The best work days are when I have a good sleep, good food (not too much consumed not too late in the evening), an exercise, a time for writing, physical work, and a good company at dinner at the end of the day. The good days are made of these rhythmic activities - getting up early in the morning to spend an hour of quiet time by myself writing before going to the pool and meeting with myself to write down the day's schedule with coffee followed by a breakfast at the kitchen counter. For me it means that a solid uninterrupted work hours at the studio, writing and journaling before dinner, and reading before going to bed.  Maintaining good routines has been proven to keep me active and flexible physically and mentally. I am more energized, quicker in making decisions and more optimistic, and enjoy socializing more. Keeping the regular schedule also works for adopting unexpected visitors and events. All is good but it's so easy to derail from it.  The bad cycle starts and worse it sticks when I sacrifice first the sleep and second the swimming in exchange for "work" time. 

Why being busy seems to be praised? for the coming year I will aim not to be busy. Being busy seems, for me, relates to wanting affirmations from others - which gives me a certain level of comfort.  If I know what I want I would be happy without chasing after a project that invite other's affirmations, which ends up keeping myself busy - so I think now. 

I want to write a few things about what I have learned this year of making anything before it ends. 

Finding a way to receive feedback helps me follow through on projects. Interactions of feeding and feed-backing refresh motivations.

This relates to why I stopped wiring everyday for this blog after September. I did not need to publish to have a monologue, which I have a plenty of on my own without allocating the time to do it openly. Feedback encourages me to feed again and helps me keep at the project. It is the best if I can make the situation where it is almost impossible to stop. Salon at Forest is a good example of involving others and let project take its own life. It is difficult to keep at it if I work quietly without relating to others because if it is only to satisfy myself I can always decide that I have already satisfied. There will be always moments that what I would do seems meaningless and worthless, even if on a bright day I would know that 1 - it is meaningful and worthwhile and 2 - whether it is meaningful or worthy is not an important question.

Also deadlines are good and practical motivations that work. It is a good reason to decide if 1 - I quit it, or 2 - I complete it. Sadly deadlines work better for me if they were made with others.

I have not written for a while and now it is strange to write to publish. I went back to my notebook - the writing of the morning - which I started in June 1st. it says "I make art because it calms me down." I do not remember writing it. it is approaching the last page.  It is fun to go back to find what I was trying to say. I am realizing that the year is almost over. it is actually 3/4 of the year that is gone but it has the different sense of time from the first quarter of the year to the last quarter of the year waiting to end. I do not have the exact plan for the next year yet. Now I try to remember why I wanted to start this blog. when I am writing I would imagine I was speaking to my future self, to a 90 year-old version of me, trying to explain how I am experiencing this time. I have many moments in my life that I wish I had recorded.

Although I set this out as a year to play and I think I have been pretty successfully at it, on planning for the next year I will have to figure out how I will sustain in. The finance. and think about what I am doing out of a habit and what I am afraid of doing just because it's new to me. Generally speaking I think I'm in NY for too long. This has become the world I know..

Time does make an exception and goes slow for me. The herbs planted in the beginning of summer have now grown tall. In the backyard the peach trees are bearing orange fruits. I found another pit in the herb box - and now I remember seeing a squirrel appropriately descending down the fire escape a step at a time this morning. Somehow already it feels like fall.  

Though in the studio it is unmistakably summer. I thought about getting an AC again as I headed there this morning but it just does not make sense to install a thing to cool air right next to two big machines doing just the opposite all the time.  I do not get used to the heat and often it really wears me out but I like working and sweating and feeling sticky on my forehead. It feels rewarding at the end of the day, after the shower, sitting down by the window watching the sky changing its color. -- Rewarding? It just feels good, to physically work, and feel tired at the end of the day. Did I do good work today? My time is almost up. Have to use it. Use it well.

I'm getting ready for a show opening next month. I just got an acceptance notice yesterday. I"m running around in my mind.

The planner's page moved on to the next again. I came back to the apartment thinking that I finished only a half of what I set out to do again.  I have been making pieces with lots of holes the past few days. I have some moments that I finally beginning to make things of my own, that I'm not repeating something that's already done. It's not easy to relax those muscles.

This morning the sky was in a pink cast. From the east to all the way to the west, filling the gaps made by the buildings. Streaks of highlighter orange. Some people are up and seeing this pink orange sky, judging from the sound coming from the BQE. I stuck my head out from the small window over to the herb garden on the fire escape. People talk about meditations, I just want a quiet mind, an accessible one, Ideally going to the  the beach. to the forest where the earth breathes and whispers, not me. 

