Yakakutei 野鶴亭, Kirishima, Japan

During our 2-week vacation, we stayed at two ryokans (traditional inn). The first is Yakakutei 野鶴亭 (wild crane pavilion) located in Kirishima霧島 (literally, fog island) in southern Kyushu. Half-board is usually the only option for staying at a ryokan and we were happy to indulge ourselves.

And indulged we did. Every night was a kaiseki-ish feast. Not only we ate what was set on the table, we were served a few more additional dishes, typically ending with a rice and miso soup. By that time, we could barely get up from the floor.

On the right is a little stove for making shabu-shabu or nabe.

Another elaborate meal.

There were 11 courses one night. Below are the dishes presented at a casual kaiseki.

We will not bother to translate the menu which was printed onto gold-flecked paper.

These three dishes were brought on the same tray made of woven bamboo and a wooden frame.

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Two plates of fishes – this one being quite sour …

… and sashimi

There was chawanmushi.

Tasty stewed meat dish but we cannot describe what the flavor was.

 Grilled fish – yakimono (焼物) – pretty plate !

Something crunchy

Personal shabu-shabu – a shiizakana (強肴)

… started by cooking the shimeji fungi

Salad ?  Su-zakana (酢肴)

There were barely-cooked tuna hidden underneath the vegetables.

Finished with mouchi and fruits. Mizumono (水物)

The snacks and meals we had were the highlights of our trip. More posts about food to come.

Sengan-en 仙巌園, Kagoshima 鹿児島

After visiting Lake Fudoika, we came down the Kirishima mountains by taxi and came to this garden in the afternoon. Sengan-en 仙巌園, is a Japanese garden attached to a former Shimazu 島津氏 clan residence in Kagoshima 鹿児島.

Together with the adjacent Shōko Shūseikan, it forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site that focus on Meiji’s industrial revolution. Shoko Shuseikan is a museum set in a 150 year old stone building originally used as a machine factory.

The Sengan-en residence was built by Shimazu Mitsuhisa (島津光久), a feudal lord in 1658. The name “Sengan-en” is derived from a supposed resemblance to a rock feature on Long Hu Shan in China.

The Shimazu was one of the families of Edo period daimyō (lord) to have held their territory continuously since the Kamakura period, and would also become, at their peak, the wealthiest and most powerful family.

There were mandarin orange trees in the garden (above photo).  I (Chris) know these small oranges are known as satsuma in England. Apparently, the name came from the Satsuma (薩摩) area owned by the Shimazu clan which fought a war with the British that was trading in 1863 (Anglo-Satsuma War 薩英戦争).

Due to the proximity, China had quite an influence in this area. In 1736 Shimazu Yoshitaka (島津吉貴) added a kyokusui (曲水) water feature and moso bamboo, obtained from China via the Ryūkyū Kingdom.

Bamboo forest

“Big bonsai” – we called it.

The Shoko Shuseikan and this area of Japan were fundamentally important in the modernization of the country. It was here that Western industrial technology was introduced, studied and used in the creation of modern factories. We did not spend much time here but it was one of the more interesting museums we visited.

Some of the small old houses are converted into shops, selling all kinds of souvenir, handicrafts and snacks.

A stream runs through a part of the garden – the stream barely visible in the picture below. But a tradition -Kyokusui no En – is renacted here at least once a year.  It is an elegant poetry game originating in ancient China in which small cups of sake are floated down a winding stream. Participants dressed in traditional clothing sat along either side of the stream must write a poem before the cup passes in front of them. On completing their poems the participants take the cup from the stream and drink the sake.

Apart from the main buildings, there were also little shops scattered in the garden selling crafts – very low key.

 

The garden has a direct view of Sakurajima – an active volcano – they sell many postcards of the volcano spewing smoke and lava. It was not active while we were there – just clouds.

There is even a shrine dedicated to cats here !

The garden is beautiful, touristy but not tacky. It was fun to have a driver for a day.

Click here to see the lake in the Kirishima mountains.

 

Lake Fudoike不動池, Kirishima Geopark 霧島ジオパークについて

After so many posts about Venice and art, we will now turn to Japan where we spent our two-week winter vacation in February 2016.

First, we are very sorry for the people of Kyushu, especially in the area around Mount Aso and Kumamoto who endured the earthquakes in April 2016 that caused deaths and a lot of damages. We hope the people, towns and villages in the area escaped without much loss.

The first two days of our vacation were spent in southern Kyushu near Kirishima and Kagoshima (which are about 2 hours drive from Kumamoto). We hired a taxi for the day and used it to tour a mountainous area and a shrine north of Kirishima, and then Kagoshima.

Our driver does not speak English but he was super-nice. He showed us the roadside hot springs, deers and took us to eat freshly hand-made soba noodles for lunch. The entire Kyushu is volcanic with hot springs everywhere, hence the onsen in our ryokan.

Certain roads pass through open vents and the sulfurous fumes are thick and choking.

Our destination is a small crater lake – Lake Fudoike不動池 (which means literally “immobile pond”) next to Mount Io 硫黄山 (which means “sulfur mountain”).

