Temple Cities

Today I’m flying out to Hong Kong to celebrate my paternal grandma’s milestone birthday! (Here are some photos from past HK trips, and a bit of my grandma’s story is told in “Pearl” and “King of Kowloon,” which are always popular posts.) Then, for the first time, I’m visiting Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Bangkok, Thailand!

Me and a monk at Polin Monastery, Ngong Ping,
on Lantau Island, Hong Kong, December 1996.

See you in a couple weeks, Chicago. Until then, follow along on Instagram and Twitter for live updates and photos, and refer to the previous post for my top 10 January art shows.

10 Chicago art gallery exhibitions to check out in January

Happy New Year! Make a resolution to see more art; here’s my monthly highlight post on Time Out Chicago to help you kick start 2016.

Hope everyone had a happy holiday season! (This was my Christmas, and this was my New Year’s Eve. The geekery is strong with this one.) When I was little, I made “pet rocks.” (If I noticed a uniquely shaped rock, I’d clean it, then paint it into whatever animal it reminded me of.) I came to my parents’ house to see that they’d dug this guy out.

Every few months or so, I CAN DO THAT blows up (it probably gets shared somewhere). And it’s happening now. Love it! (Look forward to my next exhibition in June.)

And a PSA: Artists, beware of frauds / imposters / overall horrible people / etc. Thanks to June Keser for alerting me in this post’s comments to someone who went by “Hop Coplin” on Facebook stealing this doodle of mine and claiming it as her own, even changing my signature to hers. The charlatan deleted her post after I told her off, and it now seems like her entire account has been deleted. Success.

To art thieves out there: We artists don’t know who you are. We don’t know what you want. If you are looking for attention, we can tell you I don’t have an attention span. But what we do have is a very particular set of skills, skills we have acquired over very prolific careers. Skills that make us nightmares for people like you. If you give us credit for our art now, that’ll be the end of it. We will not look for you. We will not pursue you. But if you don’t, we will look for you, we will find you, and we will obliterate your web presence.

To everyone else: Cheers to a splendid year!