Before Debbie and Salih

A post before Debbie and Salih get here.


I eat at this place a lot and sometimes take out from here. This is gong bao ji ding a.k.a. kung pao chicken. it is $1.30 for this


went to a karaoke place near my house. its weird its in a residential district in the middle of nowhere but there were tons of people there. it was like $5 for 7 hrs of singing and an all you can eat buffet crazy! and the girls wear these mini capes. there is probably a word for these.

good stuff for the vegitarians like bob. too bad we didnt eat the many yummy things wrapped in tofu bob!


this is the reason i moved to china. i took a break from working to eat dinner. me and my roomate rode down the street to eat at this sidewalk makeshift street food place that seems pretty poppin all the time. the food was good, lots to choose from, and lots to try. super cheap too. I mean it is .088 cents per stick, that is less than a penny! It is awesome that i am able to roll down the street on a warm spring night, drink a beer, experience some new stuff, experience new food, talk about china and culture and life with my roomate and then go back home and work. One of the reasons i came here is so the boring parts of life would be a new experience, things like riding the subway, eating dinner, walking home, all that stuff is just building up my experience points.


a bad thing though is how bad the air is here. here you can physically see that. I cleaned this off a few days ago and now look at it. coming in through the window.

on the other hand look at how spotless this subway track is. you could go to sleep down there. In new york if you did that you would be soaked in p!ss, have aids, and be a host mother to a family of rat babies. come to think of it i haven't see 1 rat in Beijing. Yoon said this was one of the cleanest cities he has seen and i have to agree.

I like how one of the big magazines in china is "Table Tennis World". and they love basketball here.


the University of Science and Technology has a huge mao statue. he is less fat and a lot taller than i remember him because i did have the chance to meet the man on several occasions when i was a foreign correspondant Life magazine. Oh wait that wasn't me i forgot.

Startin' to get Ballz

startin' to get hot here.

couples shirts. grossness. i wanted to buy this t-shirt of this lame little sheep cartoon character which is the only cartoon i've seen on tv in china but it turned out to be a couples shirt! They have Mr. Pizza here which is a Korean franchise. and just like Korea they use little or no sauce! I remember mr. pizza in korea being better than this though. this was like almost a store bought oven pizza. No wonder there is a bottle of ketchup and tabasco on every table because they dont use and g-damn pizza sauce! This is also the most expensive pizza i've seen in beijing. 4 thumbs down. never go to mr. pizza. on the other hand i am really temped to try this place. the marketing people really know how to reel the english speaking customers in. warm weather is here and that means street food aplenty! some spanish party that i ended up at somehow. spanish as in Spain. a couple color shots. this an apt at the first floor of my building i noticed they got a new mat that hits with that green a little down the street. blues H and M just came to beijing last month. I wonder if eventually they will get this HandN imposters its nice to know that when i become broke and homeless there will still be ways for me to continue making money as an artist. It just requires me sitting on one of the dirtiest stairwells i know in beijing literally in garbage with no shoes on. in the winter this was a disgusting almost dried up creek bed that smelled. its by my house. i didnt know that they would turn on these water things and pump water through here and that it would get all green and less smelly(but still smelly a little of course) and be kind of nice in the summer! and i didnt even notice the bonus that i got that girl looking not happy with me in the pic too. the water "spouts" that make this artificial canal it is awesome riding my bike around. somedays i go for lunch and try to go in a direction ive never been. this time i happened upon this smoke stack with a basketball hoop attatched to the side! further down there were straight up shanty shacks, it was sad, there were people out in front doing their thing so i didnt take any pics but will next time. it's crazy to think i live in an ok apartment and then 2 minutes away there are people living in corrugated aluminum shacks.

China National Gallery in Beijing again

went back to the China national gallery because Zizzo wanted to go see the Joseph Turner Exhibition on loan from the Tate. No pics of the Joseph turner exhibit beacuse it was dark and they were really militant about taking photos. that doesn't mean i didnt take fotos but i found this chinese painter's stuff waaaaay more inspirational. There were like at least 100 paintings by this guy. the guy is 69 and he looks pretty healthy so he looks like he has some more years of turning out these amazing paintings in him. This style is the Xie Yi style of Chinese painting (black ink brushes, not really any lines). I am absolutely dumbstruck as an artist by this kind of stuff. I am looking for a way to incorporate it into my work.

to give you a scale of how big this guy works. this was the biggest piece. the rest are either huge or really big. Xie Yi painting uses the white of the paper in combination with varying the amount of water and how diluted the inks are to achieve depth. that means if you F up its really bad. can you imagine how intimidating it would be to paint on this huuuuuge piece of paper that probably costs a fortune and had to be prepped and treated and soaked for days?!!

he had several differnt rooster paintings but this composition was the coolest.

