The building next to my office is Singapore Art Museum. Although I’ve working in my office for almost 1 year (8 months to be exact), I never visited the museum (^_^)! . Btw, if you never been to the museum before, you can view the map at StreetDirectory.com or at Google Maps.

FYI, free entrance is on every Friday from 6 PM to 9 PM. Which is why last Friday I visited the museum. 🙂 The current main exhibition is featuring the works of Feng Zhengjie.

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Feng Zhengjie (born 1968, Sichuan Province, China) is an artist based in Beijing. Originally a high-school and college art teacher in Sichuan, he came to Beijing in 1995.

His best-known work is his Portrait of China series, very large Warhol-style oil portraits, in a red/turquoise palette, of Chinese fashion model faces with vacant diverging eyes (his signature style). Critics view his work as a critique of contemporary consumer society. His early paintings were inspired by 1930s Shanghai posters. His more recent work is based on the red and green of traditional Chinese New Year art, the colours made “more acid, a representation of the flashy, commercial nature of modern China”

When I looked into his paintings, especially those from “Portrait of China” series, I sensed a strange mixed feeling between glamor and emptiness, or perhaps sadness. I also admire his painting techniques. Especially his usage of subtle color that cannot be differentiated from close-look, but from distance it will be visible and make the painting looks like 3D. I recommend you to look closely, especially in the eyes of the person on the painting. It’s really beautiful 🙂

You can view other examples of his works here:

1. Feng Zhengjie – Geodhuis Contemporary
2. Feng Zhengjie – Painting – Saatchi Gallery
3. Feng Zhengjie at Marella Gallery
4. Feng Zhengjie at Willem Kerseboom Gallery

I think you can enjoy his works best by seeing the real thing. If this Friday (8 Feb 2008) the museum is not closed because of Chinese New Year public holidays, I will surely visit the museum again. Let me know if you want to tag along 🙂

I discovered a new term today. It’s NNT (Number Needed To Treat).

NNT will helps you to avoid consuming unnecessary drugs. It’s good for consumer, maybe bad for those Pharmaceutical Companies which making profit from FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).

For example, consider a hypothetical drug which reduces the risk of colon cancer by 50%. Even without the drug, colon cancer is fairly rare, maybe 1 in 3,000 in every 5 year period. The NNT for a 5-year treatment with the drug is therefore 6,000: by treating 6,000 people with the drug, one can expect to reduce the number of colon cancer cases from 2 to 1.

So next time you see advertisement of a particular drug which boasts a whooping numbers like ‘Reduce .. bla bla bla… by 60%’, please consult with your physician to find out the NNT of that drug.

Blogwalking is the easiest way to create a post 🙂 You don’t really need to think, you just need to randomly visit any blogs, then write down whatever you think about that blog, or what is interesting thing that’s happening in that blog.

So here’s my plan, every week I will visit 5 blogs that are listed either in MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. So here they are:

1. Above Popular by Mark. The blog has no specific theme, but given his job as an IT Administrator, his posts are very much related to computers (new hardware, digital media). Although he didn’t post anything new since Sept 2007, he left two posts that I found really intriguing. A YouTube video about a 2 years-old girl which has better skill to locate countries in a map than to pronounce their name. And another one is a well-thought article about the death of Hip hop music.
2. A Not So Desperate Housewife by Rebecca. Rebecca is a wife to Shawn, an US Army Soldier. Her blog chronicled her life as a mother of two beautiful children, Michael and Lydia. Although she’s a self-confessed not-so-environmentalist, but she is doing her best to go green but practical in the same time.
3. aiAlex by Alex. This beautiful silverish blog is about Web 2.0, Technology, and Blogosphere. I found many interesting articles here. A few of them are: 7 Easy Ways to Inspire Creativity, Need I Say More and The Formula for Designing a Successful Website, Simple to Understand and Execute
4. 1/2 an Hour Later by Dave Heffernan. Although the topics in his blog quite varies, Dave can teach one or two things about getting fit. Great articles like Lose those Manboobs (looking at my Flatmate :P) and Keeping Motivated to Do Work Out will certainly beneficial to those who want to get fit and burn away the fats.
5. Adapt, Adopt, and Improve by Anon. A Mus. From the way he picked his Blogspot profile name, I can sense that this fellow has a good sense of humor. I specially like his take mild-sarcastic but definitely amusing story of attending a Wedding ceremony. You can even see him doing some funny sketches. Well dude, whoever your name are, your blog definitely worth visiting again and again 😀

That’s all folks! If next weekend I really have nothing to do and specially… specially when I’m dry on ideas… you’ll see again another episode of BlogWalking.