Relinquish

Champs de Mars, Paris

The terrible famine of the early 1970s became a backdrop of our years in France and England, where we lived amidst so much beauty and bounty. Those infants lying listless in their emaciated mothers’ laps became the icons of my childhood.

I am constantly surprised that I wasn’t much more affected by these images. At one time, even rock stars were putting them as stage props for their charity concerts. The most famous images are of the infants and mothers. I think I sensed the biblical scale of this famine, and interpreted these images into a distorted Mary and infant Jesus. My young mind relinquished the horror to God (I never prayed about it, so it was an instinctive, intuitive, reaction), where I believed there would be a day of judgement.

Excerpt from my upcoming memoir Westward Bound: Western Bond

Paris: Learning About Independence

Here, even then, in my juvenile amateurship, I seemed to know something about perspective. The view is from the steps of the Eglise de la Madeleine, and looks all the way down to Place de la Concorde.

Paris became a perfect training ground where I learned to rely on my wits to understand the often confusing and contradictory worlds I would inhabit for the rest of my life. I learned to be independent in Paris, and to understand my surroundings based on my own deductions, childish and simplistic at first, usually through quiet observation, and more sophisticated in my later years, and, up to this day, through additional support from books and study.

I became an avid reader in Paris. Almost all my books were in English, although I went through phases of reading some French classics, mostly because of my school requirements or my holiday French Language immersion classes during our summer vacations in Paris. These texts included Jean Racine's Iphigenie, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Emile Zola's Therese Ranquin, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile.

I also visited museums with regularity, skillfully weaving my way around the Louvre. I was never attracted to the more modern galleries since they confused me. Much later on, while studying film and photography, I realized that confusion, or distortion of reality, was their very purpose. I used my instinct to include things which I felt benefited me and to mercilessly discard those that didn't. I understood that time was not on my side, and indolence or bad judgment would cost me dearly.

That is a strategy I have kept all my life.

Chung-Im Kim and Her Textile Designs' Korean Ancestral Loyalties

Here are the most current designs from Chung-Im Kim, textile designer, and associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

I believe that Kim has nothing to emulate, nothing to draw inspiration from, in the Canadian landscape, but rather looks back thousands of miles, and cultures, away to her Korean background.

As I wrote in my August 2018 article:

Kim's designs are a combination of..."deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

Kim writes about her textiles and her inspirations:

...the familiar Korean textile never fail to encourage my search --- perhaps it is a consolation that I look for unconsciously living so far away from Korea.

Chung-Im Kim
Bow
2005
8" x 9.5"
Ramie, Hemp, Natural Dyes, Silkscreen Printing, Machine & Hand Stitching
[Source]

About her felt work, she writes:

Searching for a personal vocabulary of images that can speak as a universal language was my core concern when I resumed my art career in Canada after a long break since arrival. This often took the form of a repetition of a few basic essential shapes, adding interest through the use of relief, appliqué, inherent dyed colour and many related techniques. At the same time, I continued to be inspired by traditional Korean textiles --- in both a technical and spiritual sense.

Here are her fungal-like growths which she designs with felt, and which she sells for over $6,000 each. She categorizes them on her website as: Living Geometry


Chung-Im Kim
Mutation III
From the Living Geometry series: No. 5
2015
23.5" x 12" x 3"
Industrial felt, thread, dyed with (Natural Dye) lac, hand stitched
David Kaye Gallery

Post-modern, abstract textile design is a lucrative business, along with associate professorship in leading universities.

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Below is my post, from August 2018 on Kim, her designs, and her loyalties:

At the end of the article, I write;

Their ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country, and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.

I should add to that:

...its empty outline, ready to fill up with foreign, alien forces.

After all, Kim's fungal protrusions are titled" Mutations."

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I've always, since my Ontario College of Art Design days, tried to master textile art and design. My instructor was a Korean woman. It was then that I intuitively realized that "Asians" had an inherent dislike of whites. I went to "night school" and took only one course for four consecutive sessions. This course was open to the public and not just OCAD students. It became an issue for her after the second course, but I was paying the $200/course fee. If she had any sympathy for me and my ideas, I would have told her that I was there to use the equipment.

By the third session I had developed many of my ideas. I had briefly started doing the geometric border patterns found in Ethiopian dress, but my models for my work were the historical textiles of the Western World up to the early 20th century. Anything beyond that took on the modernists' "destruction of the image" ideology.

The textile instructor, Chung-Im Kim, who I believe didn't have the rigorous "image-making" background required of textile design - including drawing and painting - vociferously pushed me to "design something Ethiopian." Eventually I came to the course randomly and spent my time - evenings and weekends - in the textile workroom, mixing paints, cutting cloth and printing. I did the blueprints at home on a makeshift IKEA work table.

I wondered later why she never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.

I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

ALL non-whites at some point begin to refer to their ancestral lands for inspiration, artistic or otherwise. And the constant, daily reminder that art created by whites has always been SUPERIOR to their art, from their specific non-European or North American region or country (Asia, South America, Africa, the Caribbeans) must ignite their fury.

I believe, though, that I am the exception.

As I write in an unpublished article:

My family and I left Ethiopia in 1973, a year before the “Ethiopian Revolution” which occurred in 1974, when Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a communist regime ran the country for almost two decades. I was ten years old. My father secured a post in UNESCO in Paris. My brothers and I initially attended school in Paris, but our parents sent us to England to boarding school a year later.

