Sunday night in Toronto

Sunday, October 13th

Gatineau paper mill, on our departure

It was a misty, then sunny morning in Ottawa with a light breeze from the east, though when we climbed there was a west wind ... but no turbulence. On our flight to Toronto, anticipating rain clouds ahead, we were routed via APLOV waypoint, then LORKA and ILIXU (on the Prince Edward County peninsula near Mountain View). This was the start of the long IFR "ILIXU4 approach" to Toronto City Island aka the Billy Bishop Airport (YTZ), taking us across the middle of Lake Ontario a good 10 nautical miles from shore, which is beyond "gliding range," so we hoped the engine wouldn't quit. The GPS programmed our next sequence of waypoints for us––ILIXU-DUSUB-UKPAG-MURUM-ROTRU––just as well, since most of them don't appear on the maps. For half of our journey we were in the clear, but once over the lake we were soon above a thin layer of wavy cloud, with thicker layers ahead.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" I asked.

"Oh yes, very much!"

Destination more or less in sight

Before long, the Toronto controller asked us to descend from 8000' to 4000' which took us into solid cloud, still way out over the water, but as we continued the approach, descending further, we broke out of cloud at around 3000' and there were the Toronto Islands starting to be visible through my window! That was encouraging. Because we now had visual contact with the ground, Chris was granted permission for a Contact Approach to YTZ, so we never needed to fly as far as ROTRU; he was excited by the novelty. We landed from east to west, one of Porter's "twin turbo props" waiting for us to land before it rolled onto the runway itself, as we taxied to the Porter FBO.

FBO service at YTZ is compulsory and expensive ($35 for the tie-down), but Porter gave us a welcome that we'd recommend. The airport has changed beyond recognition since we used to fly here at the turn of the century, now with a gleamingly modern passenger terminal and escalators to and from the ferry; the ferry itself (shortest cruise in the world, 2 minutes) is soon to be replaced by a pedestrians' tunnel to the shore. Unlike the rest of the numerous foot passengers who were being shepherded to a car park, we set off to walk along the lakefront past the Music Garden and marinas to our hotel. A big "revitilization" of the Toronto waterfront is taking place, with the road up and partly closed, the sidewalks repositioned and "wave decks" and bridges being installed. It's a proper mess at present but will look good when it's done.

The Radisson "Admiral" Harbourfront Hotel would normally be beyond our means, but for $149 on Thanksgiving Sunday we got a room that would otherwise have cost $285 (plus taxes). It was an upgrade from the room I'd chosen online, at the quiet end of the corridor, with a huge bed, a view of the Police Basin (housing 10 police boats) the lake and islands beyond, an early check-in too, and free wi-fi access. Great!

In the afternoon we walked up John Street in the rain through the arty district to the AGO, to see the phenomenal Ai Weiwei exhibition, According to what?, that's been widely publicised. I've mentioned it in a previous blogpost. The crowds and line-ups at the entrance were also phenomenal; I'm glad I'd booked our tickets on line because that meant we could walk straight in. The crowds were visibly moved and awed by the exhibits, mostly photographs or videos (one of Mr Ai jumping around stark naked with other naked men; he has a lively sense of humour, it seems, in spite of his angry thoughts) and sculptural installations. The wall of 5000 children's names was particularly poignant, a recording of their Chinese names and ages being broadcast through loud speakers.

We saw the snake made of school bags and the wooden maps of China, the cluster of Qing dynasty stools held together like a chemical molecule without nails or glue and the many pieces of rebar he's had straightened after being twisted in the Sichuan earthquake, the pile of these rods, entitled Straight, now representing a fracture zone and the earth moving in waves. No 2-D photo can do it justice.

Another irresistibly interesting piece is Forever Bicycles, a tower of intertwined bikes, the front wheel of one becoming the back wheel of the next. Apparently its title is a reference to Yong Jiu, or Forever-Bicycles, a popular make of bicycle in China owned by millions (although the irony is that these are now being superseded by cars). There's a relatively small version of this structure in the museum, but out of doors in Nathan Phillips Square by the City Hall they have a really big one, made of 3144 bikes, "creating a massive, labyrinth-like, visually moving space..." The girl at the hotel desk advised me to go and see this as well as the exhibition. It took 2 weeks to construct and caused a sensation when lit up at night. Someone was arrested for climbing on it yesterday.

