One Stone, Three Forms - lee wen 李文
One Stone, Three Forms
"Letter A no.2" performance Lee Wen iwth Wong ShihYeow and Vincent Leow
Singapore Arts Festival 1990
After having been in Jalan Ulu Sembawang since 1989, The Artists Village (TAV) were evicted from Sembawang in 1990 and we were forced by circumstances to carry out our intended performances and installation proposed projects for the Singapore Arts Festival 1990 in the city instead.
Our loss were seen as gains as we continued to explore working for the Arts Festival from Queen's Avenue where Tang Da Wu rented three of the ex- colonial houses, taking down the fences between the houses and hence joining the gardens and making them seem like one continuous ground.
While it was an exciting experience working with Tang Da Wu, Vincent Leow, Wong Shih Yeow it was nevertheless a bitter sweet one. However we still managed to work with considerably cheerfulness meeting many other artists. Two of the foreign artists participating in the festival were introduced by Da Wu: Hannah Sofaer and Hiroshi Mikami, both were become guides and the links to a journey of self discovery for me. Hannah was a Masters graduate from Royal College of Art in London, who did an installation with ribbons and butterfly shapes sculptured earth and green tufts beneath an umbrella canopy of a flame of the forest in Fort Canning Park.
Hiroshi Mikami did his stone breaking project that usually he would also meticulously arranged a time shuttered camera to capture amazing photographs of the sparks on one negative that printed as a tfantastic ball of sparks taken intermittently as he break the granite stone with chisel and hammer by hand over the course of a week or so.
Hannah Sofaer offered to invite us to Portland Sculpture Park in Dorset where she is also an associate artist and trustee. It was through her kind invitation introduced by Tang Da Wu that gave me a chance to go to London with Han Sai Por, Amanda Heng and S. Chandrasekaran in order to do a symposium at Portland Sculpture Trust. After which I also had a chance to check out London for the first time. I stayed on for two years and kept in touch with Hiroshi Mikami too. He offered to invite me to India where I could experience the carving of granite stone with chisel and hammer.
After living in London for 2 years Hiroshi Mikami invited me to participate in an International Sculpture Symposium, held on a farm 2km outside the city of Gulbarga, Karnataka, India in November to December 1992.
Here I learned from him how to split a huge basalt stone into three parts. The stone given to me was enormous and by repetitively knocking a line of holes with sheer persistence, one last hard knock saw it split clean into two stones and it is through this exercise that taught one how to handle its carving by chisel and hammer.
I gave my three stones broken from one three working concepts. One developed out of breaking it dfowen into smaller chips and sometimes producing the awe-inspiring sparks of Mikami's in the dark, and afterwards putting the broken chips caged back into a wire square cube. Another was shaped using the basic shapes of circle, triangle and square. The last one was a free formed organic response to the stone's own characteristics.
Our loss were seen as gains as we continued to explore working for the Arts Festival from Queen's Avenue where Tang Da Wu rented three of the ex- colonial houses, taking down the fences between the houses and hence joining the gardens and making them seem like one continuous ground.
While it was an exciting experience working with Tang Da Wu, Vincent Leow, Wong Shih Yeow it was nevertheless a bitter sweet one. However we still managed to work with considerably cheerfulness meeting many other artists. Two of the foreign artists participating in the festival were introduced by Da Wu: Hannah Sofaer and Hiroshi Mikami, both were become guides and the links to a journey of self discovery for me. Hannah was a Masters graduate from Royal College of Art in London, who did an installation with ribbons and butterfly shapes sculptured earth and green tufts beneath an umbrella canopy of a flame of the forest in Fort Canning Park.
Hiroshi Mikami did his stone breaking project that usually he would also meticulously arranged a time shuttered camera to capture amazing photographs of the sparks on one negative that printed as a tfantastic ball of sparks taken intermittently as he break the granite stone with chisel and hammer by hand over the course of a week or so.
Hannah Sofaer offered to invite us to Portland Sculpture Park in Dorset where she is also an associate artist and trustee. It was through her kind invitation introduced by Tang Da Wu that gave me a chance to go to London with Han Sai Por, Amanda Heng and S. Chandrasekaran in order to do a symposium at Portland Sculpture Trust. After which I also had a chance to check out London for the first time. I stayed on for two years and kept in touch with Hiroshi Mikami too. He offered to invite me to India where I could experience the carving of granite stone with chisel and hammer.
After living in London for 2 years Hiroshi Mikami invited me to participate in an International Sculpture Symposium, held on a farm 2km outside the city of Gulbarga, Karnataka, India in November to December 1992.
Here I learned from him how to split a huge basalt stone into three parts. The stone given to me was enormous and by repetitively knocking a line of holes with sheer persistence, one last hard knock saw it split clean into two stones and it is through this exercise that taught one how to handle its carving by chisel and hammer.
I gave my three stones broken from one three working concepts. One developed out of breaking it dfowen into smaller chips and sometimes producing the awe-inspiring sparks of Mikami's in the dark, and afterwards putting the broken chips caged back into a wire square cube. Another was shaped using the basic shapes of circle, triangle and square. The last one was a free formed organic response to the stone's own characteristics.