In a fascinating bit of intellectual history, Andrew Gelman says he started off in math but came to doubt he was good enough at pure math. This reminds me of something one of my Tsinghua students told me a few days ago. An art major at his high school (the top high school in Beijing) was accepted at UC Berkeley with a big scholarship on the condition that the art student compete for Berkeley in a college math competition.
From The Story of Science, a great new BBC TV series, I learned that in 1856 William Perkin, a British chemist, while trying to synthesize quinine (to cure malaria), created the first aniline dye, called mauveine. It could be used to dye cloth mauve. (more…)
Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?
The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.
My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.
This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.
A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”
In a Shanghai apartment, the phone rings. A friend of the occupant answers the phone. “It’s someone from a rural area,” he shouts to the occupant. (Shanghai and other dialects are quite different.) “I’m from Beijing,” says the person on the line. “It’s someone from Rural Beijing,” the friend shouts.
This joke is told by people who are from neither Shanghai nor Beijing.
From Time Out Beijing:
Veteran Beijing artist Gu Dexin . . . first turned European noses at a satellite show of the Venice Biennale in 1995, when he dumped three hundred kilos of raw beef into three glass coffins set in a local casino.
In the heat of summer, poisonous gases from the rotting meat quickly forced officials to clean up the show. This shy enfant terrible of the art world went on to astound European audiences in a succession of shows, placing raw meat or fruit in public places and letting them rot.
Up until this year, when he installed raw pork at the Legation Quarter, the formula has served him brilliantly. Part of the force of this current show is the absence of decay – resulting in a sterile and odourless silence.
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