Sculpture

Poems in Parchment

• Byline:JIM HWANG
• Publication Date:06/01/2006

Wu Ching-fang folds poetry and life experiences into paper sculpture.

Within the city of Chiayi, not particularly known for its arts, a community of paper sculptors is busily transforming lifeless sheets of paper into all manner of imaginative shapes. Any investigation into this artistic phenomenon will eventually lead to the door of 40-year-old Wu Ching-fang. She has been practicing the craft for 16 years and has shared it with students at the community college, local high schools and seminars organized by the local government's cultural bureau.

Wu, however, was not always so communicative, and not always so willing to place herself and the craft she mastered in the spotlight. As a child, the second youngest of six, the Chiayi native was painfully shy. She would scamper off to find a hiding spot even when she heard the familiar sound of her father's voice. She preferred solitary entertainments that allowed her imagination to roam. She liked to read, everything from novels and poetry to comic books, and to draw. Her brother Wu Hsing-yu recalls that in the days when comic books were rare and expensive, his sister drew comics for him, which he proudly showed off to friends.

Her eyesight suffered from the hours spent with her nose in a book or staring at a drawing pad. When a doctor fitted her with a pair of glasses of the wrong prescription, her eyes weakened even further, nearly putting an end to her drawing. To spare her eyes from deteriorating further, Wu's father strictly forbade her to read or draw and would not let her enter the arts high school she hoped to attend. Wu ended up entering a vocational high school and studying fashion. "I had absolutely no interest in tailoring and sewing, but I thought I could at least sketch something in the design classes," Wu says. "It was not exactly what I had in mind when it came to pursuing art, but it gave my drawing a solid foundation."

Wu's drawing skills landed her a job as an animator in 1986, and after several months of training at the Chiayi branch of the animation company, she was assigned to the Taipei headquarters. At the time, cartoon companies in Taiwan were contracted to provide animation for major international productions, and Wu got the chance to work on some famous cartoons, such as The Smurfs and The Bionic Six.

Wu found that the work was a useful way to sharpen her drawing skills, but she longed to have a freer hand with the design. Eventually, she began to work as an art designer and text editor for publishers of children's books. Finding creative ways to illustrate books gave Wu her first contact with paper sculpting. She pored over paper-sculpting books that her colleagues had brought back from abroad and was fascinated by the art. She hoped to illustrate a book with richly textured paper sculptures instead of the usual flat illustrations. Although the publishing house rejected Wu's proposal because of the difficulties of producing such a book, the craft's potential had already caught her imagination.

In 1990, Wu returned to Chiayi and established her own advertising design workshop. The plan was to take design projects to pay the bills and work on paper sculpture in her free time, but things did not quite go as planned. "Trying to make a living by designing is a dead end in Chiayi," Wu says. "People here would rather make do with whatever is already there than spend a few dollars on, say, a business card that may help improve their image." Wu keeps at it today, however, and the lack of business leaves her plenty of time to work on paper sculpture, which she is determined to make profitable as well. "My father thought doing paper sculpture or any form of art was not a profession," Wu says. "I promised him that I would someday prove that not all artists were doomed to a life of poverty."

Since making the pledge, Wu has been sculpting ever-more elaborate paper art. She explains that one of the challenges in paper sculpting is to elevate a flat drawing to a textured sculpture. It takes, for example, as many as a dozen layers of paper to make eyes, eyelashes and wrinkled skin to show a complex human expression. And since the works are actually done in layered relief and are not fully three-dimensional sculptures, it is important to craft the angles precisely to get the desired effect. "I was experimenting this way and that way when I started," she says.

In 1992, Wu held her first solo exhibition in a gallery in the city of Taichung. She regrets that her father passed away before seeing the exhibition. Others did make it to the show, however, including several paper-sculpting artists, whom she got a chance to share ideas with. Most of the sculpture at the show was strongly influenced by Western paper sculpture. "The works demonstrated some paper-sculpting skills that were unfamiliar to Taiwan, but they could hardly be said to have been in a style of my own," Wu says.

