It was a short trip: Two full days in Guadalajara and 3 days in PV (mostly on beach). I only wish I could have spent more time down there, but work beckoned. Now only a few images were caught by my camera, since I partied way too much without a camera on hand!

The renowned British photographer Martin Parr did a project (autoportraits) to showcase the photo studios around the world. He asked them to dress him and take a portrait of him. The ending results, when shown together, demonstrate a diverse set of asthetics and techniques associated closely with the local customs and pop culture icons. When M and I went to China last December, we went to the BARSAR studio to take these photos. Apparently glamour studio shots are very popular in China for young women and wedding couples. They are big business and make very good profit, although by American standard their service seem relatively cheap, considering that they would do all the hairs and makeup and provide all kinds of costumes and propups. For a few hours you can live your fantasy and play roles from Hollywood or old Shanghai. Our photograher was a handsome young boy who recently graduated from photography school in WuHan Hubei. He got excited when I took the liberty to improvise and posed in unusual ways...

As a photo journalist for state-run Worker’s Daily, Liu Zheng set about working on a series about common people in 1994. It took him eight years to complete, and the series, under a very generic title called “The Chinese”, caught wide attention and has since been traveling around the world in various galleries. The publishing house under Worker’s Daily also published the forty-six black and white prints in a small photo book, which I found in a dingy bookstore at Beijing’s 798 art district this past Christmas. Liu wanted to catch a nation in change and tended to select small or quirky characters struggling at the margin of the society: convicts, monks, traveling opera singers, transvestites…sometimes he would push the comfort level of the viewers and show corpses and dying elderly straight at your face. At a very first look, these photos remind us of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. But at closer examination, they are not quite the same. Liu does not observe a changing China at such a comfortable distance as Robert Frank saw his adopted land, neither does he projects his own psyche into the characters as Mrs. Arbus did. Liu is very much a Chinese photographer who invested his enormous sympathy and love to his own people, no matter who they are and how ridiculous or tragic they may first appear. This is quite in sync with the culture tradition of Chinese intellectual, who sees as his own responsibility to love and save his own fellow countrymen. Liu made these images and seemed to tell us: Look, these are my people. They could be ugly, sad, miserable, used, harassed, impoverished, sick, opportunistic, uneducated, uncultivated, unfortunate…but they survive and they have their joy and hope and dignity. I simply love them unconditionally.

Non-Chinese critics are often fascinated with these photos and tend to interpret these series under more negative light, but clearly Liu was not interested in making any outward political statement. Chinese viewers, and especially oversea Chinese, may get offended or furious due to the overall negative and tragic tone of these images. They would probably consider Liu as a sellout who caters to the West’s stereotype on Chinese. As a Chinese myself I find the images very powerful to evoke this twisted love of my own. And if one truly loves his own country, he should be able to look at the darker side without shame.

Liu has done some other works in between and after this series, mostly deviating from photojournalism and working on staging and other conceptual gimmicks, but none of them could compare to this series. I hope Liu would continue down this path instead of getting sidetracked to other ideas.

Head On, German-Turkey, Fatih Akin,
Fatih Akin has matured into a true master after this masterpiece. I cringed in my seat through the film with my heart throbbing and my fist clenching. Love hurts and bleeds, and the despair and the loneliness as culture outsiders are so real. In the end you get so invested in their world that you can only fear the worst. I confess that I fall in love with the lead actress Sibel Kekilli. I googled her as soon as I got home and only uncovered her earlier porn clips, and thus her life-imitating-art stories. Guess how heart-broken I was!

Peacock China, Gu Changwei
After the film won the Berlin film festival and became a huge box office inside China, I keep on hoping that this film will be on the radar screen of the American film distributors. No luck so far. Although the film aims to depict a particular period of China (late 70s- early 80) through a family of five, the struggles between the children and the parents are universal and should easily touch on hearts of non-Chinese audience. But since the film is neither an underground film that tried to be subversive nor a Kung Fu epic with technical wonder to woo the West, it probably would never get shown here. Gu could proudly stand in the A-list of Chinese directors after this amazing debut, and I can’t wait for its sequel “Spring Begins”, which recorded a subsequent period (mid-late 80s) I was so familiar with.

Old Boy, South Korea, Chan WooPark
South Korea has become a formidable entertainment powerhouse whose stars and films are sweeping over Asia and starting to gain their foothold in this side of Pacific. Old Boy is a second installment in Chan's Vengence trilogy. It lays out a plot that is almost impossible to believe but still very logical, with potent power of sentiment and intense visual violence. A perfect example to show that art can shock and entertain, especially when it is innovative, unexpected, and humanistic.

