A BEAUTIFUL WEATHER IS ALWAYS BAD

 Last Thursday, when I was on my way to the bus stop for work, it started to drizzle. I regretted forgetting to bring an umbrella, worrying that the rain might get heavier. "The weather is cunning!" I complained, as it had been sunny when I left home. What was worse, the rain suddenly became much heavier while I was waiting for the traffic light to cross the street. By the time I reached the bus stop, the rain had nearly stopped. I raised my head and, to my surprise, saw a splendid rainbow stretching across the sky over Gympie Road. I couldn't help but turn on my mobile phone to capture a photo.

The other day, I woke up early in the morning. As usual, I started reading my e-book. I was reading a biography of the renowned British painter J.W.M. Turner. There was a chapter about Turner's travels to the European continent. In his mind, beautiful weather was always bad weather. From the perspective of an artist, he was always keen to pursue scenes that couldn't be seen in normal situations. Extreme or bad weather gave him a lot of insight for his artwork.

Since I picked up my paintbrush again, I no longer complain about the challenges and suffering of the past. They suddenly became my treasures, as they gave me a lot of inspiration to create art.

Thinking about the past, I have experienced too many unexpected incidents. The more I suffered, the more I understood life. Especially whenever I was in a dilemma, I received support from family, friends, or even strangers. In addition to my own endeavors, I have overcome challenges one after another. If I can apply what I have learned or been inspired by into my artworks, I will be able to fulfill them—giving them souls that can touch many people's hearts.

Abandoning Attachment

 The video clip I recorded and uploaded to social media a couple of days ago—showing me playing "Traces of the Monk in Cold Mountain" on a xiao—has received a lot of attention. This song is a typical example of a simple melody with a deep philosophy. It tells the story of a man climbing Cold Mountain to visit a monk and find answers to a puzzle of life. Unfortunately, he failed to meet the monk. However, as he was leaving, he was suddenly enlightened by the mountain view, realizing that his puzzle was actually caused by the attachment of his own mind.

I have never been to Cold Mountain. When I was playing the music, I was reminded of Yutai Temple on Guifeng Mountain in my hometown. I visited there almost every Lunar New Year when I was young. My most memorable experience was in 2008, a few months before I graduated with a bachelor's degree. I knelt before the statue of Guanyin Bodhisattva and shook the bamboo container holding the fortune sticks. It was a traditional practice to obtain guidance from the Bodhisattva by drawing a stick.

"Congratulations!" the staff member responsible for interpreting the stick told me. "This is a good stick. The story is about Shang Lu in ancient times. He took first place as the Zhuangyuan in the imperial examination. Are you a high school student who is going to take the university entrance examination?" he asked.

"No, I am already a university student, and I will graduate in July," I told him. "I asked Guanyin Bodhisattva for guidance on how to find a suitable job."

"If you're an undergraduate student graduating this year, then the Bodhisattva's instruction is likely to continue your studies for a postgraduate degree—preferably a PhD if you can. I think nowadays a bachelor's degree is very common and doesn't compare to being a Zhuangyuan in the old days. I think a PhD degree is a better match," he said.

While I was playing the music, I was recalling this past event while also reflecting on the story behind the music. I achieved an emotional depth in my playing that I normally couldn't produce. From the view count and the feedback from the audience, I know that I interpreted this piece of music well.

A Visit To EKKA

I knew it would be boring for me as I was not interested in any type of agricultural products, but I still planned to visit when the EKKA came around.

The EKKA venue was probably the most crowded place I have ever seen in Brisbane. It was especially crowded when we were pushing two prams; we could barely move in some directions inside the indoor locations, such as the area selling showbags. However, this was a place we couldn't skip due to the kids' desires.

I was not very interested in the amusement rides as many of them were too exciting for me. To satisfy the kids, I chose to ride the Ferris wheel once. Afterward, I asked my toddler whether he enjoyed sitting on the wheel. He said, "Yes, this is really a big fan." 

I was eager to go to the convention centre, where there was an art exhibition. I had participated in the drawing and painting competition. Though I already knew that I had failed to win a prize, I was still keen to see my artwork present in the exhibition. When we arrived at the art exhibition level, I looked around to find the location of the painting exhibition. "They are all beautiful!" My wife said, "It makes sense that you couldn't get a prize because all the paintings here are nice!"

"Look! That's my artwork!" I pointed to a painting hanging on the wall to my wife and children. We then moved closer. "I think mine is nice too, isn't it?" I said. "Yes," my boy responded. "Yumi, could you help me take a photo? I want to capture the scene while I am standing next to my painting," I asked my wife.

Then I walked closer to the picture and found a few red letters on the label. I checked it more clearly and said cheerfully to my family, "Oh, it's sold!" This was the first time that I had sold a piece of artwork! What an impressive encouragement this is to an amateur painter! After seeing my artwork sold, my heart was filled with joy. Everything at the EKKA had become much more interesting.

