I'm back on the Pacific again! As my father and I drove down towards the ocean from Torrey Pines, on the way back from the airport in San Diego, I was thinking of the last time I saw the Pacific surf - in Sydney, not much more than three weeks ago. (Returning the favor, I suppose: at Bondi Beach I felt that the surf was familiar.) I grew up aware of Asia on the other side of the horizon, but my gaze never dipped below the Equator. I've lost my northern hemispheric innocence!This picture is from a book by contemporary Chinese artist Hong Hao called "Selected Scriptures"; this is page 2123, and is one of the most successful of its many attempts to deconstruct the familiar map of the world. I've only seen this on line, but discovered it there because my interest was piqued by some works of his included in a lovely exhibition of representations of journeys, landscapes and maps now on in the Met's Chinese galleries. Much of that unfamiliar land mass is in fact the Pacific, inverted east/west and land/sea.
