Joining the Human Race
By Annemarie Kiely

Working with intricately joined timber, US sculptor Foon Sham finds inspiration in death and humanity.

Passages was the perfect title for the first commercial showing of American sculptor Foon Sham's work in an Australian gallery. It accommodates Sham's own well-travelled history - he was born in Macau, China, grew up in Hong Kong, moved to art school in California, now lives in Virginia and recently exhibited at the Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne - and the transitory nature of life, implied by the exhibit's moving centrepiece, Sea of Hope.

"I was here in May 2003 to work on sculptures just months before my mother died of cancer. It was very sudden, very unexpected and I felt so bad that we as children did not pay attention," says Sham, who as Professor of Fines Arts at Maryland University in the US is as well regarded for his teaching as he is for his art. " She was supposed to come to the opening of the exhibition and I felt terrible, emotionally down - there must be something I can do that will help me feel better, I thought. She was a strong Catholic, always doing the rosary, so with the same ritual activity I cut 101 blocks of wood, the number symbolising that little bit extra she always did."

Gesturing to a length of small blocks attached to a slim central spine of the same timber, Sham says the sculpture first suggested an altar. "But I think about the journey, the passage from life to death and it became a vessel, a boat. My sister asked if she could share in it, because she felt the same; thus came the idea of the smaller boats travelling alongside. She sent me a paper boat from America with her own handwritten message inscribed inside."

The addition of small pyramids of tea leaves - representing the Chinese love of tea and its anti-oxidant properties that can help fight against cancer - was intended to communicate hope. "Everyone who has seen it has wanted to be a part of it," says Sham of the growing flotilla of paper boats laden with their cargo of tea and memorial messages. "No two pieces are alike. They may be similar, but the combination of patterns is different every time."

This difference may be exaggerated by the broader context of Sham's creativity. In 1999 he was the first US artist to take part in a three-month residency in Dale, Norway, where he worked with the distinctive white birch that surrounded his studio in the fjords. More recently, while in Australia, he has played with salvaged bits of gum and jarrah and assembled these "wonderful pinks and reds", stacking, carving, joining and laminating them, into meticulously crafted pieces.

Underpinning his masterful joinery is a profound interest in the human condition. In 2001 he began work on a single, 80-layered, three-metre high piece for the World Bank Art Program, but altered his design after the events of September 11. "I built Bio-Morphic Forms into 110 layers to refer to the actual number of storeys of the building of the World Trade Center in New York and then I created a second component," he recalls. "It was not in the plan, but I can't control what happens. I simply made the decision to mark down the day by doing what I do - building the natural."