samsung leeum museum/korea's contemporary art museum

celedon

blossoming red and white plum trees
yu suk

a hermit with a boy servant
choe buk

small boat by blossoming peach forest
an jung-sik

chusuk che
new style of calligraphy
gim jeong-hui

child on a tree
chang uc-chin
kandinsky/klee

standing face to face
post war korea
song young-soo

mountain
yoo young-kuk

valdemosa
welded steel
john pai

dancers
suh do-ho
some/one

faint shadows of love
kwant-kyu kim

/////////////////

dual painting
yang qian

egg shape #2
xu zhongmin

terraspin
huang yan
grotesque humanism

floating = new generation of china
how young chinese artists are too independent they float in their own worlds

how do they differ from young korean artists?

5
huang yuangqing
personalizing language from calligraphy
the spirit can connect the east with the west

emotionality
urbi culture
li wei
chagall

quiet garden
wang yiqiong
the grey zone can tolerate anything

china vision 2
yan kai
cypresses = time = humanity

a hereness is six

We leave Ti We fly back into parts of Ch It grows hazywehavepassedover
mountain rang Did we believe we saw Mt. Ever It was

auspiciously magnificent

at this point. No man's land

a hereness is five

tomato wedges coated in sugar granules. muslim tea floats sage and chestnuts dried mums quietly. the boy shied a rock or potatoe at my heel. or so i didn't see but felt. enter clockwise random temple you monk sleeping. they hide deep within the temple cornershadows behind mandelas or kettledrums. to make eye and a sometimes smile. i see you in the wall mirror at the steps descending mandela restaurant. rooftop garden low ceiling ascend the stairs.

the light is making sense to me now. how it reveals the thing. how we are balanced under it. bus ride back from sera monastery to realize it is important to relax my face in sunlight with whistle jingle of bells around beyond. all colors drift past and the light flap colors towards eye. monks locals attach two pieces of metal for solar capacity. they use only the sun to heat water. through sera sounds of boiling kettles and tibetans working to raise a wall. details of daily work. he places a large bourlder on stakes of wood a woman pours red dirt mixture into the space where the boulder will go. he cuts and carves the rock to fit. one monk takes a graphite slab and pounds my backside willingly because i move through the temple and decided to go into the room and decided to take my own invitation. he knows to miss the spine. printers sit on calves strattle a long wood block of scripture. they fluidity and utterly rhythmic nothing no thing can interrupt their rhythm not the two 5yuen tourists who paid to take pictures. i remember that man is most beautiful when doing daily work and for pilgrims here it is a primary one.

we you eye are fortunate to know ourselves better in this light. no where else is it pure and unrefined, raw, raw light. the sun is on every part of our body even the forgotten parts like a toe and elbow.

the barkhor once more for a street vendor. she drops her price from 80 to 50 yuen only to give me a bracelet with explanation. bracelet meet the one i bought when we first arrived. we are identical. how so much is bohemian in lhasa.

hullo? hullo? you look. you buy. very cheap.
and to mean it. if you look you do buy.

we grow restless. we have acclimitized. we have walked.

someone takes my photo from behind a curtain.

tomorrow he will buy a painting from tashi i. i will buy a series of flags sewn together.
we will continue to walk through.
should we ask why we are walking?

auspicious/prostrating

a hereness is four

head fill dream of sauntering. my body prostrates before my imagination. a difficult day. moving in and out of tibetan people i am forced to recall i am a westerner. seen as a westerner. the pushing past feels more familiar now. in korea i can get away with my western self more; here it is not tolerated and i am constantly reminded of its presence. i am slowly facing my western ways; not in an attempt to change who i am, but understand more about how others live. how they see me and what it means to be seen. to be living side by side easterners as i integrate more and more into an eastern culture. in my imagination, i am of an eastern mind in certain respects, but i forget that no one can see my imagination; it is my body seen and translated instead.
any hope for communication is between our bodies, not our words.
what does it mean to embody an eastern mind inside of a western body as one might have it when they look upon you in an attempt to know you? that is, how can i learn from an eastern mind that is the body?

