painting class #3

This is the most satisfactory i got so far. Although it is not even close to the completion. many areas are not good. luckily we will get another chance to work on this pose. it looks a lot better with a background.

Shenzhen is a city of China

I just finished reading this graphic book called "Shenzhen".

Shenzhen is the name of the city where my parents are working in. To me, it is famous because of being the only "Special economic zone" in my country and just next to Hong Kong. I only stayed in this city for about 3 weeks with my parents last summer. Most of the time, I was sitting in my parents' room, listening to the clamour of cicadas. Outside the window, telewires penetrate through the tropical leaves. Everything melts in the moist and heat. Whenever i go out for meal, i will get on my dad's car driving through similar concret highways, to some crowded streets with similar high rise department stores along the sides. Apart from the food, i didn't enjoyed it very much. The city was developed from a little fishing village to today's capitalized city within 20 years. It is a city without a face of history. Immigrants from all over the country came here for money. They settled and adapted the new life of commericalism and left their culture behind. My parents don't like it either. Their concern is the city makes people radical and crazy, which creates too many crimes. It's a city doesn't make you wonder what are the individual lives and emotions behind those faces. I didn't remember one single day that i saw a blue sky.

This book is from a canadian guy who worked with an animation studio in Shenzhen. This has encouraged my great curiosity. Although i don't like the place, it will always be interesting to find out what a foreigner thought about it. Only have I known already before i read it that this book must be about how he dislike the city.

Once i started it, i realise that it's not really about a city called Shenzhen. It's about a country called China and the conflicts and prejudices between two cultures. Helplessly, i automatically developed a self-defense against his opinion. I agree that many things he hated reflect a part of the reality. But every one of those makes me like my people more and more. Acturally, what had happened to him doesn't matter to him. How different this culture is from his own culture bothers him. He became a defender of his own culture at last, in a situation where no one is actually willing to challenge him. How funny. After all, no one can escape their own stereotype.

Reading his experience, i kept having two sides of feelings. On one side, he is pathetically positioning himself as an outsider. He never tried to learn the language. He took as offense when people express their curiosities towards him. On another side, i understand how hard you need to try in order to be accepted. No matter how, you are still a different species in a foreign circumstance. At one time, i think why he didn't go to visit some other places. Although Shenzhen is a typical snapshot of today's China, the country is far more gorgeous than he can imagine. He likes Hong Kong and Canton, but he didn't give enough justice they deserve in the book. But sometime i'm thinking no matter how much you experienced, people live in their own little world anyway.

Apart from these, i did enjoyed his drawings. His dark pencil marks make you think his mood must have been heavy. I'm about to read his another book "Pyongyang". I am expecting some common prejudice between him and me this time.

By the way, unfortunately the image to the right is in French. It's about the girl who works in his hotel will call up the lift for him everytime he walks off the room. Only she is obsessing with the button, said his self-called colonial reflex.