David Wicks :: Writing

Nonsense way of thinking

David — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:59:40 +0000

Gadget OK, a device-art and japanese robot-culture symposium, took place this weekend at UCLA Design|Media Arts. With the lectures, panels, and artist presentations finished, about thirty lucky folks got to spend the afternoon with Novmichi Tosa today. He introduced the process behind some of his recent works, and then led us through a brainstorming exercise designed to produce nonsense objects.

There were 4 main steps to creating an idea using Tosa-san’s method:

Write down everything you touched this morning, in order (10 things). After you finish writing down everything, write ‘nonsense’ next to it.
Write something for each thing that would make it nonsensical. If you can’t think of anything that would make the thing nonsensical, put in the word of the day. Ours was ‘blue’.
Combine each pair of nonsense things and write down the new image they make.
Draw your final idea.

The process worked quite well for generating a range of silly possibilities, provided you were open to having silly ideas in the first place. After we went through all the steps, Tosa-san photographed everyone’s ideas and shared them with the group. I came up with a sketch for wooly, felt dentures. They give you a nice, hairy smile for greeting people. Other people’s ideas included time-travel toast, a booger-swapping machine, and an air hotel. Give it a try, and perhaps you will come up with something silly, yet worth pursuing.

At the end of the day, some questions arise. What would it mean to have these nonsense objects in the world? What kind of stories do they suggest, or make possible? These are questions raised not only by today’s workshop, but by much of the work presented during Gadget OK. There are so many strange new things; what are we going to do with them?

Tosa-san also runs longer workshops in Japan, with the aim of helping each participant build a nonsense object. The ginger-rifle is a nice example of how those can turn out:

Josiah McElheny and women of modernism

David — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:16:30 +0000

Last night, Josiah McElheny gave a talk at UCLA. Among other things, Josiah talked much about the implications of Modernism and what it has meant that a group of men were allowed to decide how our world looks. Josiah presented multiple beginnings to multiple universes, and also dropped some names of significant women who were largely written out of the Modernist history. The ones I caught follow:

The talk was, in many ways, ideal. Josiah cares deeply about the history which he is interrogating, and still maintains a level of modesty about the power of ones work to change its subject. It prompted me to think about areas of research that I deeply care about, and what it would mean for me to engage them rigorously.

Reading on the bus

David — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:27:05 +0000

I recently finished reading “non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity” by Marc Augé. The book, recommended to me by Peter Lunenfeld, positions itself within anthropological thought and then uses that position to look at how we encounter, interpret, and analyze space.

My experience of the book was fragmentary; I read sections as I rode the bus, occasionally being forced to stop mid-sentence when I reached the last stop. This seemed like an appropriate way to encounter the material. As I passed through places marked only by signs, I was reading about their demarcation, the way they function as non-relational space. Unfortunately, it prevented me from effectively noting sections of the book; any attempt at writing was thwarted by the irregular vibrations of the bus. I’ll try to piece together some of the elements that interested me while I read, centered around the production of meaning for researchers and individuals.

The early portion of the book is dedicated to how anthropologists define the group which they are studying. Somehow, a relation between all group members must be found through discrete samples. This is no simple task, and takes consideration of the representativeness of sources and their reliability. Augé describes this world-building elegantly:

The field ethnologist’s activity throughout is the activity of a social surveyor, a manipulator of scales … [s]he cobbles together a significant universe by exploring intermediate universes at need. (Augé, 13)

All experience is fragmentary, and all places unfinished. Augé discusses this as a challenge when considering anthropological subjects, for cultures “never constitute finished totalities” and individuals “are never quite simple enough to become detached from the order that assigns them a position: they express its totality only from a certain angle.” (Augé, 22) We encounter the world as individuals, and we can present it to others only from our individual perspective. This presentation is one of the possible roles for an artist or maker. To establish a way for others to see the world from a new perspective, although they will not move entirely outside themselves.

