Weekend Fun (週末樂趣)

It's sometimes said that Chinese have no sense of humor. But like in so many other ways,  things nowadays are moving fast in the land inhabited by the so-called "descendants of the dragon". The following is the translation of a Chinese joke forwarded to me.

In the middle of a bank robbery, a bunch of Quangdong robbers made this quotable quote: "Nobody moves. It's the state's money. It's your own life!"
Everybody lay down without the slightest murmur.
(An example of "switching concepts": changing set thinking.)

The robber took a look at the a skirt wearing lady cashier on a table with her legs in the air and said, "Please, can't you lie down in a slightly more civilized manner. We're after the money, not sex."
(An example of "professional ethics": not doing what's not required)


When the robbers were back at their joint, the newly graduated robber with an MBA said, "Big Brother, let's count how much we got."
The veteran who just had primary education said, "You out of your mind? So much. When do you think you'll finish? Won't we know when we watch the evening news?"
(An example of "working experience")

After the robbers were gone, the bank manager told his junior: "Quick, report the crime." As the supervisor was on the point of doing so, he said, "Wait a minute, include the 5 million we embezzled."
(An example of "crisis management": how to profit from a disaster)

The supervisor replied:" Ah, wouldn't it be nice if they were to do that once a month?"
(An example of "fun at work")

The following day, the joint media announcement reported that the bank was robbed a total of 90 million RMB but no matter how many times the robbers counted and recounted, they only got not more than 20 million RMB.


The head of the gang swore: "What the F.... We risked our lives and got only 2 million. Upon a wiggle of his fingers, that SOB got 7! It's looks as if, after all, it might be worth our while to get an education."

Have a nice weekend.

Practices at Kadoorie (嘉多利練習)

When we go to a park, nine times out of ten, we have our eyes only for the flowers. But sometimes, it may be worth our while to pay a little attention to leaves too.

their shapes and colors may be no less attractive.

Saturday Fun (週末趣味)

We live in a sad world. Perhaps that's why we  need have all kinds of religion to give us hope and consolation. Three of the world's established religions all worship the same God, the God of Abraham: the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslims. Yet adherents in the three religions all seem to think that the others are wrong and that they only hold the eternal truths about God. That makes the world an even sadder place. And what's even worse, the Christian world is divided against itself into two large groups called Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants are further divided into Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Pentecostals, Unionists etc and the Catholics into Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Orthodox Catholics. God must have a difficult time deciding which group to help in a war. Whatever the mysterious thoughts of the almighty and all knowing God may be, that should not stop us from having a little Saturday fun. 

THE IRISH BROTHEL

                    
       Three Irishmen are sitting in the pub window seat, watching the front door of the brothel over the road.
                            
       The local Methodist pastor appears, and quickly goes inside.

       "Would you look at that!" says the first Irishman.  "Didn't I always say what a bunch of hypocrites they are?"

        No sooner are the words out of his mouth than a Rabbi appears at the door, knocks and goes inside.
      
        "Another one trying to fool everyone with pious preaching and stupid hats!" says the second Irishman.

         They continue drinking their beer roundly condemning the vicar and the rabbi when they see their own Catholic priest knock on the door.

         "Ah, now dat's sad." says the third Irishman.  "One of the girls must have died..."

Have a nice weekend

                            
                            
                               
                            

Blossoms of Spring (春之花)

Spring is come. It has come a long time now. I wish I had more time for her. For she has been waiting, waiting, waiting. But better late than never. I went to my favorite park, the Kadoorie Farm.

All sorts of little flowers are already there on the ground at the entrance, waiting to say "hi".  .

Saturday Fun (星期六趣味)

To a man who enjoys a bottle of wine or a glass of beer, nothing in the world holds more attraction. But once he has tasted it, nothing in the world will ever stop him from having another and another and another and...
 

1.

