saturday afternoon at daegu station

"Do you always have your digital camera with you?" Jiyoung asked.

Ella and I had walked downtown to get some sketchbooks and film for Ella's new Hello Kitty camera at Homeplus. We had put our purchases in a locker there and strolled on to Daegu station to get tickets for Ulsan, where we'll be attending a New Year's Eve party at Barry and Justyna's.

Jiyoung found us in the basement of Lotte Department store while I was looking for some apple juice. She was dressed up and had her hair loose so I didn't recognize her at first. Ella didn't recognize her at all until I reminded her that Jiyoung had gone with us to the Buddhist temple in Palgongsan and shown Ella how to bow and 'make a wish'.

Jiyoung was meeting 'just a friend' coming into town on the train from Kyongsan. He turned out to be a tall young man, and though I had asked Jiyoung a few times whether it was actually a date she kept on shyly denying it. I gave her two of the discount coupons I had for Lotte Cinema anyways, and recommended that she suggest seeing Casino Royale, the new James Bond flick. I'm sure any guy would be impressed by a lady who did that.

"Do you always have your digital camera with you?" Jiyoung asked.

Come to think of it, now that I have my new 1GB SDRam card, perhaps I will.

즐거운 성탄절 되세요

CV for Gordon Foster, BFA York 1996

Since December of 2001 Gordon Foster has been developing a living installation and interactive performance investigating cultural anomalies in South Korea and tentatively titled Where's Your Mother?

In March of 2005 he staged an intervention during the opening performance of A Suicide Site Guide to the City at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, which was inspired by the collaborator in his work-in-progress who staged her own impromptu intervention during a Ballet Jorgen performance at the Premier Dance Theatre.

An extreme interdisciplinary artist, Gordon Foster has created a body of work that transcends disciplines, incorporating post post-modern theatre, dance, music, performance and visual art practices into his recurring interactive text-based installation sponsored by Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea and entitled English 101.

During a brief stint in Toronto in the fall of 1998 he created a month-long work incorporating found-object multiples into a dissertation on consumerism entitled Stocking Shelves at Loblaws.

During a two summer residence in Poland in 1998 and 1999 Gordon Foster began incorporating more extensive language into his practice and was able to stage several conversations cycling around the theme Not Exactly Who You Think I Am. His favourite one-off remains to this day Csesc, Jestem Jez, Lubje Jablko i Borowki.

In March of 2006 he staged a one-and-a-half person protest outside the gates of an American military base, subtly taking the military-industrial complex to task for the ongoing occupation of Iraq entitled Nostalgia - Old School.

Actively participating in invigorating the cultural life of South Korea's third largest city, he has continued to perform songs of love and dismay interspersed with self-evasive comic monologues as The Suburban Cowboy and his Broken-Necked Round-the-World Guitar.

Enamored of Japan since his first visit there in February of 1998, Gordon Foster has consistently developed interventions and explorations on the islands of Kyushu and Honshu, most notably the cycle of walks in his 2002 Fukuoka exploration entitled Missing the Boat.

An avid naturalist and photographer, he has found himself concentrating increasingly on creating micro-nexes linking the natural environment, habitable space, and cyber reality. These have been accessible to several hundred million participants in the project since January of 2006.

His most recent traditional work, an intentionally unfinished acrylic, is an evocative pibroch to discarded and discredited materials, methods and subjects.

In the past month he has begun working in the film media, retracing its development from black-and white silent stills to its highest pinnacle, the music video.

an afternoon in seoul

some of my paintings, annotated

there goes a tico

do i know some great artists

Teresa van Neste's show began on Saturday in Toronto.
Click on the painting for more info.

lost lady love

what do I know about business?

You (gordon foster, from Daegu, South Korea, Canada) wrote: There's an honest explanation for all of this: let's assume companies only grant options when their stocks have plummeted in value, and do so in order to provide their executives with an incentive to pay attention to the bottom line and the interests of investors thereby turning the share prices around. I know it's a big assumption. When was the last time anybody trusted a businessman?
Posted 01/12/06 at 4:03 PM EST

I think there might be a missing comma, between 'investors' and 'thereby'.
Why not check with Rogers?

