More Sculpture at Cheng Da

Though this is an abstraction, something about it from this angle reminds me a little bit of the “Winged Victory of Samothrace”— a marble statue at the Louvre.  This sculpture (after a squinting look at the blurry zoomed-in tag) is called “Fleeting Cloud and Shadow Traces Marked by the Wind and Trees.”

I’ve never worked with marble before, but the texture of this “cloud” really intrigued me.

If I recall correctly, there were a series of these almost two-dimensional steel sculptures with cut-outs.  I liked this one because it reminded me of the moon with a cloud in front of it.

Sculpture around Cheng Da

Surfing Cheng Da’s site, I discovered that there is an art festival going on, and figured I should post my photos of art at Cheng Da.  Art on college campuses can be hit or miss (my sculpture prof. in college said she had to artfully dodge when asked what she thought of the sculptures decorating our campus after her initial interview), but there are some nice pieces at Cheng Da .

This is a doughnut-shaped abacus that is outside the business building (if my memory is correct and things haven’t changed).  Abaci are still used by kids in Taiwan and remind me of my experience trying to teach elementary students math with manipulatives– if we’d only used abaci, I could have avoided a veritable hail storm of pennies and base ten blocks…

This sculpture was a bit small in scale next to its surroundings, but I had fun with its reflections anyway…

This blog has more recent postings of art at NCKU.   While it is in Chinese, the pictures show some fun murals have been added to the landscape since I was there.

Sorry that I didn’t record titles and artist names to go along with the photographs.  If anyone can enlighten me on them, I’ll gladly add them to this post.

Around Cheng Da

Sorry I’ve been a hideous blog mistress when it comes to updating.  My trusty laptop Fawkes-Buckbeak fell prey to the black screen of death and since then I’ve been hopping between shared computers, which didn’t have ready access to my archives of pictures.  Of course once I fell out of the habit of posting, it required some catching up to figure out what I’ve posted and what I haven’t from what is now over a year ago’s worth of reminisces and images.

So here are some images from National Cheng Kung University (Cheng Da or Cheng Gong Da Shuei as my personal romanization goes…), taken in the summer of 2008 (eeks, time flew!) while I was trying to study Chinese.

The view from the covered space between buildings where students could be found practicing skits, dancing, or Tai Chi in the shade.  The entrance gate is at the end of that long vista.

The pond in front of the foreign languages department with its lovely red bridge.

The bridge had very shallow steps.

Sparrows were lined up on the railings.

Rock formation on the little pond island.

A palm that lost to a typhoon and gravity.

A curious mushroom.

Another rock formation on the island– some of the white ones are worn corals, I think…

An old gate to the campus.

I don’t know why the paving stones have a semi-circular placement.

A stone sculpture on campus.