That’s what the lake looks like on the ground (sorry about the size of the panoramas).

View downhill behind the lake.

The lake, 200 m in diameter, was partly frozen.

Pretty to look at …  but apparently the water is very acidic …. pH4.5.

While the driver took IT and Sue to use the restroom and buy snacks down the hill, they left me behind so that I can walk further up the hill.

I did not see any of the volcanic ash and lava, as the lava flow is on the other side and at a higher altitude. The map above shows the direction of the lava flow which appears as waves.

There must be a geological reason for the flatness of this mountain top.

I saw a few trees like this, the wind must be strong and persistent year round. The environment is harsh as there are very few trees.

Multi-language sign about the lake which is a part of the Kirishima Geopark. It is so tourist-friendly.

The Geopark contains 20 small volcanos that have been active from hundreds of 1000’s years ago to recent times.

Can you imagine how it would have felt hiking there and encountering an earthquake ?

The local people are tough and prepared and we are confident they will recover and rebuild swiftly.

 

 

 

 

 

86th International Motor Show, Geneva, 2016

The 86th International Motor Show was held in Geneva from March 9 to 19 this year. Since we recently changed our car, the dealer sent us a set of tickets to the show and invited us to the brand’s pavilion for a snack and drinks and check out the latest models.

It was impossible to take photos of the cars without 20 or 30 persons standing next to it. To show off the cars, there were floodlights and spotlights every where. Then we noticed some very interesting headlights and taillights. And here they are.

Some of them looked as if they are made with double-digits carat gemstones.

Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond

Find light in the beautiful sea
I choose to be happy
You and I, you and I
We’re like diamonds in the sky.

We went to the show several years ago and the set up is more or less the same.  The stands exhibiting garage equipment and car accessories are placed near the entrance near the train station. So they get a lot of foot traffic. The pavilions of the car manufacturers are in the main halls.

It was the last weekend so the place was packed. In the main hall, the walkways were so packed with people gawking and snapping photos that it was not possible to walk normally. Sue really did not like the surging crowds, nor did I.  It felt unsafe: the thought of stampede and the risk of catching a respiratory ailment from someone in the crowd.

Despite the crowds, we did see some very nice and shiny cars.

Toyota and Lexus had some very sharp-looking angular lights – quite different from those developed by the Germans.

Some do look like animal’s eyes.

LED lights certainly changed the whole industry allowing the designers to come up with aesthetically interesting lights that presumably outperform the last generation.

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The taillights have also received an update.  A classic corvette below.

Guess which brand of car is this ?

This was a Toyota Prius 5th or 6th generation.

 

Alright, that all folks !

Random photos #196 – 205

These are the photos I (Chris) took and posted on Facebook. The series was started in March of 2013. There is no theme – just something random and visually interesting. We gave each a title and noted where it was taken (to the extent we could remember the city).

random photo #196 – dinner – Reykjavik

 

random photo  #197 – curtained 1 – Miami

 

random photo #198 – just the 2 of us – Barcelona

 

random photo #199 – mr. cat – Brooklyn

 

random photo #200 – stare – Milano

random photo #201 – princess & horse – Milano

 

random photo #202 – fading- San Juan

random photo #203 – old word processor – Milano

 

random photo #204 – wheels – Miami

random photo #205 – gravity – Milano

If you are interested in seeing other Random Photos, click on the  random  tag on the left.

We have nothing to do with the ads below.

刘若望 Liu Ruowang’s wolves came to Venice Biennale 2015

The outdoor installation by Liu Ruowang (刘若望, 1977) is known as 狼来了 (The Wolves Are Coming), created in 2008 and shown previously in Beijing’s 798 art space, New Zealand, and now in Venice. Click here, here and here to see more about the Venice Biennale.

The wolves are installed in the Telecom Italy Future Center located outside the Giardini and Arsenale main venues.  It is a great location – in a thoroughfare between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge – lots of tourists.  Unlike the Biennale, there was no entrance fee.

In the courtyard, there must be at least 50 or more life-sized wolves, each assuming a different posture of aggression and beastial brutality.

The center of the wolves’s menacing attention is the Pieta by Michelangelo (a copy) placed in the middle.

The confine of the courtyard adds claustrophobia which is compounded by the number of animals in the hellish pack. While it is a static piece, the placement of the wolves between the columns near the entrance conveys a sense of an ongoing attack.

The wolves can be read as symbols of those who surround and attack the arts, history, religion, culture, etc.

Many of the wolves have blood in its jaw suggesting some targets are hurt but the Pieta is pristine white, untouched.

The exhibition is a part of the Friendship Project – between China and the Republic of San Marino. The artist lives in Beijing. On his web site, he noted that his name Ruowang is a phonetic translation of “Johann” and the village where he grew up in Western China was one of the first places that encountered Christianity.

In fact, the wolves can be installed to attack anything that is put in the midst of the snarling and bloody jaws. It is quite a clever piece of work that adapts itself to the surrounding. To some purists, this flexibility may be considered to devalue the merit of the art.

