Hong Kong Blog Day 5

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The Spiritual Heart of Hong Kong

When I woke up, there was a hazy fog so going to The Peak wasn’t really an option.  Instead, I decided to go to Flagstaff House—The Museum of Teaware in Hong Kong Park in Central.

After a few false starts finding the museum (a sign pointed me into a shopping mall, but then I lost the trail for a while and had to walk around and make a few false starts before I picked up the trail again), I entered the garden.  This is a fairly substantial garden that is formally laid out with a combination of water features, winding paths and some flower and flowering shrub plantings.  There are plenty of park benches offering an opportunity to get off your feet and to enjoy the park.  The Museum of Teaware is in a colonial-style residence that has been converted into a museum.  The collection is focused on teaware, especially yixing teapots.  There are numerous examples of yixing teapots and videos that show how these teapots are made and even an example of a Chinese tea ceremony of the gongfu type.I myself have a modest collection of not terribly valuable modern yixing teapots.  It was very interesting to see lovely examples of much higher quality and especially to see the manufacturing technique.  These teapots are made from a special clay that is not suited to building up the pots either by the coil method or by throwing them on a wheel.  Instead, the clay is prepared and rolled out, then the various parts that make up the teapot are cut out and assembled by hand.  The clay has special porous qualities that is purported to take on the flavor of the tea when the pot is used over a period of time.  The story is that after many years of use you can brew of cup of tea in one of these teapots simply by adding hot water.

 http://ceramicartsdaily.org/pottery-making-techniques/handbuilding-techniques/poetry-in-motion-a-yixing-teapot-master-creates-an-exquisite-handbuilt-teapot/?floater=99(go down the page and click on the video showing how yixing teapots are made)Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBn3NpGw-fsI spent a fair amount of time in the Teaware Museum and experienced a real feeling of apeace and lightness, especially watching the films of the Chinese Tea Ceremony and looking at the exhibition of yixing teaware.  I bought some reasonably priced, but very fragrant Ti Guan Yin in the gift shop and then left the museum to walk around the park.

http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/attractions/green-hongkong-park.html(for an interactive, panoramic view of Hong Kong Park)As I was walking around Hong Kong Park and marveling at the juxtaposition of nature and the tall building of Central which surround the park on all sides, I felt strongly connected to a deep spiritual vibe.  Nothing I had read or heard about Hong Kong prepared me for this experience.  Hong Kong is always touted as a “shoppers’ paradise” and I hear endless laments from locals about how materialistic its citizens are.  With this preamble, one would hardly expect to effortlessly connect to a profound and extremely strong spiritual essence in the middle of the business and economic locus of Hong Kong.  Yet, there it was.  All I had to do was to be aware of it and I experienced how it permeated everything.  Beneath the glittering skyscrapers, in the midst of the harried crowds, there was this very powerful spiritual reality that I could not see but that was so palpable that I was filled with it to the point that I felt like I was positively vibrating with it.  I was so surprised, you could have knocked me over with a feather.  Hong Kong, a city of secrets and surprises, had revealed one of her hidden aspects to me.  I have felt a connection with other places I have visited, but never have I experienced something like this.  There were many surprises during my stay in Hong Kong, all of them pleasant, but this experience has to rank as the most unexpected and powerful.

I had lunch in a pleasant outdoor café in the park and had a chance to look at a museum brochure that I had picked up at Flagstaff House.  I hadn’t realized that Flagstaff House and the Museum of Teaware are part of the Hong Kong Museum of art and the newsletter had information about the various permanent collections and special exhibitions at the Museum of Art across the bay in Tsim Sha Tsui.  With the weather turning darker, cloudier and windier by the hour, any plans I might have had to go to The Peak were abandoned, and I decided to explore the Avenue of the Stars and the Art Museum instead.

 I located Leslie Cheung’s star on the Avenue of the Stars and snapped a few pictures.  But the weather was so foggy that there weren’t many good shots of Hong Kong Island across the harbor.  The dropping temperature and increasingly gusty winds soon drove me inside.

Since I was a young child, one of my great joys in life is museum going, in particular visiting art museums.  I have taken trips with the sole and express purpose of visiting an art exhibition.  I take at least one trip a year to Washington, DC to immerse myself in its marvelous museums.  One of the motivating factors in visiting New York is to go to art museums.  There wasn’t very much about the Hong Kong Museum of Art in my guidebooks, they certainly weren’t touting the collections as world-class (whatever that means), so I had low expectations about what I would find there.

