FLOW
By DEBORAH MCLEOD

Flow is an essential of life. It conveys the idea that the infinite is measured by change. It is a two-pronged key to both evolution and revelation.

In Zen Buddhism, the concept of flow describes a state of expanding awareness, enabling the acceptance of things beyond our control, a resilient integration of the unforeseen, and an understanding of the communion of separate things.

Chinese-American sculptor Foon Sham gives form to all of these processes in his installation Flow: The Landscape of Migration.   Using the five ancient elements of his own native China – Water, Fire, Earth, Metal and Wood – he creates visual allegories on the transformation of the discrete forces of the physical world.  Sham constructs a three-dimensional or topographical map by which to illuminate the dynamic properties of phenomena, and applies the lessons to humanity; indicating the subtle affinities among both.

The artist chose to represent the five elements as large tent-shaped cone sculptures placed throughout his gallery terrain. Subliminally alluding to the tradition of Chinese landscape painting point-of-view, which alters scale to achieve a psychological vista of simultaneous perspective, the artist’s cones propose five corresponding mountains that can be walked beside, seen over and beyond, and yet still provide inspiration in the prospect of a dwarfing majesty. In Sham’s manipulated panorama, magnitude issues from content rather than extent.

Clear plastic drinking cups feature prominently as a human element in Sham’s installation, and in the cups’ various functions offers a metaphor of individual life. From a mass-produced product, each uniform cup leaves the nested stack in the plastic sleeve to receive some nurturing substance, some user’s fingerprint and lipstick mark, to become unique, and as such to be of service for a time.  Foon Sham transfoms this simple picnic item into the many diminutive vessels that he places in a variety of ritual locations to convey unique qualities of growth and change. 

For Water, the artist fills hundreds of these cups with sparkling indigo-blue water and re-stacks them into a sparkling, aqueous mountain. None are filled equally or colored exactly and yet when they accumulate to rise and form a crystalline baptismal font, they approximate a sublime humming quality, each cup’s resonant idiosyncrasy present amidst the choral effect of the whole. In Sham’s installation, the evaporation factor requires an ongoing contribution of cups of blue water from individual visitors – hinting at the purification of each contributor and the constant flow of generations.

The plastic cups become votive holders in Fire. They gather at the base of Sham’s translucent paraffin mountain, like vestal virgins encircling the white cone and awaiting the offering of a match that will cast a luminous, flickering pink-gold glow to enliven the volatile spirits of fire and maintain the element’s internal furnace.

While nestled into Earth’s tiered matrices, small isolated realms or continents germinate grass in insular agricultural plastic-cup microcosms.

On this work’s sculpted terraces, the grasses will eventually grow upward to reach a subsequent plane, or double down to touch the level below. The mature shoots of gentle green spread their reach to migrate up and down the cone’s precipice.

The remaining Metal and Wood cones particularly leave the mystical/natural realm to focus on the tool-using circumstance of human existence. For these works the cup-surrogates invite constructive actions – the inclination to create, the endless search for shelter. While each of Sham’s five elements requires an interdependent partnership of these ancient elements with mankind, the sculptor’s intimate homage to metal and wood and the participatory involvement he asks of gallery visitors – to insert nails into an ancestral marching gathering of many others in Metal, or to leave an offering of wood wedges in a sprawling pattern before Wood acknowledges the community nature of such a contingent relationship. This shift in Foon Sham’s symbolic procedure particularly makes the leap from a human relationship with the elements of earth to our enduring commonwealth in each other.

We might understand Flow: The Landscape of Migration to show us not only how migration of any subset – from fire and water to butterflies and swans to refugees – invigorates and magnifies the bounty of every relationship with the earth – but how it envisions the tributary wisdom of existence, an invisible, expanding providence.

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