Taiwan Today

For Lee Chien-chu, a pencil is not a writing tool but a medium to showcase his creativity.

Whenever he has time, 46-year-old Lee Chien-chu (李健竹) sits at a small worktable in the corner of his living room. With simple tools, steady hands and a lot of patience, he carves pencils—pencil lead to be precise—into all manner of miniature sculptures.

The self-taught artist turned his hand to the practice in 2010 after learning from a friend. He started by creating some swords and spears out of scrap pencils, and soon found himself buying the writing tools by the bucket load and experimenting with all kinds of subjects.

One of Lee’s favorite works is “The Xiluo Bridge,” which recreates the 1,939-meter-long historic structure that connects his birthplace of Yunlin County in western Taiwan with Changhua County to the north. The piece required the artist to hollow out most of the pencil lead and took about a month to complete.

From time to time, Lee also comes up with some more playful creations. In “LOVE & HATE,” the letters L, O, V and E carved on four pencil tips turn into H, A, T and E when the implements are swiveled 90 degrees.

For most of his works, Lee prefers 5 millimeter lead pencils—the thickest on the market—as they provide more material to work with. But once, to test his abilities, he carved the complete English alphabet into a piece of 0.5 mm mechanical pencil lead.

Lee has finished more than 100 works so far, and has many ongoing projects as well as ones still in the planning phase. For the artist, employed full time as an engineer at Formosa Plastics Group’s Sixth Naphtha Cracker in Yunlin, his biggest challenge is finding the time to bring all his ideas to life. 

—by Jim Hwang