INTRODUCTION TO FLOW
By JOANNE BAUER,
Exhibition Director and Curator
Greater Reston Arts Center

When Foon Sham first saw our new gallery, what caught his attention was not the expansive, open space but the red-orange floor. “I can tell you right now, this floor will compete with my sculpture,” he announced. His immediate impulse was to cover it up and prevent it from interacting with his multi-layered, wooden pieces. And that is how our yearlong collaboration began – with a problem. Solving the predicament led to FLOW: The Landscape of Migration – an installation of sculpture and materials that would fill the entire space.  

Sham decided that the best way to deal with the floor would be to construct a landscape of “mountains” and “lowlands” representing the five essential elements of his own Chinese culture: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth.  He would build each “mountain” in the shape of a cone representing a specific element. Then he would ask the audience to develop the flowing “lowlands” by placing related items around the cones.

Sham has been incorporating cones and cone-like structures in his work for years. An earlier work, Self Portrait (2004), is a wax-filled tray imbedded with three cones – rice, tea, and, wood. These two-inch cones, like the human-sized ones in FLOW, also represent elements, only these are personal – his preferred food, beverage, and material.

Cones appeared again in a previous installation, Sea of Hope (2005), Sham’s elegant tribute to his mother who died of cancer. Comprised of Chinese tea leaves, the cones sat as medicinal emissaries in white paper boats trailing after a wooden raft. During the course of the exhibition, visitors wrote messages to departed loved ones in their own boats and floated them in a growing wake of memory.

Once he had settled on his basic form, the cone, Foon Sham selected materials to represent the five elements. Some of his choices were simple like wood, his preferred medium. But others required more experimentation like his choice to use grass for the Earth cone.

Sham had used grass before in Torvtak (1999), a spiraling ten-foot tower he created in Norway. Made of stacked wood and topped with grass, Torvtak is reminiscent of the sod roofs found on rural Norwegian homes.

When Sham decided to use grass again for the Earth cone he discovered that while growing seeds outdoors on a flat surface is easy, growing them indoors on the sloping sides of a cone is challenging.

Professing no aptitude for gardening, Sham nevertheless devised a number of horticultural experiments – most of them ill-fated and some with hilarious results. In one, he attached soil and seed-filled stockings to the sides of a wooden cone. Far from conveying the ancient element Earth, they looked more like giant, hairy slugs. In another, he tried growing grass in plastic bags, which worked but developed into a brilliant display of green slime. Eventually, as he frequently does, Sham returned to an ancient tradition – in this case, terracing – and found both a practical and aesthetic solution.

Finding appropriate materials for the remaining cones was relatively straightforward compared with another more complicated puzzle; how to let the audience participate in FLOW while maintaining some measure of artistic control.

Involving audiences in his work has been an on-going concern for Sham. Starting in the mid-90’s he began inviting them inside his structures, offering them shelter as well as a sculpted view of the world outside. 20-20-3 Joint, erected in Chicago in 1999, is comprised of two joined cones, open above, and entered through a door. The audience loved it but instead of merely walking around, looking at the basket-like forms, they began signing their names on each interior block. When the space ran out inside they moved outside and covered the entire sculpture with names and dates. Most artists would take offense at this graffiti but Foon Sham marveled at how people would climb a ten-foot structure and risk being caught just to leave their signatures.

The experience in Chicago illustrates Sham’s spirit of encompassing the new and unintended in his work. Coupled with his considerable artistic rigor, that spirit shaped his eventual decisions about FLOW’s interactive component. He wanted the installation to reflect the array of gifts immigrants bring to a new land and imagined visitors would donate materials from their homes (rice, candles, newspapers, coins, and tea) each representing their own particular culture. However, he worried that either they would arrive empty-handed or the gallery would become a sea of trash.

In the end, he decided to provide clear cups of uniform materials: soil with grass seeds, candles floating in water, wooden wedges, metal nails, and blue water. They would line a windowsill for visitors to collect and arrange around the cones like offerings. In this way, the lowlands of FLOW would evolve as elements accumulated and merged into one multi-colored streambed.

FLOW: The Landscape of Migration is a celebration of gift giving. It honors the timeless practice of exchange over generations, between cultures, and through artists while exploring the mystery and un-knowingness of the creative process. For those of us at GRACE who have had the pleasure of working with Foon Sham, this project will always remind us of the gifts he shared with us – his intelligence, his energy, his curiosity, and his vision.

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