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.
