I was half an hour late to my storytelling group meeting with my students' parent at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Children Art Campus. Naturally, they were gone already but I was forced to stay to listen to uncle chubby with a head gear microphone tell a story about seven brothers with seven different disabilities. I took me only about five minutes to decide it was time to leave. On top of all that, the humidity and the heat were unbearable when standing outdoor, kids' loud scream wasn't helping, too.
Being a children art campus, the place was littered with kids, most of them are from the near by kindergartens with matching uniforms. Most of these kindergartens, shown with pride, all have slogans/ advertisements on their children's uniform. "Best bilingual kindergarten education in town", one school proclaimed. Teachers were yelling at kids in broken english while the foreign teachers stared in awl with admirations wondering why the locals try so hard to learn a language that don't really belong to them, let along forcing these little brains to process it without learning the essential requirements of being a successful, well, KID, first.
So I left the children art campus because I couldn't stand all the screaming, kicking, broken english and the smear on the faces of those foreign teachers. The weather is still humid and the sun is still blazing hot; I walked for about ten minutes across the sculpture garden with a muddy lake to the main building for some fine arts.
The museum lobby reminds me of the old museum of arts in Davenport, Iowa. Even though the size of the buildings are completely incomparable; the one in Kaohsiung is like a huge memorial and the one in Davenport was more of like a library with only three galleries. "Minimal Means and Maximum Effects- Joseph Alberts Exhibition" is the main feature in the grand exhibition space. I figured more time was required to check out the exhibition, So I skipped it and went for the small gallery space right underneath the lobby. The exhibition downstairs features some taiwanese and french conceptual artists. nothing was out of the ordinary in the sense of the exhibition being a" conceptual" art; colors interacting with both relative space and lights, unconventional materials coupled with use of language with hidden meanings, and biomorphic forms overlapping with mechanical shapes. I was enjoying the exhibition for its conventionalism. Out of no where, from the conner of my eyes, I saw a group of museum volunteers walking by the gallery entrance. Immediately, I had a thought about chilling with a group of turkeys on the farm in Iowa. Those museum volunteers were talking so loud my attention was completely diverted. I was so focused on deciphering the meaning of some of the art pieces, getting disrupted in the middle of it really pissed me off. None the less, I decided to be the bigger person and just kept to myself. MISTAKE! Some of them were so uneducated in the arts of gallery viewing they were touching the artworks, without wearing any gloves. I got pissed off royally this time.
Granted, it is not really my business wether the art pieces get destroyed by greasy fingers or not, nor my responsibility to tell the museum staff they need do a better volunteer training in the future. I did not mean to cause a ruckus and eventually had five museum staffers apologizing to me while promising to provide a quality art viewing environment in the future.
I was just, simply put, furious. Mad at littlest things such as the smear on the foreign teachers faces, people talking loudly and touching art works in the galleries.
