《另一端》圖像與文字的對話:鄺國惠油畫創作展|THE OTHER SIDE: Walter Kwong’s oil paintings exhibition

23/01/2010to28/02/2010



展期: 2010年1月23日-2月28日
exhibition period: 23 Jan - 28 Feb 2010
地點: 艺鵠(香港灣仔軒尼詩道365號富德樓1樓)
venue: ACO (1/F, Foo Tak Building, 365 Hennessy Road, Wanchai, HK)
開放時間: 星期二至四:下午1 - 8 時|星期五至日:下午3 - 10 時|星期一休息
opening hours: Tue - Thur: 1 - 8 pm|Fri - Sun: 3 - 10 pm|Mon: closed
新年假期: 2010年2月12日-19日(年三十-年初六)關閉
CNY holidays: closed on 12 - 19 Feb 2010



是次展覽兼用「圖像」與「文字」雙線創作,既取其互補,亦試圖牽引出不同創作媒界的碰撞與對話。
作品呈現香港人兩個層面的處境:
-主權回歸後,香港人與大陸人相對地位發生微妙變化,隨之而來是複雜、曖昧而矛盾的心情;
-香港人置身大都會中,小小個體生起渺茫與空洞感。

The exhibition shows the parallel creation of “text” and “image”. the 2 mediums are supplementary and interrelated.
The works reflects 2 situations faced by Hong-Kong-ee:
-the complicated and ambiguous relation between Hong-Kong-ee and mainlanders since it’s handover
-the solidarity of individuals situating in the metropolis



鄺國惠|Walter Kwong
博客|blog:hk.myblog.yahoo.com/kwongkwokwai

「第一屆天地長篇小說創作獎」亞軍得主。著作有長篇小說《普洱茶》及《消失了樹》,短篇小說《看樓》獲收錄於《香港短篇小說選:1998-1999》。
從事記者工作二十二年,現職電視台,報導政治新聞及專題特寫;曾奪The New York Festival, RTNDA The Edward R. Murrow Awards及香港人權報導大獎。

Walter has been a news journalist for more than 20 years. He has got The New York Festival, RTNDA The Edward R. Murrow Awards and Hong Kong Human Rights Award. He is also an award-winning novelist.


相關閱讀|related readings ﹕

鄺國惠
新聞在另一端(短篇小說集)
$75
ISBN: 9789882191365 2009年12月出版

當放下記者簿,新聞人會是怎樣 的述說者?

九個無從報導的故事,九種人生的境味:當遭竊聽的記者,自己絨成偷聽賊;當坐在攀龍附鳳的搖搖板上,從高點跌到另一端;當香港人與大陸人的血肉,愈來愈相連模糊……這是卑下與鄙夷消失的時候。



Published by aco on 27/01/2010

new book arrival|新書上架

Mark C. Taylor
Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living
Cloth $190
ISBN: 978-0-231-14780-4 Published October 2009 by Columbia University Press

馬克・泰勒,知名神學教授、公共知識分子、教育改革家、德里達(Jacques Derrida)生前好友,五年前大病不死,此後一直出入鬼門關,活在癌病的陰影下。由死及生,泰勒決定執筆以第一身寫下多年來的哲學與宗教思考。大限臨近,回顧一生,他在這自傳式的52個章節裏重整回憶,思索死亡、犧牲、孤寂.捨棄等等扣連我們每個人的共同生命經驗。


Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere is an intoxicating whirl of a book, an engine of thought and feeling that touches on everything that counts most to us: living and dying, families, faith, friendship, and the quest to ground oneself in the real. To the best of my knowledge, it is a work without precedent.
— Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy, among other novels

Mark Taylor has been a magisterial but impersonal presence in his pathbreaking work on art, religion, and the ebbing of modernity. In Field Notes from Elsewhere, he takes us out of the library and into his life in a series of death-haunted meditations. Neither a summation nor a memoir, Field Notes from Elsewhere is an epilogue offered, provocatively, as the prologue to a sequel that someone other than Taylor must write.
— Jack Miles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography


In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. “These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand,” Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. “After the past year, I am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary.”

Field Notes from Elsewhere is Taylor’s unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir’s fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. “You never come back from elsewhere,” Taylor concludes, “because elsewhere always comes back with you.”


