One man’s trash is another man’s artwork
Print Edition
Gu Qichang might be somewhat compared with British musician and TV presenter Neil Buchanan, whose popular “Art Attack” program encouraged children to make art from items found around their homes.
Gu can turn cotton wadding, plastic cans, polystyrene foam or any trash really into a piece of art.
What people throw out, he collects. He rummages through recycling bins looking for bottles of peculiar shapes. He scours construction sites for discarded materials with art potential.
“Yeah, the house looks like a garbage site,” said Gu’s long-suffering wife.
Neighbors aware of Gu’s special interest collect empty bottles and other usable refuse to bring them to him. To date, the 80-year-old retiree has created between 4,000 and 5,000 pieces of art.
His peculiar passion began in 1994 when Gu became a teacher at the Jing’an Teenager Activity Center so he could be close to his ailing mother in the district.
“I had taught math and Chinese at my previous school, but they didn’t offer those classes there, so I became a handicrafts teacher,” he explained. “I’m not a professional. I don’t have a degree. I thought hard about what I could teach students.”
Calligraphy? Painting? Rubber carving? No, those arts were commonplace in every school. He wanted something different, something special to engage his students’ attention. It had to be new, simple and clever.
“Simple meant that we would use materials found everywhere in daily life,” Gu said. “I didn’t want students to have to buy a kit for only one class. It wasn’t necessary.”
At first, Gu brought large stones to class to form artificial hills, but the stones were too bulky and difficult to carve. So he decided to use common polystyrene foam, which he covered with white glue to make it more durable and then wrapped in thin paper on which colors could be painted.
“Students didn’t even need scissors in class,” he explained. “They could just use their hands to create the shapes of hills.”
Although Gu wasn’t a trained artist, his inclination toward art manifested itself early in life. At age 10, illness forced him to drop out of school. His mother sent him to study traditional Chinese painting. But Gu wasn’t really interested in old traditions. His interest was in finger painting, blow painting with straws or any other new way of creating art.
“Such so-called ‘unrefined’ forms of art can often achieve what traditional arts cannot do easily,” he said.
In Gu’s classes, students used toothpicks and glue instead of brushes to draw. An electric soldering iron and rubber sheeting were the tools of their creations. Wire, straw, bottle caps and plastic plates were their inspiration.
“Look at this white and soft cotton wadding,” he said. “How suitable it is to create a ballerina. If you look at something and you don’t see much beauty, then you have to use your imagination to create something.”
His art has encompassed many techniques, including floating ink painting, imitation etching, paper carving, blow painting with straws and use of sticky notes.
“I just like finding a new path of doing things — thinking outside the box,” said Gu. “Many parents send children to piano or chess lessons. That’s good, but I wanted to teach them a way of thinking that allows them to find creative solutions when faced with a dilemma.”
This sort of creative process is filled with serendipity.
“Sometimes I can predict an outcome,” he said. “Other times the result is a surprising shock.”
He recalled the time a frustrated student threw his artwork in a bin because he thought it was no good.
“I picked it up after class, cut out the best part and put on some decoration on top,” he said. “At the next class, I displayed the work and asked them to guess who had done it. They were stumped. When I announced the name of the student, everyone was surprised. That student himself didn’t recognize his own work.”
The work of Gu’s students was displayed in the Shanghai Technology Museum when it opened in 2002.
Since retirement, Gu has held classes in community centers. It’s harder for the elderly to learn thinking outside the box than it is for children, he said.
A bit of a chip off the old block, Gu’s eight-year-old grandson is already an expert in making darts and paper planes from leaflets, and searching through rubbish bins for any interesting materials he can use.
“We see more creativity in the younger generation,” Gu said. “And it’s important to teach them how to keep developing in that way in a world where iPads and mass media divert so much of their attention.”
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