Category: Everyday Life

We have some stories that are not about cats

One may feel we are spending a lot of time for cats. (Surely, we wonder how much time we are devoting to cats!) However, there were some other events not related to cats, so I’d like to write about them.

 

Heavy rain all over Japan. Sunday, July 23rd

We went to the ‘50 years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings: 1925-75’ exhibition at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. We didn’t know about anything at all about Vietnamese art, but it has a unique style, and it was a better exhibition than we expected. We feel we are not interested in the more contemporary paintings, because they are not unique any more, and the artists often tried too hard after they got too much influence from foreign style painting.

Vietnamese lacquer painting, which we saw here for the first time, was interesting. We don’t know what the technique involves, but there is a type where the picture is painted on a lacquered board, and a type where the image is carved like a cut out picture. (I guess most people have done the kind of painting where you paint your favourite colours on paper and then paint over it with black pastel crayon, then scratch it and make some kind of picture. It has this kind of atmosphere.)
Some pictures were painted during wartime, but the colours were not as dark as we thought they would be. But it is scary to see guns painted in a casual view. (A gun propped up beside a nursing woman: something like this.)

I don’t remember the man’s name, but there were three or four impressive paintings by a actor who suddenly awakened to his need to paint during the war. He got money by his acting and used it to buy colours (in general, it was hard to get art materials in Vietnam), and the paintings are endlessly dark and sad. I could say it’s like shouting. His painting technique might be poor, but they touched me more than pictures that were merely skilful – it is very unusual for me, because I usually prefer beautiful paintings!

After that, we went to Aoyama Book Centre Fukuoka in the rain. A Shiina Makoto photo exhibition ‘Wind Path Cloud Journey’ was being held at the gallery.
I really like his essays, including the ‘Ayashii tankentai’ (Suspicious expedition party) series. (But I’m not good at reading SF, so I couldn’t finish one of his SF novels.) I also went to listen to his lecture at a hall near my parents’ house. His monochrome photographs, which he took in Okinawa, Siberia, or Mongolia on his travels and movie shoots, made me happy with the memories of his essays. I also thought I could buy one of his photographs for the cost of cat surgery and vaccine.

 

Tuesday, July 25th

We went to Fukuoka City Museum for the 40th anniversary year exhibition of the Waseda University Egypt Archaeological Mission, led by Yoshimura Sakuji.
Aah, I forgot that the summer holiday started! Many families came to the museum. Yoshimura often shows up on TV and is well known to regular people. We knew him only through TV, but his group has excavated many more things than we thought over forty years. This is our simple impression of the exhibition.
Chris, who likes Egyptian history, always says he has more chances to see Egypt-related exhibitions than he did in the country where we used to live. Even though we live in a minor city and don’t go to all the exhibitions, it seems we go to an Egypt-related exhibition once a year on average.
By the way, I always wonder about people bringing the stuff they excavated in places like Egypt with them when they leave the original country. Is it better than looting? It seems those artefacts mostly belong to some kind of museums in other countries. (This is just a simple question of a person who doesn’t know many things.)

–YS, 26 July 2006

26 July 2006