Hunterian Musium at The Royal College of Surgeons

Part of a female cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) dissected to show the developing egg, prepared by Edward Jenner (1749-1823) and presented to John Hunter, 1788.
A post card I bought at Hunterian Museum
Copyright 2005 Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons

I visited Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons tree times (may be more). I always feel down for next one or two days every time after I visit this space. While I understand these dissected collections contributed a lot for today's advanced medical technology, it is very hard for me to avoid imagine their final scream. The enormous Hunterian collection look rather cruel to me but I have to say some of the specimens in glass cylinders are just look stunning. –This place easily makes me believe I tend to appreciate beauties more than ethics and it always annoys me.



However, I have to treat this very carefully. Why the female cuckoo in a glass cylinder looked so sad and beautiful? Instead of trying to get plausible reasoning, I made 9 sketches of another cuckoo specimen from the same angle. The sketch could be more but I stopped when I found essential lines of painful distortion in the 9th sketch. What I have seen in the glass cylinder is an evidence of her life. Though no one can help her anymore, I thought I can paint about her at least.

9th Sketch for Cuckoo

Cherry Blossoms

From the research essay, I found strong resonance to the concept of Carl Andre’s bricks, even though I don’t have any brick in my background. His tendency toward unitary form, repetition, and specific site, seems similar to my strong interest in cherry blossoms. I believe cherry blossoms are one of the most popular modules in Japan in which a whole made with small identical flowers. They bloom just two weeks in spring, and Japanese people get together and enjoy watching them every year. Under the full bloom of cherry blossom trees –at that very specific time and space, I feel like I’m allowed to refresh my body and spirit.

Walter Benjamin used to say;

In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the mark has been subject. (Benjamin, W. 2008, p. 21)

Benjamin’s words sound reasonable for me; however, when I see lives –any kind of lives whatever they are human beings or cherry blossom flowers— I just remember all lives are essentially reproduction of forerunners, slightly imperfect reproduction of someone else. I may be accused of stretching the Benjamin’s point beyond, since his words are for “the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” (Benjamin, W. 2008). But, I think reproduction have been the basic method to carried on lives in this world and I’m wondering how much we can be different or how much our arts can be unique in view of ourselves are reproduced lives. –May be I’m either suffering from the age of mechanical reproduction or just a successor of a traditional ontological sense of Japanese Buddhism (Miyazawa, K. 1922).

On the other hand, for the sake of live my life positive, I also can’t help seeking the meaning of beautiful individuals which is just hard to believe if they are merely created for another reproduction. I remember Andre’s words; ‘We live in a world of replicas, and I try desperately to produce things that are not replicas.’ (Cunnings, P. 1979, p187), Carl Andre might found such answer in a piece of brick. The secret of individual’s beauty seems exist in its detail – if we take a look at it closely, we may be able to find another universe in there.