Abstract

The author was invited to participate in the 5th Biennale of Sydney 1984: Private Symbol and Social Metaphor. Since then, she has continued the artistic development of her private symbols and has examined their meanings in wider social and cultural contexts. The manner of her research is both creative and academic. She looks into the Chinese folk craft as a source of creative and innovative inspiration. At the same time, within this frame of reference, she also tackles the issues of dramatic changes in human behavior arising from the digital reasoning that has challenged our analog perception since the last decade. The cognitive issues include the tension between old and new, ritual and virtual, global and local, modern and postmodern. In the paper, she will begin by illustrating how humble materials such as bamboo splits and rice paper have traditionally been transformed into sculpture and community art. From this understanding of how clever hands implicitly made decisions about the appropriateness and use of these materials’ properties, she explores the transformation of the traditional Chinese craftsmanship into an explicit knowledge-database, which allows art projects of large scales in terms of flexibility and sustainability, dimension and security, and impacts on cultural practice and economic activities.