16: Transition from Rectangles to Planes to Bamboo Poles
It rained like the dickens for part of the night and our waterway is back to muddy greenish. For the past several days there has been more English speaking at breakfast than ever before, with the Bandung Conference going on all weekend. People representing various other countries are here discussing the 60 years of this “Third World” collaborative organization. It is interesting to contemplate what “Third World” means from a hotel in China. The original Bandung Conference was held in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, as a gathering of Afro-Asian nations to form cooperative economic and political relationships and stand against colonialism. The major gathering was held in India this month, at which they re-affirmed their support for Palestinian independence, according to the Jakarta Post. Here, on the campus of the China Academy of Art, we see a smaller gathering of familiar and unfamiliar faces that look a lot more like our New York City home style, but the English is precise and fluent in ways that most in our nation do not speak.
Walking in the drizzle this morning, we had the mission of finding a pharmacy that could provide Rob with more of his saline rinse combination, since our mixtures of baking soda and non-iodized salt seem to irritate him. We had luck finding the pharmacy, and even managed to get our meanings across, but no luck on finding the powders in the measured form we sought. Back to trying our own mix.
A pleasant lunch with the company of another sculpture faculty member, and then Rob scooted off to class. The students are having fair success exploring how to make fascinating sculptural elements out of one sheet of heavy paper by scoring, cutting and folding. It is remarkable how diverse their ideas turn out to be once the students begin applying the principles for their own purposes. Rob is fairly sure they will be glad to leave the paper behind and experiment with 3-D lines in metal wire, though he isn’t sure there will be time enough for them to make constructions that combine the planes and lines. There has been some organizing necessary over all the materials, which the students turn out to have to buy for themselves. The bamboo for the final project is estimated at some serious expense, and Rob asks the administration if the school can cover some of this. The answer is “yes,” they will chip in half. The bamboo will be lashed together in site-specific structures next week. At least that’s the plan.
See the gallery for images of student work. These will be loaded once the students develop their completed forms of the project