A method for artists to present their world is suggested in the methods ethnologists use to discover worlds around them: the creation of intermediate universes, each of which clarifies some portion of the whole. This creation of universes can be used as a strategy for individual works, or thought of as a way of looking at an established artist’s ouvre. As a strategy for making work, I think it may be useful to consider the exhibition as a “significant universe” and the piece in it as intermediate ones. While the pieces all corroborate some whole, the gaps between them must be inferred by the audience. Viewers essentially study this universe and construct their own vision of what binds it together. I would also like to explore the possibility of creating a series of islands that inform each other, worlds in miniature, that constitute a single piece.

There are obviously many other facets of this short collection of essays. Eventually, I might like to take on the necessity of individual production of meaning as a reaction to the instability of collective reference points. Also, the notion of online locations as anthropological places, and how they exist as dynamic spaces theoretically without spatial borders, is worth addressing. Regarding online places, why is it that social networking sites don’t feel like they have a history when we return to them?

I am left with many questions right now, so I’ll include a few of them here: How do we create meaning for ourselves? How can we create spaces for the production of meaning? Places that are ready to be seeded with memories and relations.

Starting Point: Projected Spaces

David — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:19:55 +0000

I’m ramping up for the next quarter, and have a handful of ideas I want to pursue. For one, I plan to do an independent study with Jennifer Steinkamp, exploring different possibilities for projection onto irregular surfaces. The reason I want to explore this is so I can create fragments of living worlds (like tidepools, mountain peaks, or other micro-climates⁄habitats) that occupy physical space. I have in my mind small islands that rise out of the floor that are activated by a range of animated forms.

At the moment, I’m collecting various reference images and gathering materials for a basic projector setup.

VJ Kungfu has an excellent video detailing how to build your own flexible projector mount. If you’re interested in securing your projector (or pointing it at crazy angles), I definitely recommend looking into their system. The mount consists primarily of standard lighting rig components. I’ve ordered parts and look forward to putting them together soon. Also, I’m getting up a projector to put on said mount. I started with the fantasy that I would get something super high-end, but talked myself down to a more reasonable $1000, 1080p projector. That way, I can still afford to pay my rent.

Constructing personal spaces

David — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:02:38 +0000

Creating Spaces

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. (Solnit, 13)

My current work is a continuous attempt at representing the world as I remember and imagine it to be. It is about the places I have been and the places I wish to inhabit, with plenty of diversions along the way. There is the hope that the experience of the work translates into a similar or new personal meaning for people who engage with it. To that end, I am interested in creating new personal spaces in our world. Spaces where people can explore. Spaces where people can meditate. Spaces where people can play. Spaces to feel safe in. To bring the mountain vista to the gallery space, the forest trail to the sidewalk, and in so doing create a new kind of interconnected space. I see my work simultaneously running counter to and parallel to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. In opposition, I am often using representational elements from my experience; In parallel, I create concrete conditions of possible ways of being. My central concern is not representation, but creation of worlds or, more accurately, their fragments. In order to explore ways of making meaning, I will look at artists creating dream spaces in sculpture, digital media, and hybrid forms. This idea of making concrete interventions is central to Bourriaud’s argument in support of relational aesthetics. The primary concern of the work “is not a matter of representing angelic worlds, but of producing the conditions thereof.” (Bourriaud, 83) So, rather than giving someone an image of this or another world, we are attempting to create that world in our present space. This creation may be small or temporary, but its existence as a real way of being is nevertheless significant.

What, then, are these angelic worlds?

The angelic worlds that Bourriaud relates are not necessarily the ones I am interested in (or ones I would consider angelic). Perhaps it is better to consider them as alternative worlds, or dream worlds. They are places “where reality and dream form a whole.” (Bachelard, 23) I want the interstitial elements that I create to allow people “to recapture the naïve wonder we used to feel when we found a nest,” to become comfortable dreaming in their daily lives (Bachelard, 93). Different manifestations of these dream-worlds include the man-machine hybrid, technologically-mediated nature, and my interest, The spaces for reflection and discovery I aim to create are modeled around the spaces where I reflect on and discover the world. They are landscapes and cities of my imagination. They are pieces of music that play over and over in my head, and the places where I learned them. These, for me, are dreams of interconnectedness and liminal spaces. Dreams of being simultaneously apart from and in touch with the world. I want to create scenarios where we can see the other world and reach out to touch it, experiencing the journey without going far. I walk often, as it is how I generally form the strongest association with a place. It is not merely that I am walking, or the place that I am in, but the engagement of all senses with that place. The physical exertion needed to climb a mountain bolsters the view in validating its summit. Wandering and discovery are important themes in my work, even as the landscapes themselves are transposed/mediated, made into objects and made portable. As I wander, I sometimes dream of occupying Bachelard’s image of rootedness and interconnectedness, “the undergrounds of legendary fortified castles, where mysterious passages that run under the enclosing walls, the ramparts and the moat put the heart of the castle into communication with the distant forest” (Bachelard, 20). Not of leaving the world behind, but being in a vast interconnected state. Of being at home, and simultaneously everywhere.

