International Collaborative Project: Harmony between Man and Nature
In March, 2014, 20 wood sculptors gathered in the city of Dongxiang in South-east China to work at Rongsheng Art Village to create a collaborative sculptural installation to celebrate the concept of harmony between man and nature. Ten of the artists were traditional Chinese sculptors, and ten were internationals from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, England, Ireland, Tanzania, Italy, Cameroon, and Romania.
The Project Director was Australian Terry Martin and this project was built on the success of the Irish Wall Project he directed in Ireland last year (see video below). The work was sponsored by the International Wood Culture Society (IWCS), a not-for-profit that works to develop and sustain awareness of wood cultures around the world.
The installation was to be shown as a centrepiece of World Wood Day (WWD) celebrations in the Chinese coastal city of Xianyou on the 20th to the 22nd of March. WWD is the brainchild of IWCS aimed at focusing attention on wood-related causes, such as sustainability of resources and survival of traditional woodwork. Rongsheng Art Village is a new Chinese initiative aimed at creating a world centre for sculpture in wood. A new village of studios, artist housing, retail outlets, and tourist facilities is being constructed and this project was the first of what they hope will be many international collaborations.
The biggest challenge was the cultural differences between the artists. The international team had its own challenges. With a Swahili-speaking Tanzanian working beside a German-speaking Italian, and a Japanese-speaking Romanian collaborating with a traditional Maori carver, it was an intense 10-day period with rapidly developed sign language skills and much sketching with chalk on the floor.
This challenge paled beside the task of working with the Chinese. Despite their overwhelming friendliness and willingness to work hard, breaking away from tradition was difficult for them. There were plenty of interpreters, but the barrier was not so much linguistic as cultural: old versus new.
After intense discussions and a warm-up group sculpture to loosen the creative minds, the two groups agreed to separately create installations by interpreting the theme. Amazingly, each group designed a variation of a doorway – the internationals created a vaulting archway and the Chinese made a traditional Chinese gateway. The arch was five metres wide, three metres high, made from camphor laurel and ended up weighing 3500kg. The gateway was made from 10,000-year-old wood dug up from Chinese floodplains, stood five metres high, and weighed 2700 kg.
When each entranceway was built, the teams swapped sculptures and in turn modified them without consultation with the original makers. It was an intentional exercise in ‘letting go’ to help all the team members develop a sense of harmony not only in what they made, but in how they worked. Needless to say, there were fraught moments, but the whole project was marked by deepening trust and many moving moments where eyes met across shared work and it was understood that friendships can be created in the language of wood.
The installation was erected in Xianyou, pronounced a remarkable success, and will continue to be shown in different parts of China over coming years as proof of what can be achieved when skilled artists combine patience, respect and energy.