Painted Skin is one of those eerily beautiful films that could have benefited with a much more tragic ending & less campy kung fu stunts - but the impossibly sad love triangles and heart-wrenching acting from Zhao Wei & Zhou Xun (males, I realise, are periphery & plot devices in most Asian ghost stories) makes me want to ball my eyes out.

Argh, someone hand me a tissue.

Listening to Jay Chou's 烟花易冷 like crazy, but why is it that all of his 中国风 song's MVs are so depressing? Look at 发如雪 and 千里之外 and 青花瓷 - amazing lyrics, beautiful cinematography and all tragic endings.

Sometimes, it's not enough for the characters to die once but are reincarnated into the modern world to die another time. Mercy does not exist in ancient Chinese love stories, I realise. You're either committing suicide for your dead loved one like 孟姜女 or, at best, meeting your sweetheart once a year on a magpie bridge because of irreconcilable circumstances. Depressing.

~

雨纷纷 旧故里草木深

我听闻 你始终一个人

斑驳的城门 盘踞着老树根

石板上回荡的是 再等

雨纷纷 旧故里草木深

我听闻 你仍守着孤城

城郊牧笛声 落在那座野村

缘份落地生根是 我们

~

Can anything describe how just mind-blowingly terrific these jackets & pants look?!
I know... I know... My elder sis has been telling me how awful my fashion sense is. But tell me how can you look at a planet & stars design & polka dots & NOT say it's the cutest thing ever???

Need. These. In. Closet. Now!

From Here

My brain is an empty space.
Life tells me to go left, & all I wanna do is walk straight on into concrete oblivion at the other end.

Let me tell you a bit about my secret life.
I'm terrified of recieving messages on my handphone. Especially from people whom I know are going to ask me to do something.
So I wait ... I wait wait wait for my courage to build up, in a process that takes several long agonizing days, before I somehow summon up the guts to do a mass suicidal replying of all messages & email requests that have been building up in a moment of sheer bravery & folly.

Following that, I will recieve the inevitable swarm of replies about this & that & whatnot & whatis. This is totally stupid on my part but is a habit that I cannot get rid of just yet.
Sometimes I think that humans haunt me more than ghosts.

Anyway, I've finally got to designing the T-shirt for the Assembly family day. Yay!

Also, I've finished crafting my first rain doll! Hurrah!


Lydia's being very productive today, eh?
No.... No.... Noooo..... The amount of work that sits smiling like a fat smug caterpillar on my floor is driving me into a state of procastination. Something I do not need right now.

My aunt's teapot. It's been with her since the 70s & I still remember her serving water from it when I was a toddler with her mismatched teacups. I'm tearing from its sheer loveliness.

I fell in love with this retro porcelain & rooster motif bowl set. They use it to serve ice-cream in an art cafe called Orange Thimble.

I love the mosaic & colours in this old Toa Payoh dragon playground. So bold, so honest and so very enduring.

What happened to these kind of designs? Why have they disappeared to be replaced by the glossy bland Helvetica conceit we have now? Singaporean designs had so much more soul 20, 30 years ago. Gaudiness should be celebrated! Patterns should be revered! Colours other than black, white & grey should be vehemently used with unabashed zeal! Yes, this calls for a revolution my friends! Although I'm sure I'm only talking to myself.

I'm going to go drink some tea & cool down my overheated head.

I've not been sleeping so well this semester mainly because the design briefs I'm getting are as open as the openess thing that ever did opened... An American society? Everything is so vague & arbitary that you start to research on anything & everything & sooner or later you end up on the weird side of the internet reading things from jumping ghosts to the drain canals in Singapore.

Oh ho ho! A designer complaining that a brief is too open? Unheard of!
Well, now I'm reduced to conjuring out the end product & then thinking of what it means (BS level + 9000) *oh what? My diagram looks like a vulgur sign?? Erm... that's because the idea of vulgarity comes from the word 'crude' which is like crude oil, & crude oil comes from fossils that represents the lost memories of gaia and gaia is a sphere & spheres are beautiful, so vulgarity is beautiful *

Sheepish laugh & dies.