had lunch with qinghui, weisheng, zhiwei and huiyi. had a little discussion of whether singaporean guys are shallow. haha well let's not go into that coz it would be long. quote BBB: ' yes i m shallow, just tell me which girl is pretty.'
after the rest of people went for their lessons, qh and i were two bored people in the slacking mood. since it was a super hot day, we decided to go in for some air conditioning when we walked past chinese library. first time in four years qh went inside there, second time for me i think. took a glance of the books they had there and qh was very amused by the titles of the all the 中国古代禁毁书籍-books banned in the past, of which a majority is considered too explicit to publish in the past. (青楼艳史 and alike) 'haha ancient chinese porno novels!'
as we came out, we saw this 3D wood carving of a part of 清明上河图 on the wall. there i started my cultural tutorial with qh, telling him that 清明上河图 is the longest painting in chinese history, the original is not 3D but a brush paiting blah blah... studied it in art lesson before when i was back in china.
so the topic gradually shifted to antiques, art collection and so on and we decided to go nus museum to have more exposure to cultural stuff, since heard from guofeng some time ago that they have new stuff there. (actually suggested by qh, hmm... an attempt to prove he's not shallow?) haha... nus museum... where the 牛角(脚) story came from...
they are having this persian caligraphy exhibition there now and there is those persian or arabic music playing in the exhibition area (think about one thousand and one night and belly dancing). what? persian caligraphy? you might ask... yes... some of them looks like frost on the cake to me... it's amazing! i m thinking, when european people first encountered the chinese language, they must be amazed by the structure it. one painting like pattern, is a word and can has its own meaning and pronounciation. if say that the basic units of chinese language is 横竖点撇 etc and the basic unit of latin language is the alphabets, a chinese word is made up by all these basic units in all kinds of arrangements and it's two dimensional. in say english language, the combination is only linear. tt's the difference we are getting here. two major types of languages in the world: 表音文字 vs 表意文字. (sorry dunno the english term). english belong to the former and chinese the latter. say if u know the rules of pronounciation, u see an english word, you can pronounce it but may not have a clue what it means. the opposite for chinese. ok i m not a linguistic and let's go no further. what amazed me about the persian caligraphy is that, whether english or chinese, you write it word by word, and in either horizontal or vertical directions. but the persian caligrahpy in the exhibition, it could be overlapping in one whole chunk, could be going in circles, could be by clusters... basically in all kinds of angles and directions and layout possible and we were just wondering, if someone is to read it, where does he even know where to start??? to me it feels like a 2D animal like ant discovering the 3rd dimension, totally beyond comprehension. hmm... reminds me of this short story i read about alien languages. it was saying the aliens, they don't have words and sentence, they represent one idea in one drawing and one glance they know what it means. very very intuitive. haha that could be too philosophical to touch on i guess...
another interesting thing in the exhibition is that they got like one caligraphy item up there and there is a corresponding song track you can play. no idea if what's written there is the lyrics or what. but it sounds quite nice indeed, very persian. hmm ancient civilization... language is merged with art and music... caligraphy and painting, and melody, could essentially be similar things.
also exhibited were persian artefacts. the carpets, the pen boxes, book covers, jewel box with drawers... wow!!! lacquered paper mache and wood with exuberant colours and exquisite paintings... so exotic and so zmazing!