Have a fine

I have recently visited the national art gallery, just last Thursday, on Thaipusam. There was an exhibition on Contemporary Art from China, showcasing the many different ways in which one can use ink to create different effects on canvas. There was a particular painting, called DNA of people/, which seems at first to be nothing more than repetitions of faces , smeared and blurred with smudges of ink, diluted with oil. Or black water colour. Yet it later struck me that this theme is repeated many times in various other paintings by other artists, all with shadowy or alluding images of people, yet their faces unknown and blanked out, leaving only their shapes to play other lines and blotches, ridges and raw edges. In some of the paintings, there were depictions of the old with the new. One see in one canvas, rows of different shoes worn by Chinese ladies from the first half of the last century to a century or more before. And yet in another painting, with repeated motifs, one see allusions to the crassness or even cruelty of modern technology, each of these items signifying man's rule on earth buffeted with blotches for cushion. The collection themselves are very small, yet they left me with a sense of niggling doubt as to what role has art in this day and age, where everything seem blaise and utilitarian. Perhaps another observer would see something different, or nothing, from those paintings. I next checked out the National Library, just two doors away. It is as messy and unkempt as ever, at least at the lending section. But I managed to find some rather interesting books which I will read, and write about once I am done reading them.

Today, I went to a class discussion on Conrad, Ellison and Faulkner. I have to confess that I did not read the latter two before going to class, but I definitely will now. Am now at the last leg of reading Jean Rhys's Quartets. While I caught my human self sneering at the weak-willed heroine, I realise just how much myself, and even supposedly 'strong' people around me, are as bad, or even worse. Perhaps we want to prove that our humanity is not weak. Perhaps we are struggling with the last throes of humanity as we plunge into the inhuman. Heck, even postmodern theories are now moving away from being anthropocentric. But then, are these theories of any practical use? Or are they echoes of our thoughts, couched in fancy terms?