Only in Asia?

So I'm in Taipei right now and I've started noticing this commercial that is always playing for new contacts called Acuvue Define. I'm pretty sure that they are only on sale in Asia because when I looked online they weren't on the American Acuvue website. Here is Acuvue's description:

"Acuvue Define is the 1st daily disposable designed to enhance the beauty of the eyes in a subtle and natural way. It makes the eyes look bigger, brighter and more beautiful so naturally that nobody will know your secret. It features a unique and defined circular ring that enhances and darkens the iris (the coloured part of the eye) thereby making the eyes bigger, brighter, and better defined. Its every woman's secret to having more beautiful eyes naturally."

Here are the example pictures and descriptions from the website. Do you think the women look better with the contacts?
"Dark limbal ring enhances and defines the iris for an elegant look"


"Delicate brown spokes enhance the natural pattern of the iris for a livelier look"


On the bottom of the website it says:

With the average Asian Horizontal Visible Iris Diameter being 11.2mm*, hence the outer diameter of 1•DAY ACUVUE® DEFINE™ was designed to enlarge the eyes.

*Average diameter of Asian Eye (Horizontal Visible Iris Diameter) Data file, J&J Vision Care, 2005

I really don't know how I feel about this. In Asia, eyelid surgery to create double eyelids to make your eyes look bigger is very popular. I think that is why Acuvue makes a point to say that these contacts make your eyes look bigger "naturally." Eyelid tape is also very popular because it creates a fold and has the same effect. Even though Asian people naturally have smaller eyes, is it the Western ideal of beauty that is making them (and me also, since I'm Asian American) feel that we need our eyes to be bigger? I'm not gonna lie, when I get my make up done I always ask what can I do to make my eyes look bigger. It's also one of the things I'm most self-conscious about.

These contacts are only sold in Asia, is that because Acuvue thinks that Asian woman are the only ones who want their eyes to look bigger? Also, I always thought that if your irises look really big, won't that end up making your eyes look smaller because the irises are too big for your eyes? These are mostly rhetorical questions, do any of you wear these contacts, do they work? This is a very controversial subject and I still don't really know how I feel about it. However, for some reason I find these contacts kind of disturbing. What are your thoughts on the eyelid surgery issue?

Part III of Travels: Museums

I promise I'm getting to the coolest part of my travels (at least blogwise) Japan soon, but I'm doing things chrnologically so here's some more London. I absolutely LOVE going to museums and London has some of the best of them.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a wonderful museum that is pretty unique. It has sculptures and paintings like all muesums but it also has a lot of textiles and different exhibits about objects used in everyday life. The V and A is actually where the Kylie Minogue clothing exhibit is, it was sold out though. It also does not focus on eastern or western culture, it has everything from Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern items to English, French and European items. Apparently it has one of the largest collections of Indian art outside of India. The museum is HUGE, miles long apparently so there's so much to see. They were having an exhibit on fashion when I was there and here are some of the highlights.

They have an exhibit on the clothing which i just had to share. Here is a part of the exhibit on the history of dresses. I really like the last 2, they're so pretty.


Yes, a Juicy sweatsuit is in a museum. A pink one of of course.


This is a dress made out of 20some bras which is pretty cool. When I first saw it I couldn't even tell what it was made out of. I like the dress to the right of it too.


They had a special exhibit on '60s clothing which was pretty cool.


Of course fashion of the '60s is not complete without hats!


The Tate Modern is one of the coolest museums I've ever been to. Instead of the regular old audio guides you get a mini computer (for only 1 pound, 2 US dollars) which totally made the musuem tour for me. For each piece it features it tells you different things. In this Miro painting it circles certain aspets of it and explains them.


The computer will also show pictures of other works that artist was inspired by, historial photos and other things, like this lobster phone thing by Dali and other artistic things that were part of the surrealist movement.


It even has some artistic games you can play, there was a create your own surrealist painting one.

Right now the Tate has this artistic installation by Carsten Höller that are giant slides which are really fun (and free). They start at every floor, all the way to the 5th floor. All the tickets for the high ones were sold out though so I did the lower ones which was awesome. You can even watch live webcam video of people sliding down.


From the Tate's website:

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Another cool exhibition

I went to Breaking the Mode at LACMA today and it was really great. I was surprised at how many Japanese designers were featured. Next week i'm going to go to the Skin and Bones exhibit here at the Museum of Contemporary Art, it sounds even cooler than the LACMA one. If you're in LA you should check it out.

SKIN + BONES: PARALLEL PRACTICES IN FASHION AND ARCHITECTURE
11.19.06 - 03.05.07



Testa & WeiserCarbon Beach House (left) Yoshiki Hishinuma,Inside Out 2way dress (right)

This exhibition explores the common visual and intellectual principles that underlie both fashion and architecture. Both disciplines start with the human body and expand on ideas of space and movement, serving as outward expressions of personal, political, and cultural identity. Architects and fashion designers produce environments defined through spatial awareness—the structures they create are based on volume, function, proportion, and material. Presenting the work of international fashion designers and architects, the exhibition examines themes such as shelter, identity, tectonic strategies, creative process, and parallel stylistic tendencies including deconstruction and minimalism. The exhibition is curated by MOCA Curator of Architecture & Design Brooke Hodge and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Architects and Designers in the Exhibition:
Shigeru Ban
Hussein Chalayan
Preston Scott Cohen
Comme des Garçons
Neil M. Denari Architects
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Winka Dubbeldam / Archi-Tectonics
Eisenman Architects
Alber Elbaz for Lanvin
Enric Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue / EMBT
Foreign Office Architects
Future Systems
Frank Gehry
Tess Giberson
Zaha Hadid Architects
Herzog & de Meuron
Yoshiki Hishinuma
Toyo Ito
Greg Lynn FORM
Jakob + MacFarlane
Elena Manferdini
Maison Martin Margiela
Alexander McQueen
Miyake Issey
Morphosis
Narciso Rodriguez
Neutelings Riedijk Architecten
Jean Nouvel
Office dA
OMA / Rem Koolhaas
Ralph Rucci
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA
Nanni Strada
Yeohlee Teng
Testa & Weiser
Olivier Theyskens for Rochas
Isabel Toledo
Bernard Tschumi
Dries Van Noten
Viktor & Rolf
Junya Watanabe
Vivienne Westwood
Wilkinson Eyre Architects
Yohji Yamamoto
J. Meejin Yoon / MY Studio

Last weekend!!