A man walks into a bar obviously stone drunk, and asks for a drink.
"Sorry, but you obviously already had a little too much to drink", says the bartender.
Fuming, the drunkard walks out the front door.
He walks into the side door.
“Can I have a drink please.”
“Sorry” the bartender says “you can’t have a drink here.”
The drunkard walks out . 
He goes in through the back door.
“Can I please have a drink.”
“Enough!” The bartender screams “I told You 'No Drinks'!”
The drunkard looks at the bartender closely and exclaims, “Darn! How many bars you work at!”

2.

Two Irish friends are drinking together at the home one of them.
One takes out a bottle of Irish whiskey and asks the other, "Will you pour this bottle out on my grave if I die first?"
His friend replies, "Do you mind if I were to pass that through my kidneys first?"

3.

A habitual drinker finally realized how serious his problem was and went to a see a psychiatrist to see how he could help.
The psychiatrist suggested that  every time he got drunk his patient had to report it to him the very next day. 
A few days later, the drunkard staggered into the psychiatrist’s office.
“I wanna report that I wash drunk last night,” he mumbled.
“For heaven’s sake, man, you’re drunk right now! ”cried the doctor.
“Yeah I know,” said the patient, “but I’m gonna report this tomorrow.”

Have a nice weekend.

Obce Cialo (Foreign Body)(色)

Fate is unpredictable. Ironically, the last may sometimes be the first.

My last film at this year's HKIFF,Obce (Foreign Body) (2014)(色) happens to be my first film from Krzysztof Zanussi (1939), an Italian-Polish director who studied physics, philosophy and film making in Poland and the maker and director of a large number of documentaries, TV drama and feature films some of which had won international awards at Moscow, Venice, Chicago, Valladolid, Locarno and is now a professor of film making at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and professor at the Silesian University in Katowice.

The film starts with a pair of young lovers Angelo (Riccardo Leonelli) and Katarzyna (Agata Buzek) ("Kassia") meeting in the hills and beaches of Italy. For some reasons, Kassia, who comes from Poland,  wants to have a go at being a nun and enters a convent there. Her father (Slawomir Orzechowski), probably someone with some influence in Poland, arranges for Angelo to work in a power company close to the convent, hoping thereby that Angelo will be near enough to convince her daughter to change her mind. As a devout Muslim, Angelo refrains from making love to Kassia before marriage, because he respect her decision as a devout Catholic. Since she is on trial for just one year, Angelo is prepared to wait until she changes her mind. In the meantime, he works under Kris Nilska ( Agnieszka Grochowska) his young and attractive new boss in the Polish division of a power company, a lady drunk with a different kind of "power", believing that with sufficient money, you can do practically anything and overcome all forms of resistance, a go-getter prepared to stop at nothing for corporate advancement, by hook or by crook.

The film is about their conflict. Angelo is straight and principled and is full of compassion and an ardent desire to relieve the suffering of those around him. We're shown how he helps a young man begging for money outside an opera house to buy a medical machine to help his bedridden father, first by applying on his behalf to the Polish government for the needed funds and when that fails, by setting up a corporate charity to help him do so and how he resists Kris' seduction. We are also shown how in order to win an important government contract for building a power station in Russia, Kris told her subordinates Mira Tkacz  (Agnieszka Grochowska) who shares her values, to seduce the engineer of their competitor to get information on the price and other conditions of their tender. She succeeds. Angelo knows about it but refuses to participate. He spends his spare time in small prayer groups and occasionally visits Kassia in the convent.

Maps to the Stars (墮落星圖)

Hollywood is often viewed by the uninitiated as a place of dreams of stardom, glamor and gossip. But if one may trust in David Cronenberg's portrayal of the Weiss family in Maps to the Stars (2014), its glittering chrome and glass surface lit by multi-color LED lights may well be a cover for a designer's hell full of incestuous demons, whose occupants are each desperate to escape from their unspeakably dark past and cut-throat present into fame, money, sex, drugs and verbal vitriol, driven largely by another incestuous circle of greed, lust and jealousy and mutual hypocrisy.

