mel chin

  • Seasonal Sculpture

    Seasonal Sculpture


    2002
    Proposal for the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 2003
    For the Echigo-Tsumari Region of Niigata Prefecture, Japan

    An artwork that transforms into a snowplow to serve the farmers of western Japan after the art exhibition ends.

    The Echigo-Tsumari Region of Southern Niigata Prefecture, Japan
    Seasonal Sculpture will contribute to the Triennial project of placing international contemporary public art in a traditional rice farming region. This new artwork will fulfill the mission to provide aesthetic contemplation for people as they tour the region during the summer arts festival and give then new meaning to the term “action figure” in winter. As a conceptual art piece it will temporarily take the form of a traditional, figurative, sculpture during the arts festival then radically reconfigure into heavy equipment to serve the public after the festival is done.

    Seasonal Sculpture is a work that is inspired by the several things from my visit to Japan: the traditional rice farmer, the transformer toys originally designed in Japan, and the mountain region itself.

    Seasonal Sculpture will be a slightly abstracted representational sculpture of a traditional farmer, wearing traditional snow gear (masa, kino and harigatsu) seated in a huddled position during the summer arts festival. This homage to the farmer will be readily identifiable by the outline of his clothes and hat. During the massive snowfalls of winter that deeply affect the region, the sculpture will dramatically unfold (with gears and hydraulic pistons working), transforming itself to become a working, state-of-the-art, snowplow.

    It will plow the snow, making paths for stranded farmers and carving out needed territories for art and industry to collaborate.

  • 9-11/9-11 graphic novella

    9-11/9-11 graphic novella

















    Originally printed 2002
    reprinted 2008
    27 pages

  • Wheel of Death

    Wheel of Death


    2002
    Firestone® Wilderness AT tire, paint on wood
    72 x 72 inches
    Made from a single Firestone® tire, formed into the boar, the snake, and the rooster, representing ignorance, avarice and lust, the root of all human misery according to the Buddhist Wheel of Life.

  • S.P.R.E.A.D. (Social Platform Readily Engaged in Active Development)

    S.P.R.E.A.D. (Social Platform Readily Engaged in Active Development)


    2002
    proposal : A New World Trade Center Exhibition

    Not a building
    Not a memorial . . .

    “ . . . into the sky laying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.” -William Faulkner, Sanctuary

    A Boeing 767, full of fuel and the blood of innocents, arcing sharply in the blue sky over Manhattan on September 11, 2001, ended the reign of the skyscraper. Nuclear waste, bunker-busting bombs and oxygen-depleting thermobaric explosives have ended the usefulness of a shelter, in use since the dawn of human existence – the cave.

    The question is not which building to build to replace the shelters of the past but which direction to take in building for the future. As the destructive forces of terrorism and war provoke the military imagination toward more horrific inventions, what does the creative individual or team produce in the wake of such events? As Brecht noted to Benjamin, “Do not build on the good old days but on the bad new ones.”

    Rising from lines of ash, debris and death drawn by FEMA as its boundaries, horizontally spreading across lower Manhattan, skirting open spaces and parks and subsiding before Ground Zero, leaving it time and space to find its recovery . . . .is a new system resting in the old canyons of late modernism.

    S.P.R.E.A.D. (Social Platform Readily Engaged in Active Development) is a modular platform, suspended 72 feet off the streets and avenues of downtown New York City. It is a grid of new material combinations, filled with fibers and fluids of data, water and power and capable of generating new acres of sustainable infrastructure. This platform, managing its own wastes and water, equipped with an undercarriage of light, is buoyed by its skyscraper neighbors in symbiotic attachment. In exchange for structural support, it can supply its hosts additional power and water conservation as well as portals onto new work and leisure spaces.

    A “system” as opposed to a building is proposed as a response to the destroyed World Trade Center. This New World Trade City is a horizontal plane supporting single story offices and “green park” components built on “floating” foundations. These work/green spaces can move about a grid (not unlike the cars and trucks below) arranging, connecting and adapting to needs and desires of people who work/play within, above, below.

    A massive, object-based, monolithic expression of individual design has tragically fallen. Rising in its place is S.P.R.E.A.D. It presents a multitude of sites, in need of a new generation of designers to provide a diverse new city of human-scaled shelters, in an unusual open space.

    A massive, ever changing, adapting infrastructure, teaming with a life of creative talent responding to the diversity of human needs, is a fitting response to the destruction of terror and war.


  • Scholar’s Nightmare

    Scholar’s Nightmare


    2001
    wood, dye, animal part
    30 3/4 x 60 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches

    A Ming-style table, as seen in a dream, where reality and abstraction converge.

  • Study for Scholar’s Nightmare

    Study for Scholar’s Nightmare


    2001
    watercolor, white-out, graphite
    11 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches

    see Scholar’s Nightmare