Mark C. Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. A leading figure in debates about post-modernism, Taylor has written on topics ranging from philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture to education, media, science, technology and economics. He is the author of twenty-five books, most recently After God, Mystic Bones, and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption.


伸延閱讀|of related interest

Robert Faggen (ed.)
The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Paperback $170
ISBN: 9780674034662 Published November 2009 by Belknap Press

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost’s complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion–his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War–as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America’s greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.

Edited by preeminent Frost scholar Robert Faggen and annotated to help readers with the poet’s more elusive references, the notebooks are also thoroughly cross-referenced, marking thematic connections within these and Frost’s other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost’s writings.

Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
Hardcover $190
ISBN: 9781568584232 Published May 2009 by Nation Books

Eduardo Galeano is one of our greatest storytellers. Throughout his career he has transcended genre and turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Mirrors is his latest book of wonders, his most ambitious project since Memory of Fire—that landmark recreation of 500 years in the Americas. Mirrors is a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen—and mirrored to us—through the eyes and voices of history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano asks, “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind?”

Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the “thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth,” Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

Terry Eagleton
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Hardcover $190
ISBN: 9781568584232 Published April 2009 by Yale University Press

Terry Eagleton’s witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the ’superstitious’ view of God held by most atheists and agnostics, and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.

There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade - Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular - nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.



Published by aco on 10/12/2009

佛教與社會講座系列:右翼佛教─斯里蘭卡佛教民族主義為例

13/12/2009
3:00 pmto5:00 pm



主辦:正念文化
講者:劉宇光博士
回應:吳國偉先生(大公神學工作室
日期:2009年12月13日(星期日)
時間:下午3-5時
廣東話主講, 費用全免,座位有限,請先訂座

斯里蘭卡由獨立前後至迄今爲止,佛教僧侶在政治與社會均起着舉足輕重的作用。持極端態度的僧侶到底是透過什麼手段,使其影響力及聲音在社會上得以持續增長?講座將從宗教衝突、佛學院體制及後殖民處境三方面,探討斯里蘭卡長期內部衝突的性質,及其對國內及南亞區域帶來的負面影響,以茲與其他國家及地區的佛教發展作對照。


相關閱讀|related readings ﹕

下載劉宇光〈右翼佛教 : 佛教的宗教極端民族主義對斯里蘭卡內政和南亞區域穩定的衝擊〉

梁文道:佛教是世界最佳宗教?

吳國偉近其曾就宗教右翼議題開講



Published by aco on 06/12/2009

new book arrival|新書上架

Geoffrey Batchen (ed.)
Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
Hardcover $215
ISBN: 9780262013253 Published October 2009

Like Camera Lucida, Photography Degree Zero is a story of love and loss. These fourteen astute close readings of Roland Barthes’s last book, masterfully assembled and introduced by Geoffrey Batchen, grapple with Barthes’s brilliant insights and quirks, and with his disappointing limitations and misreadings. An essential companion to Camera Lucida, this rewarding volume is less an attempt to get it ‘out of our system’ than a testament to its continued relevance as we think about photography’s evolution and, in Barthes’ terms, its ‘death.’
— Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Codirector, Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, Columbia University


Roland Barthes’s 1980 book Camera Lucida is perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studium and punctum, coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes’s understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero, the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida, goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes’s important book.

Photography Degree Zero (the title links Barthes’s first book, Writing Degree Zero, to his last, Camera Lucida) includes essays written soon after Barthes’s book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors’ approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic’s light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes’s writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucida and its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it.

The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero, and the focus on Camera Lucida in the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes’s influential work.

Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Victor Burgin, Eduardo Cadava, Paola Cortés-Rocca, James Elkins, Michael Fried, Jane Gallop, Gordon Hughes, Margaret Iversen, Rosalind E. Krauss, Carol Mavor, Margaret Olin, Jay Prosser, Shawn Michelle Smith


Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press.

伸延閱讀|of related interest

Geoffrey Batchen
Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History
Paperback $130
ISBN: 9780262523240 Published 2002

In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores a wide range of photographic subjects, from the timing of the medium’s invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role of the vernacular in photography’s history, and the Australianness of Australian photography.

