In 1989 British artist Antony Gormley started working on a very physical project, his "Field" series. The approach behind each "Field" was the same: a local community would mould figures by hand from locally sourced clay. Throughout the years Gormley created "Fields" in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South America.
But it was after making his "fields" in Britain and in Malmö that he started thinking about going to China. The project was ambitious as it was conceived as Gormley's biggest "Field" since it had to represent China's size and population.
Officially started in 1995 with a first visit and an exploration of the locations and conditions for production, the project properly developed only in 2003 when Gormley identified the ideal location - Xiangshan Village (now Huadong Town), in the outskirts of the city of Guangzhou.
For five days villagers of all ages together with students from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, worked on making the clay figures, following Gormley's instructions for this project - each sculpture had to be hand-sized, able to stand vertically on its own, and have two eyes facing forward and looking up towards the horizon. Makers were otherwise free to improvise.
One of the most beautiful things about the project was the fact that different generations of locals - grandparents, parents, and children - worked on the pieces. At the end of the project, the locals made approximately 210,000 clay figurines.
Guangzhou-based photographer Zhang Hai'er created a series of portraits - entitled "Maker and Made" - pairing each maker with their sculpture, focusing on the gaze of the person portrayed to show how that was almost imprinted into the little clay statue. The figurine becomes therefore a representation of the person portrayed, travelling all over the world together with the memories and the story of the person who made it.
In previous projects from the '80s and the '90s, Gormley moved from his own body to create iron or lead sculptures, often monumental, that were then installed in a variety of spaces, to spark up a dialogue with vast architectural locations or with the elements when the pieces were placed outdoors. The focus of this practice re-shifted instead on the collectivity.
With the "Field" series Gormley investigated indeed the power of the collective, resizing the pieces, but multiplying them and opting for a fully collaborative experience. The artist's self is therefore dispersed among the crowd composing the field.
Requiring a minimum of 2,000 square metres for the installation, "Asian Field" was first exhibited in an underground carpark in Guangzhou in 2003; then it was on display at a museum in Beijing, a warehouse in Shanghai, and a former underground air-raid shelter in Chongqing.
The installation is currently on display at Hong Kong's M+, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. This is the first time the work has been shown inside a purpose-built museum space.
As an installation, "Asian Field" is meant to be experienced from a single point of view, from the threshold of the exhibition space, so that visitors end up gazing across this dense yet quiet sea of figures that look mesmerizing.
Confronted by this "Field", by this army of clay people, visitors feel overwhelmed, yet not in awe as you may feel in front of the Terracotta Warriors. But they also realise they have a connection with the figurines looking up towards the sky, as if they were deep in thought, exploring, contemplating the progress of humanity. The visitors do share indeed something with that crowd - responsibilities towards one another and towards our planet.
The most significant thing about Gormley's fields is that they acquire new metaphorical meanings as they years pass. It is therefore impossible to stare at the vast expanse of humanity forming the installation of "Asian Field" at M+ without thinking about the global pandemic, modern migrations, the anxieties of climate change and the death and destruction brought by the war in Ukraine.
Comments