As if to prove the point, the moment I stepped into his home he pointed out an ant nest to the left of the door. "Take a look at the ants I bred," he said, much as a proud farm wife might point out to visiting relatives "this litter of pigs I bred."
So I was not surprised when he remarked that he was born to a farming family in Chiayi Hsien, in the middle-south of Taiwan. But his youthful life gave no indication of what was to come. After graduating from junior high at 17, he became a retail shop assistant, then a factory worker. A year later, he left his hometown and apprenticed himself in woodcarving at a furniture factory in Neihu in suburban Taipei. But then, during the following two years, he learned—and worked at—other kinds of woodcarving, including temple arts and commercial sculpture, on jobs around the island.
The training contented his hands, not yet his mind, and he felt impelled to transcend the limitations on master craftsmen and become a creative artist. But he did not know how to proceed. "The most distinguishing difference between artist and artisan lies in creativity, something that is not learned—of that I can be sure.
"But what is creation? In my opinion, creation is doing what others have never done, or doing what others are unable to do," Wu said.
But what that others have not done? The problem vexed him for years. He worked at a carving enterprise days and often wracked his brains at night, sleepless with his problem.
"One evening in 1975, I sat on a dike in Peitou musing on how to begin artistic creation-sculpture. On the soil wall in front of me, I watched seven little ants pushing a lizard egg almost vertically up the slope. The weight and volume of the egg was many times that of the ants. But with their slender legs and tiny mouth-parts, the ants lifted it and moved swiftly up the slope." That day, he says, he was not only moved by the force of the ants' joint spirit, but deeply impressed by a kind of beauty he discerned in the ants' body structures. And an unusual but compelling idea flashed into his mind, "Why not use the respectable ant as a model for sculpture?"
From then on, Wu was an obsessive observer and student of ants. He read books concerning ants, bred ants, inspected ants with magnifying glasses and microscopes, spied out their life habits, surveyed their living environments, and analyzed their labor division/life specialization system, recording every detail.
"During my intensive observation of ants, I found that I really appreciated their social structure. Among all the insects, the ants' system of labor division is the fairest, their social discipline the strictest, and they are the most unselfish," Wu declared, going on to quote Dr. Lin Yutang: "Ants are the most rational animal of all."
In 1978, two years after he watched the ants transport the lizard's egg, Wu finally combined the craving of his hands with the obsession of his mind and accomplished, after three failures, his first ant sculpture.
"I knew that carving ants would be difficult from the very beginning, but still, I underestimated the difficulty," Wu recalled.
A sculpture of the tiny insect in a combat pose titled Stand Roaring
Each initial project was completed only after three or more failures. Deserted works are scattered across his studio, though the flaws, to a layman, are almost invisible. Not only must the artist pursue perfection, but recognize that imperfect works cheat the viewer, even when they satisfy the sculptor, he believes.
Every sculpted group of wooden ants, including the base as well as the work itself, is shaped from a single piece of wood. Control in his carving is, thus, the most important and most difficult aspect of his creation. Often, a little heavier cut will sever a leg—and the work must be thrown away.
"I felt the failure of my initial sculptures. The results made me feel odd. It was because I had modeled my enlarged ants according to my own visual impressions instead of taking the precise ratios of the ants' body-part volumes as the basis of my carvings," he remarked.
Wu Ching began to use precise instruments to measure dissected ant parts. In his studio, perhaps the most eye-catching item is a diagram designated "12-Time Magnification of Measurements of the Brown Mountain Ant." The diagram stipulates lengths, widths, and diameters—and illustrated proportions—of ants' mouthparts, antennae, front, middle, and rear feet, and the front and the side of the ants' head, thorax, and belly, etc. Wu Ching's meticulous measurements are to assure that his wooden ants approximate the biological model.
Wu's perfectionism and scientific attitude toward art have limited his accomplishment to 20 meticulously completed works for the seven years he has been exclusively committed to ant sculpting.
One of his largest works, Ants Transporting Grains of Rice, is about 10 feet long and features a group of 24 ants. Wu spent a full year, averaging 11 working hours a day, on this sculpture. It took him 15 to 20 days to complete each ant. One ant leg could take him a day.
Wu urges visitors inspecting his works to focus their attention on the ants' antennae, legs, and mouthparts since these three areas convey most of the feeling of an ant's "presence." The antennae are the organs the ant uses to check its surroundings; the mouthparts are for attacking as well as carrying and eating, and the legs are the motive power, he notes. His ant groups are lively, busy, harmonious compositions in which each single "frozen" movement is the result of punctilious observations in Wu's records.
The style of Wu Ching's sculpture is clearly "super-realism," except there is an unexpected sentimental appeal in his works, a "subjective-super-realism."
Wu explained as an example, that in the work Struggling to Be Free, which stands about 12 feet high, he used five successive movements to show ants breaking loose from a covering of dirt—in the lowest ant, revealing its belly and back feet; another the thorax; then a half head; the last ant has extricated its whole body.
From The Course of Life, a line of ants following a daily destiny
In The Course of Life, four continuous movements express a complete life process. Such stilled movements—frozen in time—are not discernible viewing actual ant activity; they have great power in an artistic conception.
The works, though varying in size and depicted activity, carry out a common theme: his vivid, lifelike ants are constantly "exerting the utmost effort to advance."
Wu confessed to being unacquainted with art schools. "What I have done is the result of a process of groping. I have received no regular training in the arts. When I felt such and such an arrangement might be powerful and impressive, I proceeded."
Differences between art and craftsmanship are often very slight, and Wu Ching's background may prejudice judgments classifying his works. And indeed, the critics do have differing opinions concerning the artistic measure of Wu's works. But in common, they are agreed that his skill has attained perfection.
Since Wu Ching uses no supporting props for his ants, and since the ant carvings are so delicate, he chose boxwood as a major raw material due to its strength and durability. The hardness of boxwood adds difficulty in cutting, and therefore he made his own special carving tools to deal with the material.
Wu has also experimented with other materials for his sculptures among them marble and copper, as seen in his studio in incomplete works.
Pushing, his latest work, is his first done piece by piece
Another experiment is a new parts-assembly process in his latest work, Pushing, of a man-size ant propelling a cube. This ant is made up of individually carved parts, joined together. Even the ant's bristles were carved and implanted instead of being chiseled out as in his earlier work. The ant is painted black, contrasting strongly with the white cube—perhaps a cube of sugar.
This technique, according to Wu, allows the sculptor a freer hand to carry out creative ideas but is otherwise no easier. He feels that larger works and a theme of social criticism may be the future tendency of his creation. However, he said, he would let any style change occur naturally rather than programming it.
To engross himself in sculpture, Wu Ching had to give up production of carvings as a daily livelihood. "Ever since I began to sculpt ants, except for one work bought by the Taiwan Provincial Government this spring, I have had no out side income at all;" he confessed his poverty matter of factly, adding that his family in Chiayi used proceeds from farm land to support his art career and asked for no return. He added that appreciation for his sculpture must go to his family as well, since they had dedicated the same effort to his artistic accomplishment as he had.
After a lonely journey of over seven years, Wu Ching's sculptures have gradually won him attention and applause. On July 20-29, his works were exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a prime attraction for many thousands of visitors. He has now been invited by the Kariya Museum at Nagoya, Japan, to exhibit in November.
It is all in celebration of Wu's own words: "What a long road an ant must walk before it can move a single grain of rice back to its nest."