Morning walks to run errands, which might be buying a hatchet for splitting bamboo, or looking for wire cutters, often end up at the early lunch in the faculty cafeteria. This is located in the public services part of the hotel we are staying in. There is a full-scale restaurant, a cafeteria that the school uses, a tea house, meeting rooms, and some sort of conference facilities. The actual hotel part is fairly small. In fact we think we might have the only room with a second space. We are just above the “Western Restaurant” section, where our breakfast buffet is offered every morning, and then it is set up with forks and knives for lunch and early dinner. The staff literally stand around there all day long, waiting to see if anyone wants to eat there. Today there were mobs of 20-somethings as part of some organized lunch, but usually they would be lucky to have two or three separate customers.
The cafeteria has been a nice way to eat lunch. It is noisy, full of people eating and talking and smoking in a space that is all hard surfaces, heavy chairs, and large tables. We sign in, pick up our trays, get a blob of rice from a lovely woman smiling at us from behind her face mask. Then there are the trays of food: the first section of which is all meat and fish mixed with various vegetables, and the second is mostly vegetables mixed to some degree with meat (or in one dish, congealed cubes of duck blood). So we choose carefully and by now the lovely women who serve the food onto our molded tray cum dish know that we go for the high octane veggies. No one really speaks to them except us, our Niha (hello) and XiaXia (thanks) again and again usually in that order but not always. Sometimes we “hello” when we mean “thanks,” but we are met by those masked smiley eyes every day.
Rob has now completed a few cycles of presenting assignments, watching the first explorations, seeing the excitement then the confusion, feeling a bit deflated by the work he sees, and then interacting one-on-one and seeing steady progress towards understanding, and a more coherent piece of work in a day or two. I’ve gotten used to this too. He comes in after class dubious and concerned, or anxious to show me the photos of the progress. I get to preview the slide shows, which helps him hone in, cull out, and prepare generally simpler language so his translator has a better chance.
Time is short now. After we visited the Bauhaus collection, Rob took his students in the other morning that it is open. They then worked that afternoon on putting together their ideas of plane and line, much to his disappointment. But by today, Friday, they are showing promise, refining things, figuring things out – just like they did with the rectilinear and the planar works. They also saw images of site-specific works and bamboo pieces that seemed to truly interest and inspire them. They watched Rob splitting bamboo so that they would have little pieces with which to begin making models, and he showed them how to use the zip ties and how to lash together bamboo pieces. It was also cookie day. Since the first week, Rob has brought cookies in for them on Friday. They’ll miss him when he’s gone.
Certainly the main impact of this month of “Abstract Modeling” will be the introduction to the conceptual frameworks that Rob has been consistently offering to the students, but there has been so much more going on. Rob has showed them some ways of problem solving, of assessing and using materials, of reconsidering a design and drawing something more out of it. Not inconsequential were his personal attributes, climbing into the classroom through the window just like the kids do when the door is locked and making them clean up the studio space, as well as ventilate and vacate when using spray paints and toxic glues. Perhaps the most surprising parts may be introducing them to the Bauhaus collection right on their own campus, and to working with bamboo, an indigenous and ubiquitous material in their world. It will be wonderful to see what comes of all this as the planar-line pieces are finalized and the site-specific bamboo pieces are formulated.
We will be up early tomorrow and on our way by train to Suzhou for the weekend.
