4 Studios.
Today we visited 4 studios. Our studio, on loan from Yan Yan (the director of the 501) during our residency; Wang Jun’s studio, where we had tea and he invited me to spend a day in his studio sometime soon; The Sichuan Institute of Fine Art’s Sculpture Studio, an aircraft hanger of a building filled with sights I hardly know how to describe, with students working in ways I never expected, on a scale I never imagined. This involved the construction of three monumental pieces of commissioned public art, all being worked on by several students, all expertly choreographed by university staff. Rich, red clay, being batted and scraped into shape, by students all clambering over each other to get the perfect angle of the jaw, or crease of the trouser leg – surrounded by worryingly unstable stacks of uniformly grey studio furniture and discarded work.
Finally Xu Gangfu’s studio, the sculpture lecturer at Sichuan Institute of Fine Art, a classical sight, reminiscent of images from the Henry Moore Institute book: Sculptors in the Age of Photography (or something similar). An artist surrounded by his maquettes, his experiments, his sculptures, his drawings, his photographs of his sculptures, a model, his assistants sculpting the model, work in progress and work complete. All happily existing within a very small space.
Jessica Longmore
13 November 2010
Chongqing