she at market stand
grabs one arm
more cheap
handle situation?
pay her respect
you obvious consumer
but did not want
to compromise myself
prey on
my humanity
i have no money
you saavy business woman
eye communicate
thank you softly
thank you softly
thank you softly
momentary human moment
weary situation
today a difficult day

affected by our interaction i could not get past muddy puddles and a band of unacknowledging monks who walked in the central compound of meru serpa monastery. we were flagged away. potala to no avail. no at the west gate. no at lhasa's tourist agency. a couple wanted to travel outside the t.a.r. but could not afford the permits.
a pilgrim's peaceful ways seems very treacherous and dangerous to understand. i do not understand it, but i can respect it. it seems that to be peaceful requires a certain amount of aggression. it is really difficult to feel this.
to see pak la buk cave relief paintings and a monastery. a very young monk makes eye contact with me as we cross pass the wicks burning in yak butter and wax. we pass right past each other. he looks out the window for a long time. she looks in the window of the cafe, who, i do not know. i only held my peripheral vision there. we wait for the pilgrims to pass through before us, a long line, always moving clockwise in these holy places. tibetan children are the most directly demanding. one boy tried to stop me in my path for the length of a block; i continued to walk forward acknowledging him under a soft voice with words he could not understand. it was difficult to get around him. he only held one hand up and shoveled food into his mouth with the other. never once looking me in the eyes but clinging to me as though i were his mother.

how to get past the other before the "i"?
i struggle with this. it. is. not. about. me.

i am uncomfortable most of the time here in tibet, but it is necessary and it is not easy. still it feels of home in the light and i came here initially for that. despite my discomfort, i still love it here. i love it because it is authentic out of necessity. tibetans use everything here. they depend on each other like no other people i've met.
they sat under a tent carving scripture into stone tablets they broke from the rock of the mountain. they take from the mountain and give it back language so that language is embedded literally into the mountain.
so that rebirth of language continues.
rock hives. thoughts of andy goldsworthy.
they didn't say no to photos so we were careful.
he paid for her portrait.
i recorded the sounds of the rock carvers.
knowing the day is beautiful.

it does not seem you can negotiate with tibetans; that is, you cannot negotiate with a spiritually-inclined person. you cannot make a person laugh or cheat themselves when they are asking you to truly acknowledge them despite their apparent begging.
i did not acknowledge him in the way he wanted, but i let him see how i was acknowledging him through my act of writing:
i am doing this right now and will not leave my creativity. you may stand there or even sit next to me. but my creativity should not cease until it needs to.
i apologize if we cannot understand each other in this moment.

a hereness is three

tashi delek
tu jay chay
di gong ka tsay ray?

gu xiu nu for tea with currants and pine needles. he is playing guitar in pieces a song
half recorded half he wipes the tables down. this makes a song. two monks on the street barkhor square. one wears a backpack. one speaks into a cellphone. all the prayer beads at their sides
all the robes at their ankles. they peek into a window. hear a young tibetan sing a folk song. and two americans off to the side.

wondered and wandered into much today and the barkhor grows into an orientation we
they clockwise pour yak butter into bowls of floating wicks in the jokhang and we
old musty wood infused with yak meat butter, sage, and urine

why the basket with red and white garlands? when he plays it is folk infused gregorian chanting a meditation he can easily break with self and gather self back into. she has no money and the girls takes the garlanded basket back into curiosity and shyness. take picture, give yuen. does a shopkeeper know boredom here? where does their fascination begin? to notice everyone and everything that passes.

i saw her snatch the basket cradle it in her arms. everything is needed, shared. a kid on one neon rollerskate. which place is the rooftop? we reconciled ourselves to ourselves the other night. we will get into some world. can we be here? should we be here? will anyone notice or believe us? we live our togetherness in secret places.

here, the light is pure directness. harsh and ever present. white, white light. a man has an empty eye socket. i misheard her 40 yuen for 4 and she has no money but i have no interest in that bracelet and if it is not a photograph that means something to me i do not need it. he reminds me. circuit. square. there is an older section, still. where, but we find our ways and things we forgot about. it was always in front of our eyes, the prestige. everyone is lugging something around on their backside or in their hands, their hands and backsides pulling and lifting and holding. the day still isn't done the light makes it

gedum artists guild
tserang dhundrup
"languid dogs"
wang shi min
"women"

a hereness is two

to look them
to look them too long
to look them too long in the face
to look them too long in the face is to lose face

nowhere else have i seen such full-bodied characters

their skin alone
both sanctuary and formidable

to go into
i want to go into

a hereness is one

an arrival hauled over

a slowness delivered

we are here in Tibet


a hereness we were always inside of


a handful of kind air


where is the elsewhere in the world?