After a necessary sit down in the organic coffee place diametrically opposite the AGO, we ended the day with a walk back through the business district in the rain and found a bronze elephant with two babies in Commerce Court just off Bay Street and a tasty and nourishing supper at the Spice Thai restaurant on the waterfront, the same place we'd patronised on our last visit to Toronto two years ago. Amazing effects were caused by the low cloud swirling around the skyscrapers, the warning lights on top of the towers shining like stars through the murk. We watched the Porter and Air Canada aircraft departing from YTZ and immediately disappearing into the low cloud ceiling; we could see them from our hotel room too.

Monday, October 14th

View from our hotel room at daybreak

I woke just before sunrise to see a beautiful change in the Toronto weather. This meant we didn't have to rush to get back home and could linger over a posh breakfast on the 5th floor of the hotel, where the outdoor pool is, before setting off on a leisurely walk to the ROM, 4 km north of the lakefront at the corner of Queen's Park and Bloor Street. Via the university campus it took us about 45 minutes to get there. This was for Chris' choice of exhibition; having read many books on the subject he really wanted to see the show about Mesopotamia. For this one we didn't have tickets in advance but it didn't matter; it was a quiet morning, most people being at home with their families for Thanksgiving.

It was a tremendous collection of exhibits, mostly on loan from the British Museum, such as the stone statue of Ashurnasirpal II, Assyria's self-proclaimed "great king, mighty king, king of the universe... mighty male ..." I kept thinking of Ozymandias, King of Kings and of Kipling's poem too:

... Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, / Lest we forget––lest we forget! ...

We haven't altogether lost track of the ancient civilisations so long as stone carvings and artefacts like the ones on display can be preserved and not blown to smithereens by fanatics. We even saw a stone tablet inscribed with a chapter from the Gilgamesh epic. I was surprised by the smallness of the cuneiform script, proof that the scribes must have had excellent eyesight. The realism of the carved figures of animals and men, of their faces, beards and muscular arms, was astonishing too, considering that this was done thousands of years ago. The ancient world comes alive in an exhibition such as this, partly thanks to the coloured animations which spark the imagination and keep the visiting children interested. You begin to wish you could have seen the hanging gardens of Babylon (with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants), perhaps created for the King's wife, missing her mountainous homeland.

Thin cloud over S. E. Ontario, higher cloud on the shoreline

My legs were tired by the time we left Toronto; I reckon we walked 18km from one place to another, as well as standing for long periods in the museums. It was nice to sit still in the cockpit after that and float along with the benign clouds. On the return journey, we flew VFR, following Lake Ontario's shoreline to Oshawa, then skimming over a thin white layer all the way from Peterborough to Almonte. Chris did a "simulated engine failure" landing for practice on arrival at Rockcliffe which curtailed the circuit. I ought to mention that the colours of the treetops all the way home were lovely.

Another provocateur

This man, said Ming Tiampo (lecturer in Asian Art at Carleton University), is the most powerful figure in contemporary art, not only in China, where he is seen as a threat, but internationally. At a CCFS event on May 15th, she was introducing a packed audience––I was sitting near the back on a borrowed office chair on wheels––to the creations of Ai Weiwei, the famous dissenter. This summer the AGO in Toronto is going to be exhibiting some of his work.