We tasted some street food, such as Dagwood dogs, potato tornadoes, and strawberry sundaes, before heading home.

My Lifelong Passion Is Nature

 After a couple of years of playing flutes made of metal or plastic, I eventually switched back to bamboo flutes. I feel that bamboo flutes have some earthy characteristics that cannot be matched by flutes made of other materials, despite they have their own challenges, such as that pitch accuracy is harder to be achieved due to the natural variations of bamboo. Those natural variations, from another perspective, give unique features to each individual instrument, as if filling the musical instrument with a soul.

I am always keen to enjoy nature in the countryside, even though I grew up mainly in an urban area. I like the fresh air, the green mountains, the rivers, the insects, the animals, and even the soil, which are hard to see or touch if you are living in a city. When I was at university, I once saw photos from a classmate who was from a village in northwestern China. There was a small cottage in a mountainous area, with a lot of corns and chili peppers on the wall outside. All of them attracted me, but I was most interested in a bull sitting in front of the house. "Have you ridden on it?" I asked with full curiosity. I envied those who grew up in rural or mountainous areas, despite people said life was not easy there.

Especially when I was living in the university dormitory, I had a roommate who was from Guizhou Province, and he told me that he had to swim across a river to school when he was young. I felt it a bit scary and dangerous, but in my deeper mind I felt it was also romantic and attractive.

Throughout my childhood, I could only experience much of the country life during school holidays with my maternal grandma, who lived in a quiet village before moving to Hong Kong. Every morning, Grandma would take me to the marketplace to buy food for lunch and dinner, as well as to have breakfast in a restaurant. When we arrived home, I used to play under the star fruit tree near the house. I favoured the evening most, with a stunning starry night and sounds by insects and frogs. Usually, there would be grandpas and grandmas living nearby coming to our home to play dominoes. If not, Grandma would tell me lots of stories of the old days of her own life.

Twenty years ago, I went to Hong Kong to visit Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma told me that, throughout her life, the happiest time was when she was living in her hometown village and I went to spend my school holidays there.

When I was young, I used to study painting from a book about Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques. There was a chapter about learning from nature. "Learning from nature" is still my principle of art practice, but it is not limited to painting. I applied it to music and literature too.

The opera The Peony Pavilion, written by Tang Xianzu is one of my favourite literature. In an episode, when the main character, Du Liniang, came to a garden in spring, she couldn't help but say, "My lifelong passion is nature!" And so is mine.

The First Splash

In 2009, when I first studied computer science in Australia after obtaining an undergraduate degree in telecommunications engineering, I felt a bit uneasy as the summer holiday was approaching. The summer holiday in Australia was too long, and it would be too boring if I couldn't find something interesting to do. 

Paul asked me whether I would like to continue a project about microphone arrays in his lab. I refused, and accepted Marcello's invitation to develop the process configuration component in YAWL — Yet Another Workflow Language. 

Marcello was a young lecturer in the Enterprise Software Architecture unit, which taught component software and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"Let me introduce you to my team." He led me to an office on Margrete Street. "Our team is called the Business Process Management Group, focusing on process-centric services. It is the largest team in this area in Australia." 

I had read quite a lot in this area, but this was the only time a teacher had linked Business Process Management with process-centric services in SOA, which was quite innovative. 

He introduced me to members there, such as Michael, Moe and Chun, and finally led me to meet Arthur, who led the group.

He gave me some documents and explained the basic concepts. "Please be aware that these documents include chapters from books that are ready to be published. Please do not share them with others." 

A few days later, when I arrived at the office, he asked me about my understanding of process configuration. 

"I think it is about generating simpler process models from a big model that includes everything, by blocking some gates," I said. 

"Basically correct," he said. "Yeah, I had some friends in China investigating how to strip driver components from a Linux operating system, and select only the driver software components that are required. I think the concept is quite similar!"

After I set up the development platform in Java, Marcello told me he would be traveling to Italy. 

"No worries if you encounter problems. Arthur and Michael will support you."

The first big problem I encountered was to find out which paths were affected when a user blocked a gate in YAWL. For each activity, it has input and output ports, and arcs connect output ports to input ports of the next activities. So to find the affected path, I had to trace the flow. 

Then I started thinking: if I blocked an output port, the arc that stretched from this port would be blocked, and it would not reach the input port it was connected to in the next activity. 

This pattern was familiar to me — it was the problem of finding dependencies in database design!

An output arc was always dependent on an output port, whereas an input port was always dependent on an input arc. The output arc for one port was always the input arc for another.

"Ah, I see. I should use the closure set algorithm from database design," I said to myself.

In the following weekly meeting of the research group, I consulted Arthur about this idea. 

"Yes. This is a way to solve the problem," Arthur responded immediately. "There are many similar applications. Some people call it the bounding box theory."

After Arthur confirmed it, I gained the confidence to start the development. Michael shared the YAWL architecture documents with me. Almost every day, I stayed in the office until 9 pm.

