Breathing Life into Wood and Gold--Sculptor Wu Ching

Born in 1956 in the village of Hsipei in Hsinkang, Chiayi County, Wu Ching was an intense questioner before he ever attended school: "How much space is there?" he would ask. "What is the meaning of life?" His parents-farmers-were too busy working the fields in order to put food on the table to answer his questions. They exerted little control over him, and he had an obstinate personality, such that when he went to elementary school he would often boss around the older students. In school he majored in having a good time, and once he played hooky for a whole term, spending his days reading comic books, stealing fruit with friends, and using air guns to shoot birds. He was like a wild horse that refused to be bridled.

For Moth Orchid, which used 5.6 kilograms of pure gold, Wu insisted on using the "running water" method of welding. As a result, this gold carving of an orchid was more difficult to build than a highrise.

In the 1970s, when Taiwan was exporting record amounts of high-quality, intricately carved rosewood and ebony furniture, the 17-year-old Wu Ching set aside his ambitions of attending an art college and moved up north to Taipei. There he had a job lined up at a friend's rosewood furniture shop in Neihu, where he would learn how to carve in relief. Just a week later, he switched jobs to begin working at a furniture workshop in Hsinchu, where he started by carving the faces of the "Eight Beauties." He would later move around Taiwan learning from the masters in such places as Taichung, Tainan and Pingtung.

When he was 19, he was apprenticing at a rosewood shop in Peitou. That year he visited the National Palace Museum for the first time. Observing the exquisite classical carvings of jade cabbages, ivory balls within balls, and walnut-shell carvings, he thought to himself: "If one of my carvings could be collected by the National Palace Museum, then my life would be fulfilled!" People live for less than a century, but works collected by the museum would be passed down for thousands of years.

One day after visiting the museum, Wu Ching was strolling along the riverbank when he saw a little white ball moving, seemingly under its own power. When he looked more carefully, he observed a group of ants moving a gecko egg. They then proceeded to push it up a sheer slope. Wu Ching found the scene extremely poignant, in that something as small as ants could-through group solidarity-move something as large as a gecko egg. Moreover he was taken with the beauty of the ants, whose animated appearance gave him the urge to carve them. He began to go out with a magnifying glass, looking for ants everywhere.

In 1978, on leave from military service, Wu Ching began to carve ants. At first, because his technique was crude due to never having learned three-dimensional carving, he was unsuccessful. But after spending more than two months at it, he finally succeeded in carving a wooden ant for a work that he called Soar and Roar. "In the natural world, an ant couldn't have had the posture I gave it," Wu recalls. "The work conveyed a conceptual form." He hadn't yet gained a deep understanding of ants, so their proportions weren't very accurate.

Zen, which is carved from boxwood, features extremely light and thin cicada wings (in Chinese the words for "cicada" and "Zen" are homonyms). The wings are only one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper. A first in the history of carving, it conveys the artist's own state of Zen enlightenment.

The following year, Wu Ching completed the work An Idea Gels, which was selected for the 34th Provincial Art Exhibition. The same year, his work A Love of Life and Death was selected for the Ninth National Fine Art Exhibition. At that time, neo-realist art was sweeping Taiwan's art scene, and Wu Ching decided to use ants as the main theme of his work. Focused on his creations, Wu started to raise ants.

"Over the course of two years I raised a whole colony of several hundred ants in an acrylic box. They belonged to a species of large black ants, and I called them 'black warriors.'" Wu just can't contain himself when he gets going about his "pets": "They are so cute, and they run so fast. When you observe them carefully you discover that they have emotions of joy and anger just like people. They love to eat grape skins, but if the skins are old and the container isn't cleaned out-so that the skins start to ferment-the ants will appear a little drunk after eating them, weaving around aimlessly."

Working to fully express both the ecology of ants and his abstract artistic conceptions, Wu Ching spent seven years all told completing 25 intricately carved sculptures of ants. Of the works in this series, the most time-consuming was A Group of Ants Moving a Grain of Rice, which he completed in 1981. Wu, who was 26 at the time, wanted to create a large piece about ant ecology, and it became a personal challenge for him. First he used wire and Styrofoam to create the basic shape, and only then did he start delicately carving. It took a whole year to complete. Every day he worked until late at night. His eyes would feel as if someone was poking them with needles before he would reluctantly go to bed. This large piece took more than 4015 hours to complete. The ants were enlarged to more than ten times their actual size to make their ecology easier to see. And in 1983 the Taipei Fine Arts Museum invited him to display this work.

Wu Ching used his own face as the model for The Bliss of the Dharma. The work challenged Wu to depict skin like never before in a carved work, and he succeeded, showing humanity's pores and wrinkles in this expression of enlightened peace and joy.

Apart from loving to carve, Buddhist devotion has also helped Wu to calm down and focus on his carving. This represents an important pillar of his lifetime learning. He started to read the sutras and practice Zen meditation in his early 20s, and the understanding he has gained from it has allowed him to take materials such as wood, bronze, silver and gold and use them to create clear representations of the cycles of life. By clearing his mind, he has been able to create a song of praise for life.

