The evening of 13 April 2013, the International Award for Public Art Presentation Ceremony and Public Art Forum was held. Lewis Biggs, the president of Public Art Award jury, hosted the forum.
Professor Derrick Cherries, Head of Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in New Zealand gave a speech. He said, “Public art can encourage public participation and experience, but also to enrich their experience. It is important to you or to me how to participate, how to enrich experience, and how to become a sociological experience. From these days exposure to the public art works, we can see that those works should reflect an identity and a purpose, and sometimes itself is a very straightforward process, but sometimes also a very complex process. Thus, during this process, we need to be able to identify the driving forces behind these works and aspirations.”
“In addition, we find the importance of a comprehensive knowledge, but also it should be applied to different situations. The knowledge in a certain surrounding may not be the required knowledge in another surrounding, or probably lack of knowledge. So, the important thing is we have to know that the specific surroundings and circumstances may need the people who have special knowledge, but we also need to supplement other knowledge. In a new surrounding, we may need a certain kind of new knowledge.
The most important of these projects is that users are involved into these works. They are not just an observer, or just passive observation, but are active participants or are active audiences. Their participation is not just a method.
We also have to educate our audience professional knowledge. The artistic knowledge of public art audience may not be as high as that of you who are sitting here. So we must know what their expectations of public art are. We should let them know what kind of public art content is and what kind of public art they will see.
Assistant Professor Eric Troffkin from Department of Art and Design, Wayne State University, made a speech: "I also agree with the views of end-users or viewers. At the beginning, I also talked about what is successful public art and what is good public art. In the past few days I always think about these questions. How should public art develop in today’s society with constantly social and cultural environmental changing? Some scholars talked about planning for the future. But the question is we can’t guess our future through logic or derivation. In my understanding, the success of public art will be able to impress you and make you optimistic for the future.
“As we all know that we do plan for the future, but sometime the future is counterproductive with our plan. However, because of the public art, we have a sense of belonging, and always maintain a faith and confidence for the future.”
Derrick talked about the importance of a user, “I think user is an important indicator for the success of public art. If one public art project was not successful, we could still tolerantly say that at least he tried and because of the trying, he will get better and better as long as it interacts and take accounts with the end-users. "
Mr. John McCormack, Director of the Starkwhite Art Gallery in New Zealand, summarized the sub-forum “Public Art in Beautiful Countryside”. He said, “During the sub-forum, speakers have put forward all kinds of questions, such as what kind of benefits public art has, who received such benefits and how we can achieve these benefits. The first two speakers, Prof. Pan Li and Mr. Shi Mingqiang, mainly talked about public art in countryside, some public art projects in small mountain villages, or faraway fish villages. They introduced the positive influence of the public art projects on the local social, economic and cultural. That is, these public art projects are not only able to create great artistic value or social value, but also enable rural achieve rebirth. We also discussed the different methods of bottom-up or top-down.”
“The third speaker is Rhana Devenport. She introduced the art influence for the local landscape in New Zealand, which reflected the public art ability of commitments to social action.”
“The fourth speaker is Mr. Jack Becker. He talked about how to solve the ecological public art, how to challenge economic problems, how to improve everyone's life. He also introduced a lot of creative projects, and how to use public art projects for the local residents. “
“The next speaker is Mr. Ta-coumba Aiken. He talked about his public art projects and how to interact and cooperate with local residents to make it sure that the local residents will get more interests from the art projects.”
“The last speaker is Prof. Hoshina Toyomi from Japan. He introduced the Japanese public art. We all know that the Japanese are facing the challenge of aging and dwindling number of young people, so public art has to do some efforts to respond to such a phenomenon.”
“Finally, I want to say is that our host mentioned he found Chinese artists and researchers are more concerned about the public aspect of the public art, and Western researchers and artists may more concern about the art aspect of the public art when he talked with speakers yesterday. I also agree that we must seek common ground. In fact, we have a lot of similarities, a lot of projects have now become laboratories, which allow us to try different ideas, different approaches. We can also get the varieties into our public art project cooperation. If we want to know the future of public art, my best answer is we should predict the future well, the best methods become a part of creating. That is, we must strive to work together to build our own public art in the future. " |