To say the least, it is quite sensational when one comes upon the installation, and it must have been a crowd-pleaser.

This post concludes our series on the Venice Biennale.

徐冰 Xu Bing’s phoenixes at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale 2015

Another work we saw in Venice that is worth mentioning.

Xu Bing (Chinese: 徐冰, born 1965) is a Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States for eighteen years. Currently residing in Beijing, he used to serve as the vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The two installations – The Phoenix – weighing 8 tons were installed in the Gaggiandre basin at the Arsenale over water.

We were not looking for it, just exploring the vast Arsenale venue and did not even suspect that there were something displayed at the boat basin.

So it was quite a pleasant surprise as the pieces are large and mysterious.  They looked supernatural or alien as they appeared to be hovering over water, ready to take off from the unusual venue.

The larger sculpture, 100 feet (30 meters) long, is identified as a male and named Feng in accordance with the Chinese phoenix tradition. The smaller one is 90 feet (27 meters) long and is a female named Huang.

In 2008, after returning to China to take the position at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xu Bing was asked to create a sculpture for the atrium of the World Financial Center, which was then being developed in Beijing. He was inspired to construct two large sculptures in the form of birds that are made largely out of construction debris and tools that he salvaged from the site.

Originally planned to take four months, the sculptures ultimately took two years to build (completed in 2010); by that time the developers of the complex had decided the sculptures did not meet their needs.

They were displayed at the Today Art Museum in Beijing and at the Shanghai World Expo before going to the United States in 2012. After a year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, they were then moved to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, where they were unveiled to the public on 1 March 2014. They were suspended from the ceiling of the nave, where they spent about a year.

Another of Xu Bing’s work that I(Chris) saw years ago in New York was Tianshu (“Book From the Sky”) – a large installation featuring precisely laid out rows of books and hanging scrolls with written “Chinese” texts – 4,000 characters that looked Chinese but were completely meaningless according to standard Mandarin. It was not shown here but it was memorable.

Click here, here and here to see more about the Venice Biennale.

Qiu Zhijie 邱志杰 @ Venice Biennale 2015

This and the following two posts will be about works by individual artists that caught our eyes in Venice. Co-incidentally, the three artists are all of Chinese descent. The first is Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰, 1969) who was invited to participate in the Biennale by the organizer.

His work –The Jinling Chronicle Theater Project – was exhibited in the Arsenale venue but not in the Chinese pavillion. The project appears in part as a series of ink-and-wash maps in the tradition of Chinese landscape painting. It renders aspects of certain intellectual concepts and recurrent roles that repeat themselves in Chinese history.

Bilingual names are provided for each concept or role. Our apologies for the small photos which are hard to read. The concepts and roles named in the painting immediately above are: memoirs, news, koan, inventor, revolutionary, stepping stone, frog.  

The concepts and roles mentioned in the painting above are: inn, fortune, thunder, geographer, shangri-la, tortuous path, lament, history maker, reform.

According to Wikipedia, his work deals with the struggle between the forces of destiny and self-assertion, as well as social fragmentation and transience. The concepts and roles mentioned below are:  out of border, wolf smoke, cavalry, merchant, great wall, epitaph, will, licentious emperor, central plain, joker, highway pavillion, supreme seductress, monk, curer, night rain.

The concepts and roles mentioned below are:  comet, lobbyist, deposed empress, dictator, eunuch, bribery, elixir, imperial court, jade seal, southern flight, local prince, fisherman, eastern palace, imperial in-laws, dragon vein.  

One can roam from one landmark (concept) to another topographically and ponder the meaning (if there is any) of their juxtaposition. The project also offers 108 surreal objects corresponding to some of the concepts and roles in the painting.

Ploy

“Ploy” appears in the below ink painting. The other concepts and roles named are: warlord, soldiers, commoners, household, banquet, samsara, strategist, and princeling.

Evil cult  – this object reminded us of Rene Margritte’s pipes and certain Czech graphics designs.

“Evil cult” appears at the bottom left corner of the photo. The other concepts and roles are: natural fortress, walled city, nostalgia, covenant, recalcitrant army general, northward march.

This is the bottom half of the same painting. The other concepts and roles shown here are:  bandit, canal transport, torture, prophecy, natural disaster, peasantry, taxman.

I(Chris) liked maps and infomational graphics generally – so it was really fun to peruse the ideas and the execution. It was unfortunate that there was not enough room in the Aresnale space to spread out all the 108 objects.

“Minister of Propaganda”

The other concepts and roles named in the painting below are:  servant, nursery rhyme, story teller, mad man, ghost. The minister of propaganda is on the right side near the edge.

Qiu Zhijie is an accomplished author on art theory books and a professor at the Chinese Academy of Art. He studied printmaking and is skilled in calligraphy. He is interested in art production, employs many media, and champions the idea of Total Art.

There were several bigger panels of ink painting (see above for example) in the tradition of scrolls, with more details depicting the life of people in a small traditional town, but it is not possible to properly show them here.

Hope he publishes a book of these paintings.