The beach I grew up in was a sleepy one, of dark sand of volcanic rocks, too hot to stand in bare feet on summer days.  At the Ruby Beach in Washington State two weeks ago I saw the superfine sand under my toes has the similar color. During the low tide the sand becomes a floating mirror, making people on the horizon hang between the sky and the ocean, the fog blends everything like a pool of monochromatic water color paint that is still wet on paper.  This week I started working on a project, the seascape. With this I try to be free from explanations and reasons. I don't want to use symbols to mean something. While building forms I want to think about the landscape and not the individual pieces. The forms do not represent actual shells or rocks or driftwood. I want to create the feeling of the quiet landscape that I have become physically far from it but know that it is still there. Such landscape for me is the beach. Yours is probably different from mine.

I need to read more. The more time I spend outside of my head the better. Go outdoors. Be in the nature. Use the body. Do something for others not for myself. Be kind. Be alert. Be adventurous. Be playful. Be open. Be active. Be creative. Be generous.

The sun is golden and the music sounds like a Christmas song. what I like about this view is that I can hear the BQE and I only see running shadows of cars behind the trees, disappearing into the new building of three-story high, the second floor not yet occupied. From here I hear the traffic in the morning and at night, and if I try I can hear the sound of the ocean. 

I would usually spend the last part of studio hours cleaning up, which I would be perfectly happy without doing, only if I could find a way to keep the work area clean without actually cleaning it. Often I think it's a good thing that I have other people working in the studio because it forces me to maintain the space. It is important for me that they are happy working in the space. Also, although of course this is not the reason why I do the event, the monthly Salon surely makes me at least once a month move the clay boxes and vacuum and mop those small corners and wipe the counters, the stools and the doors. Tasks that can be so mundane if they were for my self can suddenly become painless if they were for others. 

Now I have a new approach: at the end of the day it is a time to prepare for the next day, not to close the day.  Some people seem to work out this concept naturally but unfortunately I was not the one of them and took me months to come up with this simple solution.  The key is to change the way to look at it. In stead of cleaning up the mess I made I'm preparing for tomorrow. This now changes eventually the same type of tasks from a chore to a motivating job. At the end of the day my body is tired and my brain exhausts its decision making muscles, so it is a perfect time to do non creative but necessary work. This allows me start working as soon as I get in in the morning, without spending an hour and my fresh energy in preparatory work. 

It is in a way I become an assistant for tomorrow's me. Making sure when tomorrow's me comes in in the morning all the tools are ready, work bench set up, clay prepared, schedules made. Tomorrow's me would come in, change to the studio clothes, get a bucket of water and start working. So far so good. I hope this will continue to work. This is pretty much the same thing as what they were trying to teach me when I was at kindergarten: get your stuff ready the night before. I should have listened.

I was going to show the Time Vessels pieces at the Governor's Island's art fair this fall if I was accepted and planning on making additional 50-100 pieces to finish the series.  Now the project has untheatrically ended without completion. I considered making the additional pieces anyways but somehow the original idea that motivated me to make those pieces does not fit me well so I decided to take a break and start on a new project. I have been writing to see what would come out; now I'm mainly interested in holding the present time and not so much about going back to the past to amend my youth wastefully spent or visiting the future to know what my current doing and being should be. My desire is about now, about my everyday activities and immediate needs. I want to make the present moment longer so I could be working on a project as long as I like and could spend time generously, drawing every single petals of dandelions without thinking that I could grow old while making worthless paintings of these ordinary flowers. I want to be at multiple moments at the same time so I could be painting, working, walking, playing music and spending time alone and with friends, and traveling and staying home at once without having to pick just one. 

I do not remember how exactly I became interested in medicine cabinets but I suspect it was when I was in a bathroom that was not mine, alone, like any other time I use a bathroom. I don't have a habit of breaking into to someone else's medicine cabinet but it occurred to me that it was sort of funny a box that could potentially hold something very personal was in front of my face, available to be secretly peeked in. 

They say a steamy bathroom is not an ideal place to store medication but it is still a convenient place for storing items used on our bodies and must tell something about the owner. Mine for example is a very boring one, and only contains standard items off the shelf like toothbrush, dental floss, toothpaste, nail files, a tweezer, a box of bandages, q-tips, hair ties, hair products, a bottle of sunblock lotion. Even so you can tell that the owner is a female, who goes to a Japanese hair dresser, and the minimum maintenance is all she needs. 

