Ambrose Li’s face2face postcard

At first glance, this looks like a matted Chinese painting, an ink painting in black-and-white with an orange border. The self-portrait is on the right hand side. On the left, there is what looks like a poem at the top, and what looks like a signature, a date (perhaps the date of composition) and another word on top of a red, square signature stamp right above the Braille. The writing on the left is written vertically from top-to-bottom, so probably right-to-left; yet it doesn’t really quite look like Chinese.

The person portraited on the right has shortish black hair and wears a white tee. He looks like someone in his twenties. But he looks sleepy; he has black eye bags. He also looks a bit unconvinced.

Looking more carefully, the poem is not written in Chinese at all, but actually in French and English, and it says:

Mes atouts je compte
e to the π i plus one
But they say I’m wrong

(“I count what I am good at [and I come up with] zero; but they say I’m wrong.”) So this is probably what he is unconvinced about: that he actually has more than zero things that he is good at. Why e^πi + 1 (which is just zero) though? Does he like math? But anyway, the number of syllables seems to suggest that the author tried to write it in the form of a haiku. So does that mean he likes to play with words too?

It turns out that the signature is in English too, and it reads

Ambrose Li

and the date is in French:

le 24 août 2012

(August 24, 2012). The other word turns out to be

Toronto.

and the stamp is actually a QR code.