Exhibition: From Mao to Now

The fishball diaries will be in the Mao to Now show in Sydney. Yay! I have about a week to get them ready to send. They'll need to be framed in Sydney i think. They need to arrive by Saturday 14th June. This is still the draft. I'm changing the writing style. Better but slower.

Notes from sitting in on classes at Creative High School

NSS Starts 09-10
First lesson, listening exam prep, focussing on numbers.
Second lesson, comprehension and local issues. Teacher so patient, doing an open cloze, hard work keeping ppls attention.
Both classes: Ss need some chinese vocab support/ glossing.
Students safe behind chairs and tables. Discussion be easier in a circular space (even keeping chairs & tables)
Throughout one lesson, students were working on a 3D design project to build a living space (for a class in the afternoon), they were cutting, fitting, gluing and listening more or less at the same time. How could you harness that desire for 3-dimensions and focus it toward the English lesson (vs cope with it).
Possible: Create a 3D game, use play sets (like the barbie sets in Marvel/DC). Lego. Read intro to a play, make the set with lego (like the Endgame one). Watch a HK TV show, re-make the set, describe the set, get prepositions. See if you can describe a set and the other team can make the set you described.

Drama games that cd be used to back up the lessons: Nouns: Mona Lisa game, freestyle. The furniture game; Prepositions: Look at blueprints and plans. Design own house or shopping mall. Make a book mapping a district. Go to the park and write down/map out which plants are where (the labelled plants).

Reading Notes and Writing Notes

Cross-curricular education: a New York Times article on Claudius Conrad.

There's a book of essays by a french guy from Madeleine's Roof Party, I can buy it at Parentheses 2/F, 14 Wellington St.

Notes from my little black book:
Textures of Aberdeen
Mixed media
Colour photograph, crayon rubbing on rice paper, diary entry.
Glue and transparency

Crimes and Complaints
Drying the fishing
Hanging fish-line
The drain (hi res enough)
New Apt with dust
My illegal roof
The guitar


Textures of SSP
Baby playground
Roof of old apt
Street
8s
All the numbers

How to win a game

I sat in on a Landmark seminar this week and it was about what you need to have in place to make a brilliant idea work. This is it:
Integrity
Relationship (i.e. interested in what's in it for them)
Existence (this blog is me working at existence structures)
Enrolment

I had a sudden flash of every fabulous idea I've had in the last ... 15 years... that has gone to shit. the cringe-making list. But when i looked at it, i realised I completed quite a lot of other things that didn't suck. They are just out-shone by the failures. So my new project is spend some thinking time to look at the failures without cringing, working out what i didn't do (from the above list) and put them to sleep. Beautiful and useful doesn't need me dragging donkeys and pianos around on my coat tails. (you know, that film with the cloud and the eye).

People I met this week

and want to remember. Stuart More from AIS in the primary part. Maarike's baby's first birthday, Amilia, the blondest baby in Hong Kong. Lots of great teaching/ using tech ideas. I'm going to go into the school and meet the Australians.

Louise Ho the poet. Lives in Queensland, is in HK at the moment. Wants to go and draw pictures of Sham Shui Po and around, and take photos. She will have a book launch here in a few weeks. I'd better find out when.

Theatre du Pif & Elsie Tu

Last night I auditioned for a production that will be created by Theatre du Pif. They are my favourite theatre company in HK. They are movement-based and multi-lingual and build their work from primary sources. I don't have acting experience (besides the everyday kind), so I don't know if I'd cast myself. But I love their style and I knew an audition would be great in itself. It was. And I liked the improvised thing I did more that the one i practised a lot. I improvised something based on the life of Elsie Tu. I hadn't heard of her but now I have. Her documents are online at HKBU. She's responsible for the ICAC. I talked to Dad today, who said she was in LegCo when he moved here. He said 'she's a professional thorn in the side of HK Government'. Brilliant. I'd like to be a thorn if it in no way inconvenienced my lifestyle.

Ink Pen and Overview

Converation with Marina about the 'Crimes of my neighbours' series. I should be writing the diary entries with a proper pen. But I'm so lazy and it will take about 3 times as long. It's really pretty, and it makes the text more about image than content which is the effect i was going for.

Conversation with Linda about the Sham Shui Po project. It needs to make sense. I didn't set it up to make sense to an outsider. I set it up to be one place with English translations. But now the context has changed, so it's suddenly a problem. Of all my blogs, it's the one that gets hit by people I don't know. It's time to make it make sense.

Tanya is...

Tanya Hart is an Australian visual artist, writer, teacher and performer. She has travelled and exhibited in in Australia and China, and has been living and working in Hong Kong for the last six years. Her work extends through photography, hand-made objects, paper arts, journalling, poetry, performance and installation.

In my life, most of my work is about relationships, communities, self-expression and making a positive difference in the world. I work as a volunteer with Landmark Education to create more powerful possibility for people in my communities and in the world. In my job I work in schools with Hong Kong (Chinese) teenagers, teaching English and empowerment through performance.

By contrast, my artwork is about the microcosm; about capturing and extending small moments in time, emotion, space; looking into the 'dark corners' and finding the thing that is beautiful there; sublimating; finding the political within the personal.

Inspired by strange obsessive women whose brilliance is in their power of observation. Sophie Calle and Marguerite Duras. Anais Nin. Alice Walker. I'm inspired by mothers who bring their whole self to their work.

I find it impossible to make 'art' while I'm travelling. I enjoy being a tourist and looking at things as an outsider, taking snapshots, writing emails, but there's no 'art' in it for me. For something to feel like art, I need to have pulled it through my own experience. To photograph the fish drying on the roof, I need to have been astounded that someone would do that on MY side of the roof where I'm drying my laundry. I photographed the drain after I fell in it on the way to work. It has to be all about me.