At times he has carved cicadas (in Chinese, "cicada" is a homophone for "Zen"). Once he placed a cicada specimen next to his worktable. His housemate, the painter Huang He-hsin, asked him: "Would it be possible to carve a cicada wing so that it is transparent?" According to Huang's research, there had never been a transparent work of woodcarving in the history of the world. Upon hearing this, Wu tried and tried again. He adapted and improved upon his traditional carving tools. He started to carve and whittled the wings down to 0.02 millimeters (only a third the thickness of a sheet of paper) with veins on both sides. The sense of the hard shell under the fine hairs he also portrayed convincingly.

This carving of a bear cicada (genus Cryptotympana) with transparent wings was exhibited in 1986 in the modern art gallery of the National Palace Art Museum. Once again, a work by Wu met with great fanfare. Yang Chenning, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist wondered: "How ever did he manage to carve symmetrical transparent veins on the top and the bottom?" A work created that same year, Zen, took three months of hard work. Wu had carved half a cicada with a transparent wing extended upward in a round piece of wood. But what about the other half? Was it in the wood? Had it gone out? Or had it gone in? It doesn't matter. Wu was able to truly convey his own personal insights from Zen. When your mind expands to become an empty vessel, without stubborn desires or shackles on the consciousness, life becomes free from concerns.

Practicing Zen cultivation and meditation, Wu Ching's mind grew to be at peace, and he carved countless exquisite masterpieces. Yet when the wings became as thin as only a fifth of a sheet of paper, he had reached his limit. But he hankered after other breakthroughs. The work Man or Butterfly, which he started in 1988, took 16 months to finish. It was a triumph of willpower. The work, carved from a 35-kilogram piece of boxwood, conveys his thoughts and sense of enlightenment. As he whittled it one stroke at a time, "the process of carving became like meditation; the dust rose and settled, and with my mind totally focused on carving, time seemed to stop." There was an empty, transparent abstraction of a skull, and a butterfly, as a symbol of transformation, that was woven through it. When finished, Man or Cicada weighed only 40 grams, less than two newspapers.

To carve Mundane Affinity, Wu went to the educational materials center at National Taiwan University Medical School, where he purchased the fiberglass model of a 10,000 year old skull, which he used as a reference to make a wood mold. Then he carved the wood to give the impression of it being weathered, and from it cast a silver skull, which he entwined with gold carved morning glories. The work conveys the idea of "eternal life, eternal death."

On Chinese New Year's in 1989, his workers were on vacation, and his usually bustling workshop was quiet. Surveying the works on which he had spent so much time and energy arrayed around the room, Wu suddenly had doubts about what he was doing. He sat in the room and meditated for half a month. He neither spoke nor ate, but instead just asked himself, "What is it all for?" Half a month later, Wu had figured it out and burst out laughing, tears in his eyes. "I thought, 'I understand my existence'-though even after I got up, I would still have to experience the vicissitudes of life."

He displayed his deep understanding of life's mysteries in his carving Intermingling Grief and Joy, in which an entire body, save the head, appeared to be melting. For the face, he carved his own image, with teary eyes, the top of his skull cut open, and a lotus blossom seemingly inserted in the opening. It clearly conveyed the great joy of transcendence of self that he had experienced at that moment.

"From that moment on, the Heart Sutra of Transcendent Knowledge began to lead the direction of my creativity: What do physical phenomena mean? What is 'emptiness'? What is 'reality'? I had many questions, but after spending several days in Zen meditation, when I opened my eyes I had an epiphany, and all physical phenomena seemed unreal. For a long, long time, I had suffered from my attachment to things. Tears began flowing down my cheeks. Inside I was filled with feelings of mercy and joy."

In order to achieve greater perfection, he took up the challenge of portraying skin texture, showing all the intricate pores and wrinkles of the skin, which historically had been entirely absent in fine carvings. In 1992 Wu began to carve The Bliss of the Dharma, in which the texture of the skin and fine wrinkles were based on those of his own face; the depth of the lines in his scrunched brow, the nasolabial folds, the varying coarseness and distribution of pores on the skin around his nostrils and beside his ears. These have all been "transferred" almost perfectly to this carving. The work even captures the lines of the iris. Placed next to a real person, and viewed from the same angle, the shadows on this carving and on a real person's face would be the same.

What elicits even more gasps is that Wu Ching has burst open the skull to reveal a group of butterflies. This he did to demonstrate the enlightened state of "being filled with Buddhist joy." Each of these carved butterflies has wings of the thickness of real butterflies, and the entire work is made from a single 1000-year-old piece of boxwood.

There is nothing unusual about Wu taking a year or more to complete a work. In fact, three to five years is closer to the norm for him. When asked about his creative approach, Wu Ching earnestly explains: "I must constantly remind myself to maintain inner peace. When working on something that represents three to five years of work, you've got to be very careful with every cut."

