Guanxi － 关系

Harbin Festival

In China, people say that Guanxi, "relation", is very important.


One morning, somebody came to my room asking me to go to see the director of the foreign student department. A friend of mine and myself got a grant from our government to come to China to discover and experiment Chinese culture and art. The director wanted to talk to me because of that. He explained me that a professor from the sculpture department wanted to participate in the Harbin Snow Sculpture Competition 2003 and for what needed to build an international team. Flight and accommodation were paid by Harbin Festival, we only needed to conceptualize and realize a three cubic meters snow sculpture. I accepted right away and went to talk to my friend Guillaume about it. He enjoyed the idea. We started to work immediately on the concept. The idea was a mix between a cute rabbit and and Homer Simpsons. An allegory of contemporary China and an homage to McCarthy.Next week we were suppose to meet the professor and other team members.
We went to the meeting with our sketches.


The Professors, they were two, also had their own sketches.
The first one, from Prof. A, was a reproduction from Botticelli's Venus.
The strange things is that the model was a rectangular prism instead of a cube as it was suppose to be. Everybody enforced that point.



But Prof. A was sure that it would be fine. I tried to image what would be the result.


Prof. B, with his giant hands and a meta-something calm, revealed its project. It was something really astonishing. He took a traditional auspicious image representing a baby in a lotus flowers and cut in the middle with a wall. The wall was a symbol for modernity.

Prof. A project was not so far from ours,
but it seemed a good idea not to show our concept.

We were introduce to other teams members: Helena and Nathalia, two Russians student who were learning Chinese and suppose to be our translators; Petra, who as that time was a professor at Shanghai University. Next day in the plane to Harbin joined another team member: Chi-chi, a writer from New-York who was an old friend of Prof. B.

Harbin is a delicious place.
In the Chinese part of Siberia.
It's cold.
People are really nice.
They like to organized funny events that implement cold elements.







A car from the Festival arrived to bring us to the hotel. There we would assist at the Official Ceremony for the Launch of the Snow Competition of Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, which was preceded by the Introduction of the Official Jury of the Snow Competition of Harbin Ice and Snow Festival and follow by the Official Dinner of the Official Ceremony for the Launch of the Snow Competition of Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, where the other Official Participants of the Snow Competition of Harbin Ice and Snow Festival were also attended. After that we officially went to bed.

Next day, 7am sharp, the competition started. Many people from many countries speaking many different languages were carving, chiseling, casting and jumping all around there three meters high snow cube.
Our team have to be split in two as we had to realize two sculptures. Which also mean that Helena and Nathalia had to participate, and they did not like so much the idea. This plus the fact that they had to pay for an insurance-which was not suppose to be- and that he was not participating in the realization of the sculpture made them pretty pissed against Prof. B. Prof. B's job consisted of buying cigarettes and disappearing all days long to smoke them with certain people.
Prof. A was more active, sculpting all day long, calm and concentrated. He was not speaking much. We developed a sort of telepathy to communicate.
By coincidence, my hotel room was adjacent to the one of a Russian team from Vladivostok which came with a big box full of bottles of vodka. Every night a lot of people were gathering in their room, the vodka helped people communicate. From that moment on and until the end of the competition half of the contestant were totally drunk.
This was the snow competition 2003: a lot of drunken people from everywhere doing giant snowman in the middle of Siberian steppes.

With Petra, we exchanged a lot our point of view about art, China and the World. It was really nice to have somebody with whom to exchange about art as a Praxis and not only as craft.
After one week of trying to fit our prism into a cube, the competition ended. Our sculpture was close to a disaster but we made a lot of friends whom had realized very nice works. We were feeling really bad when we heard we won the second price. This was mostly because Prof. B smoked a lot of cigarette with certain people. Guanxi is sometime very important.