4A Beijing Residency
I got up at 630am and made myself a coffee before heading out for a run. No extra exercise for me today, I’m a bit buggered from yesterday still. We had a quick breakfast and all jumped into the car to visit Gao Daqiang in his studio. Apart from being an amazing performance artist it turns out that he makes beautiful prints and paints as well. Justin and I bought a couple of small works, I got an awesome little ink drawing. After that we went up to the dam so that we could take part in his ongoing performance work where he invites people to pour water into this huge empty dam using whatever means they choose. I became a fountain and squirted water out of my mouth. I also scratched a little fish into the rocks to join some of the many fish drawn onto the rock walls of the dam. We headed back to the local town and had a huge lunch again, this time with lots of chilli. After lunch we drove around visiting a bunch of artist studios. The first place we went to was a very cool little ceramics studio where we bought a few things each and I wacked my head on the very low doorway. We visited three different painters, a sculptor and an artist run gallery tucked away in the middle of the village. We had to get back to Shen’s so that Hamida could pack up and get into Beijing for her flight. We had to hustle for new accommodation in the city for a couple of days from tomorrow after our AirBnB got cancelled at the last minute, it seemed too awesome to be true and it turned out to be the case unfortunately. It’s a bit of a shame because it appeared to have a round bed and what looked like an upholstered spa! Luckily we all got rooms in the same hotel not far from Galaxy Soho where Justin will perform on Thursday evening during the moon festival. It’s going to be awesome to see him in full flight, he’s such a soft spoken, lovely guy who becomes an otherworldly creature when he goes into character, it’s going to be amazing. A couple of new guests, Romaine and her son James from Tasmania arrived and we all had a pretty straight forward dinner for a change, lot’s of chilli, onion, potatoes, a bit of chicken and these super tasty fried pancakes that taste just like roti cannai. I think I’ll take it easy and just chill for a bit tonight. Tomorrow I’m going to shave a moon into Justins head before we head into Beijing by ourselves.