JAGS has JAGSded

I really am sorry about the lack of news on this thing. Since discovering TV on the internet my life has become filled with the the inanity of re-runs and the obsessive need to watch every last episode of Scrubs, Six Feet Under and many shows of a much lower calibre. It keeps occurring to me that this is an odd way to spend my last few months in Japan, but then I choose to view it as both a necessary escape from the reality that my time here is ending and a tool of reintegration back into English speaking society.

But my time has also been more gainfully employed. For the past few months I have been involved in the planning and execution of an art exhibition called JAGS (that thing what I made the plastic tree for last year). Now that the actual exhibition has begun (it opened on Saturday) I have time to draw breath again and take stock of my situation and impending departure.

My impending departure scares me silly so instead I am going to ramble about the exhibition and post some nice photers.

Fundraising stuff for JAGS went like this:
First we baked delicious foreign treats...

...then we sold them to the curious localsThen we raised funds with an exciting rock concert
Then there was an 80's party in Matuse which I sadly couldn't go to ...Then we exhibited!
Rebecca and I took the Friday off school to get stuff set up, but the day before opening we still had only half the artwork... but thankfully almost all the JETs from Hamada and it's surrounds came to the rescue the next day and everything went swimmingly.
I don't have any photos of the opening because I was running around like a sleep-deprived headless chicken (they are the worst kind) trying to make sure everything was ready for everybody. I was interviewed by three news papers in which I tried to put a positive spin on my rather critical artwork and Nori's Mum's kagura group did an awesome performance. I will post pics when I get them.
So for the last week and a half the exhibit has been ticking along. I took some photos one grey afternoon when there was no one there and you can find those here.
I shall leave you all with a picture of my tree.
It is made of used (then cleaned) disposable chopsticks. Japan uses over half the world's disposable chopsticks and when China slapped a tax on them in an effort to curb deforestation, Japan took its business elsewhere - to Indonesia and Thailand where illegal logging is rife. And they are totally unnecessary. No restaurant I went to in Korea used them.