What do a girl with a scarred face and scarred arms from Florida, Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a rich middle aged woman movie star with fading charms Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) eager to get the part to play her deceased mother, another well known movie star Kayla (Emilia McCarthy) who died in a fire, a cab driver who earns his living as a part time actor and has hopes of becoming a screen writer, Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson ), a successful actress, novelist, screenwriter and an agent for actor and actresses who runs a blog, Carrie Fisher (who plays herself), a successful pop psycho-therapist who frequently gives talks, appears on TV shows, who treats people with various kinds of mental and emotional dysfunction at USD1,000 an hour and is about go on tour for his new 12 part self-help book Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a 13-year-old boy star who is the principal character in a popular TV series called "Bad Babysitter" who dispenses non-stop verbal abuses to those who work with him and who's just back from a private de-tox program and shows absolutely no courtesy to pink press TV reporters Benjie (Evan Bird) and a mother who treats her son as a precious commodity to be exploited for maximum profit, Christina (Olivia Williams) have to do with each other? The link is Agatha. She falls in love with Jerome, through her internet connection with Carrie, becomes the personal assistant of Havana  and is in fact the daughter of Dr. Weiss and Christina, who themselves are brother and sister though they claim they only found that out after they are married. 

Une Nouvelle Amie (A New Girlfriend)(女朋友的女朋友)

I can't boast that I have seen very many gay or lesbian or transvestite films but I have yet to see a film dealing with such themes the way François Ozon does in Une Novelle Amie (A New Girlfriend) 2014. Adapted from a novel by Ruth Rendell of the same name, Ozon has transformed it into a romantic comedy with touching moments which seem to suggest a new kind of gender complexity: a man who likes to dress as a woman but still makes love with another woman as a man and a woman who loves a man as a woman! How gender roles can be rendered really complicated by biology!

The film has a most unusual beginning: we see a female body being made up and dressed as if for a wedding but it turns out that in fact, it's for a funeral at which the funeral-bride's best childhood friend Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) recounts how they became the best of friends since age 7, when they had a blood pact at a neighborhood wood in which they declared their friendship will be "for life". Claire is now happily married to Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz) and her best friend was Laura (Isild Le Besco) whose widow is David (Romain Duris)
As the film develops, we see how after the funeral, Claire could not concentrate on her work at the office and decided to take a break during which she visited Laura's house to see how David was doing. To her surprise, when she arrives, she finds David dressed as a woman with wig, nail polish and all, feeding their 6 month's old baby Lucie. Embarrassed, David explains that he has had this urge to dress as a woman since infancy but when he's with a woman he loves, he doesn't feel the urge to do so but even if he does so, he has never once gone into the street as a woman. Now that Laura is gone, the urge has come back and he asks her not to tell anyone. Claire promises.

Claire continues to help David and a close relation develops. She helps David appear in public dressed as a woman and spends a weekend at his country home where Claire shows him the heart enclosing the name of Laura and hers on a tree trunk at David's estate. Gilles finds out about their weekend rendezvous because David's mother calls and asks for Claire during that weekend. Claire then explains to Gilles David's unusual need and assures him that there's nothing between them. Gilles feels more comfortable and invites David to have dinner together and even helps to look after Lucie, the experience of which makes him suggest to Claire to have their own.

Everything seems fine until David has an accident on a busy street as a woman as a result of which he's turned into a human vegetable. David's father sheepishly tells Claire at the hospital bedside that at the time of the accident, his son was dressed as a woman. Claire feigns surprise. To help revive David, she first brings Lucie to the hospital and whispers in his ears that she is Claire with Lucie. David's eyelids flicker for a few seconds and then he reverts into coma. It isn't until later, when Claire addresses him as Virginia and sings a song written by a man who has transformed himself into a woman and who sings that he/she is not happy until he becomes a women, a song which both of them heard together earlier at a cabaret, when tears fell from David's eyes, that he finally wakes up. When the film ends, we see a pregnant Claire and Virginia, hand in hand, picking up the 7-year-old Lucie after class. We see how Lucie seems perfectly comfortable with them.

