Our last week begins with very warm weather, tough air quality, and a sense of familiarity tinged with that poignancy of approaching departure. It is a relief to be back in our hotel, doing laundry, and getting genuine greetings from the staff. Rob plunges back into the fray with the students, observing that for many of them the results of the plane and line combinations reflect a resistance to integrate line and a return to the construction of volumes. There are a few bright spots, and of course, several technical problems that demand his attention. Meanwhile, the students are deeply involved in model making and even construction for the final project: the site-specific bamboo pieces. There is a process required by the administration in order to put art pieces into the public space, so there are some invisible constraints that may pop up. Rob’s translator brings up an administrator’s concern about public safety, and Rob looks at these models knowing full well that they will not support the weight of a climbing child. So, we wait to see what happens next on that.
Tuesday morning our hotel room becomes an open studio for our host and his colleagues, a lacquer painter who is a professor at the Academy and the gallery director we had met before. Everyone is enthusiastic about the work, especially upon learning some background of how the forms evolved from Rob’s early work as a potter, his concern with vessel forms, and his conceptual interest in Duchamp’s piece in which he dropped three plumb lines and creating template forms from these random string shapes. He explained the process of making his 8 template forms, exploring the possibilities through drawings, and choosing and drawing finished works. He has been asked now to give a public lecture Thursday evening about his work. He is calling this new series of 18 or so drawings “Made in China” and will leave them here perhaps to be shown in venues in Shanghai or Hangzhou. We joked a bit about “Made in China, Stays in China,” but it really was meaningful to share the work and feel that there is now a deeper understanding of who he is, and what he is trying to communicate to the students in his teaching. It helped enormously to have a fellow artist with English skills who could communicate Rob’s explanations in Chinese, and reflect back any questions.
In exchange for this private viewing, we were taken to our new friend’s lacquer studio to see his work. The studio is three large rooms and one small one in an enormous apartment complex just 10 minutes from campus. Vistas on either side, and amazing light, there are old works, works in progress, and the first layers of lacquer on several waiting to be realized. We see Dubuffet’s influence and learn more about the lacquering process of layering, and the slow tempo of the work. There are some overlapping interests, and a relationship is cemented. Turns out this professor earned his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. Ahh, more intersecting lines as both my parents studied there. We have Fujian tea and dried dates, and then return to campus to visit the classroom, where one group of 3 girls is lashing together bamboo sections. Rob introduces a strategy for reinforcing junctions and extending longer pieces. It is obvious that the students want to accomplish this work and make their teacher proud of them. In fact, they present him with a classical tea service and a bamboo box full of Fujian tea. This is a black tea that comes from a neighboring province South of Zhejiang province. We are to go out again this evening, driven once again by our novice driver (who, by the way speaks Italian) to join in a group at a special vegetarian restaurant. We are told that tofu is used to imitate meat and fish shapes. It will no doubt be a special experience.
The students are showing some anxiety as they tackle their major construction projects with such a short deadline. The bamboo is interesting but also challenging, and the kids are really having their first experiences with this kind of construction. How well their ideas translate into this material remains to be seen, as they do not tend to experiment with the material to generate the ideas, but the other way around. Rob, too, is a little anxious for them, as our days are so limited now, and it feels as though the social elements will be demanding for us in these last few days too. Luckily for Rob, he had the foresight to put together images of his sculptural work and a bit of an explanation of his template drawing process, so he has little to prepare for his Thursday lecture.
Amazed at the heat here and wondering what summer would be like. We are told this 90F degree day is a beautiful summer day, where mostly it is hotter and more humid and much less pleasant. Many people walk with sun umbrellas , and even passengers on motorbikes cover themselves with lightweight fabric to shield themselves from the sun.
