JOURNEY
By ELIZABETH TEBOW

FOON Sham's recent work is about journeys, both literal and metaphorical. A native of Hong Kong, he traveled half way around the world to settle in Washington, D.C. more than 20 years ago. Now, well established in the area as an artist and educator, Sham's travels are by no means over. His reputation as a sculptor has proven to be a ticket to many other destinations in the past five years, to show his work, participate in artist residences, and to absorb and respond to other cultures and artistic traditions. Since 1999, he has been to Mexico, Norway, Canada, Australia and China. He has also navigated through a personal journey of private and public grief. Sham's sculptures reflect travel in many ways, ranging from obvious, to the allusive, rendered playfully or with touching poignancy. While providing thematic imagery for his work, they have also led him to explore new materials and forms.

Wood has always been Sham's primary medium, one which he has handled with a variety of processes and aesthetic vision. His techniques have including the traditional one of carving, but also sawing, laminating, and assemblage using both soft and hard woods, to create organic and geometric sculptures ranging from small to massive. In the early 1980s, he began exploring the effects of contrasting textures, stains, natural color, and pigment and investigating the interaction of interior and exterior surfaces. In the past five years, he has used the wood product paper, as well as organic materials such as tea leaves, natural found objects such as rocks, and man-made materials, including plastic, wax and artificial light. He even ventured into collaboration with Renne Rendine on a piece for School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Maryland in 2002.

As an artist-in-residence in Norway in 1999 and again in 2001, Sham was clearly inpsired by the region's long tradition of fine woodworking, as well as the ancient Viking ships preserved by their permafrost burial grounds. In Boat in the Air, which he created for the Nordic Artists' Center in Dale, a small village on a fjord, he carved a long, sleek shell that he hung upside down, suspended from the ceiling by wires anchored to bars that resemble oars, or in an interesting bit of cross-cultural blending, chopsticks. On his return trip he went to Bergen to work on an installation at Kulturhuset USF. The extensive coastline and ever-present sea were compelling factors in the direction his work took. The studio at the art center, which is located next to the sea, had a large window with a striking view of a harbor and boats coming and going. In an interview, Sham recalled enjoying the spectacular sunset, the magic of the northern lights, and imagining the far-flung destinations of the boats heading into the Norwegian Sea. With only a few small hand tools and firewood at his disposal, he created a room installation evocative of the world outside that window. In it, two small vessel shapes with rough, uncut bark exterior surfaces seemed to "float" on wooden bases. One had a rock in it that suggested a passenger or freight. A third, smaller form sat a few feet away from hte first boat, while beyong, in the corner, were sections of small boards and boxes that resembled islands and boats, sea lanes and coastline. In their midst were four rocks wrapped in glue-soaked maps. On on level, the green-colored maps suggested vegetation covering rocky islands, and on another, they literally respresented a charting of the terrain and the artist and spectator's guide to exploring it. Any effort to do so was thwarted, however, because Sham cut and rearranged sections of the map so that they were no longer readable. Instead, they functioned symbolically, but also served to add a colorful, painterly surface to the stone objects.

Between trips to Norway, Sham traveled to Canada in 2000 to take part in Art Action Actual, an exhibition that opened in October at St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, where he created a work that engaged the spectator in a literal journey. Challenged by an exhibition space interrupted by awkward piers, he chose to create a piece that encircled one of the room supports. The result, Broken Cube, was made of boards layered from floor to ceiling to form a box that had jagged openings on all four sides and was illuminated by the existing ceiling lights. It was both a discrete structure that combined the linear elements of its wooden construction with light emanating from the core and an interactive environment that the visitor could enter and travel through.

In 2001, Sham embarked on a different kind of journey. In early fall of 2001, he began work on a piece for the Washington Sculptors Group Artists at Work project. Offered trees that were cut down to build the new Strathmore Concert Hall in Bethesda, Maryland, he obtained a portable saw mill and was just beginning the task of cutting up the giant tree at the site when the September 11th attacks in New York and Washington occured. The Strathmore project became and outlet for his shock, anger and grief. Altering his original plans, he ended up creating a wooden tower made up of 110 layers, echoing the 100 stories of one of the two Manhattan landmarks that collapsed and transforming the sculpture into a tribute and a memorial. Unlike the rectilinear skyscrapers, the resulting form rose more than 13 feet in an irregular contour that curved and opened up to a concave interior. The exterior of stacked wooden blocks had a natural, rough bark surface while the interior wood of the concave surface is sanded and planed. It is man-made on the inside, natural on the outside, Sham's acknowledgement that both the organic and inorganic were destroyed by the collapse of the towers. He created a second tower form in 2003 after the shared, public loss of 9/11 was followed by personal loss in December of 2002 when his mother died. The second tower echoed the shape of the firstp iece. Shown as a single work called Bio-morphic Forms in a winter 2003 exhibition at The World Bank in Washington, D.C., the two concave forms faced, but did not touch each other. They appeared to be unraveling or pulling apart, but at the same time suggested a sheltering or a protective gesture, one for the other. Touchingly, he inscribed the month and year of his mother's death on one of the blocks inside the second tower.

