Elderly Kong general

One elderly Kong general, after defeated on the battlefield, cut his throat for the sake of his dignity. When the news reached the Kong mansion in Qufu, his son hanged himself as an expression of filial piety. After discovering the body, his wife hanged herself out of female virtue. On hearing this, the emperor bestowed the family with a board, inscribed “A family of faithfulness and filiality.”

The Twins' Early Portrait

oil, canvas/ non manufactum 
165 x 75 cm
2007.

"Like church bells"

We could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing—bang a drumstick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells.

Rothko comments

The set of colossal canvases housed in Tate Modern's Rothko Room originated, as every art-aware schoolboy knows, in a commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building on New York's Park Avenue. The commission, one of the more remarkable instances of incongruity in the history of art patronage, was for 600 square feet of mural-sized paintings to decorate the walls of the restaurant - "a place," according to Rothko, "where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off" - although it is not clear if Rothko realised from the outset that his paintings were intended as a backdrop for fine dining. The architect Philip Johnson, who assisted Mies van der Rohe in the design of the building and who was chief commissioner of the Rothko murals, always insisted that the painter knew that they were to be hung in the restaurant.

"I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won't. People can stand anything these days."

Away from Mussoorie

At night the room was very dark and the wide window showed the whole southern sky, and into this room one night came – with a great deal of fluttering – a bird. Turning on the light and getting out of bed one saw it under the bed. It was an owl. It was about a foot and a half high with extremely wide big eyes and a fearsome beak. We gazed at each other quite close, a few feet apart. It was frightened by the light and the closeness of human being. We looked at each other without blinking for quite a while, and it never lost its height and its fierce dignity. You could see the cruel claws, the light feathers and the wings tightly held against the body. One would have liked to touch it, stroke it, but it would have not allowed that. So presently the light was turned out and for some time there was quietness in the room. Soon there was a fluttering of the wings – you could feel the air against your face – and the owl had gone out of the window. It never came again.

L’omo e la terra

L’omo è detto da li antiqui mondo minore, e cierto la ditione d’esso nome è bene collocata, impero chè, siccome l’omo è composto di terra, acqua, aria e foco, questo corpo della terra è il simiglante. Se l’omo à in se ossi, sostenitori a armadura della carne, il mondo à i sassi, sostenitori della terra; se l’omo à in sè il lago del sangue, dove crescie e discrescie il polmone e discrescie nello alitare, il corpo della terra à il suo oceano mare, il quale ancora lui crescie e discrescie ogni sei ore per lo alitare del mondo. Se dal detto lago di sangue dirivano vene, che si vanno ramificando per lo corpo umano, similmente il mare oceano enpie il corpo della terra d’infinte vene d’acqua.