If you live in Los Angeles this is your last weekend to check out this exhibit at LACMA. My mom told me it was great and I'm going this weekend, January 7 sure came up faster than I thought it would.

September 17, 2006– January 7, 2007

Hammer Building


Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection


A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) Queen
Yohji Yamamoto (Japan, b. 1943), Woman's Two-Piece Suit (detail), autumn/winter 1993-94, wool gabardine with wool and goat hair canvas trim, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. H. Grant Theis, © Yohji Yamamoto.

Creating clothing, for protection, profession, or spectacle, has undergone dramatic change over the past twenty-five years. A number of designers have introduced subversive elements into the fashion system, examining and deconstructing its entrenched conventions and changing the rules about what is aesthetically pleasing and fashionable. Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection will present designers who found traditional criteria and solutions obsolete – designers who challenged the canons of the body’s fashionable silhouette, revolutionized methods of garment construction, rejected the formulaic use of materials and techniques, and exploited new technology in textile production.

The recent dynamic changes in the forms and surfaces of fashionable dress will be featured in this comprehensive exhibition, which will include over 100 examples of contemporary dress drawn exclusively from LACMA’s collection. Among the contemporary designers whose work will be exhibited are Jean-Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, Issey Miyake, Thierry Mugler, and Yohji Yamamoto, with historical examples by Gilbert Adrian, Christian Dior, and Charles James.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was supported by the museum's Costume Council. In kind support was provided by Neiman Marcus.

Curators: Kaye Spilker and Sharon Takeda, Costume and Textiles.

The Getty Villa

If you've ever been to LA, you've no doubt seen the Getty Museum on its mountain top while you're driving on the 405. The Getty apparently has over 5 billion in assets and to keep their tax benefits they must spend at least 5% of it, or something like that. Basically they are required to spend a crap load of money every year. Hence the Getty Museum on top of a mountain (they literally just chopped off the top of a mountain to build their facility and spent over 10 years building the museum/school. They also have a great internship program where they pay students to work at non-profits) and the renovation of the villa in Malibu. The original Getty Museum was actually in Malibu, it was J. Paul Getty's old house. After closing down for renovations the villa has recently re-opened and is spectacularly beautiful. It has a gorgeous view of the ocean and the museum building is modeled after a first-century Roman country house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy. When you first get there it might seem a little gaudy with all its bright colors, but then you realize that an ancient Roman/Greek house would have actually looked like that. All the ruins and sculptures we see were originally brightly painted, not the natural stone color we see today. I especially love this museum because I am very interested in antiquities (the only type of art the museum has) and I've always enjoyed learning about ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Greek history. This post does involve fashion a bit, but we'll get back to that later.

Here is a birdseye view of the Villa.


This is the Greek theatre they have where for one month during the year they have live performances every night. They also have random live performances throughout the year.


The gardens in both Gettys are beautiful. This is the prettiest part of the Villa to me and it's calming to just walk along the pool and look at your surroundings.


The inner area (i believe it's called the Peristyle) has a water fountain and a small garden.


Also, the food at the Getty Villa cafe is AMAZING. It's reasonably priced, $8.00-$12.00 an entree, and tastes like gourmet food. I forgot to take pictures I was so anxious to start eating. I would suggest the Roma Burger and the Tuscan Soup (yummy soup with lots of seafood, big enough to be an entree). I had the ahi tuna salad with white beans, grapefruit and oranges which was awesome.

Their current exhibition (going on until April 2007) is called Stories in Stone and is a bunch of mosaics from Tunisia. The Getty website says: "This exhibition presents a selection of mosaics from the national museums of Tunisia. They are among the finest of the thousands of mosaics produced between the second and the sixth centuries A.D. in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, a portion of which is known today as Tunisia." In person they're pretty amazing.


The Getty is also giving back many pieces (I think over 26) to Greece whose ownership has been contested for years. So you should visit the museum and look at them before they go back to Greece forever. Apparently the former Getty curator Marion True bought several items either illegally or with knowledge that the ownership is disputed. She's currently awaiting trial in Italy on other charges relating to smuggling and buying illegal antiquities. The LA Times wrote this interesting article on what's going on here.One of the pieces going back is this beautiful golden funeral wreath which i saw at the museum yesterday.

A Greek prosecutor wants to file charges against Marion True for her role in the purchase of this wreath. I had no idea there was so much drama and intrigue in the art world.

Now to fashion. I LOVE museum gift shops, especially their jewelry. The jewelery usually has something to do with the type of art carried in the museum and is often made by artists so they're very unique. The Getty Villa store is no exception. They have really cool necklaces and earring with pieces modeled after old Greek and Roman coins, just to name a couple things. I ended up buying this necklace.

It says "I love you" in hieroglyphics (I have always been fascinated by Egyptian art and history). I wish I had a better picture but oh well.

While the bigger Getty museum on the mountain does not require tickets and you can go up whenever, the Getty Villa is much smaller so you have to reserve tickets, but the tickets are free, you only have to reserve a time and pay for parking. You can reserve you tickets here. If you go let me know what you think!

Oh yeah, and Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays!!