Joan assessed the crowd, lighting upon the most interesting: young men turning white T - shirts into art, pinching the material tight and rubber - banding each section until they looked like porcupines being dipped into huge steaming vats of colored dyes; the young woman with a
bird's nest of purple hair sitting at a potter's wheel, slamming down hunks of clay, her hands moving nearly
as fast
as the wheel, cups,
vases, plates, bowls, trays, appearing like magic; the elderly man in a worn blue linen suit, a jaunty straw boater on his head, a smeared palette tight in his hand, painting a mammoth canvas of people on a beach staring out at an ocean where a sailboat bobbed in the distance, though he himself was standing in a mowed field; the handsome young man at an old - fashioned school desk, a manual typewriter in front of him, a stack of paper to the side.
The Chinese artist, who co-designed the Beijing «
Bird's Nest» Olympic stadium, is best known for large - scale, powerfully provocative work such
as an installation made up of thousands of children's backpacks to commemorate the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, and a photographic triptych of himself smashing a Han Dynasty
vase.