Starting today, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine will be showcasing two huge sculptures of phoenixes by the Chinese artist Xu Bing—and to celebrate, there will be performances from tightrope walker Philippe Petit, stiltwalkers and jugglers from the Big Apple Circus, puppeteers and more.
Xu made the sculptures, which weigh 12 tons each, from detritus and found materials he discovered in China. From the NY Times:
The project started in 2008, when he was asked to create a sculpture for a glass atrium at the base of a new building designed by the architect Cesar Pelli for the World Financial Center in Beijing’s central business district.
“When I first visited the building site, I had a sense of shock,” Mr. Xu recalled in an interview at a coffee shop near St. John the Divine. “It was impossible to imagine that with all the modern technology today, the building was constructed with such low-tech methods.”
The poor working conditions for the migrant laborers who were building such luxury towers, he said, “made my skin quiver.” Mr. Xu had such a violent reaction to what he saw that he decided to make the phoenixes rise, as it were, out of debris and workers’ tools that he salvaged from the construction site.
The building's developers asked Xu to make the birds look less raw ("perhaps with a crystalline exterior"), but he refused and the sculptures were rejected. With the help of migrant workers, Xu still created the birds, which are 90-100 feet long, and they've been displayed in Beijing and Shanghai as well as at Mass MoCa last year.
Curator Judith Goldman told WNYC, "You can look at it and think: it’s the most fantastic piece of Chinese folk art, and yes, it’s about migrant workers too, so it’s all those things."
The piece, which is also lit internally by LED lights, was transported by nearly a dozen flatbed trucks to St. John the Divine. The sculptures will be on display in the church's nave for the rest of 2014.
