The Modern-Day Monkey Pilgrim – Foreword by Jean Loh, Curator of the exhibition
Since my childhood I have always heard that Man descended from the Monkey. No need to study Darwin, a few trips to the zoo sufficed to convince me that there was not much difference between the games of squabbling monkeys and those of my classmates in the school playground. At eleven years old I devoured a book that I found on my father’s bookshelf “Journey to the West”, whose character, the Monkey Pilgrim—Sun Wukong—long fascinated me by his extraordinary powers and burlesque antics. Later, as a serious yoga student, I discovered the epic Ramayana and Hanuman, the monkey god, through whom I recognized the “ancestor” of Sun Wukong. Indeed both share that courage and sense of daring when confronting the impossible, what American writer Tom Wolfe called “the Right Stuff”; for evidence, Man’s conquest of space would not have been possible without the monkey.
