favours in the process.

But trust one of my banker best-friends to come up with the perfect solution:

T.W.: Betta, what you do is you make beautiful things out of rubbish.

She nailed it! That's what I'm using from now on!

Ink and hair

I'm going to be cliche and declare that I hate women's magazines on the whole, yet bafflingly, once in a while, I absolutely MUST know what Keira bloody Knightley's or Angelina bugger Jolie's views are on life, love, sex and global warming. Yeah, usually when I'm stuck in a doctor's office with nothing to read. Some, like Marie Claire or Harpers are okay (I've been in the former and a friend works at the latter), but really... ugh whatever, I'm hungover and miserable so I'm just going to say it... it's all excreble.

A magazine I've started reading lately is Inked, which is about tattoos generally, but dressed-up in culture, art and fashion. Their photospreads feature absolutely gorgeous creatures, all real women with their tattoos who don't look retouched. You totally see goosebumps, shaved legs (well-shaved legs, but at least you can TELL they're shaved, at least you know that despite what you see in ads and fashion shoots, women do not enter the world as naturally hairless as... as... bloody hairless Mexican dogs), frekles, scars, folds in the armpits and neck, and all kinds of skin color and body shapes. And it's not like those stupid 'Real Beauty Within' issues women's magazines invariably put out once a year to convince themselves they're not purveyurs of unhealty body image and general shithouse-ness. They are just beautiful, beautiful shots of beautiful women in beautiful clothes and make-up.

Wow, I'm in a GOOD mood today, aren't I? Can't even summon up the will (Betta it's called latent perfectionism, fuck you!) to find different words for 'beautiful' in the Word thesaurus. Sigh. I'll stop spreading around my inner anger and misery like a bad case of herpes now. I'll leave on a high note: here's one of my favorite photos in the lastest issue of Inked, of the impossibly beautiful tattoo artist Julie Becker. I've decided that this will be my next haircut as soon as the current one grows out.

Enjoy, bitches. Oh, and pay a visit to Inked online where you can see the entire photoset. Some of them are in colour. Mmmm.

photo taken from Inked Mag online: www.inkedmag.com

I drank the Seven Seas*

...and some Club 99*

...and vodka

...and beer.

Oh yes, there was quite a bit of sorrow to drown. I did it with great dedication. But that's between me, the bottle(s) and the hills.

*these are Malaysian liquors well known for their... ahem, affordability, efficacy, and ability to induce a blindingly painful hangover. There's a reason why they're sold at Chinese medical halls throughout the country: cheap cure for misery, but apply with caution.