What do you think, BPG? Am I ready for an MBA? This was posted as a comment to an article in the business section of The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper.

a gentle tap to the nostalgia nerve

I guess it's time to start posting my published comments to the Globe and Mail again. The very next comment after mine referred directly to something I mentioned. Gee, it's nice to be read!

You (gordon foster, from Daegu, South Korea, Canada) wrote: To the SONY MD owners who have posted: it seems only a true audiofile understands equipment. My MD player is in it's original packaging in storage while I work through my first 1GB Shuffle. Why? Because it was affordable and versatile, and I want my daughter to be able to enjoy it the same as I enjoyed my father's Nordmende tube-amplified stereo. I have a stack of blank discs, and now I think I'll buy a few more. It doesn't have mp3 capability, but I can use it with my SONY Walkman to record non copy-protected CDs diigitally. It also records actual sound! And it doesn't require a thousand-dollar plus computer interface to operate. And for the person wondering what to do with their turntable, unfortunately you are going to need a pre-amp for the output, but even without that you could still try recording straight to MD by upping the level on the input. My SONY turntable has a pre-amp to allow headphones to be plugged in directly, a prescient feature that was built-in already in 1982! It's really too bad SONY became involved in manufacturing computers and especially batteries, but as long as they keep on innovating and producing quality audio products I'll remain a fan. Since when has Apple had a reputation for hi-fidelity? Remember those old five-dollar portable AM radios? They're now called iPods and cost upwards of three-hundred bucks, but it's still the same idiots buying them.
Posted 01/12/06 at 3:46 PM EST | Link to Comment

Scot Affleck from Prince George, Canada writes: I remember getting my first hand held little transistor radio back in 1958. It had 7 transistors! Had it for years. Oh, to be young again.

Scot, I'm sorry I implied you were an idiot.

old droopy eye

I posted a comment to the Globe and Mail recently criticizing their article on the sale of a Cornelius Krieghoff painting. It garnered about $300 000 CDN at auction and the person responsible for the headline had the audacity to infer that the Canadian art market was 'hot'. This after a Warhol Mao portrait sold at auction for $17 million. In my comment I mentioned one Michael Snow and the need to wait until twenty years after he was dead in order to determine the true temperature of the market. Snow was a founding member of Fluxus, if I recollect correctly, the same group that included the recently deceased Paik Nam-Jun, Korea's most famous post-modernish artist and an innovator in video art.

The first time I encountered Paik's work in Korea was at Seoul Grand Park a few months after the currency crisis in 1997 and the huge tower of televisions had been turned off, apparently to save on electricity. More recently I was able to view photographs of his collaborations with Josef Beuys at the Shilla Gallery here in Daegu, and I was delighted to encounter his twin television structures at the Sejong Cultural Centre in Seoul a few months ago. One of the videos of Paik repeatedly pushing over an upright piano while a group of men waited to lift it into position again had me grinning for some time.

Now I have never met Michael Snow even though he had monthly appearances with a jazz performance group at The Music Gallery where one of my friends named Steve worked while I was still living in Toronto. I did encounter his sculpture while still an impressionable teenager, though. His most famous work, Walking Woman, seemed to me initially to be nothing more than a feeble tribute to Woman's Liberation and I paid closer attention to the Group of Seven and other more traditional artists while wandering around the AGO.



One day, however, when I was sixteen and on a date with a lovely young lady named Valerie Bernard who was studying at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, I happened across a book of Snow's work in the gallery store. I was glancing through it not expecting much when I came across a series of preliminary drawings for one of his Walking Woman renditions. Valerie was browsing close by and I had been showing her everything of note that I found. Would I show her this? The last of the drawings had an additional figure, that of a man, walking in the opposite direction. Both figures were outlines and they nested perfectly. The man could best be described as rampant, and the woman had an additional element: a cavity extending upwards from her groin in the distinct form of an erect penis. Now even just standing next to an attractive young lady could have been enough to arouse a sixteen year old boy. Valerie was not only young and attractive, she also apparently liked me a lot. I don't remember if I showed her the drawing but between Valerie Bernard and Michael Snow, I was turned on to Art.

I haven't been able to find a picture of Valerie, but here's Michael. I like to think he's winking at me.