In the center of the shed sits a sculpture in the shape of a cone, which, when you go inside, is more like a tent. Sitting inside you are bathed in a soft light; the sculpture's skin is made of thousands of sheets of paper, individually colored then glued together. Outside again you see a hundred kimono-shaped sculptures, one-sixth the size of a real kimono, sitting on a platform. Images of typhoons are painted in paper pulp, evenly spaced along the twelve meter sides of the shed. Large slabs of red, yellow, and blue paper lie on the ground. The Korean artist who made this sculpture tells us it is about his dream of the reunification of North and South Korea. Book objects and handmade paper cylinders mimic a fantastic machine, now defunct, once used for debarking logs. It is twelve meters long and runs the length of the site. Walk out of the shed along this old rusty paper machine and under a tent to see the tools that these artists have used to create the exhibition; a Hollander-type beater, a hydraulic press, a maze in a vat, and buckets and buckets of fiber. Attached to the outside of the shed are two five-and-a-half meter high, shaped paper drawings. They are like Chinese characters but rounder and softer. The artist has paid so much attention to the empty spaces within the work, the scale of them in relation to the wall, and the monochrome color that these two seemingly simple drawings require time to view. You are distracted because you hear Chinese, English, German, and Korean voices all mixing together. Ten people hold newspapers printed in different languages. They are rehearsing a Fluxus music piece. A set is being made for a performance, including red hats, red paper, and a red dress, with shards of paper hanging from a bright red bamboo pole. You wander into a double spiral mass of stacked, printed commercial paper. These bales of paper are stacked so high that once you go in you cannot feel the wind; all you can see is a spiral of open sky above your head. At the end of this spiral path you arrive at a table and chair covered with grass. This dynamic visual scene was created by Helmut Becker (Canada), Chen Da-Chuan (Taiwan), Chen Long-Bin (Taiwan), Chen Sui-Can (Taiwan), Joel Fischer (United States), John Gerard (Germany), Cuteo Hang (Taiwan), Alison Knowles (United States), En-Soo Park (Korea), Christine Pellikan (Austria), Dorthea Reese-Heim (Germany), Naoaki Sakamoto (Japan), Hiltrud Schäfer (Germany) and myself (United States), for "Play, Paper Factory: International Paper Art Festival" in Taiwan during nine days in June 1999. This well organized event was sponsored by the Chang Chüen Cotton Paper Foundation, the Cultural Affairs Department, and the Taiwan Provincial Government. The exhibition was supposed to be up for a few weeks. After days of making our art and then having it open to the press and the public for just one day, typhoon Maggie descended and reclaimed most of our work back to nature. People were very upset, especially the organizers, who had spent five months of hard work putting together the event. Most of the artists felt the typhoon became part of the event and that the beauty, experience, spirit of the work will live on. Helmut Becker writes: "Typhoon Maggie has been a lesson in humility for all. One must accept the ephemeral nature of the paper art works, and what inevitably in time would have happened, only here it was brief, as Dr. Frank Lee observed, �A beautiful dream is always short.'" Alison Knowles said she could imagine vast periods of time had elapsed and that we were allowed to sense we had witnessed the process of erosion and decay in speeded-up time. The paper festival consisted of several parts, including a workshop, exhibition, symposium, and a student paper art competition. The one hundred and fifty entries of paper art from different schools around Taiwan were juried at the Su Hu Memorial Paper Museum in Taipei, where the international artists selected winners. When we left Taipei and went to Ilan, these student winners came along as our assistants. They were awarded prizes, their work was exhibited near the international artists, and they participated in the two day symposium. Most made presentations at the symposium, which was also attended by art educators, reporters, and other students. It would be impossible to mention all of the organizers by name or describe all of the wonderful things they did for us. Three of them stand out, though: Chen Suzchi, our ever-present angel; Chen Ruey-Huey, who made the Museum and the international paper festival possible; and Emily Tuon, Chen Ruey-Huey's niece, who is originally from Taiwan but studies music in the U.S. Chen Ruey-Huey is responsible for the existence of the Su Hu Memorial Paper Museum. Her father, Chen Su-Hu, owned several paper factories and had planned to open a paper museum. In 1990 he and his wife were killed in an airplane accident. Chen Ruey-Huey spent five years after the crash fulfilling her father's dream of opening a paper museum. The Museum's four floors include historical, technical, industrial, traditional, and contemporary displays. The Museum conveys the unique characteristics of the paper made in Taiwan along with paper from more than twenty other countries. In the paper laboratory visitors can learn more about paper through hands-on experiments. There is a display of live plants used in papermaking and even a history of toilet paper, found on the wall across from the entrance to the bathrooms. Most importantly, museum goers can watch the hand papermaking process in a wet area and a rooftop studio allows visitors to enjoy making paper themselves. Ilan, where we held the symposium, is a big city surrounded by a farming community. A typical day for us began with a dozen plates of locally grown food, which we ate with chopsticks, a van ride to the workshop, work, a picnic lunch, more work, a quick hour back at the hotel, then some amazing evening adventure full of food, music, people, and kindness. One of the first evenings in Ilan we were the guests of the local people who held a pot luck dinner with over one hundred dishes. A stage was set up under a very old tree lit with traditional lanterns. The tree protected the stage from the rain, which came and went all evening. Traditional music was sung in Chinese and high school students played traditional Taiwanese instruments. Unusual heartfelt music was sung in Taiwanese by soulful older men. Skits and joking were plenty, especially when our hosts asked us to come up on stage to learn some of their traditional dances. We, the professionals, were brought in to stimulate awareness of paper and its infinite flexibility, variation, and beauty. We came away with a rich feeling of the Taiwanese people and their culture. These local people were the true cultural emissaries.
