{The visual blogwerks is twinkling with Don Hong-Oai's 'photographs'. And at first I was there too. But it's fake. Imbalanced, pretentious and fake. It's like these houses around here (central California coast). Because the area's so climatically desirable, people who have made money elsewhere move here and do their Kublai Khan trips. A lot of them create these grotesque assemblages of ideas-made-reality, like picket fences and geraniums and lavender and holly and other 'plants' and the door a certain shape, and the brickwork all just so. And everything looks like it was picked one item at a time from some digital menu and just stuck together. Instant tradition. The effect they want is what you get when someone who loves their home lives in it and works on it for twenty years minimum. Grandma's house. You can't 'duplicate' that. The attempts are macabre. It's frightening, and disgusting. Don Hong-Oai isn't disgusting but he's got a real 'zen'-Disney thing going on, and aside from the pseudo floating world/antique Chinese aesthetic it's just technology again, formula. Thomas Kinkade for buddhists.}