Hand Made Journal

Here are a few images from my Hand Made Journal from the Great Wall and time in Jinan, Shan Dong. A persistent theme in my work here in China so far has been MOBILITY.
We've been in Shan Dong for about five days now. Our hosts are treating us like rockstars, five star restaurants and trips in a big bus to the countryside. So far we' ve worked much with our Chinese partners, my partner is named Fan Yie Ming, and he's a good match. I imagine he's being adveturous with our ideas together: We're working on The 3-d suitcase journal, a stop-anima cartoon is on it's way. Something new to happen to the 3-D suitcase journal is the manufacturing of many stuffed dolls or monsters, I like to call them characters. Their emergence happened when I arrived to the Shandong art school and noticed that character making, or doll making was a popular theme at the school; I would say it's a popular theme in folk art and all of Asia and even Latin America, anywhere where their is some kind of effigy used in the culture to communicate, anyhow the phenomenon made it into the journal and we've got about a dozen dolls in the journal made of materials my partner had and even some found object buttons for eyes and such. Stay tuned. The exibition is on Tuesday, I might have to leave the 3-D jounal here???

Shandong has been too good to us Americans! I hope we can get close to their expectations while we have many for them to live up to. By the way we've been to the home town of Confucious, the top of Mt. Tai, a kite factory(using the word factory loosley) and a printing shop(relief, very old school).