Last night my good friend Fife texted me to ask if I wanted to go see the Ai Weiwei exhibition. I texted back "Sure" and, absentmindedly - "what is it." Ridiculous, because I know well enough who Ai Weiwei is and was very much moved the Newsweek coverage of his supporters folding money into paper airplanes and flying them into his yard to help fight his tax evasion charges. Very luckily, Fife and I were able to catch the "Ai Weiwei, Absent" exhibition on its second-to-last day in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum on my second-to-last day in Taiwan. I was very excited to see things Weiwei'd made. We saw the photographs he took in New York while studying at Parsons and the pieces Grapes, Surveillance Camera, Colored Vases, Chairs, Watermelon, and Forever Bicycles, among others. I saw his Circle of Animals sculpture, which will also be up at LACMA until February 12th, so I'll go visit them again at home. Read his essay The City: Beijing.
I think sentimental personalities skip generations. My ma is a spartan, practical woman who rarely exhibits extreme outward emotions. I cry all the time and have my grandfather's sticky-handed attachment to objects (two days ago he was showing us his seventy-year-old middle school report cards) in addition to a chronically weepy attachment to people. Prior to this week I hadn't seen Fife in well over a year. It was really joyous to see a familiar face from Shanghai again and saying goodbye at the subway station made me feel deeply troubled, end-of-the-world sick and panicked like all hell. This same feeling when: I discovered this week that I have a great-aunt who lives on Long Island. I resolved to meet her when I am in town next month, which led to a long talk from my ma about why that can't really happen, all of it boiling down to how gender inequality and fighting over money and property have rent both the maternal and paternal sides of my family apart and left us all on antagonistic, non-speaking terms.
I think sentimental personalities skip generations. My ma is a spartan, practical woman who rarely exhibits extreme outward emotions. I cry all the time and have my grandfather's sticky-handed attachment to objects (two days ago he was showing us his seventy-year-old middle school report cards) in addition to a chronically weepy attachment to people. Prior to this week I hadn't seen Fife in well over a year. It was really joyous to see a familiar face from Shanghai again and saying goodbye at the subway station made me feel deeply troubled, end-of-the-world sick and panicked like all hell. This same feeling when: I discovered this week that I have a great-aunt who lives on Long Island. I resolved to meet her when I am in town next month, which led to a long talk from my ma about why that can't really happen, all of it boiling down to how gender inequality and fighting over money and property have rent both the maternal and paternal sides of my family apart and left us all on antagonistic, non-speaking terms.
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