A multitude of flowers has been shaken
from their twig-ends,
the Chinese apricot-alone,
fresh and fetching,
Monopolizing infinitely
romantic feelings.
within an elfin garden, blooming.
The scattered shadows flutter
along a pond of water,
crystal-clear;
The light fragrance, persistent, flows
amid the moonlight, dusky ....
—The Chinese Apricot
1,000 years ago, in the vicinity of the West Lake at Hangchow in Chekiang Province, Lin Pu (Lin Ho-ching, 967 1028), a hermit poet of the Sung Dynasty, recreated forever with his elegant literati pen, the transcendent bearing and beauty of the Chinese flowering apricot.
Today, on a major avenue of the modern city of Taipei, the multidimensional virtues of this cinque-petaled national flower of the Republic of China find a new artistic medium in which to present themselves-stainless steel, via the huge sculpture fronting the National Building on An Ho Road.
Its rounded, austere, forceful form gives the huge sculpture a modern look, which, however, continues to embody the age-old impression of this flower cherished by the Chinese over the past 5,000 years. According to the sculpture's creator, Yuyu Yang-who is also the designer of New York's East-West Gate (the Q.E. Gate) and of the frontal sculptures for the '70 and '74 World's Fair China pavilions, "Spring Again Over the Good Earth" and "The Advent of the Phoenix"—the squared trunk of this representation symbolizes the superb resilience of the apricot flower in the midst of winter snows.
The figures surrounding the central round shape, implicative of the flower's progression from bud to consummation, symbolize the maturity of Chinese wisdom.
Stainless steel expresses, via the qualities of its luster and hardness, the Chinese flowering apricot's "gentlemanly characteristics," in Mencius' words: "to be beyond the powers of riches and honors to inflict dissipation, beyond the powers of poverty and mean circumstances to cause a swerving from principle, and beyond the capability of power and force to cause to bend."
The sculpture's setting includes the rainbow-colored semicircular balconies of the 15-story building, through which it acquires expanded dimension-as of hundreds of additional Chinese apricots blooming between heaven and earth.
Pull this metallic tribute to the national flower out of these surroundings, and its magnificence would undoubtedly diminish by multiples. Simultaneously, the auspicious mood of "heaven and earth here in harmony" would disappear.
Huge sculptures with modern countenances and profound inner meanings have, in recent years, popped up across the country. Various styles may shape them, but they share a common trait-a unique appropriateness to a certain site. Existing sedately in preselected positions, perhaps set in the facade of a building, offset in a public square, or gracing a garden, a park, or similar open spaces, these works of art seem to have been originally conceived by sentient environments: they reflect not only select ed traits of a select ambience, but substantially complement these traits.
A common name for the genre is "environmental sculpture"—beneficent greetings from sculptors to man and nature.
Such huge "modernistic" sculptures seem to trace quite easily back to the colossal stone structures erected for burial or religious purposes in Megalithic cultures (ca. 4000-1500 BC). The ancients developed large sculpture forms as means of flaunting the divine power, enhancing the authority of loyalty, and burnishing a sense of mystic honor, among others.
In China, fostered by the traditional conception that everything nourishes in harmony with nature, sculpture, as many other artforms, occupied an inherent position as an integral part of the Chinese lifescape.
In the Renaissance of the Western world, sculpture was to break away from its place in the realm of the practical arts and become "pure" and "independent." Not until the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries did the impetus of "modern ism" again bring sculpture back to people's living environments.
Two events may be especially note worthy in the development of contemporary environmental sculpture. One is the 1919 founding of the Bauhaus school of design in Germany. Bauhaus director Walter Gropius (1883-1969) proposed a theory, "the joining of art and industry," calling on architects to produce in concert with the total visual environment. And sculpture found an enhanced position equal to, instead of attached to architecture in modern landscape designing.
The second event was the world's first Sculpture Symposium, organized by Karl Prantl (1924- ) in 1959 at a quarry in St. Margarethen, Austria. Sculptors left their studios to work in the open fields, and finally left their finished works right where they originally be longed-in the bosom of Mother Nature. Their sculptures now revealed such unprecedentedly massive impact, that those in attendance at St. Margare then suddenly realized the meaning of the ageless Oriental conception-stated negatively, that anything separated from or out-of sync with its environment (i.e., the magnitude of nature) is deprived of vitality.
After so many tidal changes, sculpture finally returned from the pedestals of enclosed salons to sit beneath the vast horizons of open land, to direct converse with man and nature.
Time: Present
Setting: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
The new Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Asia's largest, inhabits a square covering an area of over 1,000 ping (36,000 square feet), an excellent stage for environmental sculpture in the role of "the totem of Taipei's artistic totem."
The first artistic attraction for visitors to the museum-aside from the complex itself-is a frontal two-part stainless steel sculpture by Yuyu Yang entitled" Apart, or Together, in Accordance With the Yuan (in Buddhism, a predestined relationship)."
Yang's explanation of this rather philosophical title is that the button on the concave side of the curve of one of the shapes can represent only one, or two, or three, or ... to infinity, as you visualize the sculpture from different standpoints. The phenomenon may be just like the relationship among the peoples of the world, or more remote, or more intimate—all in accordance with predestined fate. If all this seems rather convoluted, it takes clearer form as one views the object.
In terms of the harmony of this sculpture with its environment, its magic-mirror-like surface has a special and surprise optical effect—it softens the hard lines of its site, adding to the dimension of the museum's artistic atmosphere via changing, multiply-curved images moving over its glossy surfaces.
