Overseas 2010

Suzhou

Lotus seller, Suzhou

The old canal city of Suzhou is ringed by innumerable apartment blocks with names like ‘Orchard Mansions’, with services like ‘Urban Romance Restaurant’, billboards for luxury labels. We pass through the international expo centre, vast halls, boulevards empty and stop at Modern Plaza for Toys R Us, Casa Zoe – Tex Mex, The Coffee Club, ‘Rise Immersion Subject English’. We carry on down Wangdun Road heading to the Yangtse Delta and Shanghai passing Rolex, Hermes, Mont Blanc, Ralph Lauren, and the ‘Art Soft Outfit Life Bar’.

Billboards for the Versace Company Store clutter. China has become one of the most important markets for luxury, at 25% of the world market proportionally way above its income. They are keeping up with the Smiths or the Wangs. Consumerism has gone mad after all those years of Mao suits. When I was last in China 30 years ago, one of the first backpackers in the country, I found one private stall in Shanghai and that only sold one product, busts of Beethoven! How is that entrepreneur doing now?

"My Artistic Conception of Life", Shanghai

My Artistic Conception of Life, Suzhou

Modern Plaza, Suzhou (with Toys'R'us in shot)

Monopoly, Suzhou

"Pollution of the earth, air, and water has been largely ignored in the rush toward material consumption that has seized... [China] in its haste to emulate our shallow and problematical Western 'progress.'"

Peter Matthiessen, The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes

Northumberland

Thomas Bewick's goldfinch

He was influential in bringing nature to people's attention. When a new species of swan was discovered in Northumberland in 1829, the year after his death, it was named Cygnus bewickii Bewick's Swan.

Thomas Bewick's platypus

Thomas Bewick's view - the Tyne Valley

Action in the British Museum

Action at Tate Modern

Contemporary Painter

Dreaming of Poetry

Viennese Actionism - Rainer

July

Bananas - self portrait, Chelsea Physic Garden

Sun Temple

Amersham Hill

June

In the Uk in to see my elderly parents.

The mystery of miserichords

and of poems written by diamonds:

True Greatness of the soul soars far above

what the world calls misfortune & afliction . . . 1775

Lyme Regis reminding me of my childhood in Sussex.

Via Hong Kong and Macau

- met up with friends Kit Kelen and Carol Orchard and Chris Somng who is translating my poetry into Chinese for Kit's second volume of Fires Rumoured about the City – Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poets.