Ozon always tries to examine human relations under all sorts of situations in which partly through chance and partly through the personality of his characters, they find themselves in the most unpredictable kinds of social and personal situations.  Une Novelle Amie is his latest exploration in such a direction. Not only does he introduce some humor into the theme of what form transvestism can take, he  shows us some of the most unexpected and unusual effects such a form may have on the male-female relationship and plenty of food for thought.

Il capitale umano (Human Capital)(奪命保險金)

A tombola party is over. A waiterr Fabrizio (Gianluca Di Lauro) cleans up. He rides the bicycle home in the dark. He is knocked off the road by a vehicle. The driver does not stop. The worker is admitted to hospital in critical condition and later dies. That is the start of three separate but linked stories.The first relates to Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio  )("Dino"), the second to Carla Bernaschi (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) ("Carla")and the third to Serena Ossola (Matilde Gioli )(Serena). The "human capital"  in the title of the film, directed  by Paolo Virzi and adapted from Stephen Amidona's novel by Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo and the director himself, relates to the insurance company's compensation to Fabrizio's family which sum includes recompense for loss of life, loss of consortium, loss of income and loss of amenities.

Jauja (巧黑)

In many ways, the film Jauja is one of a kind. It's made by a Dane who was born in Argentina: Lisandro Alonso with a script co-written by him with Fabian Casas about a little known region of the earth, Penatgonia, an enigmatic land full of mystery, myths and legends and for the Spanish, gold, a kind of Eldorado.("dorado" being a Spanish word meaning "gilded").  The name of the film "Jauja" is a Spanish word of Arabic origin, connoting "plenty". At the start of the film, we are given a quotation in a legend about a land dominated by Zulualaga, a lone hunter and the story of a captain dressed as a woman roaming in the wilderness of that land, apparently looking for someone. Is he really looking for someone or for something rather more ineffable?

As the film opens, we see two people, a young lady in an 18th century dress and a bonnet, Ingeborg (Villbjørk Malling Agger), her head against the shoulder of an older man in a bowler hat and suit Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), each facing a different direction, the man towards the sea, the girl towards the land. They are discussing about what they like or dislike. The father, an engineer, dislikes the land and wishes to return to Denmark as soon as possible, the daughter says she likes the land, the desert and feels comfortable there. Her father asks her what she most wants to have. She says a dog. He asks why. She says that she would like a dog which would always follow her around, wherever she goes. In the distance, we see a naked fat man in a rock pool, relaxing, his clothes at the edge of the pool, masturbating. All across the screen in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, we see tuft grass on clumps and clumps of volcanic rock.It looks spacious, calm, peaceful. Soon Dinesen changes clothes into those of an army captain, complete military uniform with sword, pistol, rife and long spurred riding boots but appears to have a slight difficulty mounting his horse. Another army officer Lieutenant Pittaluga (Adrian Fondari) approaches (the man observed earlier to be masturbating in the rock pool) asks if he would like to go to the governor's ball and asks for for permission to take her daughter to the up-coming ball. He offers to give her daughter a horse at his ranch. The father refuses. Unbeknown to her father, her eyes were set on a younger soldier Angel Milkibar (Esteban Bigliardi?) whom she meets earlier on the salt marshes. He has given her a wooden toy soldier found floating on the surface of a small rock pool which she carefully keeps with her. Later we see Dinesen inspecting some engineering works where some trenches are being dug. But soon after that, Ingeborg disappears with the young soldier. Dinesen embarks upon a search for her, alone, with hardly any preparation by ways of food and water. The film documents that search, in beautifully shot images, with hardly any dialogue to speak of. 