How do we form these worlds?

The importance of abstraction

These worlds should be expressed obliquely, leaving room for explorative, imaginative and emotional responses. We cannot simply say, “there is a forest,” and expect that statement to engage the imagination. As Bachelard writes (concerning the image of a snail retreating like a girl being teased): “Images that are too clear … become generalities, and for that reason block the imagination. We’ve seen, we’ve understood, we’ve spoken” (Bachelard, 121). Rather than tell people what they should experience (or show them mere photographic evidence of my experience), I want to direct them to a memory. To give them “an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.” (Bachelard, 13) The secret, in the case of my work, is my own, deeply subjective, experience. It cannot be extracted from that subjectivity, and so can only be hinted at through equally subjective signs and directions. The artwork of these directions provides a place for discovering memories or dreams that inspired the work, and for new dreams and imaginings engendered by the work.

Building on land

Numerous artists create spaces that leave room for the imagination to complete them, to fill in the network,. I am interested in their works that present a vision of another way of being, and enable us to experience it directly or through the work as proxy. A High Plane by Katrin Sigursdottir is a simple installation with a strong effect of collapsing distances, shown at PS1 in 2007. Entering the room, visitors are confronted by two ladders rising up through small holes in the ceiling. At the top, after climbing eighteen feet, the visitor enters a new space. An expansive ice floe in miniature surrounds the viewer’s head, as if she is just surfacing from the ocean. This is the type of interconnectedness embodied by the fantastical cellar: the visitor is simultaneously in the gallery and playfully elsewhere. James Turrell’s Meeting Room, also at PS1, has a similar effect of bringing the outside world into the present space. It is a small room with seating around the outside which is opened to viewers at sunset. The ceiling has been cut away, such that there is a crisp white edge that meets the sky, making the plane of blue sky level with the white-painted ceiling. David Altmejd creates sculptural dioramas of fantastical worlds. As Sigursdottir and Turrell bring imagined or outside space into familiar, interior spaces, Altmejd’s work brings the larger world into the interior of the imaginary body. These sculptures play with the body as landscape. They include worlds living in the crystallized bodies of dead beasts and tiny civilizations built around the hairy flesh of giants. He collapses space so far that we are not inside a new liminal space, but instead show us that the new space can be inside us, as it is inside the bodies he constructs. They are worlds we might create when we are dead, but which we do not yet participate in.

Building in the clouds

Work in non-physical spaces faces a different set of problems from those of physical objects and provides new opportunities. We rely almost exclusively on the sense of sight in most of our virtual worlds. (Interfaces are starting to shift away from this anemic sensory experience, as I will discuss below.) Despite the limitation to visual and auditory output, many artists are creating engaging work on the internet and in screen-space in general. Many independent games give the player the opportunity to explore alternative, seemingly impossible, worlds. The pixeljunk series allows players to experience existence as life-giving plankton growing a digital menagerie on their screens through a series of balletic encounters with corals. Flower from That Game Company lets the player journey through a world experiencing the daydreams of a flower. Aether presents a similar kind of journey, inviting the player to move casually from planet to planet by swinging from clouds. The work of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar takes some of the playfulness of these games and charges it with the somewhat more serious task of representing people’s emotions as gathered from blogs and chatrooms. As it brings together information from disparate places into our brightly-colored playground, “We Feel Fine” begins to create new interconnected spaces online. It provides a window onto thousands of other worlds from within our own. While one can argue that web-browsers in general provide this window, projects like “We Feel Fine” do so with meaningful intent and poetic framing.