I like this guy because he mixed some gong bi hua elements in there (the lines on the flower petals) to create this brush strokey but at the same time graphic look.


this one was the second biggest. look at all the white on there. look at all the layering and differnt opacities of ink and paint. can you imagine painting on this? its like 10 feet long. by the time you get over to the 9 foot mark i would have soiled my daipers 20 times over from fear of a misplaced ink droplet or a smear.


awesome topaz color used on this instead of green.

a muted green on red color scheme also awesome.


a lot of his stuff features 2 birds on the branches. there is probably an extremely poetic and beautiful reason why its always two birds. as we were walking through Zizzo was saying that every painting had a beautiful title that really hits the heart. this is a time when i wish i had a full grasp of the chinese language because if the names of the paintings alone can move Zizzo, who i don't take as an arty guy at all, then it would probably knock me out!

love the splashes of graphic leaves and flowers randomly in his work

this is not part of the exhibition. everything in these rooms looked of lesser quality and def not done by "masters", yet there were still some cool things. this thing seriusly looks like it was made with one of those fat magic markers but its still awesome and looks very illustrative.

so in conclusion the china national gallery is awesome again and if you like art then you should def come here. Debbie and Salih were are def going here when you come! another note is that i feel like Chinese and Japanese people have a better appreciation for art, especially their countries art than Americans have. i guess it doesn't help that American art is all over the place due to our history but still it seems like Chinese and Japanese people have a deeper appreciation. good job guys.

End of April - Beautiful Weather

there are actually 2 disgusting little chinese rat dogs in that baby carriage

I finally started kung fu class. The style is Wing Chun, you know, the style bruce lee started out with and adapted. anyway it is known for its crazy hand techniques. this means you have to use your forearms a lot. that means a lot of drills requiring you to smash your forearms together. so that means i rubbed of a lot of layers of skin doing one drill so i had to wait a week for this to heal.

i went to that Hong Kong Jockey club next to Angel's office for what i thought was going to be a photography exhibition with my roomate. she know someone so we went. i've posted pics of this building in the past because it looks awesome and now you get to see the inside.

they had some of the best catering i've ever had. keep in mind that gorilla cavemen don't get invited to events with catering that often but still it was pretty awesome. they even had a peking duck table. and sushi and sashimi

they also had a lot of tall skinny beautiful ladies wondering about. these girls in the red are wearing qi pao's but they look like they are wearing rugs because they are not fitted properly. too bad, a proper fitting qi pao can be a knock out. there was a squad of girls in black dresses in the back that were looking good though.

this is Zizzo's church. we rode by on our bikes so we stopped in. inside looks like a normal church but outside is intersting because there are chinese pavillions on either side. also there is a small number of christian's in china so zizzo is definitely in the minority.

hot pot that my roomate made.

angel's apartment with all the t-shirts. i won't show the rest because it was messy and she will probably be mad.

this was on the wall at the wash post. it says we must liberate taiwan.

picinic at the temple of heaven with sue sue and lulu

night fishing at xihai next to my house. i dont know why they need to use these special super long poles. I was wondering if their wives would be happy or p!ssed that their husbands are out all night fishing. at least they're not gambling. maybe that comes later

798

these look like wishes hung on this tree written on bamboo. never seen it like this before.

yes these are whole defeathered frozen chickens just thrown in this open top freezer for your purchasing enjoyment. again if there ever was a place to come and want to turn veggitarian it would be china.

i have been watching a lot of movies lately so i thought i would try some chinese popcorn. this one is "cream sweet taste"

this one is "salted shallot and pepper flavor"

i just finished an illustration for an article about the recession and spam. I know, yuk. a lot of people have this reaction when i tell them i love spam. I loved spam sandwiches as a kid. If you are asian you probably love spam. Korean's eat it a lot. it's in dubu chiigae which is basically this military stew that was "invented" during the korean war and included spam introduced by the American GI's. anyway sale of spam always goes up during recessions in the US apparently. so i had a craving for spam only i couldn't find any Hormell brand Spam so i had to resort to buying the most expensive can of chinese stuff i could find. $3. the quality is def not the same nor is the taste. i am a little scared. my eyes are shifting left to right.