trees from a field of marsh

she?

barks waddling in a half circle

they we tethered by old rope

to

How can you decide a

mountain?

estranged cows


Face up the mountain

Press my face up to the mountain


along the highway they're


Faces against the mountain


nippled haystacks

and they we walk in mud


You forget to breathe

or your breath is still

entering a bridge planks to(o) many

All of two mountainsides

First well traversed pagoda resting

Old Korean men walk behind

with hands behind

tiny roses or knots folding against spines

Young Korean men walk aside

hold her purses her bags her hands

Young bench

Strange intercom

Wherever flurries of English, I assume too much

mainly I am being addressed am I being addressed

May I ask where you are from?

There is a beautiful bridge there

Ye, audah yo

I give my mashi toaster to a friend

She tells me about the mountain behind blueville

You climb it and there is the ghost town beyond, you can see it

A wall you cannot scale, a mountain you can climb

But both were hills

Iron nickel bridge, metallic music notes and flower buds welded on

To go over in poppy light some transfusion

Duck under the bridge and meet the red dirt roots, I swear I know myself better in this place

A farm plot protected by one stuffed animal giraffe

Makeshift irrigation for deadened corn crops and rice paddy fields

becoming swampland becoming

Red earth

To make use of the war

Old barrack gardens

A minefield where whole families travel

To make use of the war

A mindfield of barbed wire tied into asterisk risk

Vines sent to coil around new life but the wire remains to remember

Make use of war

And white gloves abound up and down the path

What I imagined was queen anne's lace, picked and fingered

For my grandmother

She will never see such a field and dreams of traveling in it her whole life

Who cares for a failing grandfather

His eyesight passed,

his mind will not let him

breathes

remember my mother or his wife

To make use of a war

His tight embraces are my closest to knowing

She calls to speak with someone normal

and could I take her up the mountainside in my mind?

entering to be festive all

April 12, 2007

I find it is the starlet bell blossoming at the end of the stem and not the head of another person that presents the greatest challenge for me

How say that body language of any car approaching

should I not use the competitive nature of my students to gain their engagement?

I avoid the post office

It is not the language collision I fear but perhaps what really wants to be said between us is the true barrier and we want to say it without words, I mean sounds,

I want to say you white lotus lily atop branchlet
When my eyes first stuck against you the unfettered wick has now split open into onion

How say that capturing of growth?

Yellow powder dust my bare feet
They glide with ease over warming floorboards

It is not the language derision I fear but the absence for want of discovery of barriers

How say that body language of Namdaemun open market laughter

In your tiny patch grassland forest somehow you rebloom after one fall


lotus lilly rising


Sungnyemun gate

White boats floating atop
enduring blades of grass

Japanese cherry trees (Yoshino Cherry slightly fragrant with pink or white flowers---Akebono Cherry soft pink single flowers---Sargent Cherry rich, polished reddish bar---Accolade Cherry semi double petals with a deep rose pink bud opening to blush pink---Mt. Fuji Cherry large white blossoms covering widely spreading branches---Okame Cherry pink, single flowers and fine fall foliage---Rosy Cloud Cherry large double blossoms that are deep pink color---Weeping Cherry dramatic boughs drape to the ground---Autumn Flowering Cherry semi double (10 petal) pink flowers, nearly an inch in diameter---Usuzumi Cherry grown from propogations taken from the 1,400 year-old "usuzumi" tree growing in the village of Neo in Gifu Prefecture, Japan) , meet the Korean Sakura cherry tree

entering karen teacher

karen teacher, i think recommend means to commit yourself

karen teacher, i aviation to my mom for help

karen teacher, my mother knows the meaning of altitude

karen teacher, i deceived a big prize from the teacher because i helped her from getting in a accident

karen teacher, i deceived that boy by leading him to the haunted house when i said i would take him to his mom