Bridging the ether and matter

One of the pragmatic aspects of digital practice is that information can be infinitely developed, recycled, and reproduced in various contexts… (Paul, 70)

By working in digital media, we can move seamlessly between a range of representations. Its malleability aids greatly in bridging the gap between the physical and the ether, since bits can be at once an image, a sound, and translated into physical form. Using this range of outputs afforded by digital media, we can give feedback to nearly all the senses: creating motion, temperature, light, sound, and modulating each in time. Eddo Stern’s Dark Game puts the player in a world where they have new haptic senses and are occasionally deprived of senses they may be accustomed to using in gaming. When sight is taken away, the player is given a haptic sense of where their objectives are located. Similarly, other senses are traded throughout gameplay. Ear Studio’s Listening Post, on the other hand, brings the world of information into physical space but without gaining any warmth—it consists of an array of LCD screens and speakers. They display information gleaned from chatrooms in a series of movements. Both of these works have a particularly digital affect. They are about their digital materiality more than their dual materiality. I am interested in pushing digital work to have a more material affect. I think work can engage the digital world as much as these pieces while entering the physical world more materially. Work that is successful in doing this will come succeed in the realms of both traditional object-making and digital artifact making.

You can bring it with you

Rather than requiring a physical presence for these effects, I am interested in how the conditions of those spaces can be created through the limited means we can carry with us or encounter in our everyday. Portable screens are now pedestrian, and provide a pedestrian way to create portable environments. They confine the added experience to a small area, but give the carrier a sense of control over the experience. They are larger than it, can turn it off at any moment. But they can also turn it on wherever they are, which is these small screens’ strength. The screens become personal spaces by virtue of being small and being controlled by the people carrying them. They present an excellent stage for carrying out small interventions.

A synthesis of cult and exhibition value

Walter Benjamin talks of two traditional poles for the function of artwork: cult value and exhibition value. In other words, the value of the artwork as an object of the imaginary versus its value as an object that is seen. (Benjamin, 225) With the internet, the art original seems to take on the role of a cult object, as only its documentation may be seen by a larger audience. There are so many representations that serve to exhibit the work, but the idea of the existence of the original that makes it important. The cult value is no less important now, for the existence of the object suggests other life possibilities, other ways of being and using objects. The documentation provides exhibition value, but the existence of the object gives proof that, “…artists invent ways of living, or else create an awareness … making it possible to imagine a further state of our civilisation.” (Bourriaud, 71) While I think that artwork may suggest a better world, I take a more tempered view than Bourriaud on the work’s efficacy in bringing about that better world. Instead, I see artwork more as a placeholder marking our desire for something better. The artworks discussed above are not merely about exhibition for their formal value. They are inherently concerned with their cult value—their ability to transform immediate reality. It is not about changing the whole world, but about changing one moment, imbuing it with new possibilities for living. It is a new kind of romanticism enabled by technology that lets us extend visionary drawings into physical space.

Some of this may not be true

I want to create work that creates the kind of interconnected scenarios I have discussed so far. Recently, I have been engaged with work that creates personal moments online and objects that transform experiences of the natural world and bring them into our more immediate domesticated environment. My first serious attempt at creating personal spaces happened online, at timespentalone.com. It consists of a series of interactive scenes conceived in solitude and intended for display and participation in the isolated social space of the internet. I consider each scene to be a daydream, worry or solitary trip. I subsequently created Portable Forest, a jacket that creates a sonic forest around the wearer that becomes denser as they zip up the jacket. Not a space for reflection so much as an opportunity to change the space one is in, transforming it into a new kind of hybrid natural space, in which experiences in our urban environment are overlaid with experiences pulled from the natural environment. Perhaps it allows us to imagine a future state—one I certainly hope for—where we have attained a fusion between our constructed habitat and our natural one. I am currently developing the next step in the project, a forest that lives on the viewer’s cellphone, and provides a level of natural environment commensurate with the person’s current need for nature. That is, there will be more simulated forest at hand when you are farthest from an actual forest. Desert I & II diverge from this idea of creating spaces, but attempt to provoke similar emotional responses. A concrete ground that floats just above the one we stand on and a circle of miniature trees growing from salt, they present a memory of the natural world that is contrary to expectations about that world. They are a response to and re-asking of the questions I had when I first encountered trees bearing salt. My work, then, is in process. Each piece I make is an attempt at relating some of my experiences or my hopes for new experiences we may have. As the physical and digital systems we live in grow increasingly sophisticated and widespread, I hope to tell more sophisticated stories, and to tell simple ones more effectively.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Random House, 2007.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.
Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Chen Qiulin: A memory of place

David — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:55:05 +0000

My brother was in town a few weeks ago and we stopped by the Hammer to check out the work by Chen Qiulin. Chen’s work is obliquely documentary; recording some of the now-submerged cities and valleys of Sichuan, China through video of narratives enacted on the condemned landscapes.

Of primary interest to me in Chen’s work is how she presents the landscape as defining the events within it. Collapsing industrial buildings tower over people, shaping the actions they may take. It seems as if all they can do is wander through the landscape, searching for each other, searching for meaning in their actions. Indeed, they can do nothing to shape the land around them, or to prevent its disappearance. And we can only watch as they progress down a linear path.

I wonder how software and installation can be used to represent landscapes as charged as these, how they can engage viewers in ritual similar to those enacted by the actors/demonstrators in Qiulin’s work. Can we guide people through the environment as effectively as the bride and groom in Qiulin’s videos? Perhaps we need some sense of inevitability in our work; to see an the next step coming, even as we aren’t sure of what it is.

In Qiulin’s video, we follow the actors as they walk the path of their fate. In games, we may need a guide to help us, perhaps we are one of the many men carrying peonies to the lake, and so instinctively stay with the group. In an environment, we can limit pathways, like presenting viewers with a staircase leading up to an unknown plane. At what point do these constraints become meaningful, and how do they shape the narrative for the viewer?

This issue of imbuing work with substantive meaning or context is one I will be tackling in future writings. Simply using a dataset to create an image does not make the image about that data. A higher level of transformation is occurring in successful work, a level which I am trying to reach in my own practice.

The Desert: Three Themes

David — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:48:48 +0000

I spent last weekend in Wonder Valley in the Mojave as part of the Mapping the Desert symposium organized by UCIRA and the Sweeney Art Gallery. While there, I had the great opportunity to meet with artists from other UC campuses, and to encounter a number of aspects of the desert. These encounters led to early thoughts on themes the desert elicited from me during my stay: salt, the development of journey as a shareable artwork, and the not-so-serious Zombie Christians or doing what you ought not.

Salt

The first thing that struck me in the desert was the salt-tree in front of our campsite. The tree—a tamarisk—had large crystals of salt coating its leaves.

Salt manifests wherever there is water in the desert, and plants growing in oases need to be halophilic to survive. I am interested in systems where halophiles could be operating benevolently on behalf of less salt-tolerant species, and in the exoskeleton that the halophiles produce as they grow under mineral-rich conditions.

Journey

Scrambling from rock to rock in Joshua Tree National Monument cemented the desire Pete Hawkes and I had to make the journey integral to some of our work. Michael Kimmelman’s essay on The Art of the Pilgrimage brings up how travel to see a work shapes your perception of the work; I think the travel itself could become the work. What better way to share a steep mountain climb than to lead someone on it? Naturally, we would like to have some additional payoff, some tangible work that people who engage in the travel ultimately contribute to. We’re working out the details.

Zombichrucians

Let’s not forget the crazies who live out in the desert, or the artists who impersonate crazies in the desert. Christmas-tree-like light-up crosses, keep-out signs, and ringing church bells that don’t belong to you. The bells peal loudly in the desert, trailing off into the open space, never bouncing back. Someone else hears and we all scramble for the car. It doesn’t start for a minute that feels much longer, when we finally drive off into the space, becoming a glowing light on the horizon.

