Downtown San José, Costa Rica on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon… ending with a nice cup of coffee with company of friends. 
Collection of photographs from the Irazú Volcano and the old abandoned (and haunted) hospital called Sanatorio Durán, both in the Province of Cartago.
Street art and culture festival ‘Transitarte’ | Downtown San José | March 2009
What’s not to love about Chinatown? Stinky sidewalks with tons of people selling herbs, flowers, fruit, trinkets, rice cakes and anything else China. You can barely move, the smell of fish perfumes the sidewalks and pigs heads peep out of restaurant windows… a very different world than ours. The smells, the colours, the people, the history and the traditions, it’s the perfect place to people-watch and just soak in anything new and different from what you see every day back home. At night, the restaurants become busy and you just need to step in and be adventurous with a couple of funky smelling dumplings together with the worst service in town. They say Chinatown is concentrated human contact, its rude and direct, never apologizes or pretends… and this is why I love it so much!
Following, a little collection of photographs taken in Chinatown Toronto and Chinatown New York (photos by myself and Ed Klein)
Less than a week ago I had one of the best days of my life, a day with a very special person and the most amazing visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I have been so busy with my day to day life that I have put my passion for art on a back burner, something that surely changed after this day. For 3 straight hours we walked the 6 floors of the Museum just drooling at the pieces and taking one photograph after another. As we reached the 5th and 6th floor, I was blown away… I was suddenly inches away from the most inspiring artists such as Miró, Matisse, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock, Dalí, Kandisky (made me tear), Rousseau, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh and many many others… incredible, so hard to describe how amazing it made me feel.
Having said that, there was one piece of modern art that really caught my attention… a chinese artist named Tehching Hsieh who’s passion for art just blew me away. Hsieh’s art is most known as “one-year-performances” and that is exactly what he has done, unique artistic perfomances that last exactly 1 year. The one on display dates back to 1978 where Hsieh vowed to “seal himself in his studio, in solitary confinement inside a cell-room measuring 11′6 x 9 x 8.” for one complete year. During this time, Hsieh would not converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch tv until he “unsealed” himself a year later. A friend of his would visit him daily, to take food, clean clothes, pick up his waste (yes, he would shit in a bucket) and take a daily picture of him. Read the rest of this entry »
