Four Months of Observation

123 days, nine countries, about 27,500 miles, and at least 150 exhibitions, showrooms and museums.

That reads like a forced march. It wasn't. One anchor a day, then walking. If the day felt finished at two in the afternoon, it was finished. Four months only works if you stop trying to win it.

Venice was the densest stretch. The Biennale isn't a museum, it's dozens of countries each building a world in a room, back to back for two days. You come out able to tell the difference between an idea and a presentation of an idea.

Seoul was the longest, thirty nights, long enough to stop being a visit. I turned 40 there. Most of what I actually studied was retail. Seoul treats a store as something you experience rather than shop: rotating installations from artists commissioned to make them, floors built so you handle the product instead of scanning a shelf. It's the most serious thinking about physical retail I've seen anywhere.

Sabae was the one deliberate pilgrimage. A small city in Fukui that makes most of Japan's eyewear, and I went to understand how that happened. What the original techniques were, what changed when the manufacturing modernized, and what stayed because nothing better replaced it. I came home with two frames, one celluloid and one titanium, which is most of the argument in two objects.

Something happens when you look that hard for that long with no deliverable at the end. You stop sorting what you see into useful and not useful. Skincare counters in Seoul scanning your face as a matter of course, so what you buy follows information instead of a guess. A tailor in Hoi An turning a fitting into a finished jacket in a day, made to order at the speed of something off a shelf. A market hall in Kuala Lumpur kept and built around instead of cleared. Same problems, answered by people who wanted something different from the answer. None of it is a lesson at the time. Months later it comes back out attached to something you're trying to solve. It isn't a method. It's what a working eye does when you let it run.

Back in New York. The studio is Filosa. Taking on new work now.