karen teacher, i want to chase the fish very much

karen teacher, a kitten eat a mouses

karen teacher, a pronoun is what it is because it was born that way

karen teacher, joy is a baby kangaroo

karen teacher, i was very careful at bear



dear sue, i love that you sneak little stickers on my arm and purr about it all class

dear brian k., thank you for moonwalking back to your chair

dear 2nd graders, thank you to whoever left the blue marble with the white ribbon running across it on the podium. dynamic korea and i stole that marble with ease

dear woo-young, you are quite possibly the funniest student i have, especially when you playfully complain about things like the tip of a marker being furry from use. you say, "i do not like the fur"

dear sung-hee, stop tattle-telling on other students; seriously, it's annoying

dear yeong-sip, your fellow students would like you to stop expectorating when you speak; one student circled the spit on his desk from across the room

dear daniel, thank you for asking me what my position was on the usefulness of locating the object of the prepositional phrase

dear albert, you described yourself as looking like a mouse; you are very mousey when it comes to doing work, but sickeningly cute

dear 1st graders, i had so much fun making origami frogs with you even though you fought over which piece of green paper you wanted

entering first being ill, so i'll

but basho under that loose post cooling clothing behind a closed door
intuition, intonation --> icelander, ilsander leads to lander Kadio clock,
Korean K is to K, A is to A, R is to R, E is to E, N is to N.
i fit inside of Korea with open spare, with an O to spare
You mentioned gertrude stein in my dream with the time,
but to awaken it was me walking to early morning classes we teach. i always cross through diagonally the playground of dry sand and then muddy puddles in the middle with elementary schools looking down upon

education everywhere
A boy passes me with a breaded meat-sicle in the shape of a bear.

I add in, the loud speaker enters, the night and mansion of books; there was a kind of car accident in our dream; we spoke about it.

I believe an awning is san d bagged

Hangeul

Am I, will I hide within?

thought of hannah weiner this morning but only because i came upon
her
i think it's lightly raining, no the plumbing is warming
indians
and there is a little girl of 7 or 8 who is hannah choi and she is very serious just like me.
i want her to know
why does that small dog whine so,
it is considered affectionate-like when koreans whine just enough
that it is okay to be serious and open-eared


Close, near associations in symbol or character
Who is writing in Korea right now?

He said, "poverty's child" or he began such a haiku

my body, limbs so sore, full of pending rest, those kids just run around full of little viruses almost conditioned to being in a constant ring of sickness they are comfortable with coughing, sneezing directly before your face- a sign of hello-ness, a sign of respect, certainly as it shows their harmonious states, and to share, i should be so lucky, right? and so, now i am.

and poverty's child
i am obsessed with buying spinich yo-gee-a-o;
give me strength to love my sickness, come into one step of knowing myself better through it, that i am absence of place without my body.
a woman in leg braces goes up steps into a back alley hospital today
she might have stood next to me and taken in my breath, just to feel that same leg soreness i felt, feel reverberating throughout not only that part of my body, but everywhere
nose wipe
i am balanced in my body still, my illness harmoniously distributed like little leaflets


we become poverty's child when we pay too much mind to our mind

and the rest, perhaps said in restfulness (at least by these hands and eyes):

"he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon"

live the body, live for my body,
pet that dog which whimpers, eat several more squares of dark chocolate,
modor ges soyo everything,
delight in my bruised eyelids,
taste and spit unpasterized seoul milk,
get lost, get nowhere in all your many laboring hands.

Still a mythic creature in my slowness, unknowing, and undoing
the sunlight was delivered backwards and we know there was no need to name the polluted fog that on a colder night might have been trusted to the onslought of snow clouds
now in our lungs
time-nose-run-drip

Some Solnit snippings walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together,

; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.
of rhythm of thinking, Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, : it is both means and end, travel and destination.
Fear has created a whole style of architecture , where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion We fear open public space . When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; . Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

