SURPRISE!

So there we were, seven stories high at the top of a science building on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, awed, amazed and amused by our environment: a tiny, fully furnished New England cottage perched precipitously at the edge of the building and cantilevered out at an angle over the plaza below...

... as though wafted there from the other side of the country by some Wizard of Oz tornado.  It's called Fallen Star, an artwork by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, a part of the fabulous Stuart Collection of outdoor installations on the UCSD campus by some of the most imaginative artists working today.  And then an absolutely astonishing thing happened...

But first, a roundabout way to get to it.  Ellie and I first came upon this artist's work at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, many years ago.  It was a full-scale recreation, in translucent silk, of the house in which he grew up, in Korea.  We were enchanted by this installation at the time.  It had a magical, dream-like quality to it, inviting entry and perambulation, creating a sense of remembered place deprived of the heaviness of its material presence.  Its concept was utterly original, and its execution charming and delightful to experience.

So we remembered the artist's name, and were pleased to come upon his work again a couple of years later, in a New York gallery.  This time, the centerpiece of the exhibition was a floor-to ceiling tornado...

... created out of thousands of tiny human figures made out of cast resin.  I wrote about the piece in a November, 2011 entry in The Buddha Diaries.  Impressed once again with the quality of this artist's work, I kept his name in the back of my mind, as one does, looking forward to future encounters.  The next one came yesterday, on the UCSD campus...

It was the last stop on a day's art tour with a small group of enthusiasts from the Laguna Art Museum.  In the morning, we had visited the Matthew and Iris Strauss Foundation and their private collection in Rancho Santa Fe, with its prime examples of some of the leading artists of our time--Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jonathan Borofsky; and including some British artists whose work I particularly love: Anthony Gormley, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Fiona Rae...  So much work to see, in the limited time we had to spend there.  Ten Seconds/One Painting!  We left, breathless, stopped for lunch at Osteria Romantica in La Jolla, and visited two galleries there in the early afternoon.  I was particularly taken with the large paintings of Mara de Luca at Quint Gallery.  Inspired by Rilke's "Duino Elegies," they evoke misty, romantic land- and sky-scapes with a quietly serene, and yet somewhat disturbing beauty.  Rilke's "angel," at once ethereal and terrifying, lurks in these revisitations of the California "light and space" tradition.

Mara De Luca – Elegy III.I, 2012, acrylic and mixed media collage on canvas, 72 x108 inches

And then we found ourselves on the UCSD campus, seven stories up, in Do Ho Suh's cottage.  You arrive by elevator, exit onto the rooftop into the surprise of a lushly flowering English garden...



Ahead of you is the cottage, set at an alarming angle, reaching out from the building's edge.  Walk up the steps and you're immediately disoriented when you walk through the door and set foot on the sloping floor.  Only the plumb line of the chandelier gives a sense of the upright...

Otherwise, the furniture, the shelves, the lamps, everything is on a skew--except the visitor, dizzied by the experience.  (Our docent was keen to point out that disorientation was a sensation known not only to expatriates like the artist, but to every freshman student arriving on the campus, and for this reason totally appropriate to the site of "Fallen Star.")

And then, the amazing thing...  I was looking around the cottage--awed, as I say, amazed, and amused--when my eyes lighted upon the bookcase, where I spotted, to my still greater astonishment, a copy of a book I had written and published nearly thirty years ago!  Chiaroscuro was the first of two (I had planned more; that didn't happen) mystery-thrillers, set in the art world, that I wrote in the 1980s.  It was published by St. Martin's Press, and re-published as a Signet paperback.  I could hardly believe my eyes!  Talk about disorientation!  I was dizzied back in time as well as in space.  Of course, we had to take pictures...

And then, finally, Tim Hawkinson's adorable "Bear"--all 180 tons of stacked granite!  Who couldn't love a huggable teddy like this?