Note
The quiet corner
Things that full speed cannot buy.
When I was on the train to the airport the other day, I spotted a random ad. It said: Say yes to AI. Secure everywhere at full speed.
What it was selling I could not tell. But "everywhere" with "full speed"? Interesting, I thought.
Earlier that day I had spent a few hours in the British Museum, and I had gone for only one thing: a few pieces of Song dynasty Ru ware.
I had read that the colour does not survive a photograph, that you have to stand in front of it. I thought I knew what to expect. But when I stood there, I was wrong.
For the next two hours or so, I went back and forth between Room 33 and Room 95, looking at every detail.
The colour is called "天青", the sky right after rain. Blue, grey, green, all at once, and only the eye can hold all three. No patterns, no gold, no figures. Restraint taken all the way.
A couple of them sit in an unremarkable corner of Room 33, easy to walk past. Yet, nine hundred years later, pieces like these set auction records.
Back on the train, with that ad in front of me, it was hard not to think about my own work. I work in branding. With AI, full speed is the default now. We can produce more, faster than ever. What people come to believe about a brand still takes its own time, and time is the most expensive thing to ask for. Some things still have no shortcut.
But when every other brand is trying to be seen in the AI era, at full speed, and you choose the quiet corner and wait to be found, is there still enough time? Or do you get forgotten before anyone even looks?
I have no answer yet. These pieces took nine hundred years.
