Art

This page looks like a museum for a reason. What I learned from museums is not just about paintings and sculptures. I learned that "how you show something" is itself an artistic choice. Where the light comes from, what color the wall is, what sits next to what — these choices are aesthetic judgments.

Go to the museum first, everywhere you travel. Museums shaped how I see the world more directly than you might think — they taught me to trust my own eyes, not other people's reviews.

Chinese landscape painting is not about piling on detail. A thousand miles of river and mountain rendered not by filling the canvas, but by leaving room for the imagination. Picasso's trajectory mirrors the same insight in reverse — he started with faithful realism and spent a lifetime reducing it to a few lines. Two roads, same destination.

Wu Weishan's Lu Xun — you don't see a replica of his face, you see the moustache, the defiance, the spirit ready to tear down an old world. Michelangelo's David is not a study of the male body; it is a monument to defiance. Egyptian pharaoh statues do not pursue likeness — they pursue authority. Art was never about whether it looks real. It is about whether the spirit is there.

The Shanghai Tower's spiral gives you a feeling of endless ascent. I.M. Pei's Suzhou Museum fuses Chinese garden aesthetics with modernist geometry. The Chinese curved roof was both a functional tool and a status symbol — draining rain, keeping birds away, displaying rank. Good buildings never sacrifice function for form, and never sacrifice spirit for utility. A Suzhou garden teaches you: man is not nature's master. He is part of it.

Cui Jian has been singing about the same things for forty years — louder each time. He is not an idealist; he is a realist who knows speaking out changes nothing, but does it anyway. Forty years of the same stance is itself a force of nature. Classical music taught me another thing: freedom within a strict structure. You cannot break the rules, but inside them you can express anything.

Mo Yan and Márquez taught me that reality is not linear — you think you are following a plan, but the world is magical, erratic, unreasonable. Li Bai's "Heaven gave me talent, it shall be used" is not confidence; it is romanticism. Qu Yuan and Confucius taught me "knowing it cannot be done, and doing it anyway" — not idealism, but getting up when winning is off the table.

Bauhaus said form follows function. Apple said make the most complex thing look simple. Satoru Iwata said rethink outdated technology. Good design is subtraction — remove everything that does not communicate until only the skeleton remains. Unix philosophy says do one thing and do it well. A coding principle, but also a life principle.

The best stories do not give you conclusions — they give you a real enough scene and let you decide for yourself. Mo Yan and Márquez never tell you "this is wrong"; they describe it vividly enough that you feel it yourself. Film's unique power: you cannot skip. That "time you cannot skip" is the narrative itself. Good films use every frame.