Ai's father (who died in 1996) was a poet, deeply patriotic but of suicidal tendencies, since he was sent to a "re-education" camp in the far west of China despite his support of the Communist régime. The family returned to Beijing in the 1970s but most of the boy's childhood (Ai Weiwei was born in 1957) had been spent in exile. In 1979 he was one of the Xingxing artists ("Stars"), outsiders denied exhibition space in the China Art Gallery, so they hung their pictures on the fence outside, saying: we demand democracy and artistic freedom! Their works tended to be surrealist, cubist, in style instead of the social-realist paintings preferred by the authorities. In 1983 they were disbanded and dispersed, Ai being the first of them to emigrate––he moved to New York, lived in the then un-gentrified Lower East Side, talked a lot and smoked pot. "Act up!" was his motto. His hero was Marcel Duchamp––the subject of his Profile of Duchamp, Sunflower Seeds (1983)

Ai Weiwei is no new phenomenon but the latest in a long line of rebellious Chinese artists dating back to the 12th century and earlier. Some "literati" painters of the Song Dynasty were also dissidents. In that meritocratic society, the Chinese civil service examinations included painting and caligraphy with the brush. Mi Fu belonged to the intellectuals. He, like Ai Weiwei, collaborated with others to create his works of art. Su Shi (whose statue I saw in Hangzhou) was exiled for his implied criticism of the government of the day. These were free spirits, not servants of the Emperor. After the conquests of Kublai Khan, southerners were treated with suspicion and had to wait for the right moment to step forward. Zhao Mengjian's 13th century flower paintings (of the early Yuan period) have political connotations. Like the artist's family, the narcissus he painted had no roots. "Three Friends in the Cold Season" (a pine twig, plum blossom and bamboo leaves, painted in ink) represented those who had no friends among the Mongols. They are plants that bend but do not break and that live through punishment, surviving the winter. Ming Tiampo also commented on Gong Kai's "Emaciated Horse"––a picture from the Yuan Dynasty and an obvious comment on the artist, who had to get by on minimum rewards.

Silence, in Ai Weiwei's opinion, equals death, therefore he keeps on commenting. In his "Study of Perspective" photographs (1995-3003) he gives Tiananmen Square the finger, and the Eiffel Tower, the White House, Hong Kong, the Mona Lisa ... In 1995 there also appeared a photo triptych of him "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (that he'd picked up cheap at a flea market!), a symbolic comment on the destruction of history that shocked the world. Chairman Mao's view was that "we can destroy the old world but build a new world"; Ai Weiwei wants, rather, to bridge the two worlds. In 2007 he made "Coloured Vases", for example painting a Coca Cola logo on a real, neolithic, Yangshao urn. Is this a tongue in cheek comment on the commercialisation of art or something angrier? According to Ming Tiampo, he is patriotic. His "Table with Two Legs on the Wall" (2008) was made from disassembled and re-assembled Qing Dynasty furniture. His "Map of China" is from recycled rosewood.

The famous Bird's Nest Stadium in the Beijing Olympic Park is his crowning achievement to date, created with the approval of the government in collaboration with Swiss architects. Ai didn't approve of the "fake smile" of the Olympics so withdrew from the public gaze and became suspect again when he began documenting the Sichuan earthquake which probably killed 90,000 people. He called his work the Citizens' Investigation Project, displaying the names of 5000 school children lost in the earthquake as a result of shoddy "tofu" construction of their schools. On August 18th in Toronto, this year, their names will be read aloud. (This has also occurred at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.) The exhibition at the AGO will show his "Snake" on the ceiling, made of the children's backpacks. It has a threatening look.

In 2009 Ai was arrested and detained by the Chinese police. He managed to take a photo of himself using his cellphone as he was being taken for interrogation in a lift and to publish the picture there and then, via Twitter, on the world wide web. In 2010 he needed emergency brain surgery as a result of his treatment and took and published photos of that process as well. His Shanghai studio, that broke all the rules, was due for demolition in November 2010 so he threw a party there the previous day. A film ("Never Sorry") was made after this, to thank the people who had sent him money in support. Art galleries in China are often foreign owned and his work is shown there. In April 2011 he disappeared for a while, but resurfaced under house arrest. He blogs and twitters constantly, sometimes playing the fool on video (for a serious purpose) or being rude in general.

Human rights activists and journalists in Hong Kong believed that Ai offered himself to the authorities on a platter with this provocative art. (Wikipedia)

He has publically named the man who beat him up in detention and has posted photos of him on the Internet. In answer to a question from the audience, Ming Tiampo assured us that Ai Weiwei is not going away. Another member of the audience took a look at his Tweet of the day and read it out to us:
There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.