So after her 1992 solo exhibition, Wu set out to nurture her own style. She first turned to other local artists to see what they were working on and discovered that no one had yet fashioned something with an Eastern flavor. A lover of classical Chinese poetry from childhood, she began to focus on how best to translate her understanding of the poems into paper sculptures. The result was the Chinese Expression series that combined lines of poetry with exquisite, distinctly Asian structures.

Wu's subject matter later expanded to characters and themes drawn from Chinese culture. Listening to the Mountain Pines, featuring an old woodcutter resting under a pine tree on his way home, is inspired by a line in Rural Dreams and Shadows by early Qing Dynasty (16441911) author Zhang Chao. An excerpt from the work accompanies the paper art: "For the first time, he noticed the blooming wild flowers, the singing birds. Then he heard another sound. Where was it coming from?" The piece won the third prize at the Dimensional and Digital Illustrators Awards held in the United States in 1996. Another piece, The Way We Came--Qin Terra-cotta Warriors, featuring six terra-cotta warriors she saw on her trip to China in 1990, won the same prize the following year.

Her lack of interest in chasing awards, however, prompted Wu to forgo further competitions. She focused on her craft, and came up with the Taiwanese Folksong series in memory of her late father. "Whenever he was persuaded to sing, he asked me to accompany him on the guitar," she says, "and we would play late into the night." When Wu looks at the songs rendered in paper, she finds that good memories come flooding back.

While she eschews awards, Wu continues to exhibit her work widely. From 1998 to 2000, sponsored by the National Culture and Arts Foundation, she exhibited at cultural centers around the island. The exhibitions resulted in a welcome emotional change for Wu--she gradually lost her fear of contact with the outside world. She found that as she explained the ideas behind her work to the public and the media, her shyness receded.

In addition to the Chinese themes, many of Wu's works during these two years made use of childhood memories. In the Searching series she recreates images from her youth in Chiayi. "It seems that when people are approaching 40, memories about the good old days come rushing back," she says.

Wu says she vividly remembers the brick walls, rattan chairs and old bicycles of her hometown at that time, and "all the good things happened." In the Bamboo Fence, Wu incorporates a strong memory of a loofa plant growing at her father's factory and found its way into their suppers with alarming regularity. "We had loofa soup the first day, the second and the third, until everyone was sick of it," she says. "Finally, the loofa disappeared, and no one dared to ask what happened to the plant."

When her memory failed her, Wu rekindled childhood memories with her mother and traveled around Taiwan in search of old houses and furniture.

Over the past 16 years, Wu has published three books on paper sculpting. The Art of Paper Sculpture has been reprinted a dozen times, and both My Paper Sculpture World and the more recent Cutting a Field of Longing were best sellers. She has also completed some 500 pieces--too few for a professional artist, according to Wu. She says that the creation of each piece requires a long "fermentation" period before she begins sculpting. "I can't make a piece based just on a glance at a scene or a picture," she says. "When I see something or read something, I need time to let it ferment inside me, which may take a few months or several years."

Wu often writes an essay or a few sentences and then starts sketching. The actual cutting, folding and pasting usually take about a week. "Practice makes perfect when it comes to skills," she says. "But it takes life experience and the right feeling to transform abstract ideas into something concrete."

Even fewer new pieces have been created since 2001. Since then Wu has been spending much of her time teaching paper sculpting at Chiayi Community College and conducting seminars organized by the Chiayi County Cultural Affairs Bureau. Until last year, she was also teaching at a local junior high school. All the interest in paper sculpting in Chiayi has made it Taiwan's paper sculpting capital, says Wu.

Aside from the art-for-art's-sake pieces, paper folding can be used in many practical applications, such as greeting cards, book illustrations and posters. Wu says that anyone with basic drawing skills can easily try their hand at paper sculpture, but it takes some practice to get a hold of the layering skills that make a piece look proportionally correct.

Working with paper for many years, Wu has naturally formed the habit of studying and collecting different papers. If she does not already know what paper she needs for a certain piece, she experiments until she hits on the right one. Japanese cotton paper, for example, was considered too soft for paper sculpting, but after some experimentation, Wu has found it ideal for reproducing the texture of clothes. "Each paper has its own texture that fits something perfectly," she says. "I'm just helping the paper find its unique place."