I took these two shots on my cell phone last Monday in Hualien (花蓮), Taiwan at the the 2007 Hualien International Stone Sculpture Festival. One pic is a work in the making, the other a winner from a previous year.
The festival "Rock the Dream" is held every two years at the Hualien County Cultural Affairs Bureau Campus. This year it lasts from October 1 to November 4, involving 12 artists from nine different countries, which are the States, U.K., Philippines, Japan, China, France, Italy, Spain and Taiwan. The artists are given slabs of stone which they go to work on in little outdoor booths that are yellow and have flags to identify their nationalities (see above shot). At the end of the competition, the sculptures will be carted off to different locations around the city (the Bureau provides a map to the locations of previous works).
The Cultural Affairs Bureau Campus is near the ocean, so it's a nice place to sit for an afternoon, watching the artists. If they, in their grinding and chipping away at jagged stone, become too intense, there is always the long stretching deep blue to balance your thoughts.
6 comments:
I've read your new article about "Rock the Dream", and I got to say the work I saw in the pic would be the best in the festival. The material stone they used to sulpture must be "Marble", because Hualien is only the place in Taiwan where produces it.
Some of the stone is brought from other places in Taiwan or is even imported. By "Marble", you must be talking about a specific kind of marble because there's marble all over the place.
One of the major sources of industry in Hualien is marble. It's exported to countries everywhere.
I was told though that much of the marble they're using is imported. I think Hualien has only one kind of marble.
dear Patrick, I'm glad you were there and were enthusiatic about the works, but I propose a couple of corrections to your description... the participants in 2007 were from Taiwan, China, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and Austria. The stones we worked on were not slabs, but blocks of marble of up to 10 tonnes. Most of it came from the Hualien area, which exports up to 900 m tonnes each year, except for 2 pieces which were imported marble from Vietnam.The finished works made in 2007 are now placed partly in Hualien City parks, and partly at tourist locations down the east coast as far as Taitung county. The site furthest south - at the "stone umbrella" - is inhabited by my own sculpture and that of hitoshi Tanaka from japan. Yours sincerely, Sibylle von halem (participant sculptor 2007)
Dear Sybylle,
Thanks for the correction, especially about the import destination. Actually, I was curious about this point.
BTW, is there a difference between slab and block in sculpturing lingo?
You guys, or your predecessors, created some interesting works.
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