After the Christmas and New Year break, Marcello came back to Brisbane. I cheerfully showed him my work. 

"No. The OR-split should not be implemented like that." He corrected some of my mistakes, and I adjusted those errors in the source code.

After seeing that I had finished everything we discussed at the start of the project, Marcello asked me, "Do you want to co-author a paper with us?"

"A paper?" I couldn't believe I would have the opportunity to write a paper. 

"Yes!" I said firmly.

Then he printed out a draft of an article explaining that after configuration, a process model could contain deadlocks and livelocks, so we had to verify its correctness. He taught me the concept of Petri nets and explained what the idea in the paper was and what I should do.

Three weeks later, I gave a presentation to the team. When I finished, everyone kept silent. This continued for about a minute. Then one of them clapped. Soon all members were clapping loudly. 

"Your presentation is almost perfect!" Marcello said to me.

"I'm surprised that you've done so well!" Arthur walked to my desk and congratulated me. "Do you want to do another project in the coming semester?" he asked.

"No," I told him. "I'm applying for a scholarship in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, so I will be taking some subjects there."

"Our faculty has scholarships too!" Arthur said. 

"No. I tried before, but they said my undergraduate degree wasn't in computer science, so I can't qualify for a scholarship," I replied.

"I'm surprised you weren't studying computer science before. What you've done in two months is equivalent to what an average PhD student does in two years, and the quality is even higher!" Arthur said.

Do They Really Think The Swan Ugly

Eden Lake, located in the suburb of North Lakes, is a place my family often visits. It is a beautiful lake in a quiet area. 

We are used to leaning on the fence in front of a café and admiring the view that stretches to the distant mountains and forests. There is a lot of water-based wildlife, including ducks, tortoises, fish, and the most outstanding ones — swans. 

"Look! Swans! See the beautiful black swans!" Many children were cheering and bouncing on the lookout platform when they saw the swans. 

Suddenly I saw a few lonely, grey, duck-like animals following a big black swan in the water. 

"Ah, I see! They're baby swans!" I pointed to them and waved to my sons. "Look! We can see baby swans!" 

Then I expanded on the topic and said, "Do you know that once upon a time there was a baby swan hatched by a mother duck?" 

"Yes. That's the story of The Ugly Duckling," my son said. 

"But I think they're nice," I said. 

"Yes, they're cute," my elder son said. 

"So cute!" my younger son said.

I suddenly fell into contemplation. Why, in the story of The Ugly Duckling, did everyone say the little swan was ugly? Was he really ugly? Did they really believe he was ugly? 

The other little ducklings didn't know him to be a swan, which is quite understandable. However, hadn't the mother and the other grown-ups known he was a swan?

What is the definition of "ugly"? What is "beautiful"? 

These are the two most subjective terms. We only know what we think, but we can't really know what others think. We know what others say, but we can't know if they're telling the truth.

I think what happened on the farm was a bullying event. The Mother Duck should have already known the ugly duckling was not her child, and that was probably why she couldn't protect him. Or maybe she was unwilling to do so. She wanted to get rid of him but pretended to be nice. 

In that story, those animals who called the little swan ugly might not have really thought he was ugly. Some might have just followed others to bully him. Some might have thought he didn't belong to their group. Some thought he threatened their interests. What's more, some may have even envied him for being a swan.

I raised my head to look into the distance. A gleam of sunshine was reflecting on the lake. The group of swans had swum away, leaving the ducks playing near the edge. 

A black swan suddenly flew to the bank and stood near me, as if he was greeting me. 

"Thank you!" I said to him. 

People might be astonished if they heard what I said. But no one knows that I understood a lot through the swans — about the fairy tale, and about life!

Modern Literati Arts

Literati arts are very significant in China’s art history. From Tang Dynasty’s Wang Wei, literati paintings have gradually become the mainstream in China’s painting history. The techniques are still strongly influencing today’s painting practice in China. However, in today’s Chinese paintings, we can merely see the technical influence of historical literati paintings, but the spirit has been lost. This is similar for music. Folk instruments such as the guzheng and dizi have flourished with quite a number of modern repertoires, whereas instruments for literati music, mainly the guqin and dongxiao, have lost attention.

There are many reasons contributing to this. The influence of Western culture, of course, accounts for it to a great extent. However, the more direct reason is the way of modern life. Today literati are no longer a group that focuses on literature and social science. They also include scholars, academics, engineers, and officers from a large number of disciplines. Meanwhile, paintings and music are conducted by professional painters and musicians rather than literati who are not professional artists. They can easily inherit the techniques, but it is hard to inherit the inner spirit. 

This drives me to think of new approaches for literati arts. 

Yesterday, I painted a picture about an ibis eating crumbs on a dining table. The ibis was rendered with traditional Chinese expression painting skills, whereas other objects and the background were painted with Western watercolor skills. This combined approach to painting is my early attempt at modern literati painting.