Why build a Chinese roof?
By the early stages of my final year of my degree I wanted to think about constructing an authentic Chinese roof with the original style of tiles and under skirt of wooden patterns. On my travels throughout the duration of my stay here, I was always eager to hunt down a few old towns or villages to witness the kind of lifestyle that these Chinese people have lived through.
When I was looking around I had noticed most of the time how colourful and intricate some under skirt wooden patterns have turned out. It just seems in my eyes that a lot of work has been involved with making these roofs but maybe for them it must be a piece of cake just like our English ways of building our English style roofs. Although seeing some Chinese roofs, seems that some are in fact replica and made up entirely to blend in with the surroundings or the fact that they need to use traditional roof tiles to make their Buddhist temples which I can understand completely.
problematics of my Chinese roof
Better still, as I really liked admiring these nice detailed roofs, I thought it would be quite nice to take something like this back with me but would be too heavy and maybe a bit costly too so I took on the opportunity to make my own small scale version Chinese roof. At first I was aiming on the idea to make a proper Chinese roof with all the trimmings like nicely glazed tiles and nice wooden colours for the wooden framing. My biggest problem for me was that I could not afford the 70% extra import duty on top of the £600 tiles which would cost me over £1000 in total, I thought just for a student this would be too much and I even tried Kickstart program to raise the money but no joy.
problem resolved?
My confidence went a bit low at first and I had to think of plan B and turn it into slightly something else instead like something I may have seen before in china so I decided to make this roof not so obvious by not adding the roof tiles and just having the skeletal structure instead. The roof would become an incomplete structure like a fading memory trace. I have indeed seen many different buildings here in south of China like Wenzhou and Dongtou where you have a lot of unfinished buildings because either the building permission agreement has changed of they have left it too late through their bad weather to finish the job on time or they just could not keep up with their finances.
My plan of action!
Looking at all of these has given me a good inspiration and nice ideas to further my knowledge in the art side of things and I will keep developing art ideas towards my Chinese roof. next thing I want to try create is the English style roof which I will start in about 3 weeks time once i come back to England. Its like England and China are brought together again just like through Skyping but a more real reality that is just a trace of the objects and not the actual real thing.