But philosophers who thought about walking are rarer. The philosopher was a nobler profession than the physician was; today, they are, and must be the poet combined. As a philosopher by profession, one was an unsettled thinker in a settled place. Give your mind to walking. Physicians were members of a secret guild of travelers, wanderers, gypsies during Aristotle's time.
William Carlos Williams was both a wanderer as a physician and a poet.
What strange descent of alliteration,
philosopher, physician, poet

entering first awakening

March 24

A few patterings of kids run past my apartment building. I stare at the back of my W15000 alarm clock. The neon lights of Korean bbqs, mini-marts and buffets are out. A car goes down teh alley every now and then with a loud speaker and a man shouting something in Korean over and over again; it begins to sound like a song; it begins to sound militaristic; it begins to sound like a song. The walls are paper and papery thin; I can hear everything; I can staple posters directly into the walls they are so thin. Yet it is warm and comfortable; I am taken care of here. I think it rained earlier before I forced my mind to to sleep on into the noon-o'-clock hour. I am still jetlagged and need to turn my internal clock around. Still in defense-mode, my body and mind take turns being in mild shock, although I can never really feel the caliber of this shock; a defense to my defense. Perhaps my shock isn't panic-stricken shock though, perhaps I am getting more comfortable with myself, with the uncertain--with what I can bring myself to do and be challenged by, and what I cannot do at the present moment. I will consider walking to Lake Park today--how far is it again? I will buy more water, rice and vegetables, or rather, I will buy bi-bim-bap-- sa k'sayo and trot on home. I have much to read and type up for my job on Monday. I have the means to feel unalone, legs to walk it through, fingers to dial numbers and type letters and write letters. This time could be a reminder for me to look at communication again in all its new forms--its abundance-- here, I learn to hold my breath under water and still manage to breathe.

entering what I speak

March 23

I begin to speak green tea bread.
I begin to speak barley tea.
I begin to speak hello in Korean convincingly on the telephone to awoman who dials a wrong number. She is equally convinced I must know more Korean.
I begin to speak "yong-al-dur, ha sha sui snika?" "Annew, ha-jee-man adul-tile hash she neyo." "Annew, tile buteho." "!#$%&??..." "Modor ges soyo." "Ah, cho seminda." Click.
I begin to speak a translation of what I just said to the wrong number caller. Even to stay inside, full of jetlag, sleepiness, minus the 7++ cups of green barley tea and packets of instant kopee (coffee) with varying levels of sugar (yes, one can choose) printed on teh package, I am called.
I speak a call to the call of Ilsanders by showering in my Korean bathhouse, an absence of bathtub.
I begin to speak to soju na mekchu-yo, though I haven't yet tasted either yo-gee,
I begin to speak yougurt box drinks
I begin to speak bottled water to conserve, to avoid hard chemicals in the tap, today it is Jeju, San Da Song,
I begin to speak Korean television commercials that break into the very domestic and traditional and metro-sexy,
I begin to speak the option of having your noodles scissored for you,
I begin to speak my shoes off in my aprtment,
I begin to speak of 5am awakenings,
I begin to speak fo my hello kitty alarm clock that is blue,
I begin to speak the Koreapolyschool language,
I begin to speak my Korean students' rhythm and behavior, one tells me that: "If you eat a flower your stomach will hurt, but then you will grow strong; my mom said so--for real!"
I begin to speak it is not a foreign place. I find myself split second wishing it more foreign for me, but it is quick and fleeting. I will find it very foreign in my loneliness soon enough. I must eat more than fruit for dinner. I must find a new friend to eat out with as is the Korean social custom. Wanted: You teach me Korean, I teach you English and we take each other out for kimchi and soju,
I speak of enjoying the morning calm,
I speak of the onslaught of the cherry blossom festival,
I begin to speak what I do not know.
I enter foreigner slowly.

entering the first day of spring

March 20th

What falls away for me is partly conscious, of necessity, and partly unseen. That is, there are things I am shedding right at this very moment which must go their way. This must be why I never remember to use a camera, a thought which is contingent upon the next, what does it mean to record a memory? How to be like William Carlos Williams here. I am not overwhelmed by emotions right now, but patient, calm inside of them. I beg of myself to let me inhabit my experience. Slowness, says Hejinian, is the key to all. How my mind flutters to any open page right now, what strange new survival. I feel more absent and lonely outside the camera in those prolonged seconds before the finger errs in its search for the button, before the needling flash, as we, I, reduced to a subject, an object, am conditioned, am coaxed into a suspended existence for "just a little bit longer" as I "hold it", and therefore, hold myself. It is necessary to continually fall away, how else have I have here? Fold. Open.