That dramatic, but fortuitous exit sent me across the globe from France to England and America to Canada. Our first landing point in Paris separated us from the usual flow of Ethiopian emigrants and refugees who set sail for America (and fewer to Canada). We were alone in our havens. My eleven years in France and as a student in boarding schools in England gave me the unique vantage point of discovering the West without the biases and interpretations of other Ethiopians and Africans. I was able to discover them on my own terms. I learned to love the West through the beautiful city of Paris and the paradisaical countryside of southern Kent.

My informal education had taken a Western orientation, but...I eventually obtained Bachelor and Masters degrees in the Biological and Health sciences in the United States. While pursuing my PhD, I lived in Mexico for two years working on my research work in clinical nutrition. The results of my PhD research eventually produced a unique testing method which was published in various academic science and medical journals.

By the end of my doctoral studies [we] obtained residency...in Canada [where] I was finally stable and able to make decisions about my activities without affecting my residency status. In Toronto, I obtained various certificates and qualifications in film and photography. I also studied textile design, and painting and drawing. I was determined to become an artist.

My constant displacement, my rigorous science education, and my artistic training allows me to ask: What is art? What is beauty? And why is Western beauty and art so singular? I have tried to answer these questions over the years.

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Trillium and Queen Anne's Lace
Textile Design
Kidist Paulos Asrat

Happy Easter

Notre Dame
[Photo By: KPA]

French Patisserie

I finished baking these late last night. It didn't take long: about 20 minutes for preparation and another 15 for baking. They are supposed to be turnovers but I can't quite get the shape right so I just "turn over" the pastry to adequately cover the mixture inside.

And the inside is:
- Thinly sliced pears
- Lindt hazelnut chocolate
- Liqueur St-Germain, an elderflower liqueur from France.
I got a 50ml bottle at the liquor store for about $5. They often put items at 50-60% sale which they want to get rid off (sitting in their stock room for too long?) In any case it has a slightly pear/citrusy taste.
- The juice of one clementine
- Sugar

I mixed the pears, clementine juice, two teaspoons of the liquor and the chocolate and the sugar in a bowl and heated the mixture for about 1 minute in the microwave.

I mixed the heated mixture well and put about a tablespoon in a triangular piece of puff pastry and "turned over" the dough to cover the mixture. Then into the oven for 15 minutes (until golden brown).

The house smells like a French patisserie!

And the pastry? Delicious!

My Future Playlist: What I would Sing

Sous le Ciel de Paris
[Photo By: KPA]

"Les Anglais"

The contemporary thinking about foreigners turns them into moral, cultural or social issues, but downplays the most important one: actual logistics.

Foreigners are people who travel to lands which are not their own, with cultures and social structures different from theirs, with languages they don't speak or speak without the fluency of their own languages.

In less progressive eras, when a foreigner came to a country other than his own, he had to understand the country he came to and subjugate himself to these different circumstances, and behave accordingly. He would always remain a foreigner, however many years he has lived there, and however many obstacle tests he has passed (and with distinction even).

There was an intriguing and endearing time in my life in Paris.

When we just arrived, our apartment was in a neighborhood which had its own boulangerie, patisserie, cafe, tabac and all the other accoutrements of French neighborhood life. It was like a mini-village within the large city, as all Parisian residential neighborhoods are (our next neighbourhood was slightly more cosmopolitan being near the Tour Eiffel and the shopkeepers were friendly but too busy to ask for details, although they always greeted us familiarly).

I went to a French bilingual school for the first six months and later we went to the first of two boarding schools in England, in Kent.

We had always been English speakers, having had our elementary education in Addis Ababa at what was then called The English School. I was fluent in English at a very early age.

As is always the case, neighborhood merchants, especially those one frequents regularly and with a Mom & Pop management style, make an effort to know their clientele, and even their names.

This particular French boulanger and his wife would greet us in a familiar way and I'm sure, when we (the kids) no longer came accompanied by their mother, asked: "Ou sont les enfant?"

By then my mother knew some French and no doubt told them as best she could that we were at school in England.

This was an instinctive association by country. If this Arab-looking family sent their children to a pensionat in England, then they must be of the English cultural persuasion and therefore they are English. Most Arabs in France have a French - colonial - association, and they would have kept their children within the French culture.

On a side note, this was the argument - the debate - used to say that North Africans (Moroccans and Algerians mostly) were French because of this colonial past, and that the huge numbers of immigrant North Africans can live in France as Frenchmen. Of course Arabs feel differently: they ARE NOT Frenchmen!!! They would always be Arab.

Back to my Parisian neighbourhood. We became known as "Les Anglais!" The patriotic neighbourhood baker and his wife (his wife mostly because she was the one who ran the storefront and communicated with the customers) associated us with their perennial and historical antagonists, the English, those most foreign of foreigners!

But she loved us! Who wouldn't! This cute threesome, with their coats and hoods in the winter rushing to school early in the morning, or coming in for their favorite "Kim-Cone" ice cream in the summer which they bought with long-saved pennies, now going across the seas to learn things! How brave they are!

"Quand viennent-ils, les enfant?" she would ask my mother those long months when we were away.

But we always remained "Les Anglais."