I'm back in L.A., walking through galleries and museums.
Floors are buffed and swept, light haloes the artwork, the spaces are reverent, vast and empty.
The work looks oddly facile and forlorn. Just days before I had been walking along the banks of the Lhasa river in Tibet, dodging grazing sheep and nomads washing clothes in the milky, green current. A Tibetan man next to me kept up a steady stream of smiles and sign language trying to tell a Chinese artist how meaningful he found the artist's installation of dangling brooms sweeping at the polluted water. It was near sunset and the man was part of a small crowd that had started coming out of the city every evening to sit on the rocks, talk, and watch the crude brooms strain the opaque water. When I returned in September from making art in China and Tibet with a group of Tibetan, Chinese and American artists, the contrasts between there and here stunned me.