The Boddhisattva had been given two tickets to the new Paul Chiang exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. She did not intend to use them so we took them off her. Off we went down to Yuanshan where the museum is located (also the big farmer’s market in the expo centre), stopping first for a quick and slightly sickly Japanese meal at a little restaurant whose primary attraction was an illustrated menu with photos of very tortured looking fish.
I’d never heard of Paul Chiang and to begin with I wasn’t that impressed. There were huge oils in intense colours, quite hurtful to the eye. At some point I started really enjoying them, though: one could drown in them or fall into them, and each one seemed to have worlds hidden behind shifting mists. There was a particularly good series of immense indigo paintings which one could stare at for a very long time, and a room of monochrome-ish works from a time spent living on a lake. The latter furnished me with two wallpapers for my phone so I could get rid of the stock Sansung background. It turned out to be a very large exhibition and somewhat puzzlingly arranged, so we were exhausted by the time we came out and decided not to see any more. Instead we went out for a coffee and a strong through the adjoining park’s rose gardens and maze. Both were absolutely packed, strange in a time of coronavirus, and the rose garden was full of slightly over-blown blooms while the maze was peppered with squealing running children.
We looped back to Yuanshan, stopping at the farmer’s market on the way (I bought a large custard apple) and then back to the flat. In the evening, after dinner, we went for dessert of pancakes in Shida market, at the stall of a man who meticulously makes crepes, draws faces on them with fruits and cream, and then rolls them up into cones. My peach and strawberry one was very tasty indeed.
And then we returned again, and watched the first episode of The Wire. I had watched it back when I first moved to London around 2009, and have been wanting to rewatch it for a very long time. What a fantastic show. I have seen some criticism of its opening scene, a sort of set piece with a dead kid called Snot whose friends let him play even when he reliably stole the takings. ‘Gots to let him play,’ the friend says, looking at the corpse. ‘This America’. I think it’s a fantastic way to start the show: contrived and setpiece-y, certainly, but also setting up the framework of the show, of an American dream.