Bui Xuan Phai's paintings

Click any image to enlarge

Bui Xuan Phai (1920 - 1988) is perhaps the most influential 20th century Vietnamese painter. Born in Hanoi he is best known for his paintings of old Hanoi.

He was born in a Confucian household but gravitated to the arts as a young man. He attended an art school that taught traditional Vietnamese art methods, but he was to become heavily influenced by western artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Chagall. It was to mark his lifelong belief in artistic freedom and expression.     

In 1945 he supported the August Revolution which was the beginning of the fight for Vietnam's independence and freedom from foreign interference. He supported that through what he viewed as the Japanese, French and American occupations. 

However, in the mid 1950s he became embroiled in the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm movement, which is a push for greater freedom of speech and respect for human rights. As a result, he was declared a reactionary, fired from his teaching job, and barred from publicly participating in art. 

I find his palette interesting. It is not quite what you would expect to see in a Western painting, I assume it is more of a SE Asian color scheme, although red isn't lathered all over the scenes. In his urban scenes of Hanoi, he'll outline the building with a thick line and color in the surfaces. Again, a technique you rarely see in Western art. 

Bui Xuan Phai

Help Me, Rhonda

Get ready for a catch him on the rebound weekend with na Relo.

 

Reading the room

Say Cheese
(click image to enlarge)

The Room - Kevin John Hart

It is my house, and yet one room is locked.
The dark has taken root on all four walls.
It is a room where knots stare out from wood,
A room that turns its back on the whole house.

At night I hear the crickets list their griefs
And let an ancient peace come into me.
Sleep intercepts my prayer, and in the dark
The house turns slowly round its one closed room.

 

Joaquín Sorolla's paintings

Click any image to enlarge

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863 – 1923) was an extremely influential Spanish painter, although he is not as well known outside of Spain. He started painting at a young age and quickly became a well-known Spanish artist. He was an expressionist who focused on light and wind. He painted a lot of beach scenes. He suffered a stroke 3 years before his death, which marked the end of his career as an active painter. 

Joaquín Sorolla self-portrait

Māori Ki Te Ao

Get ready for an autochthonous weekend with Stan Walker.

 

Low Life

Oh Hee-dong and his uncle Gwan-seok
(click any image to enlarge)

Low Life is a Korean TV heist caper set in the 1970s. It starts with a man, Gwan-seok, and his nephew Oh Hee-dong getting out of prison. They're nothing more than a couple of petty criminals. While in prison they had heard a story of a fisherman who had brought up a valuable piece of pottery in his net. The pottery had come from a wreck of an old Chinese vessel that was carrying gold and precious Song and Yuan dynasty pottery to Japan which had sunk in Korean waters in 1323. 

Gwan-seok decides that they'll try to dive on the wreck to recover some of the pottery which is extremely valuable. He connects with a shady pottery dealer, who deals in forged as well as authentic pottery, to use him as his fence. 

To fund the endeavor the fence connects him with Yang Jung-sook, the gold-digging wife a rich developer. She has her own agenda. Her husband is building an urban complex, and she plans on upping her social status by adding a museum to it where she will display the pottery. Well, display some of it in the front, the rest of the museum will be full of forgeries, and she'll sell the remaining pieces to turn a tidy profit.

Yang Jung-sook the financer for the looting

Gwan-seok gathers up his nephew and some flunkies and heads to the coastal village he'll run the salvaging operation from. The boat captain he intends on using, who is perhaps the sketchiest character on the show, decides his boat is too small and so he has to borrow his cousin's larger vessel. 

Everybody in the fishing village knows about the wreck, and so they quickly figure out what the boys from Seoul are up to. The local goons aren't happy to see Gwan-seok's gang roll into town and so a fight soon ensues. 

However, older heads prevail and they decide, due to the stakes of the operation, to pool forces because the job is too big to do alone. Regardless, bad blood simmers between the two groups which threatens to break into more fighting at any moment. Oh, they also bribe the local police to turn a blind eye to what they are up to. 

The Seoul goons face-off against the bumpkin goons

As the show goes on it becomes apparent that they really don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of how to loot a sunken ship, so most of their plans go completely awry and they try to fix things by brute forcing it with more people. This only deepens their problems because more people mean more shares to be divided, and dividing shares, which is already a complex enough problem, is made worse by their greed and mistrust of each other. And that mistrust is well deserved, because these dirtballs would, and do, back-stab each other in an instant.

Of course, it all goes pear-shaped, and watching things go off the rails is a lot of the fun of the show. It's well-done: nicely filmed, written, and acted. It is certainly worth watching. I saw it on Disney, I'm not sure if you could find it elsewhere. 

Their fine salvage ships

     

Baseball paintings

Click any image to enlarge

Now that the World Glass, or World Pot, or whatever that soccer tournament is called is over we can get back to more interesting and exciting sports. I'll admit to watching none of the World Dish matches. However, through some sort of cultural osmosis I figured out that, since penalty shots offer the highest odds of scoring, the most popular play is to flop on the ground and fake an injury to try to get a penalty shot. It sounds screwy to me, but what do you expect of a sport that uses feet instead of hands with their evolutionarily advanced opposable thumbs?

Anyway, since summer is upon us baseball teams, unless they've already bumbled their way out of contention, are entering the pennant race. So, to flush our memories of the World Cutlery matches, I offer up paintings of people playing the fine sport of baseball. They're mainly American, but since baseball is popular in Asia as well, I've also added in a few Japanese baseball paintings.