'Butterfly Flow' show

My new show, ‘Butterfly Flow’ is starting next week (Aug 31^st – Sept 19^th) at the Piao Piao Gallery at 63-1, Yong Kang St. Taipei. This gallery is in the heart of a vibrant district of eateries, bars, antique shops and galleries. I love this area! For more info on the gallery and the address in Chinese go here.

If you’re in town on Sept 4^th please come along to the opening party starting at 7pm. Hope to see you there!

One of the newer silk paper cuts on display is the latest in my series of circular works entitled ‘Jagged Waves’.

Waves crash against defiantly jagged rocks creating a rugged razor sharp surface. Higher up in the rocks plants and flowers cling to the surface immune to the salty spray around them.

The waves twisting and turning

The swirls and eddies of water

Some flowers

Boom! Boom! Vroom!

Taipei is the home to the world’s tallest skyscraper, the 101. From my studio window I gaze out at it. It’s so tall the top seems to be in a different climate zone with swirls of cloud often hanging around it.

When they were building the 101 they realized that it was so tall it was going to interfere with the flight paths of planes from the Taipei city airport. Now planes take a wide arc around it but I always wonder what if one pilot forgets the new flight path.

When you visit the 101 it really is an incredibly well built and run building. Ordered, clean, calm, efficient and smooth. A world far removed from the surrounding streets where hordes of motorcyclists jostle and weave for the advantage of beating the next traffic lights. Some bikes spew acrid smoke while others twist and turn, mounting sidewalks for shortcuts with seeming impunity. Their riders casually smoke’n’ride, shirts flap in the wind, flip flops hang precariously close to the tarmac. It seems that, on average, once a month I come across a motorcyclist sprawled on the ground, the result of a bump or clipping a car or a shunt.

Everyday I see the survivors hobbling around with scuffed legs and arms the result of a ‘tarmac tussle’. I often ask myself if they’ll ever ride again. The answer is probably yes. I modeled my characters, the Dancing Boys, on these people – carefree and careless.

Here’s a detail of a rough sketch for my next project featuring the Dancing Boys, ‘Boom. Boom! Vroom!’ (click on it to get a clearer view). One has crashed his scooter into the 101 which is feeling the full effect of the bump. Below ground cockroaches scuttle around out of sight. Meanwhile high in the sky another carefree and careless Dancing Boy is bare back riding a plane as it hurtles through the sky. He’s being chased by others who gleefully prance along in the plane’s jet stream. Then there are the rap dancing Dancing Boys who gaze in wonder at the catastrophe unfolding before their eyes. But it doesn’t stop them. They see this kind of chaos happening every day in their world.

Once the sketch is done I’ll trace it onto silk and start cutting out the image. I just gotta make sure to cut it so that the writing comes out positive!

Silk Paper cutting decoupage

Here’s some more decoupage using all those scraps left over from silk paper cutting. However this time I also used some more complete cuttings that ended up in the reject box. I cut and trimmed them and stuck them to large bamboo plates. The leaf one was originally from a larger cut done as part of a series of silk cuts based on the four elements. The dancing boy only got as far as the sketch stage when I originally designed him. Since the design fitted the plate’s size it only seemed logical to cut it out and glue it on. If you’re interested in purchasing one of these then please contact me for further details. Comments please!!