The Return, Russia, Andret Zvyagintsev
I stumbled onto this film by accident, and without knowing anything about it actually benefited my viewing experience. What could possibly happen when two boys went out on a fishing trip with a long-absent father? But when tension starts to build you just know that something dreadful would happen. The cinematography and editing give the film such lyrical and mystic touch, and the acting of all three characters is very unforgettable.

The World, China, Jia ChangKe
This is the Jia Changke’s first film ever released officially in China, although he has already become one of the world-renown directors. It did not score well in the domestic market, however. The reasons could be many-folded…but its very bleak ending and suppressive theme probably kept many people away from theatre. Using subtle metaphors, Jia created a story with urgency and poignancy. His real interest still lies in history’s force on the fate of small characters, but this time, he touched the fresh wounds of our national psyche and people do not seem want to be reminded of that.

Walk on Water, Isarel, Eytan Fox
Two years ago I put Yossi & Jager on my top 10 list. This year the director came back with a much stronger film layered with complexity of history, race, politics, and sexuality. Pairing a deeply-troubled Mossad agent with a free-spirited German gay guy Eytan span enough drama that could keep you suspended until the very last minute.

March of Penguin, France, Luc Jacquet
Ok I got have one documentary on my list. And undoubtedly I chose a crowd-pleaser this time. French seem to be very good at making films about animals. They managed to be both scientific (not as overly sentimental as Disney) and able to retain enough drama to sustain audience’s emotions.

The Intruder, France, Clare Denis
You either love it or hate it. But during the showing of this film in SF film festival, no one walked out in the entire 2 and half hours. Clare filled the screen with such sensuality and mysterious beckoning. It is about landscape, about weather, about aging and body and flesh, about drifting and travel and culture and everything else. But in the meantime the story has no coherence and sometimes no logic at all. Clare did not want to trick your mind as David Lynch did. She merely provided a framework and let you to imagine the rest.

Broken Flowers, US, Jim Jarmusch
A triumphant return for Jim Jarmusch to do another road film with his signature caricature of characters and eccentric humor. I was converted ever since I saw Mystery Train, and I always wondered how he would be able to make another hit after all those earlier classics. Using a mysterious letter as a thread, Broken Flowers engineered a set of seemingly normal but quirky characters who either reinvented themselves or got very bitter. Jarmusch is a quintessencial American artist who is veryt rooted in the country's culture and history. His earlier films placed foreign characters in the most American locales, and this time, he enlisted a variety of personality prototypes to reflect on what kind of people this country have produced.

Carandiru, Brazi, Hector Babenco
Like rest of Latin America and following a long left-leaning culture tradition, Brazilian directors excel in making films about marginal and underprivileged people. In Carandiru Babence portrayed a colorful set of characters from the largest prison with simpathy and compassion. After a slow buildup, the final 45 minutes ended in heart-wrenching and intense violence. I

June – San Francisco: Richard Tuttle
Friends of mine seemed to have mixed feelings about Richard Tuttle. Stephanie wondered what this buzz was all about, while Diego liked a few pieces of his (or a few rooms in the SFMOMA) but did not care much about the rest. In my opinions, his latest sculptures are simply ugly, but I enjoyed his early works, especially the simple and whimsical drawings in his sketch books.

October - Montreal: Landscape of Provence
My sister loves lavender and Provence comes to her mind as that particular smell. For me Provence brings back memories of poplar trees, sunlight, Dudet’s windmill, the crazy Van Gogh and a defeated Cezanne. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Art Museum of Marseille, organized this very crowd-pleasing exhibition with a long title: Right Under the Sun, Painting in Provence, from Classicism to Modernism. I was chased by a relentless pollster long after I came back to SF. When I finally found time to answer his questions through the phone, it became clear to me that they really wanted to find out how this exhibition could generate money for the city by attracting tourists. Nevertheless I enjoyed the exhibition tremendously. Other than the usual suspects such as Monet, Signac, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Braque, there are a whole set of lesser-known names from before-impressionism and after-impressionism years that were great artists themselves but got over-shadowed by the more revolutionary ones. It is amazing how one area inspired and changed the whole course of the art history, and those same landscapes, seen through the prism of eyes and mind of artists, could contort and distort, and eventually decorate millions of house walls around the world.