3 coeurs ( 3 Hearts) (三顆痴痴的心)

Blaise Pascal (1623-1622), mathematician, physicist, theologian and philosopher once said that the heart has reasons which the head knows not. And for Marc Beaulieu (Benoît Poelvoorde), an otherwise non-remarkable tax accountant, his heart probably has more reason that his head can never understand. Every time that he meets a girl he fancies, no matter where and when, his heart would pound so hard that he may suffer a heart attack or near heart attack. He met one, after he missed the last train to Paris after investigating a client's case there. It's a girl that his eyes just caught as he was walking off the train station in great frustration after he rushed to the train just in time for its doors to close on him. He went into a cafe bar to get a bottle of mineral water after asking the bar tender that it was still open, took it and then the girl he saw before crossing the street came in and bought a packet of cigarette. After she left, he felt a compulsion to follow her. He did. He asked her if she knew a hotel. She showed him first one, then another. He went into the second. But before he checked in, he left the reception counter and went back to the girl waiting outside, Sylvie Berger (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They smoke. They got talking. They talked all night. When it was time to leave. They decide they would meet in Paris at the Jardin des Tuileries, near the fountain but did not exchange telephone at 6 p.m. the following Friday. Sylvie went, waited until 7 p.m. and returned home to her beloved sister Sophie Berger (Chiara Mastroianni) and mother Madame Berger (Catherine Deneuve ) and her husband  (Patrick Mille), with whom relations were not ideal. Owing to two Chinese clients who never said anything in reply to his questions, he was later than usual when he left the office that Friday and suffered a heart attack at the garage in which he nearly fainted. He recovered, drove at breakneck speed to the rendezvous only to miss it again. he went to see a doctor who declared that his heart was normal and that the attack was probably due to too much excitement.

Im Keller (In the Basement) (地窖天堂)

Blaise Pascal once said that the heart has its reasons which the head will seldom know. Indeed we know hardly anything about what passes at the inner most layers of our heart. If one may borrow an analogy from Carl Jung, the co-founder of analytic psychology, all sorts of surprising things lie deep within the cellar of the edifice called the human psyche, formerly called the "heart". I do not know whether or not Veronika Franz and Ulrich Seidl who co-scripted Im Keller ( In the Basement) (2014), directed by the latter, knew about what either Pascal or Jung had to say about the kind of dark matter lurking in the depths of the human heart, but if one may judge by what they did in the quasi-documentary about what some Austrians are doing in their basements, then I'm quite sure it's turning their camera lenses upon that mysterious region of the human psyche through showing us what some marginal Austrians most desire, away from the gaze of the more conventional section of their society.

When the film opens, we see a man staring intently at a huge white serpent in a glass case in front of which is a sniffing guinea pig which gradually approaches the snout of the apparent immobile white reptilian until it gets too close, when it swung at lightning speed at the guinea pig and had it in the grips of a fatal squeeze.

Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對)

The second film of the evening is also about death, a most weighty subject. But from the way Tal Granit and Sharon-Maymon treated the subject, Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對), co-written and co-directed by them, it does seem that it's at quite some distance from heaviness. This is evident from the very first scene. An old man in front of a table full of paraphernalia for welding is speaking on a phone to someone else. He says, in an obviously machine-produced low frequency voice that he is Elohim (Jewish for God) and that there is no vacancy in heaven for the party at the other end of the line and that despite her difficulties and suffering, she must try her best to hold on and receive the treatment and adds that her husband says hello to her from heaven, when she's single! On the other side of the line, we see an old lady who says that she has been diagnosed with cancer and doesn't want to live. But there's a hiccup. In the middle of the conversation, the old lady hears what appears to be a woman's voice asking Elohim where she placed her things.Then it hung up. The old woman dialed up Elohim's number asking to speak to God. A female voice told her to wait because Elohim was at the toilet! After the hiccups, Elohim resumed the telephone conversation and continued to pep talk the old lady.

