If you can't make it look good, make it giant and paint it yellow

This was a wise bit of advice/injection of wit by an old high school mentor of mine regarding art. It was something that saved a final project from the depths hell, and perhaps something someone out here took to heart and turned into their modus operandi.

China has had the luxury to produce and manufacture art on a scale perhaps never seen in human history before. I would wager that nearly every piece of public art you've seen in a Best Western or Airport Hilton is a replication or poor original mass produced in artist factories and sent to their humble destinations to draw attention away from decaying furniture and browning walls. This extremely intimate relation with the world's art (both great and horrible) is evidenced in an art village here where one can purchase a hand painted Manet, and gleaming Mona Lisa, and the one of whoever it was painted Napoleon on his fantastic steed. I would further wager that it is this very intimacy that allows the government to quite literally vomit public art all over SZ in a last-second effort to give this soulless city a hint of class, of artistic flare, and I must admit that at every turn, their hidden intentions are glaringly obvious.

I will take a bit of down time this week and capture as much of it as I can on my Leica M9 (see: cellphone camera), and post it here for you to yay or nay in concert with me. I have never really held a high opinion of public art in general, and I will gladly admit my artistic eye and background is not nearly distinguished enough to critique anything above my own humble levels of ability, but really, the soulless way the art was put up made me sad.

We'll see how it is received, certainly a lot of it is big, painted red, and to give the Chinese-lily-gild: covered in string LED's

The BP Apology and Grand-Facading

It is a widely held belief that the majority of personal blog entries begin with an apology for not being more dedicated to the narcissistic pursuit of blogging about ones life. Excuses abound and really, no one cares. The millions upon millions of people who follow this ever-changing, fast-paced, super sweet blog-o-fun wait with bated breath for the next hot update on the hot and balmy South China city. It's true.

Please refrain from fan mail as Google is starting to bug me for hogging bandwidth.

True story.


The eye of the July storm was over us this weekend and the team here jumped at the chance for a little rest and relaxation. It has been one of our busiest and most productive months, and the team has been all over the globe spreading our message and turning people on to our clients. This will no doubt be a busy summer and we could not be happier about that fact.

Tonight begins the work anew, and the week will turn our team into pitch-men and the brief window that allowed us sleep will soon seem a distant memory.

What is interesting outside of work is the fact that Shenzhen will be hosting the Universiade games very soon. I have mentioned this event in the past and for those of you not versed in International quasi-olympic games that only the most seasoned obscura-hunting hipsters are privy to, the Universiade are essentially the collegiate Olympics. Well, Shenzhen is extremely proud to be hosting this prestigious event, behind Beijing and Guangzhou and has built a slew of stadiums and additional metro stops.
SZ has undertaken an enormous expansion and beautification project to make the city internationally presentable. The completed stadiums are truly beautiful, and the new metro system is impressive, though many of us here are frustrated with the updated 'security measures' (see: ridiculous bottlenecks), but something much more impressive has been going on. SZ has been spending at a breakneck pace to re-facade the city's less than impressive or slightly older buildings/store fronts/apartments. We like to quip that they must have important the geniuses behind Las Vegas and Disney. It's truly impressive and also saddening at the same time. I've never seen such work up close and personal: sheet metal flashing pressed and matte-sprayed to look like stone facade, entire apartments covered of their heinous tiled exteriors to emulate their cousin structures in the West, and all form of small town street lights and homey-feeling public decorations.
The part of this that bugs me is that this large sum of money has been poured in to make the city SEEM nicer, while not a cent has gone to improving the lives of anyone inside the buildings. Small ground level shops have had their businesses quite literally covered to make concessions to aestheticism and symmetry, being forced to temporarily close down or perhaps use the time to remodel and renovate as many have.

I'll leave it at that, but regarding the games, we're very curious to see what the city will transform into during the games. It should be exciting.