I began with the museum’s permanent collection of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy.  They have some lovely pieces, but nothing earth shattering.  From there, I moved on to an exhibition of works by contemporary Hong Kong artists.  It was pretty weak and a major disappointment.  Next, I decided to proceed up to the fourth floor and check out the large special exhibition that the museum was advertising on the huge banner affixed to the outside of the building:  Lofty Integrity:  Donation of Works by Wu Guanzhong.

 I had no idea who Wu Guanzhong was and had no specific expectations about what I would find in the exhibition.  But, before I could even enter the exhibition, I made a major discovery.  At the top of the escalator on the Fourth Floor, you are confronted by a Ming Era polychromed wooden statue of GuanYin.  As soon as I spotted it at the top of the escalator, I felt like it was drawing me to it.  Since I saw my first such Ming Dynasty statue of Guan Yin in the pose of royal ease a few years back, I have always loved this depiction of the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion.  At this time in history, the figure of Guan Yin was not female, but a marvelously androgynous figure that embodied a perfect balance of male and female beauty.  (I don’t want to sound sacrilegious to any Buddhists who read this, but it strikes me as very similar to the type of beauty Leslie Cheung possessed).  Both male and female are fully present in the image, fully fused, not separable, creating a whole that partakes equally of both varieties of beauty.  This particular image of Guan Yin possessed a great deal of magnetism.  I noticed a similar phenomenon in Spain when I was in the presence of images of the saints, especially the Virgin Mary, that had received centuries of focused prayer and devotion.  You feel a spiritual vortex in the space around the image and can feel how much concentrated energy has been collected around this locus point.  Many spiritual traditions recognize the ability of material objects to act as a collector of spiritual energy if a great deal of concentration is focused on the object.  Although this Guan Yin had probably been removed from its ritual context over a hundred years ago, still you could feel the residual elements of this spiritual concentration.

With such a welcome, finally I was ready to encounter the works of Wu Guanzhong.    First, the facts:  Mr. Wu, I discovered from the pamphlet provided by the museum, is one of China’s most revered contemporary painters who has attempted to bring the Chinese tradition of landscape painting into the modern era.  He studied oil painting in Paris in the mid-1940s and then returned to China and painted and taught generations of students.  He works in two primary media:  oils and traditional ink on paper.  In 2009, when he turned 89 years old, Wu decided to make major gifts of many of his recent paintings to several museums in Asia.  Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore were recipients of his artistic largesse.  Soon afterwards, he donated over 30 works to the Hong Kong museum (which already had some of his works in its collection and which had staged an exhibition of his works in 2002).  The works currently on display at the Hong Kong Museum of Art are from this 2009 donation.

So much for the bald facts, the works that I discovered in this exhibition went far and beyond any description of them in a museum pamphlet.  Wu has been painting and reflecting on both the act of painting and the meaning of painting for so long that he has distilled it into works of great power, beauty and spiritual force.  Each painting contains a lifetime of experience that marries visual expression with poetic inscriptions.  Like the male and female in the Guan Yin outside the door of the exhibition, there is a perfect union of image and written commentary.  Each can stand alone, but the combined expression is positively devastating.  I was in awe of the painter’s ability to paint such pictures and invoke through words some intrinsic experience and tie it to the work he had created.  There was deep spiritual power in this art and the farther I got into the exhibition, the more emotionally moving I found the accumulation of works to be.

Standing in front of “Leaving Youth Behind” , a large scale horizontal ink painting (69 x 138 cm), an image of lotuses in a pond withered and broken by winter, and reading its inscription “When a tree is old, its roots are exposed.  When a lotus is old, its stalks break.  It is better to break than to submit, leaving no regrets even when youth is gone,” I was overwhelmed by the wisdom and experience of this 89 year-old painter.  Standing myself across the dividing line that separates youth from middle-age, I was struck by the feeling that I had left my own youth behind (in a culture that values nothing but youth) and the distance left to travel was perhaps less in terms of years, but infinitely richer in terms of experience.  This painter had blazed the trail ahead of me and by displaying such vigor, and artistic and spiritual mastery, there is indeed great hope for the future and what it holds.  Youth has its purpose and its uses, but maturity is the stock and measure of a life.  I was in the presence of a master and knew that I had something to aspire to in my old age.  To be as awakened, spiritually energized and active as this great artist could never steer me wrong.

