Among the museums we visited throughout the tour, I was most impressed by Tate Modern Museum. I spent one evening and one morning there and explored all of the four collection displays. One piece of artwork in the collection display themed “Energy and Process” struck me as particularly creative. It is a 14 minute video that captures the momentary aspect of pieces of urban detritus as they lie on the streets and are constantly transformed by wind. Carrying the title of “Incidents”, the video casts a new light on the usually ignored corners of urban life. It allows the viewer to discover formal beauty in objects seemingly irrelevant with visual pleasure. The fleeting sculptural or architectural quality of these detritus echoes the title of “Incidents”, since their instable forms highlight the role of chance and contingency. When I first stood before the installed screen watching the video, I failed to understand the point of the work. I was painfully trying to figure out its meaning and message, only to find that there wasn’t any. It was not until I gave up the efforts to interpret the detritus and let intuition take over that the video’s absorbing power began to work upon me. In fact, this is the most important lesson I learned from the Tate Modern Museum. To appreciate modern art or even art in general, I need to unload myself with the burden of interpretation and make full use of the senses to perceive and “experience” the work. Intuition is of foremost importance when it comes to art. When I entered another room and approached Andy Warhol’s famous self-portraits, one of his quotations provided me with an aphoristic summary: “If you want to know Andy Warhol, just look at the surface. There’s nothing behind it.”

Art reminds me of the importance of intuition, which can be easily dismissed or forgotten when one is buried in books. The intuitive faculty enables one to go beyond the boundary of self and get in a closer contact with the outside world. Interestingly, the necessity to open oneself and step outside one’s ego turned out to be a key theme in the story of Much Ado about Nothing. I kept thinking about the problem of ego and the boundary of self when reading the text as well as watching the Globe performance. I can still remember the opening sentences by the Warwick professor when he began to analyze the characters: Unlike in the case of Claudio and Hero, love is not only about adoring in the relationship between Benedick and Beatrice. It’s also about competing and criticizing and ripping the mask off somebody’s face. I’ve been reading a book titled Eros the Bittersweet these days, and something interesting can be drawn from that book to analyze the character of Benedick and Beatrice. In the Greek tradition, eros is often informed by metaphors of disease, wound and death, for the erotic emotion is seen by most lyrical poets as an incursion to their ego, robbing them of self-possession and the original state of content and peace. Little wonder that Eros the Greek god was given the name of “limb-loosener”. The Greeks are keenly sensitive to the aggressive force of love, for the self ceases to be complete once it desires someone outside itself. The expropriation of the self is the source of bitterness that we find present in an erotic emotion. In this light, the Greek logic of human psyche can readily explain the two characters’ strong contempt of love: Both Benedick and Beatrice have a huge ego and, as a result, love is seen by them as an intrusion to the ego. As a mechanism of self-defense, they protect themselves from the overwhelming power of love and often tend to “mock it into air”. Hypocrisy is hinted, but it’s far from evil. The two characters’ changing attitude towards love marks the maturation of their self knowledge. Although they seem to be deeply convinced of the unconquerable agency of the self at the beginning, love teaches them to reach beyond the boundary of ego and acknowledge the porous sponge-like nature of the self. 

Art, love and self are all issues of boundaries. The painting on the wall in Prof. Prickett’s garden pops up in my mind as a perfect analogue. The wall confines the garden within a small closure of space, and yet the painting of far-reaching sceneries opens it into infinity. This is a trip about crossing boundaries, the ones of nation, language and culture. Art and literature have always been the forces that push the world to challenge its own boundaries and redefine the possible, and as a literature major, I also wish to go further beyond my original niche and open myself to the diverse possibilities of the world. The UK study tour is a good start