Medicine cabinets are American things to me. The two houses I lived in Japan did not have one. All ten homes I lived in New York, including the apartment only accessible by a metal fire escape through the courtyard attached to the end of the next building had one. 

In horror movies when a heroine stands in front of an open medicine cabinet and closes the door, everyone knows what will come next. 

I like bottles - for they can contain things, remedies. I sat down in front of the wheel and made about 100 of clay bottles with a small mouth and squeezed them together side by side so each of them takes the form of the adjacent bottles. Making these bottles reminded me of things I used to treasure, like the first perfume I bought when I was 18, sample bottles of skincare product I collected as a teenager, and bottles of candy that looked like a tiny star from the local candy shop in my childhood.

When I first became interested in ceramics one of the things I wanted to try was formulating my own glaze. I did not know anything about the chemistry and even how to go about it.  So to start I read a book by Mimi Obstler on glaze rate materials and ceramic surface, which title excites me even now: Out of the Earth into the Fire. The author describes the heat transformation of the glaze and the clay body as formation of magma.  She is telling me the inside my electric kiln there is a small living world of the earth's interior.

Clay is a fantastic material that I think everyone should try. It is such an intimate material that lets me play with the fundamental elements of the world we live in - the water, the earth, the fire and the metal.  Working with clay is a collaborative work with these elements. 

I write about my process of making and where I get inspiration from: 

Ideas can come from a book I read, a conversation I have with my friends, or emotions like dissatisfaction, curiosity, and fear. In a notebook I keep ideas in words and shapes as a reminder.  Ideas I am interested in and want to explore more would appear frequently in the notebook and sometimes friends would tell me that I have been talking about certain things often. I will be spending weeks and months on a project so I want to make sure that I am interested in the subject. Once I have decided on a project I set a deadline, think of a way to show the finished work and start making forms to see how I feel about them. I read and write and show the works in progress and talk to my friends. Make more, destroy more, and make more.

I don’t have a the set process to follow and prefer not to have one so I can be flexible and see what works. Sometimes I make drawings. Sometime I do not make any sketches nor decisions on finishes and dimensions and start working directly with clay. I am attracted to being obsessive and working frantically and this process of just making without thinking can be satisfying. I would make lots of forms knowing that the majority of them would be discarded.  The process depends on the project but it is important for me to use my hands and physically produce works while developing ideas into objects. 

When I feel uninspired the best thing for me to do is to physically work and use my hands and pay attentions to things in life. I don’t have a particular place to go or things I go see. For me inspirations do not fall from the sky. 

I was asked about my first full time job and remembered the time when my manager asked me what title I wanted to have, I said Artist. This was completely irelevant to my actual tasks in space survey involving walking in and out, measuring and documenting millions square feet of space. I thought the question was funny, as if it was a makeshift position, something to fill the blank. But I was far from being an artist, in fact I believed I was incapable of becmoing one. Within my family I was never considered an artist. I was the one who lacks concepts and beliefs in the core, and by this I mean that's how I remember. My family now may say otherwise, and even if this is a memory I made up this notion has stayed with me. Even now once in a while it comes out and tells me that I have nothing important to say in my work.  I came across an article on how self delusional thinking can help continue producing work, with a quote by Michael Lewis, "A lot of my best decisions were made in a state of self-delusion. When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way."  I can use this method myself. Somehow we, I, rather, assign a frame to be in. But can we cultivate a new image of ourselves even by tricking ourselves into believing being what we want to become. To this I say to myself I am a confident woman who has ideas to pursue. 

I decided that I was off vacation the past Monday. I say I decided because I came back last Thursday from the Pacific Northwest, with the later part of it being at an off-the-grid cabin in the Olympic Peninsula, with long walks in the thousands-year old rainforests and the vast beaches with sea anemones and drift logs. In this living landscape I felt insignificant, both in scale and the history of time, and became quiet. Discontent, explanations, meanings, do not matter. They just are. Coming back was uninspiring. In stead of going to the studio I spent a half day sewing together sunflower petals that dried and fell on the dining table after these two weeks, and other time reading, finishing the one I started during the trip and two new ones, wanting to spend some time in other people's brain. At the computer screen I tried typing up the log but I did not seem to have anything worthwhile to share, and was afraid that I would end up casting negativities through this small window to the infinite world with no sense of smell or touch. 