More images from the weekend are available on flickr.

Now Here: Los Angeles

David — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:34:56 +0000

I just started my graduate education in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts program. I’ve been doing lots of things to prepare, including moving from San Francisco. When I first got here, I tried to get a feel for the city around me. In addition to hiking and seeing the friends in the city, I have been visiting locations that are part of Peter Lunenfeld’s Summer 16. The list includes four places ‘unique to southern California.’ Here are some photos.

Schindler House

It took about 45 minutes to bike out to the Schindler House. Along the way, I passed the Modern Institute for Plastic Surgery and Anti-Aging, where I spent a few moments getting my bearings.

Bradbury Building

I rode the bus downtown with Becky. After a quick stop in the lobby of the Bradbury Building—which was packed with people sketching—we grabbed a kimchi taco at Grand Central Market and toured some more of downtown LA’s historic architecture.

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale

Becky drove us to Glendale, which would otherwise have been incredibly difficult to reach (or get around). The entire cemetery is crossed by wide roads that directly abut the burial plots. Artwork is presented in a bizarrely theatrical fashion. The stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper stood out, with it’s literal unveiling to a booming narrator and dramatic music.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The museum is a collection of strangely presented, delightful artifacts. You should go.

git the konami code

David — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:25:20 +0000

I’ve been using git for a few months now, and have found it faster and more enjoyable to deal with than svn. Sure, there’s the headache with remembering git revert is not like svn revert (use reset to go back to a point in time, revert to undo a commit—more like English, actually).

In addition to git, there’s github, a good place to host your public code repositories. I’m keeping an AS3 Konami Code project and my AS3 code library on github. You can clone them to your machine or fork them to create your own project on github.

It’s easy to get a repository started anywhere: $ git init

Then you can add stuff to your next commit $ git add stuffToCommit

Then commit it: $ git commit -m "I added some really cool stuff to my project."

It’s all managed locally, so you don’t need to be online or ping a separate machine to figure out what’s changed. Inevitably, you’ll want to have your stuff backed up elsewhere, so it’s also easy to set up another location to push your repository to.

On the other machine: $ mkdir repository.git $ cd repository.git $ git --bare init

On your machine: //create a reference to the machine called ‘origin’ $ git remote add origin ssh://other.machine.info/repository.git //push your ‘master’ branch to ‘origin’ $ git push origin master

To get stuff from your remote server back to your machine, or to copy everything to a new machine (if you’re working on multiple machines and want to sync up): //use this if you have the origin setup $ git pull origin master //use this if you don’t have a repo setup locally: $ git clone ssh://other.machine.info/repository.git

You can check the status of your repository and get a log of commits by using the $git status and $git log commands, respectively. And don’t forget to edit .git/info/exclude to avoid unnecessarily versioning things.

For more information on git, check out the sites I found useful on delicious.

Return Trip: China

David — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:42:11 +0000

After three years away, I made it back to China to see a friend and do some exploring in Sichuan. The trip was eventful, logistics were a bit stressful due to my limited Chinese, and I’m not sure how to write about it. For now, I offer a pictorial overview of our itinerary, with some captions:

Shanghai

Our first stop in China was Shanghai. Lyn picked us up from the airport at night and drove us through the steel-sided canyons around highways under construction into the city. We spent about five days in the city before

Bicycles near Moganshan Lu art district

Huangpu River, from the Bund

View from the World Financial Center

Bei Si Ta, Suzhou

Chengdu

Chengdu served as a home-base for travel in Sichuan. Since we had a short schedule, we weren’t able to travel too far, but we went to some pretty awesome locations. For potential travelers, I recommend staying in a hotel near the “Tourism Distribution Center.”

Closed Temple, Leshan

Leshan Dafo

Qingcheng Shang, the birthplace of Taoism

Sanxingdui Museum

Return to Shanghai

We made it back to Shanghai in time to celebrate Lyn’s birthday after a quick stop in Anhui province to climb Huangshan.

Daytrip to Huangshan

Lyn’s Photo Studio

You can see more/larger photos of the trip in my China collection (or Becky’s photostream, if she gets around to it) on flickr.