Primordial 'Journey' into forms
The Washington Times

October 20, 2007
Joanna Shaw-Eagle

"Journey," a one-man exhibit at Bethesda's Heineman Myers Contemporary Art, sums up local artist Foon Sham's latest spiritual and peripatetic travels - and his continuing use of open and closed primordial "vessel" forms.

The artist extends his 2003 World Bank show's towering, partly closed "Bio-morphic Forms" - a memorial to September 11 victims - to the newer exhibit's also tall "Bio-morphic Forms II".

In the recent, more open "vessel" (as he calls it) he "wraps" and poetically encloses visitors by inviting them into the sculpture. Mr. Sham created the work from a gigantic Annandale oak tree, cutting large, horizontal blocks stacked upward to a sunlit opening.

He wants viewers to savor the many woods employed in the exhibit's 21 sculptures. Some are local; others more exotic, including reddish cherry, black walnut, Norwegian alder and Australian red gum.

The Norwegian and Australian woods came from recent artist residencies in those countries, where he was given free rein to borrow imagery and materials.

Stimulated by his Norwegian fjord-situated studio and ancient viking ships, he created the exhibit's tabletop "Boat in Balance" of local woods.

The artist, 53, was born in Hong Kong and trained at art schools and universities across the United States. He settled in the Washington area and teaches at the University of Maryland, although he often travels to fulfill outdoor commissions around the world.

Locally, the sculptor recently installed the enormous "WRIT" indoor wooden sculpture, commissioned by the Washington Real Estate Investment Trust, in Arlington.

At the exhibit's preview, a smaller gallery held the bulbous standing "Cenote", inspired by Mexican Maya water-filled sinkholes; the taller, wall-hung cherry-and-walnut "Wrap," in which Mr. Sham's favored "vessel" style twists upward into a serrated column form; and the smaller (about 14 inches tall) stunningly beautiful "Urn".

Mr. Sham shaped this walnut-and-cherry work after ceramic and human forms. "The open top could be visualized as a cut-off head," the artist says, adding that "its swollen body resembles a human body and rests on what could be called 'feet'".

Visitors also can descend to a lower space containing radically different forms.

One, "Black Walnut Cave," comes from the tall Maya El Castillo Pyramid at the Maya ruin of Chichen Itza. More architectural than the artist's other work, it copies the angular Maya forms.

"Passage II," a multiwood, two-vessel piece stretching from wall to floor, epitomizes the artist's "Journey," one of endless connections in the natural and human worlds.

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