November - London: Jeff Wall
One thing about photography exhibition is that, once you are familiar with the works through books and websites, seeing the actual photos becomes much less awe-inspiring. A replicated painting is quite different from the original, and one not only looks at the image but also at the texture, the shifting lighting, and the genuine human marks left on the canvas. But this does not apply to photography. Even though large format has become a norm and made a photography exhibition experience closer to paintings, the difference is still there. Tate museum’s new exhibition on Jeff Wall used a few rooms to display his large light boxes, each of which can be 10 feet high. Walking through them is like walking through frozen scenes of cinema, with a wide range of genres and themes, from war horror to intimate domestic dramas. Jeff Wall is one of the first few photographers I studied and admired, and his sophisticated skill and extensive research and premeditation before shooting changed my perception of photography. All those references to art history, all those social commentaries, ambiguous or poignant, can be conveyed subtly using staging and acting. Jeff Wall is also a theorist who writes prolifically, and his works often infuse layers of meanings through very conscious construction. One has to stand in front of them and think deep in order to grasp, and through that Jeff Wall made a photography experience closer to a combination of voyeurism and meditation.

December - Boston: Zhang Huan: Seed of Hamburg
Zhang Huan is a household name for houses that hosts someone who knows one or two about contemporary Chinese Art. Since mid nineties he performed and exhibited all over the West. Using pain and extreme bondage or other sadistic means, his works can be disturbing and poetic, easy to attract crowd and generate buzz. One always wonders why performance art is always associated with discomfort and pain, and I have to say that these ideas have got old and don’t appeal much to me anymore. In the early 90s when Chinese artists were confronting a very repressive and hopeless environment, act of self-infliction was a profound way to express emotional suffering and dream of liberation. Zhang came out from that movement and became the most successful among them all. He did extend his early works and started to borrow freely from allegories, symbolism and rituals, forming a very unique style that went beyond simple classification. When I browsed through the series of large photographs showing pigeons pecking at the seeds glued to Zhang’s body in the rotunda room of Boston Museum of Art, I was both enchanted and a little repulsed by the showcase quality of Zhang’s works. I don’t want to deny his talent, but I still detect his intention to make something catering to the West’s taste.

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Critical Mass, a new book by acclaimed British science writer Philip Ball, went further than his American peels and presented actual maths models instead of sheer anecdotes. Ball has a doctor degree in Physics and this inevitably lured him to write in more rigor and abstraction. Ball’s essential interest lies in the human society modeled as a self-regulating system that consists of “a statistical melée of many individuals doing their own idiosyncratic thing”. Starting from here he quoted freely from statistics physics, chaos, evolutionary game theory, network, and stochastic models in economics and finance, while real examples are manifested through models used to explain traffic jams, flocking birds, bacterial colonies, urban growth, market crash, and, in one of the most fascinating chapters, the six degree of separations in social network. Underlying the large spectrum of these unrelated phenomena, there is one common thread: The mass of smaller individuals are to interact and evolve and change the collective nature of the system under the influence of both internal and external forces. This is exactly what the applied mathematics is about, the ability to model and predict the system behavior. Applied mathematics has become both a broader and narrower field as more branches get developed and grown out. My own field, operations research, is essentially one small branch, but nowadays more or less stands at its own.

It is easy to deviate to too many other topics as Ball undertook such an ambitious subject. Nevertheless he primarily focused on the human society and various topics in political science or political philosophy since he recognized that as the most significant. After all, peace and war and social engineering have the most impact on all of us. If any of the maths can be used to prevent war and positively construct a more civil society, that would be the most important science of all. But as the God is still rolling the dice, maths does not seem to lead to one final utopian solution. The system will continue to oscillate, just as the invisible hand of capitalism that may help regulate the market but can't stop the economic downturns or polarization, and nobody can predict where the human society will end up with. That is one of the most important reason why life is worth living -- the unknown destinations!

Stonehenge: I was ambitious enough to tour both StoneHenge and Bath in one day, and still managed to get back to London early enough for Greg’s dinner. The image of Stonehenge has been so overly used that I did not exactly know what to expect. But as the bus took a turn, I could already see that group of famous rocks from afar. They looked magnificent from the distance and under a broad sky. As sunlight shone through between the darting clouds, it projected long shadows on the gently-rolling green hills and created an awesome view. No wonder ancestors chose this site for their rituals. There is something mystical and spritual around.

Bath: I once met a fellow traveler who told me Bath was one of his favorite cities in England, but I did not get there until 4 o’clock, when the evening was already quickly falling. With just a few visitors, the ancient Roman bath ruins actually looked grander and more mysterious in that dimming light, as if each brick, each drop of hot spring water tells a story that has been forever lost. After the tour I walked aimlessly in the town, crossing the river and the circus and the Crecsent and walking through thick piles of fallen leaves. I could see lights flickering on the surrounding hills and the after-work crowd drinking in groups or by themselves in the bars. I felt a little lonely at those moments.