Timbuktu (在地圖結束的地方/在世界盡頭喚自由)

Good Friday evening turned out to be good to me, not religiously as Jesus was said to have died on the cross on Good Friday night for the redemption of the sins of man and in that sense "good" for mankind but because I saw two good films in a row.  Both of them concern death but in quite different contexts. The first is Timbuktu, a film screenplayed, directed and co-written by Abderrahmane Sissako with Kessen Tall.

What or where is Timbuktu? It's the name of a place which my Form 1 teacher threatened he would send me to whenever I became unruly in class. But according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's a city in the western African country of Mali at the southern edge of the Sahara, 8 miles north of River Niger which was historically important as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route and a centre of Islamic culture (c. 1400-1600), which became a French colony in late 19th century (forming part of the French Sudan) but which became independent in 1960 when the Republic of Mali was established. The city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988 but because of armed conflicts in the region, in 2012, it was declared a World Heritage in Danger.
As the film opens, we see a blind-folded man (Abel Jafri) being taken in a military jeep, with a fluttering flag with some Arabic words written on it, being taken to a tiny courtyard in a small town. There he was greeted and became one of the soldiers of the local jihadists controlling the town and the surrounding area. Then we see another jeep with a number of soldiers inside, one of whom in military uniform and a turban on his head, Abdelkerim, was aiming his rifle at a running gazelle. He kept firing shots at it but the gazelle kept running and we hear someone advise the hunter, "Don't waste your bullet, tire it". Then the screen switches to a target practice. The targets were some traditional African sculpture of local deities made of either either wood or clay. They were all shot down, one by one. In the last one, we see gun smoke rising from the mouth of the broken head of a local deity. Next we see a herd of cattle being tended to by a small boy Issan ( Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) watched by a couple Kidane ( Ibrahem Ahmed) and Satima ( Toulou Kiki ) and their daughter Toya ( Layla Walet Mohamed ) lying on their rug under a tent, far from the town, but close to each other, discussing how when Kidane dies, he would like to give the herd to Issan, his adopted son. When the film ends, we see two children, both running on the desert dunes, one a boy, Issan the other a girl Toyla.  A lot has happened in the meantime.

Art Basel 2015.13

Cont'd

Take me to the mardi gras (in his study) 2015: oil on canvas by Takeo Hanazawa (b. 1977) Japanese painter and installation artist, a painting with obvious Freudian implications.

Consume (消化) 2014 in stainless steel and titanium by Gao Weigang (高偉剛) (b. 1976)  a Chinese artist from Heilongjiang associated with Ay Wei-wei, working in painting, sculpture, installation and performance art is constantly experimenting his artistic language, pushing the boundaries of painting into both sculpture and installation,rupturing our conventional perspective on specific topics and bringing the spectators into the space of his work, emphasizing more the meaning and concepts behind his artistic creations than craftsmanship. He won the "Arts Future Award" in Art HK 2011. This is what he says about this metallic structure: " In Hong Kong, one of the world's most famous ports, the container is a popular mode of transportation but is often ignored. The main structure of "Consume" is altered from a container but is in sharp contrast to it. The bridge-like structure has an arched back, the raised medium section is made of stainless steel and titanium and has been polished gold. Almost everything in our daily life were stored in containers and are delivered to us via the container from different parts of the world and are then repacked with new goods and sent to the next stop, thus each stop is a starting point in an endless cycle. Goods and commodities with the associated message run into our desires and are then inter-packed, exchanged or despatched. Like our thoughts and our lives, they engage in an endless round of exchanges of rampant moods and objects , mostly useless and meaningless. Do we really need to consume so much garbage? "

Lucia de B (Accused) (製造死亡天使)