As devastating as was the experience of “Leaving Youth Behind”, it was another picture that captured this master’s works for me.  It is an ink painting that is of the red sun setting (or rising) over water.  The water is a mirror of dark, dark grey.  The sky is inky black with a single spot of light.  The red sun is half consumed by the water and a red smear, like blood, stains the water extending from the horizon to the viewer.  The inscription that accompanies this painting reads:  “The setting sun casts a red shadow and everything on earth perishes whereas the solitary star shines high up in the chilly sky.”  Standing in front of this picture, which expressed the power of both annihilation and rebirth, showing that they, in fact, are one and the same, I was moved to the point of tears.  I had to go out of the exhibition and collect myself in the lounge that looked out on the harbor from the fourth floor of the museum.  The wisdom, truth, spiritual power and beauty of this artist’s works were heart-breaking.  It was just too much to take in all at once.  So I sat in the vestibule just letting the power of this art shake me to the core, the culmination of the most unexpected and amazing day in Hong Kong.

After a few minutes, I returned to the exhibition, outwardly composed, but still inwardly on a knife’s edge in front of Wu’s art.  After the last work had been viewed, I saw at the entrance that there was an opportunity to provide feedback in a unique manner.  Visitors were invited to write a brief story inspired by any of a number of pictures in the exhibition.  All of these writings were to be collected and then shared with the painter.  Needless to say, I was very happy to leave a poetic meditation on “Leaving Youth Behind” happy that I could put into words some of my inner state in the presence of this work.

After the experience of that exhibition, I no longer wanted to see other works in the museum.  Anything else would be anticlimactic after this.  But I did want to see if I could purchase an exhibition catalog and whatever else might be of interest in the gift shop.  (I still hadn’t bought many souvenirs for the people back home).  There is a very good catalog of the exhibition and, as a bonus, they gave me a collapsible tote bag with one of the paintings emblazoned on it.  I also found many souvenirs for family and friends (and even a few things for myself)  Then it was time to head across Salisbury Rd. and continue with a bit more souvenir shopping.  Leaving the gift shop, I noticed a group of Tibetan monks on the waterfront.  They were the first (and only) Tibetan monks I saw while I was in Hong Kong.  Then, when I came up out of the subway (what they call a passage under a road in Hong Kong), I encountered another Buddhist monk (different habit, so different order) standing at the exit hitting a cup gong and chanting sutras.  He didn’t have a begging bowl and in no way engaged the crowd of passers-by.  The chanting was of the highest order.  This monk stood like a sturdy rock in the midst of a tumbling stream of humanity, unperturbed by the rush hour hurly-burly.

I completed my purchases and headed over to Lock Road to meet up once again with my friends Danny and Jason for dinner.  As I rounded a corner, there was yet another Buddhist monk, again chanting, though without the gong this time.  I got the feeling that this was a pretty extraordinary coincidence, three different encounters with Buddhist monks in 90 minutes time but, since I’m not from Hong Kong, maybe this isn’t so extraordinary.  These encounters may also be a clue as to why Hong Kong has such a deep and powerful spiritual core.

Finally after this amazing day, it was time for dinner with Jason, Danny, Luke (the youngest son) and Mrs. Chau.  It was a warm and happy family dinner and I felt very happy and honored by how sincerely I had been embraced by the entire family.  Thank you, all, for a marvelous dinner (and I refer to so much more than the food, though that in and of itself was very good).  During the course of dinner, Danny showed me some pictures from a recently opened featuring new works by the very famous Hong Kong photographer, Basil Pao that were on display at a gallery space in Central.  The photographs juxtaposed close-up images of walls in China (a project Basil Pao has been engaged with for a number of years) with images of the Yi-Jing pictograms and accompanying text commentary.  Danny was responsible for the prints, and he and Jason had been invited to the opening.  The pictures were very intriguing and I also wanted to see some of Danny’s work while I was in Hong Kong, so I made of note of the exhibition knowing that I would go out and find it the next day.

After this lovely dinner and conversation, I made it back to my hotel late, only to find a message from Julie, one of the Leslie fans who was doing so much around the 4-01 commemorations and was going to be my personal tour guide later in the week.  I called her and we spoke for a few minutes about Leslie, and so this most marvelous day ended on a high note talking about our beloved Gor Gor.  

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