Night Buses: London is so expensive that I decided there was no way I would be able to afford taxi. And here we are, standing in the cold and waiting for the night bus after the night outings. Buses towards East London are notoriously crowded after bars are closed, but the atmosphere could be youthful and festive and you won’t mind rubbing with strangers. You are young and you party late and you live at the cheap ethnic neighborhoods populated by college students and foreigners. What else can be better than that? On the last night when we got back from Canary island, we had to take a night bus that took us all the way from Victoria Station to the East, passing through more upscale neighborhoods as well as SoHo and East. Sitting at the top deck and with a full front view, I saw rich ladies getting out of marbled mansions and into Bentleys, and I also saw homeless, drunkards, and street vendors just a few blocks away.

But I am still surprised when I found Tony D’Souza’s short story called Club Des Amis in the recent New Yorker. Set in Ivory Coast, it centers on a Chinese man from Shanghai who shares the same last name as mine. The story is heart-wrenching. The main character, whose name is Wu, came to Seguela in the 1990s to make a fortune and eventually brought over his wife and his teenage son. His teenage son ran away with a African girl and died of tropical disease in a local village, leaving the girl a half-Chinese half-black infant. Devastated by this tragedy, Wu’s wife left him and went back to Shanghai. Wu stayed and tried to take the custody of his grandson so that he would not grow up in war and in poverty. But the mother was determined to keep her own son, hiding and running away from the police commissioned and bribed by Wu. Using force, Wu eventually took his grandson away from the mother and brought him back to China.

I traveled extensively and often found Chinese restaurants in the most unexpected places. I wondered how hard and how lonely it must be to be the single Chinese family surrounded by a culture so different from their own. Deprived of opportunities in an overcrowded country, Chinese always looked out and traveled far to survive, and since China opened its door in late 70s, Chinese diaspora has seen waves and waves of immmigration to so many different countries. When cultures clash and integrate, interesting stories are bound to happen in unprecedented circumstances. Unfortunately I have not found any Chinese writers who would dig this goldmine of materials. Maybe they are too busy struggling in their adopted lands? Souza’s new story, however, captured such an unusual situation from the perspective of an aid worker, but it was framed in a larger context of globalization and political turmoil. Wu in the end was ultimately destroyed by Africa, but a new life, together with hopes, was also born out of the ruined lives.

Souza lived in Ivory Coast between 2000 and 2002, and without that experience, who would conjure up such a plot? You have to live first before you can write, and more aspiring young writers will probably take the same path to go to more remote places. After all, life is stranger than fiction, and I only wonder whether there is actually a good ending in the reality version of this story of Wu.

Our series of accidents started on the very first night. At the campground Pfeiffer, we realized the tent was not ours and the poles did not seem to match. We thought our friend Mani could have mixed things up since he borrowed it a few weeks ago. But luckily Diego figured out how to set them up before we turned back to Carmel. Anyway, the campground seemed so civilized and well-equipped that we could not wait to get out. Once we hit the road the next morning, as the trail took the first steep climb and started to extend further into the woods, we quickly felt that we were finally in the wildness.

But the trail turned out to be a long and disappointing one. It went up and down with mostly gentle slopes for seven miles before a small branch led to our camp site. The view was not as spectacular as what I expected, and bugs tended to follow whenever we made a stop. But Terrace campsite was quite a good choice. It was nicely shaded next to a beautiful stream and the water was just warm enough for us to take a few skinny dips.

We set up our tent and went on to the Sykes. Thanks to lack of information, we could not figure out the exact location of the hot springs even after we got to the campsite. Diego suggested we climb further up but after half an hour so we seemed to get further and further away from the waters. We turned back and started to explore the downstream. As soon as we started to see the trail marks (piles of stones), we decided we must be heading to the right direction. After a few more turns and climbs up the cliffs above the stream, we finally saw a pool under a rock beside which some rubber pipes were gushing out hot water. It was a tiny pool, and it could barely fit two of us. That was it?

But it all seemed to worth the efforts after we relaxed in the pools and took turns to cool down in the creek. There was a second and slightly larger pool above the rock but we were so thankful that we got this one instead. For an hour it was just two of us, and the sound of woods and water was soothing and mesmerizing. We did not leave until it was getting late and more people started to show up and want to use the pool.

We slept soundly and went down the next day. This time Diego got his ankle all damaged and had a really hard time walking downhill. But it still took only 4 hours to get out. After all, this was not such a hard backpacking trip, and I am eagerly waiting for the season to start again next year!

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