All-Day Hollywood

A 10 hour flight from Seoul to London, living in the non-time, non-place of the (very decent) Korean Airlines Boeing. This non-experience in a non-environment is exactly the right time to watch Hollywood films. The place where time drifts confusingly and illogically; where people behave very consistently but completely insincerely; where workers in the most unhealthy and grindingly repetitive, toxic jobs retain first-class skin care and make-up; where camaraderie is forced and dictatorial; where the network lives on completely independently of the people in it.

All three of these films were completely preposterous: Oliver Stone tried to shoehorn a family drama into his torrent of stable-door moralising and his film's credibility drowned early doors; Clooney remains very watchable on a big screen (though this is a very poor re-heating of the leftover excitement from "Michael Clayton") but the story here vanishes in the vastly-cinematographed Italian hill-scapes; "The Town"'s producers could afford to supply enough excitement for a crime caper, but ran out of cash when they had to buy some character-development and writing talent.

All that sounds harsh, but I'm dreadfully jet lagged.

Fractured Languages

At the Sejong Centre Special Exhibition in Seoul, there is a very digestible retrospective exhibition of the work of Ungno Lee (이응노), 1904-1989, a painter with tapestries and collage.

Being as I am beginning to learn to write and read Korean, these strange agglomerations of forms and vocabularies made a lot of sense.

The real skill was in making sure that there was nothing that really reminded us of an actual letter from the Korean of English alphabets in there. Vertical and horizontal suggestions, scatterings of punctuation, mountains of characters unfettered by page-lines, are presented on carpet-textures, hessian materials. The colours are very undemonstrative, very carefully chosen to not get in the way, such that the colour is always there, but isn't the point at all.

In some of the pieces, the characters almost melt into the the texture of the fabric, such that forms and ground are unable to resist each-other, or language and page cannot remain differentiated. Furry art should also be strongly encouraged.