Murders are always interesting. Social psychologists tell us that people have a tendency to be more alert to "bad" things than to "good" things and that the former strike them with much greater intensity than the latter. Evolution psychologists tell us why: the risk of not paying attention to things which may threaten our life is much more serious than the risk of not taking advantage of good things which may benefit us. Whilst we may have a second bite of the cherry if we miss the first one, ignoring a threat to our life may prove fatal because death is irreversible: we only got one life! Perhaps for this reason, bad things makes good news story but seldom good things, which we tend to take for granted. Perhaps for the same reason, news of "serial killing" always makes a sensationally "good" news story. One such is the case of Lucia de Berk (more commonly called "Lucia de B"), a licensed pediatric nurse in the Juliana Child Hospital ("JKH") in Hague, Holland, who was sentenced on 24th March 2003 to life imprisonment with an order that she receive psychiatric treatment for 7 murders and 3 attempted murders of babies under her care, not only in JKH but in two other hospitals where she previously worked. She lodged an appeal and on 18th June, 2004 the original verdict was upheld. However, in 2008, her case was reopened by the Dutch Supreme Court because of new evidence proving her innocence and the order that she receive psychiatric treatment was rescinded because the psychiatrist found that there is no evidence of her suffering any psychiatric problem at all and on a re-trial, she was acquitted of all charges against her in April, 2010.

Everything started with the unexpected death of a baby (Amber) in the JKH on 4th September, 2001. The hospital authorities then checked through its records on the number of deaths of babies occurring whilst they were under her care and discovered a total of 9 such deaths between September 2000 and September 2001. Although previously, such deaths were considered unfortunate but not unexpected and the cause of death was labeled "natural", it now considered them suspicious because in all those case, Lucia de B was given the task of giving medicine to the babies under her care when such deaths occurred. To protect its reputation, the hospital decided to inform the police to start an investigation. It was big news and Lucia de B was called "the angel of death" by the press.

Art Basel 2015. 12

Cont'd

Untitled 1970: oil on canvas by Chung Sang Hwa (b. 1932) a Korean artist who first trained in his own country and then moved first to Paris, then Kobe, Japan and returned to  Korea in 1992 and has since been working in Seoul. He uses the concepts of grid and covering of the paint on his canvas and folds, sculpts, scalps, and then literally rearranges the zinc-based paint that he uses in multiple layers, a technique that he perfected after years of experimentation to encourage reflection on oriental tradition of painting.  A critic, Lóránd Hegyi. says, “The closer the viewers’ interest in the plastic visual details of the painting’s sensual surface, in the painter’s subtle interventions, and in the pictorial and physical methods he uses to structure his work, the closer they also come to another meditative and emotional domain of the artistic process, in other words poetry, the genuinely poetic strategy of the artwork,”

El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex) (金錢綜合症)

From snapshots of the difficulties ijn the lives of the small guys at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in Gheese-ha, we move in my next film in the HKIFF to those of the Bohemian set of the rich but not the famous at the the western tip of the Mediterranean in El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex), which took place in Southern Spain. There we find Raphael (Rafael Lamata), his wife Francisca (Lola Rubio) and his group of friends Henry (Gianfranco Poddighe) a gold prospector, Domingo (Juan Rodrigáñez ) who is preparing to get 3 million Euros from a certain Herr Müller of Düsseldorf, Lucas (Eduard Mont de Palol) who is fond of reading all kinds of books about economics and culture, Cecilia (Cecilia Molano), a singer (Julia de Castro), another musician (Michel Rodrigáñez) and the idiot  (Pablo Herranz) spending their vacation at Rafael's huge estate. To Rafael's surprise, his son (Jorge Dutor)  brought with him a German girlfriend (Katrin Memmer) who turned out to be a very accomplished pianist.

Art Basel 2015.11

Cont'd

Untitled 2002: computer print on canvas mounted on panel by Jorge Pardo (b. 1963) , a sculptor born in Cuba and working in Mexico.