Proposal of
A Remapping and Reinventing Project
An Ode of Reclaiming A Work of Art – “The Wonder of Tao”
By Li-chin (Crystal) Huang
(The completed project was presented on the 1st Research Day in 2008 at University of Minnesota- Twin Cities )
An Ode of Reclaiming A Work of Art – “The Wonder of Tao”
By Li-chin (Crystal) Huang
(The completed project was presented on the 1st Research Day in 2008 at University of Minnesota- Twin Cities )
The main
idea of this paper is to remap and rethink the process of cross-fertilization
ideations happening in a very natural setting that can be reshaped into
multilayers of meaningful and beneficial ways of learning, reinterpretation and
deep understanding.
It happened when East and West met!
My previous colleague professor Jim Eggert at UW-Stout showed great interest to
study Lau Tisz’s “Dao Der Jing” (Tao Te Ging). Since I was the only instructor
in the Social Science Department who was a cross-cultural person (from Taiwan ), enthusiastically
we started our weekly one on one studying project from 2004. Six month later, Jim suggested that he want
to write a book and invited me to be part of the project.
I did not realize that it was the
beginning of a “cross-pollination,” as the course named it- “Crossing Borders-Collaborations”,
until I took the class offered by Dr. Schwartzhoff-
“The Theory and Practice of Inter-Disciplinary Collaborations through an Art
Education Model”. The outcomes of such a beautiful tapestry woven by the author
– professor Jim Eggert who was the economic educator at UW-Stout (and currently
is an emeritus professor), the quilt artist-Pat Eggert, as well as Mathematician
professor Dr. Steve Deckelman as video maker, as well as I - a sociology
instructor and translator, imagery maker (illustration and calligraphy) providing
the major artwork as part of the project, the final project – a book named “The
Wonder of The Dao: A Meditation on Spirituality and Ecological Balance” was
published at the end of the year.
The main theme of the book is
focused on revealing and healing the relationship between spirituality and
ecological balance drawn from multicultural disciplines, including Visual Arts
(including filming/photography), Geography, Biology, Economics, Ecology,
Sociology, Eastern and Western Religions, and Technology. The project explored
locales embedded with rich geographical symbolism and spirituality from local
prairies (Menomonie of Dunn County) and from Minnesota and Wisconsin to trace
the quintessential concept of self-sufficient, sustainable ecological “Prairie Model” as the alternations to the dominant capitalist
entrepreneurship.
That class gave an opportunity to
rethink the daily activity that can be meaningful and can be reevaluated and
reassessed the possibility of better future collaborative projects. For
example, after the book was published in 2004, Professor Jim Eggert and I were
invited to various book reading and book signing events at bookstores and local
communities to disseminate the vivid and imminent information that contemporary
society has to face. Now, the burgeoning
project is to translate this book into Chinese and Korean suggested by the
publisher. There are vast messages and advisory wisdom in the book valuable
particularly to the fast industrializing regions where the environment and
spirituality tends to be the most vulnerable sphere subject to the deterioration
and negligence.
In order to explore the possibility
of revisiting our book with new insight on our collaborative work of art, I had
a long talk and video taped Professor Jim and Pat Eggert at their prairie lands
surrounding their humble yet rich home on June 18, 2005. I consulted them the
possibility to reinterpret the meaning of the happening started a year
ago. They were amazed that there were so
many meaningful aspects of the project left to rediscoveries and
reinterpretation.
Though this can be considered as a
retro work of art, I do rediscover many ideas that I never thought about or was
aware before. The main idea of this
paper is to remap and rethink the process of cross-fertilization ideations
happening in a very natural setting that can be reshaped into even more beneficial
ways.
What I am
trying to do is to trace each step of ideation tied to the concept of
collaborations. So far, I collected the paper documents from the very beginning
of ideation of the book, video taped professor Jim and Pat Eggert yesterday, borrowed
the quilt of Tao from Ms. Eggert, and kept the photos and artwork that I made
as needed by the chapter development. We have a big storage of memory in
visiting the woods of our backyards, Red Cedar Trail, Red Wing Minnesota , Devil’s Punch
Bowl to search plants, little animals, prairie lands for sketches as well as inspiration.
Jim and Steve photoed my processing on making illustrations and calligraphy. We
consulted faculty from other departments and organizations from the Internet to
provide more accurate depiction for the contents.
Initially, what
we had done was based on the spirit of Taoism – doing things for no intentions,
no functionality, and no specific purposes, which is called “wu wei” or pure art
of art’s sake- if you want to name it, and it was fun for us older adults to do
things in this unconventional (or naivete fashion! However, as the process developing, the sense
of engaging in poetic meditation on responsibility and interbeing of compassionate
living naturally floated within Steve and me as team members. We did not expect that the book would be
published so quickly (Jim has published several other books and articles
already.) His writing this book and my doing/translating the artwork were
totally based on “wu wei,” not to mention the concept of collaborations.
Now,
reviewing the whole project, I found that it was an unintended collaborative
work of art, and the outcome is beneficial to our understanding our human
beings’ celebration, loss, and the potential rebirth. Now I am thinking the
alternate possibility if we began with carefully designed collaborative team
work, there could be another kind of new experiences and productivity!
In short,
from reviewing the above mentioned process, I relearned many a
- Collaborations can enliven your work and help get you past the rough spots.
- When is the last time you were open to another artist’s ideas?
- If studio time has been a little lonely or if you have a dearth of idea lately, why not try a collaboration to spice things up a bit?
- Think about locale we find ourselves in and think about “getting lost in one’s own city, locating the other, exploring new territories, investigating locality, and notions of trespass….etc”
Green and Dao from Xena Huang