Don't look at my ugly photos.

Look at Brian's lovely ones:

http://www.briangothongtan.com/flyingcircus/flyingcircusindex.html

"Ninjas are very respected in my country."

Justa let you know, those of us on Jetstar 555 got to Singapore safe. Koosil-ja's going to Tokyo, Melati and Katarina are going to Solo, Julie's here overnight before packing up for New York again, tomorrow KS and TT go to Shanghai, and Chee Wai, David and Mich are going to Hanoi. My my, what a busy bunch we are... (and will we ever meet again, allofus, in the same room? The statisticians are counting.)

Big goodbye hugs at the luggage belt. (These were earlier paralleled by our big goodbye hugs to Arlette and Linh and our volunteers at Tan Son Nhat Airport). Of course I tried to snap pictures, but then I was reminded about airport security.

Just before we let, I told Tadasu (who's going back to Osaka to witness the birth of his second child) about Cory Doctorow's proposal for Ninja Air Travel. Definitely, some things don't translate.

After the Fire

Ohandinearlyforgot! To observe the close of FCP 2007, David bought a paper motorcycle from the market, the kind you burn for dead relatives to bring them material goods in the afterlife.


And then we set fire to it outside Galerie Quynh.



The hawkers next door were rather intrigued, too. (Who says conceptual art is elitist?)



All gone!

I don't think I properly conveyed the sense, at the end of the talk among the artists, that this has been a highly nourishing FCP - I hesitate to use the words "successful" or "productive", because we've been redefining those very words. Reading past essays and hearing past descriptions of FCPs, I've realised there's often a tension, a clear division that emerges among traditionalists and conceptualists, the pioneers and the avant-garde. This time, that didn't happen - we somehow all became very sociable, treating everyone like soulmates, siblings.

How productive is that unity? Katarina noted that if we'd gone on for longer, we might have voiced more criticisms of each other's work, become less obviously supportive. Personally, I know that if I didn't love the person's work to begin with, I began to love the person, and the next time they presented, I understood the work, I knew where it came from, I fell in love as if at first sight.

Kaffe describes our applause in Galerie Quynh

“We’re good clappers. You should put that in your documentation. There’s something in the air in this space that amplifies clapping. You could even say the resonant frequency of this gallery is of the clap.”

Letter Home

Dear Mum, Father, Ching, Xian and Maria,

Yo! Safe here in Ho Chi Minh City - touched down this morning at the spanking new modern airport; got delayed for a while because someone knocked my suitcase off the carousel, checked into Thanh Lien Hotel (135-137 Ly Tu Trong St, Room 407), napped for an hour. talked strategy in our Liberty 6 suite-cum-office with negligible wireless reception (ok that was the artists, I was just keeping my head down and typing), met expatriate-repatriate Vietnamese-American-Vietnamese artist Dinq Q. Le, ate at Pho-24 (raw beef in hot broth and ethereally iced tea), visited the War Remnants Museum (originally the Museum of American and Chinese War Crimes), got mildly depressed because the debilitatory effects of Agent Orange and Dioxin confirmed the impossibility of using mutagens to turn us into superheroes (seriously, I think my Hegelian weltanschaung regarding the advancement of man thru technology was rudely shattered), slept in the park, got scolded by National Guard for sleeping in the park, had cappuccino freddo and choux and garlic champignons at the late-90s chic Taiwanese-investment suburb of South Saigon (which uncannily resembles Orange County/Tampines), visited our performance space, brainstormed at the performance space, renegotiated reinventions of our Superintense project at the performance space (that was them again), broke for a dinner of street food and ordered the custard apple shake, the pennyworth-coconut shake, the spring rolls and the five-flavour frog, whole and unbutchered, with the speckles still visible on its Cajun-blackened skin and white rice, bought bottled water, bought an adaptor, started blogging, blogging....

Will be keeping the world informed of my activities on http://flyingcircusproject.blogspot.com

Your son/sibling,

Yi-Sheng
B).

Kaffe remembers Chinese karaoke

“…like it was a shopping mall, only you went inside and it had chandeliers and then and we got taken to our room with massive red leather sofas, plush cushions, and microphones, and straightaway kaching it was on the list, a massive list, massive selection of songs, anything you could choose from Elton John, Bass City Rollers, Mamas and the Papas, so you turn your mike on, and all your friends and the stressed-out curators are suddenly so happy and they’re straight on the mike, and they know straightway which songs they want to sing, and every mike has a gigantic amount of reverb so you can sing really badly and still sound great, and then we ordered drinks…”

Vietnam: First Impressions

Temples, mosques, 24-hour pho, fashion design, dancercise halls, nail polish, hanging gardens on second floor balconies, bougainvillea, bonsai, construction sites, green netting, auto trading centres, lotteria, no right turn, mannequins from the year 1982, chalets, HIV awareness posters, sang piles, yin-yang, bus stops, Aquacool, scooters, scooters, scooters, sanitary masks, headcloths and Chinese straw hats, Japanese language school, magazines, cake and sandwich takeaway, guava and longan peddler rubbing his nose on a traffic island, taller trees than ever I saw in Singapore, Nestle Milo, Marie Curie Institute, blackened yellow water tower, party costumes, decorations, beep beep beep, Joe Box, PT2000, Communist flags, Kraft Assorted Biscuits, blue phonebox, Coop Mart, Pond’s Age Solution Ealry Defense, HCMC International Volleyball Tournament, Mobil, Vidotou, Victory Restaurant, Konica Minolta, Centuria Super, Tiger Beer, women in painted hats protesting for land restitution outside the fountain plaza of the Reunification Palace…

Chung ta di Viet Nam

At Changi Airport already! Wake-up calls at 4.45, 5am and 5:15. In the taxi on the way here, realised I’ve left my cellphone charger and thumb drive back at home. Meh, will survive.

More worrisomely, Francis Ng has his phone off and may be boozily snoozing. Any other artistasters want to zoom over to replace him, now’s yer chance.

UPDATE: The prodigal has checked in. Atira e ikimasyoo!

Portraits @ 72-13

Keng Sen's office.



David's knee.