Li Xing

Innovators, artists deserve recognition

By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-09 06:17

With spring on the way, last Saturday my family went to Badachu, a park in the Western Hills south of the more famous Fragrant Hills Park.

In the park, there are a few road/scenic site maps, painted on billboards or carved onto stones. It was disappointing when we could not find any store that sold a booklet about the park. We took the hills as a popular exercise site, as we could see lots of people climbing the hills.

It only dawned on us that this is also a place for Buddhists, who pay their tributes to the Buddha and ask for his blessing, when we entered the courtyard of Lingguang Temple and made three circles around the stupa.

After climbing a flight of stairs behind the stupa, we found ourselves staring at a huge stone bas-relief sculpture. Featured were some 500 Buddhist arhat Buddhists who have attained enlightenment and freed themselves of greed, hatred and delusion in different postures with varied but vivid facial expressions.

We've been to quite a few Buddhist temples over the years, but few contemporary sculptures of arhats are as stunning and lively as this one. Visitors who chance to see this sculpture invariably spend a lot of time here, capturing the arhats on film.

We began to look around, in search of when and where the sculpting was done. Above all, we wanted to know who designed and created this fantastic work.

We did see a long list names carved into a black stone wall, and they were people who donated money for the project, in return for the Buddha's good prophecy.

In the park, or inside the temple's bookstore, we couldn't find a single plaque or booklet telling people who did it, when, where and how they accomplished it.

Only from the Internet, did we find out that it took some 40 stonemasons in Putian, East China's Fujian Province, some two years to design and finish carving the bas relief sculpture. The whole work, about 25 metres wide and 8.35 metres tall, was done on 30-odd pieces of stone of various sizes so that the finished work appears seamless.

We were sorry that viewers of this huge sculpture can't link the fine crafts to the actual people who did the work.

And we find it hard to accept the neglect.

It may be customary for creators of Buddhist artefacts to maintain their anonymity as their way to show their devotion to the Buddha.

Or it may be natural for the crafts people from Putian to remain anonymous as they are, after all, common stonemasons, and stone craft is a major local business.

Or it may be this is only a piece of ordinary work by common Putian stonemasons not worth public citation.

There are too many of such excuses for not recognizing many people's good creative work.

But in an era when we talk a lot about creativity and innovation, we should create an environment in which the creators and innovators, whether they are in the field of science and technology or arts and crafts, should be respected and duly noted in public.

It should become a rule to give credit to everybody, ordinary or famous, who creates art works for public display.

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(China Daily 03/09/2006 page4)