The essays all focus on a consideration of specific photographs—from a humble combination of baby photos and bronzed booties to a masterwork by Alfred Stieglitz. Although Batchen views each photograph within the context of broader social and political forces, he also engages its own distinctive formal attributes. In short, he sees photography as something that is simultaneously material and cultural. In an effort to evoke the lived experience of history, he frequently relies on sheer description as the mode of analysis, insisting that we look right at—rather than beyond—the photograph being discussed. A constant theme throughout the book is the question of photography’s past, present, and future identity.



Published by aco on 06/11/2009

「知死渡生:《再生號》中的生死思考」電影分享會

31/10/2009
5:30 pmto8:30 pm




再生號
香港/2009/導演、監製:韋家輝/語言:粵語, 國語/級別:IIB/86分鐘

編劇鬼才韋家輝繼《大隻佬》和《神探》後又一奇特片,與影帝劉青雲再度合作,《再生號》講述一個幸福家庭因橫禍對失去至親引發起無限思念,在復生與死亡的戲中戲之中,展開了一次「離奇過小說」的再生之旅。

人死後會往哪裡?…鬼是什麼?…世界有鬼嗎?人類對死後的世界全然陌生,卻充滿想像…
十年前的一次車禍,讓12歲的湯樂兒(Melody),失去爸爸湯有亮(Tony)(劉青雲飾),自此跟媽媽程希文(Mandy)(林熙蕾飾)、5歲弟弟湯樂童(Oscar)相依過活,十年過去,長大了的湯樂兒(Melody)(閻青飾),發覺媽媽依然非常掛念爸爸,一直活在傷痛中,決定跟媽媽和弟弟一起創作小說,讓媽媽寄情小說,借小說療傷,讓爸爸在小說中的世界「再生」,跟爸爸再一次「團聚」……

電影以「生、死、愛與無常」為主題貫串全片,除了大膽的故事創作之外,韋家輝為電影花了一年多時間做電腦後期製作,以CG技術炮製多場陽界、小說世界及陰界的魔幻劇場效果充滿新鮮的視覺官感。

主辦:正念文化
講者:小西
日期:2009年10月31日(星期六)
時間:下午5:30(放映);晚上7時(討論會)

廣東話主講,費用全免,歡迎捐助;座位有限,請先訂座



《再生號》﹕學習死亡

(文﹕小西/原載於佛門網

生死向來都是古今中外的藝術、哲學與宗教的重要思考課題之一,而韋家輝的近作《再生號》,可謂有趣的例子,值得細論。

凡人一般畏死,但古希臘哲學家、伊比鳩魯學派的開山祖伊比鳩魯(Epicurus)卻認為:「死亡和我們沒有關係,因為只要我們存在一天,死亡就不會來臨,而死亡來臨時,我們也不再存在了。」伊比鳩魯相信字宙萬物皆由原子所組成,其中包括人的肉身和靈魂,而所謂生滅不過是原子的散與聚。所以他認為人死後,靈魂會跟肉體一樣灰飛煙滅,人死之後並沒有生命。他認為,既然人在生的時候不會經歷到死亡,而當死亡來臨之時,人連感覺也沒有了,所以人根本也無需懼怕死。或許,正是死亡本身的不可知(起碼在一般人的認知裡),構成了人們對死亡的恐懼,而「凡人必死」,也一直讓人們的生命以至人類整體的文明發展壟罩在死亡的陰霾裡。

或許,人的本質正正在於他能夠對死亡有所意覺。德國現象學大師海德格(Martin Heidegger)便認為,人或「此在」(Dasein)總是被拋擲於世間上,他的存在總是沒頭尾的,而他的本質則在於他總是先行地對死亡(或自己的將死、必死)有所領悟,而正是這種領悟讓「此在」自混跡於「常人」(das Man)的沉淪狀態中解脫出來,真正回歸並關切自身的生存可能性。中國著名詩人北島說﹕「我們幾個人已經是一隻腳踩進墳墓的人了」,其實,在有生之年「一隻腳踩進墳墓的」,又何止「幾個人」?因此,生關死劫也就成為了古今中外的藝術、哲學與宗教,所不得不解決的頭號難題。

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Published by aco on 23/10/2009

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