Thursday, January 1, 2009

Jasmine Tea With Okapi

This piece titled Jasmine Tea With Okapi is a fun story showing an Okapi wondering into a tea house at night, and a geisha serving him some Jasmine tea. The okapi seems smitten with the geisha serving him, though the geisha seem a bit unsure.  He has probably been to this tea house before, most likely has a crush on this particular geisha.  She knows this and seems a little uneasy that we have wondered in and are viewing the unorthodox relationship between the two. 

Yellow butterflies are flying in through the window and partaking in the spilt tea on the table and gathering nectar from the wild cherry blossoms in the geisha's hair.  This idea of the yellow butterflies is influenced from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book 100 Years of Solitude. 

The hanging lamp forms an eye, drowsily staring back at the viewer. The situation created by this scenario, combined with the blue-night milieu, nature with her wild cherry blossoms, yellow butterflies and anthropomorphic okapi, gives birth to a conscious; a situational conscious whose eye flows through the hanging lamp and stares back at the viewer with an ancient ambivalence.

The reason I chose an okapi for this piece is to contrast the natural markings of the okapi with the unnatural ornamentations of the geisha (and other women who find it necessary to over decorate themselves).  

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