The recently concluded Drawing Shanghai exhibit showcasing select sketches of Shanghai’s local life that is slowly vanishing as the city is rapidly modernizing and “upgrading” the standard of living of locals. Soon, longtangs or communities that are quintessential Shanghai will be long gone. We hoped with this exhibit we can at least immortalize the local lifestyle through our sketches. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Thank you for stopping by.
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GRATEFUL! That’s the only word that somehow keeps popping up in my head while I was finishing up my 2022 Project Life album. Honestly, there had been so many events that happened during 2022 that just made me feel so angry and frustrated and overwhelmed. But as I was going through our life in photos, I cannot help feel rather ashamed for letting all the negativity overshadow ALL the goodness of the past year. It had been an emotional rollercoaster to say the least. You can read some more via this post. We had the most strict (to say the least) lockdown which was initially slated for 4-5 days that…
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Indulge me a little with this post as I walk down memory lane… I’m reminiscing about the 6 months I spent in Tianjin, China, as a student. This was back in 1994 when China was not open and as modernized as now. Much to my dad’s anger, I enrolled myself in the Spring semester of Traditional Chinese Painting at the Nankai University’s East China Art College, which had opened under the guidance of the famous contemporary Chinese painter Fan Zeng. I was the first foreign student they had ever accepted and was placed with the senior class because that semester, the curriculum was best suited for a “newbie” like me.…
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What can I say? December turned out so completely different from what I had envisioned to be and what I had hoped it to be. Things that were part of our everyday almost since 2020 like scanning QR codes, PCR testing at least every 72 hrs, checking of green codes in public places and other restrictions, were suddenly lifted. Suddenly, the COVID virus spread like wildfire and once again, Shanghai buckled down from COVID infections, everything (at least almost everything) went upside down fast. I was feeling like another lockdown (like what happened in March/April of 2022) was happening as the city suddenly went silent by mid-December. Schools had already…
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The hustle and bustle of the holidays is here again! How are you documenting this last month of the year? I feel it is even more important at this current point of my family’s life to document our life in Shanghai. So I am doing this via the annual December Daily project by Ali Edwards. I’ve lost count on how many years I have been documenting and every year has been different. Excited to be using a handmade album I made after sensing that my order will not arrive on time. (I will share photos next as these days have been a bit crazy, to say the least.) And in…
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Feeling excited as I mark the 3rd quarter installment of my #the100day project. Last week when I was counting the number of sketches, I thought I still had 20+ to go but then when I recounted yesterday, I actually have about 10+ more to go! Yay! Driven right now to get this project over and done with! The past outings with Drawing Shanghai / Urban Sketchers Shanghai has been quite fun as a lot of these places were quite interesting. We seem to have ventured mostly to the old town more. In this batch of sketches, #52 to #54 were sketched from photos from out company outing and the rest…
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The last time I posted an “Around here…” series was back in May. I cannot believe it has been that long, really! The flurry of activities that came about as we came out of lockdown was just overwhelming. A bit of warning, this post of photo-heavy. June: First order of business after lockdown was doing the round of hospital/doctor visits. Then came the search for apartments since we needed space for a family of 7; that includes our 4 rescue/adopted cats. With the exodus of expats, there is more option but of course I had to ask the neighbours for their experiences during lockdown because I need to be prepared…
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This quarter of the Get Messy season has been a busy one and I don’t think I did as much spreads as before. This was all in between the 2-month lockdown and the flurry of activities after, from making sure we got to make doctors’ appointments, looking for new apartment to actually moving and unpacking. Whew! Looking back, I was glad I took a breather from creating to ease the pressure of needing to show up all the time. So here’s my art journal pages for this second quarter of 2022 starting with the Season of OK. The Season of Mess was an inspiring season. And then finally for June,…
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The final leg of our Europe 2019 adventure was Holland or the Netherlands. Yes, it is indeed 2019 because for so many reasons, this journal took longer to finish. Unlike the other 2 journals of this trip, I actually didn’t get any pages done while on the trip. I had ran out of paste/glue by the time we were almost halfway through our Finland trip. And we did try to find stationery stores but either ran out of time or just couldn’t find any. Lesson learned: Bring more the next time we actually can travel out of China again (yes, it’s been 3 years… and counting… since pandemic hit). For…
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I know. I know. I seem to be in the wrong season. But I feel posting this during the hottest time of the Summer may well bring in some anticipation of the cooler weather (I hope) that is just around the corner. Here are some of my favourite pages/spreads from Care December 2021. I used an old book and just randomly added art journal in between. I did not tear out pages for this one, just thought of going with the flow and see where this leads me. This post is actually way overdue with a lot of things happening. Nevertheless, it is good to go back and look at…
