A Towering 9/11 Remembrance
The Washington Times

April 7, 2003
Joanna Shaw-Eagle

Little by little, in ways direct and indirect, in the fine arts and in the popular culture, creative artists and mass entertainers are edging carefully toward the subject that has dominated the American mind for 11/2 years, the attack on the World Trade Center. Local artist Foon Sham, who is showing his recent sculpture at the World Bank Art Gallery, began his more than 13-foot-tall

Bio-Morphic Forms" a few days before the September 11 attacks. Mr. Sham, 50, initially intended it to be 10 feet tall and made from 80 layers of flat wood pieces. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, he pushed it up to 110 layers to reflect the number of stories in each of the two towers.

Mr. Sham's work is most familiar to Washingtonians through his neon-lit "The Glory of Chinese Descendants," a wall sculpture at the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro stop. It is a giant, fan-shaped sculpture lit with red lights from within.

The sculptor was born in Macao, China. He looks to his Chinese roots, Norwegian timber houses and Mogollon Indian cliff dwellings in New Mexico for inspiration. A professor of fine arts at the University of Maryland in College Park, he is equally at home in a variety of artistic mediums.

The sculptor first planned "Bio-Morphic" as a circular, enclosed form. After the devastation, however, he split it into two sections that evoked the towers. "With both structures now completed, people can walk inside the passage between the two organic forms and experience the trapped space and its feeling within the height of the tall structures," he says.

Constructing under a Washington Sculptors Group "Sculptors at Work" stipend on the grounds of Strathmore Hall in Bethesda, he finished half of it for the group's fall exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Ever since, he has wanted to make the piece as tall as he could. The bank's 20-foot-high space is one of the few in town that can accommodate it. This is the first opportunity for Mr. Sham and the public to view it intact.

"It's just a little that I could do for all those people who died," he says.

He wants people to walk through the sculpture, to experience its inner smoothness of 110 thin layers of cherry, mulberry, maple and oak woods contrasted with its outer roughness. Some pieces still have their bark. Mr. Sham first cut and angled the pieces with a curvilinear saw, then glued and screwed them together.

Metaphorically, he also juxtaposes the organic nature of the people who perished in the towers and the once-sleek outsides of the buildings.

Visitors can enter, touch and sit inside the sculpture while looking up to the sky. They may experience it as both protecting and sheltering, while also connecting them to the spiritual above.

The exhibit's other five pieces, while not as large or complex, also intrigue. For "Wall Column No. 4," an earlier, more constructivist work from what he calls his "wall column" series, Mr. Sham stacked 25 wood elements vertically in a precarious, yet balanced, arrangement. He varied the shapes only slightly, but the different colors of the woods succulent purple heart, dark walnut, warm cherry and mahogany, and golden maple give it a strong presence. Although mounted on a wall, it seems to float.

It's not the only magical-seeming piece in the show. The sculptor likes to balance forms in tense equilibrium, as with "Joint No. 9, Balance" and "Fishing," both from 2000. He set a slightly curved 12-foot-4 strip of mahogany across a rounded poplar wood base. Again, there are the contrasts a linear form meeting a massive wood chunk, smooth textures colliding with rough ones.

Three large, boldly stroked acrylic-and-pastel drawings mounted on one wall complete the show. They were submissions to the Washington Real Estate Investment Trust (WRIT) for a commissioned sculpture in a Rosslyn office building. The middle one, "Writ No. 1," a drawing for a convoluted, twisting, 15-foot-tall, wooden form, won. Look for it later this year.

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