Still waking up at 2AM. Still raining. Still noodles for breakfast with pickled vegetable, sautéed greens and fruit, with packaged cakes. Walking in the rain, and hiding under cover of the Hotel buliding to give the staff time to clean our room. But something has changed: Rob is now preparing himself and his student translator for the first class today.
Day 4 we are more aware of how challenging this task of teaching will be. Yesterday Rob met his 7 third year students, 3 boys and 4 girls, who insisted on taking us out to dinner to honor him. It was fun and a good opportunity to see them interact and get to know a bit more about them. There is a little bit of English, all of them are taking that as a course of study, but there is a gap in understanding when it comes to concepts not already part of their daily life. The translator, let’s call him “John,” wants to go over everything that Rob plans to teach so that he understands it and can better translate. It turns out that it is very hard for him to actually fully grasp what Rob is talking about, and this turns into a tutorial.
The tutorial continues this morning before class, going over the slides and talking about the concepts. In class 4 more students turn up, graduate students, and then another one showed up. So 12 students took on the first exercise – the placing of black dots on a white page. Considerations of space, of interaction, of intention. It was hard for Rob to determine how much the translation conveyed his content during the slide lecture, and impossible to know what the students really think, though they did start to talk more once the work began. Obviously diligent and interested, each student wrestled with the new ideas and the task at hand. Rob is constantly re-evaluating how much to try to convey, and which images to use to help get the concepts across.
Surprise! We are invited to a full faculty dinner with the Dean and the Head of the School of Public Art. Be ready in 10 minutes. That’s the way it is, all plans fall away and new plans pop up. An incredibly gaudy enormous facility, a private banquet room and an endless stream of dishes from which everyone eats with their own chopsticks as the dishes turn on a gigantic lazy susan. Stories and more stories, toast after toast, all to celebrate Spring and the College of Public Art, which has grown in the 13 years under this one person’s leadership. Small by Chinese standards with 1600 students, they are “trending” as consideration of public space and decoration become part of the Chinese thinking. Taking sculpture “off the pedestal” is one way it was described. A dozen men in the department, yet the dean is a woman, an architect at that.
Walking around in the rain this morning we said hello to the man we’ve seen every morning with his long bamboo pole, to the women who mop and clean off the wet surfaces, and to the people who run the art supply store where Rob found a board he can use to construct his drawing studio in our little spare room. That small separate space, off our large bedroom, contains a low hard couch and a game table. I’ve been using that room for yoga and Rob has been using it for drawing. It’s great to have this little oasis. The hotel sits next to the waterway, which has been rapidly flowing, muddy every morning, and full of debris after the wild stormy nights. Directly opposite on the embankment are blooming trees pruned ferociously, and a railroad engine and dining car from 1928 (the year the China College of Art was formed), which has been turned into some kind of a food and drink venue. All day long there is a soundtrack playing, mixed with the fairly loud voices of women working in the hotel lobby and food area just below our room. Birds are in full Spring hoopla, including sparrows, chickadees, pigeons with interesting black and white neck bands, and several species of small black and white chattering birds we do not know. We’ve seen three small dogs and one cat, one butterfly, two mosquitoes, a fly and two spiders, along with tadpoles and Koi in the ponds. Signs of other living beings around us.