Granted a sabbatical from his teaching and administrative duties at the University of Maryland, Sham set off for Doncaster, near Melbourne, Australia, in May 2003, to work on another installation project. Before leaving, he made large urn and bottle-shaped forms out of stacked blocks of wood that could be dismantled and reassembled after shipment, and photographed them for the annoucement of the show, which he called Vessels of Hope. A problem with customs regulations involving the importing of wood products held the pieces up at the port in Sydney. Faced with having to make sculptures for the show at the last minute in Australia, Sham returned to working on a smaller scale and to the motif of boats and voyages. He called the resulting installation Sea of Hope. The large central piece was a horizontal form suggestive of a supine human body or, alternatively, a narrow boat made up of small laminated blocks of wood set on a clear pedestal. Lined up on either side of it were small white handmade paper boats containing cones of tea leaves mixed with glue reminiscent of votive candles in the West and the Eastern tradition of incense burned in memory of ancestors. Visitors to the show were invited to make their own boats and inscribe them with a prayer or message for a loved one. Many did so, adding to the power of the work's message by increasing the number of boats (and prayerful thoughts) during the run of the exhibition. The impromptu substitute installation proved to be very cathartic for the artist, who was still in mourning for his mother. The pieces originally planned for the show finally arrived at the gallery a couple of weeks after the opening. In addition to the large urn-shaped sculpture on the show's catalogue cover, there was also a funeral barge or coffin-like piece called Cargo of Hope. He also had some smaller works that clearly came as a response to the trauma of his mother's illness and death, specifically her hospitalization, and the ultimately unsuccessful surgery for cancer. In works such as Bypass, powerful compact, organic shapes, interconnected segments, and surfaces of varied texture and color allude to medical paraphernalia: cuffs, lines, bandages, containers, or the choke-hold of a cancerous mass.

Sham returned to Australia in the fall of 2003 to take part in a group show in Sydney (the only U.S. artist out of a group representing 17 countries.) Both the venue and moos of this sculpture were different from the earlier Doncaster pieces. The group show was an outdoor exhibition called Sculpture by the Sea. Set against a backdrop of green lawn and seashore, several large vessel shapes rose up like huge but delicate baskets. Close up, the woven effect proved to b ecreated by individual, cut blocks of wood set at angles to form the circles stacked to create subtle silhouettes. The central piece in the installation had an opening by which it could be entered and viewed from within, the rings of pine blocks rising like ribs in a baroque dome framing an oculus and the bright blue Australian sky. The result was both playful and serene.

When he exhibited his work again in the fall of 2004 in New York City, Sham continued to explore the ways that wood could be crafted to create forms that are both geometric and organic. In Squeeze, he recycled scraps of wood block left over from carving parts of his installation piece in the Washington Metro's Chinatown stop to create a monumental tower shape, but added the element of rounded, hollow disks of wood scattered at its basesuggesting either remnants of the inner core that have spilled out or the terrain out of which it rises. In Wave, the stacked pieces of cut wood defied their rectilinear origins and created a sweeping, flowing form unfurling across the floor. In another work from the show titled Hatch, he joined together hollow discs of wood to form the shape of a large curved tree branch parallel to the ground and anchored on a small point of contact with the floor. Thrusting dynamically out into space, the piece seemed to grow outward from its core, while sloughing off an outer "skin" in the process.

In 2005, Sham set out again on trip to make art and interact with a new culture, this time to Merida, Mexico. The curator of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Yucatan Silvia Madrid, saw his work on a visit to Washington and invited him to create one of his large urn-shaped pieces for a year-long outdoor installation. Accompanied by his long-time assistant, Skip Plati, he arrived in March during Spring Break from the University of Maryland, prepared to acquire the lumber locally and construct the peice in sections at the museum and install it across from a busy traffic circle. Despite obstacles that included lost luggage, soaring temperatures, lumber that was more expensive than anticipated, and having to make do with limited tools and machinery, the project was a success. While his piece comes out of his tall vessel mode, the shape is more dynamic than in previous examples, with a broad flaring lip and a pronounced base. It conjures up images of native pottery or an ancient Mayan priest's feathered headdress and the crested tops of pyramids like that of nearby Chitzen Itza.

Foon Sham's career of the past five years has been a peripatetic one, involving numerous trips to far-flung locales and a prolific output of sculptures. His work has resulted from a rich blending of cultures, from that of his native Hong Kong to the modern aesthetic of his adopted United States. Underlying his innovative approach to materials and forms has been a consistent dedication to craftsmanship and an acknowledgement of cultural and artistic traditions. His journeys, both actual and metaphorical, have taken him across the globe and left their imprint on his work. Whatever the ultimate direction, it is clear that his journeys will continue and lead him into new areas of artistic expression that blend East and West, the personal and the universal, the organic and geometric, issues of life and death.

Elizabeth Tebow, Ph.D.

Professor of Art History

Northern Virginia Community College

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