Visitors' curiosity often urges them to test the distorting effect of the "magic mirror," forcing museum staffers into a frequent cleaning of its surfaces. But most artists, at least, welcome such social participation, maintaining that sculpture substantially belongs to the public and serves more fully via such public attention.
On the other side of the museum's environmental square, Ju Ming's "Taichichuan" impacts powerfully on the eyes by reason of the free, gross, and forceful marks of his hatchet and chisel on two bronze figures practicing a slow-motion, shadow-boxing, version of a Chinese martial art -taichi.
Ju Ming's two polystyrene-aluminum masters of Chinese kungfu hanging over the reception hall of the museum, in contrast to the deliberate two outside, have flying speed instilled in their carriages.
Lai Chia-hung's "Wedding," in the rear section of the museum square, performs intensely, from within the legacy of the local color of Taiwan. The spectral, black metal "folk musicians," caught in a sculptor's wind, will forever be in momentary collision with each other, and a clinking effect is all but audible, conveying to all who observe it the merry, hustle-bustle atmosphere of a traditional wedding in Taiwan's countryside.
Li Tsai-chien's "Minimal Infinite" expresses the rhythm and beauty of the cosmos of geometry. Tsao Ya's "The Dawn of Civilization" speaks, through the lumpy-formed legacy of Henry Moore (British sculptor, 1898- ) of the break from chaos in Chinese mythology. Mai Hsien-yang's "Without Title" hints of Graeco-Roman mythologies....
Sculptures with regional, national, and international characteristics, coexisting in the square of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, introduce the three major currents in the arts on this island.
A bridging from the more rigid mentalities of businessmen and technologists to the amorphous imaginations of creative artists has resulted in Taipei's many roadside sculptures. Some of them seemingly have shapes as simply formed as possible.
Kao Shan Ching's "The Affectionate Ties Between Parents and Children" on An Ho Road is just two vague shapes, the one larger than the other, close together. But the emotion of a mother cuddling her baby comes right out. Ju Ming's "Pulling Apart, Taichi" on Min Sheng East Road is a stump being longitudinally pulled apart by imaginary hands (but not machinery), the two parts resembling two practitioners of taichichuan. Impact radiates like light from this abstractly simple formation.
Near the Ting Hao Supermarket on Chunghsiao East Road, Chen Chen-hui's "The Radiance of the Sun and the Moon" does radiate—an ancient and mysterious feeling from the two complementary powers in the universe, the yin (negative) and yang (positive), as specified in the Book of Changes. The outer aspect of the sculpture is of a bronze sphere cut out at the two poles, with two indentations across the surface.
The sphere shape was adopted since its environmental valley space, surround ed by mountainous buildings, would not allow any towering format-only the full form of the complacent sphere can compete with such soaring foils. The moon's routine changes from wax to wane make it natural to remove some portion of the sphere, while the four seasons of the year-the gifts of the sun—are expressed via the four sections delineated by the two crossing lines around the sphere. The dark bronze finish gives a unity of antiquity to the final form.
Modern technology allows the tentacles of the elite culture of old China to make their ways into the lifescape of the modern Chinese; the participation of the age-old materials in modern sculpture, in turn, enriches the content of this artform. The old and the new tactfully converge in today's Chinese environmental sculpture.
With the hand of the flower,
To push open the sky and the land:
First, to let the clouds and birds in,
and then the world to
stretch out and out.
Then, again, with the hand
of the flower,
To sculpt morning light, dusky clouds,
and evening stars;
To delineate the green trees,
the fields, and mountains;
To toy with the sunlight, the wind,
the rain, and the streams;
And to swirl the sun, the cool moon,
the seasons, and the universe.
Finally, with the hand of the flower,
To hold Eternity in a palm,
And with Eternity,
To detain a never-fading fragrance.
These lines by poet Lo Men praise a huge environmental sculpture, "The Hand of the Flower" by Ho Heng-hsiung, now part of Hsin Sheng Park on Pin Chiang Road. Lo successfully interprets the inner aspect of all environmental sculpture. Truthfully, to push open the sky and the land and fuse the ambience of man's life patterns with nature, is the explicit wish of all environmental sculptors.
In the cities, urban artists try to bring the grace of nature to the rigid shapes of city constructions; in the suburbs, they furnish "open arts museums" to add to confined graces of nature.
An example of Taipei's small "open arts museums" is in Youth Park. On a green, grassy space, several sculptures are placed in a group-a bird stretching its wings, a mother cuddling her baby, a dancer performing, two musical instruments sounding .... They invite the public to a realm of sculpture in which their appreciation of the art is exalted.
In the mountains of Puli in central Taiwan, Lin Yuan, the "old man of the stones," never having received the slightest formal training in sculpture, started a sculpting career in his 70s by spontaneous impulse. He was a farmer who wanted, in his aged years, to exhibit his numerous, powerfully primitive works on his home area's craggy grounds. Like Karl Prantl's Sculpture Symposium of 25 years ago, Lin Yuan's Stone Sculpture Exposition startles visitors by its untainted originality.
Yuyu Yang has now purchased a mountainside plot in Puli-an area of 4,000 ping (144,000 square feet)—to pave the way for his Tranquil Viewing Exposition.
Similar efforts have been and are being made by other contemporary Chinese sculptors, driven by the inner impulse to beautify their people's lifescape via environmental sculpture. Hopefully, as a living art in harmony with the environment and men's lives, environmental sculpture will one day help advance that artistic life of happiness and fullness which our ancestors strove so mightily to create.