Brief Stop at Kowloon Park

Attended a talk on the relationship between God or Allah and man at the Muslim Mosque in Tsimshatsui last Saturday afternoon. As the movie for which I already got the ticket was not to start until a couple of hours later, I took the opportunity to practice a little my non-existent photographic skills at Kowloon Park, right behind the mosque. What follows is the result of such a hurried exercise.



The first thing of interest I saw was the pond. I have always been fascinated by reflections, whether they be reflections of people and things on the mirrors, on windows panes, on chrome plates or on water. What is interesting about reflections upon water is that such reflections never remain stable, not even for a single moment. They keep changing in accordance with the color of the sky, whether there are clouds, and if so, whether the sun is wholly or partly obscured by clouds and if so, how thick the clouds are, what the shape of the clouds that so block out the sun are, whether there are any trees, buildings, people etc at the near and further edges of the relevant stretch of water and if so, their respective colors and shapes and whether there are fishes or other aquatic animals in the water to disturb the relative calm of the water surface, whether there is any wind, and if so, how strong the winds are, the direction(s) from which they come, how they churn up ripples, whether waves interfere with each other and if so, how big the ripples are and how quickly they do so and at what phase in the transient life of the relevant waves they do so, whether they build up or cancel out each other etc. So many factors are involved in the production of the particular form of the reflections that we see on the surface of the water that the quantity of the particular combinations or permutations in time and space are astronomical! You never see the same reflections twice! They are forever new. Even in an otherwise totally unremarkable photo like the above, we can find numerous shades of green and an almost endless number of forms: big and small rings, more or less circular, oval, triangular, trapezium-ish, rectangular-ish, drifting towards or away from each other, how and when they merge into each other, how they got progressively smaller and how their lines combine until for an extremely brief moment, they become almost "straight lines", something you would never otherwise suspect could ever happen! So I can look at them forever until I got something more interesting to do. Whenever I look at water, somehow, LaoTsu's words would flow quietly into my mind" Supreme goodness is like water. Water is good at facilitating everything, not fighting it. It is found where everyone loathes to be."

By contrast, once we have human forms, they always look so regular, so static, so dull. The above is a roof lamp inside the small museum of culture inside the park. You can see that the architect has done his best to introduce an element of "surprise" into his design, using a ship lamp as a decorative feature to break the monotony of flat ceiling.




To break the monotony of straight lines, you can see that he has introduced first some curves and then different shades of brown, yellow and black and to enhance those miniscule "differences", how he has used different materials to produces effects of differential textures (e.g. the transversely cut and polished wood rings on the door and the rather softer looking tiny checkers on the curtain behind the door etc). But compared to the richness and dynamism of Nature, we're talking differences not of scale and gradations, we are talking differences of categories: difference in kind!

To break the monotony without breaking the "harmony", we can see that he has used three like-shaped circular embedded roof lamps. But still, it stays on the scale of a trio or quartet or quintet, never that of a full orchestra.

Outside, we find the same monotonously regular patterns of straight lines, greys, whites and blacks, with a wee bit of curves.

As we go outside, we find this "postmodern" lamp, in "mock" 19th-century style, to suggest its colonial history of English roadside gas lamp, but made not of cast iron or copper but with some plasticized metal. The similarity is really just literally "skin deep". But then, we are now in the so-called postmodern age, where "image" is king, never "reality".

A little bit further, we find these modern garden benches also in basically regular geometric shape. To break the flatness and dullness of the lines, the architect has introduced two loops, one bigger, followed by a smaller one. I'm so glad he inclined them a bit to the left to create the "illusion" of a kind of kinetic dynamics into the fundamentally static environment. 

It's much better to go back to Nature. Look at the suppleness and delicacy of the branches, the softness of the flower petal, the brightness of its color and the subtle and much softer color of the underside of the relevant petal whilst still in bud form to minimize the use of iron for the production of the full rosy red when it eventually blooms into a full flower, the contrast both in shape and color of the stamen and how its flowers contrast with the color and texture of the leaves. How infinitely richer than what we find inside and outside those artificial structures of the museum!



Whilst some flowers prefer to bloom in small numbers, others prefer to draw the attention of the bees, butterflies and other insects feeding on its nectar in "crowd" form so that their attention is focused not on individual flowers, but on them as a group, it being a matter of indifference to them which amongst them will eventually get "fertilized".

Look at the richness in form and color of these flowers.

How the curved forks of the white stamens stand out from the surrounding petals!

They take on different shapes in different phases of their life-cylce. These have not yet split open.

I went to the nearby rose garden and found this yellow rose.




And another one with a bud at its side. Look at the tiny tinge of pink at the edge of the top petals, just like the "rouge" put on to their faces by some ladies, but much less exaggerated!

This one is pink. Just different shades. How intricate the form of the petals!

This one is all pink, approaching red!

This one is all red!

This one too, just that it is younger than the one above.

This one is really intricate. You can see flowers within flowers at the heart of the rose and in different colors too!.

Six rings of petals!

These are some of our other "flowers". Teenage girls all intent on establishing their "personalities" and "uniqueness" in the full bloom of youth. But you can see that their "uniqueness" and "individuality", like the lamp outside and inside the museum, are also "copies" . They are copies of Japanese cartoon characters: a true instance of life imitating art, of reality imitating illusion. The "art" is however completely "commercial", created with the aim of transferring the pocket money of these young ladies into figures at the relevant columns in monthly statement of the bank accounts of the producers of the relevant cartoons. 

But that is not going to deter this young lady from acting out her "dream" of "becoming" her favourite and cutest cartoon character is her experience.




Whilst the other girl wants to look "cute" and "lovable",  this one wants to look "courageous" and "self confident", at least for several hours, until the photo shooting sessions, for which they paid more than a thousand dollars for custom making the relevant outfit, come to an end.

In the meantime, the water of the fountain keeps being thrusted into air by hidden artificial pumps, spreading its "splendor" in "sprays".