Anastazja Luna and Ms. Minse Zonge

I am excited to annouce that a renouned French fortune-teller, Anastazja Luna, will be joining me at my thesis exhibition with an intricate drawing she will be making of me based upon a reading of Tarot cards.

During my stay in France, I had the chance to visit a small village named Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, a coastal site in the region of Picardie. It was in a cloudy day in the gloomy Northern France that I accidentally walked into the little shop of Madame Luna. She is an elderly lady and, to my guess, in her seventies. Never a believer of magic, I looked around casually. Surprisingly, this shop contains so many interesting drawings and sculptures that carry an astonishing level of artistic quality. I took out my pocket notebook to document this serendipity of mystic art, and somehow Luna spotted my sketches that I randomly drew on my notebook. She seemed immediately interested:

- Vous dessinez? Moi, aussi. Ce sont tous mes dessins

(Do you draw? Me, too. All these are my drawings.)

And those amazing drawings of people's entire lives are hers! Even though I am still doubtful of the accuracy of card reading or crystal ball reading, the ability to visually present a person's predicted life story is beyong amazement.

We slowly proceeded to a discussion about symbolism, and how the traditional instruments used by fortunetellers all have a profond root in art history. She offered to give me a reading in exchange of a sketch that I made for a Tarot card design.

We jokingly made a deal, she will make a drawing of my entire life, including what I have revealed about myself during our conversation, and what she sees in me. In exchange, I will do my best to design a set of Tarot cards that are aesthetically pleasing yet mentally disturbing at the same time.

The deal would probably have disappeared into thin air had I not received a random email from a "distant acquaintance", Minse Zonge, an art critic based in Vienna, Austria.

I first encountered Minse Zonge in June, 2012. I visited Vienna the first time on May 19, 2012. I fervently fell in love with the city that I decided to cancel all my travels to West Europe after I reached Venice, and I caught an overnight train to Vienna on the 28th of May. I got to Vienna at 5:30 am. The city was so quiet and I wanted to do something to wake it up in a serene way. So I went to the Prater park at the southeastern corner of the city. There I found a tree shaped like a busted lady. The tree was so strangely familiar that I decided to dress her. I wrapped a piece of green fabric around my tree-lady, sewn a button and turned her into a lady in a green dress.

While I was doing all these, a human being appeared. She was doing her morning jogging in the park and spotted me operating on a tree. She made a comment in English with a heavy Austrian accent:

- um......I have never seen somebody dressing a tree. And you picked a good tree.

She didn't linger. Neither did I. So it was just an ephemeral comment made by a sweating jogger to a sleep-deprived foreigner. However, later that day around sunset, I was finishing up my visit to the hundreds of galeries in the famous MuseumsQuartier. I sat down on one stairstep in front of the enormous Leopold Museum. I took out my crayon and did a random sketch on the stone. A lady, to whom I didn't pay much attention at the time, sat down right next to me, and said:

- It is funny that you do draw well.

And the voice...the accent.....haha...that was the jogger at Prater in the morning!

It turned out, as another pure coincidance, that she was doing her studies in art history and was working as a freelance curator and art critic. Barely a college sophomore at the time, I did not know much about the art scene in Europe, not to mention having any history-orientated discussion with her. But our conversation went well, she seemed quite interested in my interests and choices in my very amateurish works at the time.

We exchanged emails and that was the end of my story with Frau Minse Zonge.

But obviously the story didn't end...