简单中文

Saturday August 20^th was a joy ! We had the first “Tree Planter workshop” for a range of young learners at For 觅 Gallery at Grasse Town, Tongzhou.

We discovered some information about the resilience of the Gingko leaf having withstood polluted air erupting  from volcanoes at the time of the dinosaurs, these trees are  now often a choice for town planners all over the world for city roads. We learned how it was propagated first in China over a thousand years ago then spread throughout Asia and the rest of the world .

Other origami leaves we made included the pear leaf and a double leaf.

Some young people were very adventurous and tried versions of their own design. The dead crabapple tree ( donated by the Beijing Forestry association ) was brought back to life with a variety of leaves.

The second part of the workshop “My Forest” was a collaborative construction of various kinds of trees , we learned how monoculture of the same tree type cannot support biodiversity of other plants and insects . “My Forest” was packed with various trees of all types with strange insects and surprising animals. We also looked at the idea that oxygen gets recycled again and again and the possibility of the air that we breathe is 4 million years of Forest Breath .

 

 

The energy of being in a room full of young people concentrating on their work was invigorating, the diversity of  paths they choose matched the diversity in the forest they made. Some children thought they had finished early and walked away but came back for another 20 minutes of work. There is a joy in being with people when they create new and unexpected things , when they discuss what they want to do and their decisions, whether they are young learners or seasoned professors , it always feels like a special moment.

Huge thanks to the organizers of this workshop

Little Maupassant Cup International Art Union

and gallerist Peng Chun Hui of FOR 觅 gallery

 

 

Because of this workshop,  in early October I will go to Changping to plant a number of trees , which I will document in a future blog .

 

 

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A big thank you to my translators Wang Haoning (Summer) workshop 1 and my son Fionn Cunningham Clifford for workshop 2

Workshop 2 (August 27th ) was a delight with mostly very young learners yet still wonderfully talented

 

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Previous workshop in 2019