Wu, who never received a formal art education but instead learned his craft as an apprentice, has relied on a determined living aesthetic and Zen cultivation to make one breakthrough after another and find in carving a window onto life. The photo on the opposite page shows some of Wu's carving tools. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Wu has a special fondness for wood carving, but he has been forced to confront the difficulty in preserving these works and the potential for damage when moving them. So in 1981 he started to carve wax molds with which he experimented making bronze ants. Following on this, in 1984, he made six molds over the course of half a year before he succeeded in creating his first silver ant.

In 1989 a precious metals company commissioned Wu to make some gold carvings and provided him with the gold. The commission not only allowed him to turn his energies to gold carving, but also provided a solution to his long-term economic difficulties. Adamantly refusing to sell his wooden carvings, he was heavily in debt. In 1984 when he held his first solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and sold a 52,000-square-feet parcel of land (the only one he owned), concerned family members and friends warned him: "All you do is carve ants, and you don't have any other income. Who is going to buy these carved ants? Now that you've sold your land, what are you going to do for money?" But Wu Ching felt that life was short, and that he had to throw himself into what he found interesting. Thinking about it too much, he figured, would keep him from doing it.

Having decided to use gold as his creative medium, Wu set to work, using 99.99% pure gold that lacked the silver or copper that goldsmiths traditionally add to make welding easier (but that in time cause oxidation, with the silver turning black and the copper green). The so-called "running water" method refers to the welding of two pure gold pieces at temperatures of 1200oC. The resulting joint is perfectly smooth, and Wu hoped to use this technique to bring the art of gold carving into virgin territory.

The elegant Moth Orchid has an extremely eye-catching effect. Made from 5.6 kilograms of pure gold, it combines a graceful bearing with tremendous vitality. Because the entire work consists of a depiction of a moth orchid and vase, Wu could not weld or smith gold using traditional methods. Not only did he use an argon arc welder, but because the five orchid petals were-right to left and back to front-all entirely different from each other, it was necessary to use five different molds.

Wu had made separate molds for the orchids' centers and five petals, so he invited an expert in "running water" welding to put them together. After six hours, the petals were only halfway assembled. The expert said that he really thought they should use traditional welding flux, but Wu Ching was determined and refused. After the expert left, Wu worked and studied for five hours before finally finishing one orchid.

As a result of personally performing "running water" welding, Wu twice burned his arm with the hot metal. "It's only one carved gold orchid, but it was more difficult than building a house-because when you build a house there are instructions you can follow, but in making that gold orchid there was no information to read or experts to consult."

Zen, which is carved from boxwood, features extremely light and thin cicada wings (in Chinese the words for "cicada" and "Zen" are homonyms). The wings are only one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper. A first in the history of carving, it conveys the artist's own state of Zen enlightenment.

The most famous of Wu Ching's gold carvings, Prosperous Descendants, is a 1993 work that the National Palace Museum purchased, breaking its long-held rule of not buying works by living artists. It is 2.8 meters long and 1.2 meters high, and sits on an 80-kilogram silver base under a bronze canopy. Between three gourd vines of varying sizes, there are 238 life-size ants, which are the main theme of this work. Wu adopted a very realistic technique to show the vitality in a small corner of the world. The leaves are budding and unfurling, and the ants are scurrying back and forth across the ground. The vines are full of gourds hanging amid the flowers and leaves; the flowers attract butterflies, and a praying mantis is lost in thought amid the leaves and flowers. Ladybugs, fruit flies and cicadas scurry back and forth in this portrayal of nature's energy. Although it emits no sound, observers can almost hear the bubbling vitality of the work shout out. The work required several thousand molds for individual pieces. And the "running water" welding, if calculated in terms of eight working hours in a day, would have taken three years to complete.

People are more familiar with Wu's gold sculptures than his wooden carvings, but it is Wu's woodcarving techniques that infuse these exquisite gold pieces with feeling. Apart from a few plant branches and leaves he used as forms for molds, Wu first carved wooden pieces to make the molds for the components of his gold sculptures. To realize a level of precision that can't be reached with wax molds, Wu chose boxwood, which has a fine grain and ivory-like translucence.

Wu's creative experience with these two media has led him to the following conclusion: "Carving wood involves 'subtraction,' with the wood getting smaller with each cut as you chisel away the parts you don't want. The form you desire gradually comes into being, and as the wood gradually lightens, the joy increases. Sculpting with gold, on the other hand, is "addition." The parts of the composition are first analyzed individually, created in molds and then welded together. You get the joy of addition."

Wu has various unique carving tools, so that he can carve wood however he wants. He has adapted German and Swiss lathe tools. He has taken high-grade Japanese steel and shaped it into tools of the angles and lengths he needs. And he also has a complete set of dentist's tools.

For a self-taught artist who never went to college, Wu's accomplishments are very admirable: "I think that 'originality' means doing what people want to do but can't, doing what others have never done before." Even if the creative road has at times been lonely and hard, Wu, through his Buddhist cultivation and concern for other life forms, has found meaning in his own life.

Now Wu hopes to establish his own museum to hold the works that he has created over the years, in the hope that his artistic legacy can be passed down. To this end, in early 2003 he opened a counter at the Far Eastern Shopping Center displaying his small gold carvings, especially those that depict ants in realistic proportions. It's well worth a visit.