But routines and deadlines help. Today I had a better studio day. I sat down on a wheel and had a long throwing session for the first time since I hurt my shoulder almost a month ago. I'm working on an idea on medicine cabinets, which I will talk more at some other time, making hundreds of small bottles. By two hours in I started to feel the silence coming from this repetitive task. I missed it. I needed it.  In this silence many ideas popped to mind. I wanted to write them down before they slipped out. I cleaned the clay off of my hands and rushed to the notebook trying to write them down, some lost already, some made to the notebook. Now go back to the wheel again and throw. 

I woke up this morning feeling weak. I thought it was just a few days but I was told that it's at least a few weeks that I had been in a weird mood. I wanted to stay quiet and work alone. I went to the beach. I read. I made things in clay. I kept my journal in my notebook every morning. Somehow writing on paper with a pencil feels different from typing. 

My shoulder is still not perfect and sometimes my fingers feel numb in the morning. I seem to have a compression of nerve between my collar bone and my first rib from what I read. I came across an article that it is common to experience a psychological change in people with this condition. I have not decided that I'm one of them but having a possible reason to help explain the weird mood can be comforting.

So I started the morning feeling no strength in my core. But I saw photos my friend sent me from his show in my inbox and this lifted me up. I have to get up and get to work. This is not a joke.

A bit more than a week ago I saw a stack of large boxes ready to be picked up on the loading dock as I was leaving the building. From the size and the number of boxes with a red fragile label I assumed those were his work going out to his show. Then I felt depressed. There shouldn't be anything to be sad about. But somehow when works are complete and are going out I don't feel cheerful. They are gone and gone from the studio where all works were done. A release. But works are supposed to go out the door, to the world out there. I can't connect the thought but I'm thinking about the Little Prince's sheep in the box.

I accumulated the time pieces on the shelf to dry. Haven't done firing a while I almost forgot the excitement of opening a glaze kiln. It is exciting because I never know exactly how they turn out until I see them.  The heat journey is something I could never touch. It is capable of bringing both good surprises and big disappointments at the same time.

I stared at the fired pieces for a while, unconvinced, and shifted my eyes to the glaze test tiles. The grey ones are good and I know which ones I will use. The pink ones are failed. The colors faded after I expanded the recipe to a larger batch. I can move on quite easily with test tiles. Keep, try another, discard. But these time objects, I don't know it but I should know it. And I run another glaze kiln to be done and out for tomorrow. 

I work on time vessels because I have problems knowing time. What is time?  I'm always chasing time and I want to hold on to it. My ten minutes now does not seem to have the same duration as the ten minutes from the other time. Working in forms forces me to think and see. So I read books and hear things about time. We make tools. New devices are supposed to save us time but instead seem to speed things up so much that now we can't catch up. We save time so we can do more and do it quick. but I want to have now a bit longer.

But we do manipulate time. We collect our spotty memories and make up a story of the future to tell ourselves.  We stay in one thought as if the time has stopped. I write now. You will read it in my future what I wrote which is in my past. I will know the next word in my future, and it is my past by the time you read it. It's a zen dialogue. 

I write more about the time project.

It is going to be a room filled with vessels that used to operate time. They can change the flow of time. They can hold time. They can pick different moments of your past and mix with my future. 

Some look like a distorted hour glass.

Others have a large opening like a satellite dish. It looks like a plastic funnel that sits in the middle of a board game I used to play on New Year's. I throw in four bubble-gum size balls. They go round and round chasing after another. One by one they get sucked into the tube and fall on to one of the paths underneath - where they come out determines my next move.

The funnel on the vessel is connected to a closed vessel. There is no neck, a mouth or a bottom. It is not clear if whatever you put in will come out.

They are dusty pink and blue like a furry growth on your bread that is now old. These vessels were gone and disappeared for a long while because we forgot to look. 

They look like human organs.

I wrote the first draft statement on the time vessels. My argument does not come out well. I don't even want to argue about it, but I try to tell what I am thinking about and why I make them. I try to explain the ambiguous thing I am figuring out through making them. I don't like any of the words I write. I relate same things over and over. And it does not get to a point. 

There is a joy in working on things, trying to figure it out. But when I don't hear my own voice it becomes frustrating. What is the word, the thing I'm thinking? And then I say I wish I knew how to play an instrument.