380,000 eyes fulfil a sculptor's vision

Antony Gormley collaborates with Chinese villagers on huge project
Asian Field (antony Gormley) in Chinese car park
Gormley's Asian Field - 192,000 clay figures made by villagers from Xiang Shan.
in Guangzhou, China
Tue 25 Mar 2003 05.43 EST

Imagine the scene: Hu Li Qin, a 53-year-old grandmother, is tending her rice plants and vegetables in the fields of southern China when a lanky Englishman who has built an angel in a place called Gateshead arrives to ask if she will help him make a work of art.

He wants to make several thousand hand-high figures from local clay with no features but eyes.

Imagine another scene: the lanky Englishman visits the nearby Peaceful, Happy and Brisk-Business Brickworks to ask manager Dai Jin Sin if he will fire these figures in his massive kiln.

Mrs Hu says yes, Mr Dai says yes and so do more than 300 people aged seven to 76 in the village of Xiang Shan in Guangdong province.

So Antony Gormley, sculptor of the Angel of the North, recruited the collaborators he needed for Asian Field, the latest and by far the biggest of his five worldwide fields packed with little people who watch watchers watching them.

"I want to democratise the space of art," said Gormley. "I am opening up the doors of my studio to allow wider participation, to allow people to take their rightful place.

"We all make the world and we do no credit to ourselves by putting art and artists in the specialised environment that is a museum. I am trying to put art back where it belongs in a world it should never have left."


In January Gormley's studio shifted from London to the playground of the primary school in Xiang Shan [which means Elephant Mountain, although there are no elephants or mountains there]. He and the villagers got stuck in to 100 tonnes of clay. He hoped for 120,000 figures but in five days 192,000 were produced.

"I told them that one of these figures uses half the clay needed for a brick," he explained. "A brick is of use only if it is like every other brick. But these figures are of use only if they are different from each other."

This is collective labour, not mass production. Mr Dai made a couple of figures, Mrs Hu made 2,000.

She explained her technique using her hands: "I would squash the clay like this, make the head and shoulders, the waist and feet, and then use a pencil to make the eyes. When you use your thumb like this, it is as if you are giving a heart to your figure."

Last weekend Mrs Hu, Mr Dai and their friends and neighbours walked down 36 shallow steps to see the completed Asian Field laid out in an underground car park below a new but as yet unoccupied 19-storey apartment block in the provincial capital of Guangzhou.

They went first to concrete-walled rooms lined with pictures of all the makers and samples of their work. The place filled with laughter as villagers searched for themselves, their excitement obvious.

Then Mrs Hu walked through two empty chambers past stern security guards, who smile if you smile at them, to the Field. She gazed for several moments.

Shoulder to shoulder, the figures packed the 60-metre-long floor, wave after wave blurring into the distance and filling everyone's field of vision like stubble in a newly-harvested corn field. A fair field of folk as in Piers Plowman, their colours ranged from golden biscuit to dark red to cinder grey.

They were uniform but different; fat, thin, tall, short. They included an angel, a Bronze Age earth mother, a granny with cradling arms. One had shoulder pads, another a ball, a third a Noddy hat. Some were sprinkled with pollution, "a morning mist floating down like dandruff", according to Gormley.

Collective but individual, the multitude advanced, its progress halted by a drainage grid. Their eyes gazed up at all who stood before them.


"If art is about trying to infect others with your madness, this has succeeded on a grand scale," said Gormley.

Mrs Hu spotted one of her own figures to whom she had given a hat. "It's the end," she said. "I'm happy to see all the figures here."

It is not quite the end for a £200,000 project which was aided by the British Council, and which is the first major event in Think UK, a showcase of "the best of British creativity and innovation" in China this year. Asian Field will tour to three other Chinese cities and perhaps elsewhere.

"Field turns the normal tables on the viewer," suggested Gormley, while sitting on one of the 3,736 blue crates in which the figures were transported.

"When you go into a museum or gallery, you share the space. Here there is not much sharing. There is total occupation of the space [by the art]. The art is not there to be looked at. It is looking at you and you become the subject of art's gaze rather than the other way round.

"I think that is quite uncomfortable for some people. But maybe that is the point. This is about the earth getting its own back."

The project completed, Gormley reflected that it was done by the villagers with a grace and good humour that he found very moving.

"There was a pleasure in being together and all doing the same thing. Doing repetitive tasks that are somehow cohesive brings an enormous sense of well-being. And working with clay is therapeutic. It literally earths your natural energy. It is a very calming thing.

"It is extraordinary for me that something like this can happen. It shows that unexpected things, someone else's dream, can be realised.

"We don't have to live in a functional world that is only about money, status and having enough to eat."

Gormley seeks responses and they are finding their way on to Field's noticeboard. "Feeling myself great but small. And feeling lonely," says one visitor's message.

"Hello figures. I'm glad to see you. They live together with us in this field," writes Wu Xu Ping, a teenager eager to try out her English.

One maker who scanned in vain the rows of silent figures forlornly inquires: "Where's mine?"