Honestly! Keith!!!!

Things that make you long to hold your vile husband down and slap him to an inch of his life???

Well, top of my list is the current Sotherby's Art Sale here in HK.  Ooooh, I'm so cross with him!

I've already told you about how, when we first arrived in HK, I fell in love with modern Chinese artists and particularly in love with Yun Ming Jung's painting "The Jesters" that was selling in Schoneli Gallery for only HK$3000.00. I loved it so much I begged him to get it for me for my birthday ... and so, being a big fat smarty-pants and not wanting to spend that much, he got me a Dafen copy from Stanley Markets, which now hangs on my wall!

And then, only eight years later, the original sold at auction for 16 million!!!!  And Keith has the audacity to scream at me "Why didn't you FORCE me to buy it for you!"

Well, this is exactly what's happened again:

When we first arrived in HK, over somewhere near Nathan Road in Kowloon, there was a row of old utility boxes, just stacked up for the taking, that I found so extraordinarily beautiful I was transfixed.  Someone had painted them white and written on them in the most beautiful calligraphy, and I was so taken I stopped a passerby and asked him what they said. They turned out to be a letter to Queen Elizabeth asking her to intervene with the Chinese Government so the writer would be allowed to return to China to die, and they were signed "The King of Kowloon".

The King of Kowloon in action,

in SCMP.

I was so moved by this, I actually tracked down what I could find out about the man responsible, and he turned out to be Mao's personal calligrapher who somehow angered Mao so had to flee for his life and ended up, for decades, homeless in Hong Kong.  Then, when he felt death approaching, he tried to return to China but wasn't permitted entry so started this campaign of graffiti-letters, written all over Kowloon, begging for world leaders to intervene so he could die in peace at his own place on The Mainland.

However, he wasn't successful and died, gosh, somewhere like in a dumpster in an alley, but all that was in the future because, on the day I first saw them, I fell in love and wanted desperately to take just one, but Keith was furious and kept saying "Don't we have enough of your junk?" and "It's stealing!" and "It's garbage. Leave it where it is."

And now those very same utility boxes are selling, as you can read above, for $800,000 each.

Yeah, you agree I should hold down my vile husband and slap him resoundingly for a great many hours?  It's the very least he deserves!

And how sad is it that there's now all this money involved and "The King of Kowloon" doesn't get a cent of it!  And how about those folks in the Art World now making all this money off him, do something about returning his ashes or his remains or whatever to his place on the Mainland where he so desperately wanted to be buried. I think it's the very least they could do.