"Hello, Snow Boy!"

This 5-meter-high stainless steel sculpture "Snow Child" is the first sculpture to settle in the Winter Olympic Park.

In the amusement park of Beijing Winter Olympic Park, there are eight large, fat and round snowmen, with black square covers of branches as their eyes, and carrots incarnating their noses. Each snowman wears a festive red scarf around his neck and an English brimmed hat on his head.

Not far away, there are two different "snow children". They have square heads, no eyes and no noses, and one carries the other, like father and son, and also like lovers. From the 82-day countdown to the Beijing Winter Olympics, they have stood here, accompanying every visitor.

Liu Yang, the author of "Snow Child", is a native of Harbin, and he has been rolling in the snow since he was a child, skating, playing with ice and climbing the plow. He was also the first curling course student in China. Liu Yang is now a sculptor, and in the past decade, he has left more than 70 sculptures in more than 30 countries.

Today, a piece of "Snow Child" has wonderfully connected Liu Yang with ice and snow, the Winter Olympics, and his hometown.

Interesting ice and snow memories

Tracing back to Liu Yang's adolescence, "ice and snow" is a key word that cannot be avoided.

"I started skating at a few years," Liu said, adding that every November, Harbin is full of ice and snow, "skating is probably our only sport."

Ice skating rinks are usually made from local materials. Liu Yang remembers that every year from mid-November, students poured ice on the playground almost every week. They put a large oil drum filled with water on a cart, in front of which was a three-meter-long iron pipe, which was drilled all over the eyes, and when the cart was pushed, the water would leak out, "one circle after another, poured very evenly." Liu Yang has also played ice climbing plows and played games like ice hockey. But they often don't wear skates, but throw hockeys on the snow, chase and run, and are very happy.

Ice sculpture is common in Harbin, but not all children will do it. Liu Yang is the one who will do, "Ice and snow for me, is both a sport and an art. ”

Doing ice sculpture accompanied him from elementary school to high school. Liu Yang loves to make some simple small animals, the volume is not large, generally more than 40 centimeters high, and the tool for doing ice sculpture is a wider carpentry chisel - flat shovel. Interestingly, according to his observation, the tools for making wood carvings and making ice sculptures are very similar, "so in the sculpture circle, the people who do ice carvings and those who do wood carvings are often a group of people." ”

Liu Yang also had a special relationship with curling.

At the end of the 1990s, Japan's Aomori Prefecture held China's first curling training class in Harbin, and the first batch of participants included local sports workers and sports journalists. Liu Yang is also among them. However, due to his busy schedule, he did not go much.

"Among the first batch of students to learn curling are the earliest players, coaches and referees in China's curling project. Our country's current curling level is very good, and it has won the world championship. I often joke with my friends that I used to be so close to the national team. Liu Yang said with a smile.

Connect the world with sculpture

Later, Liu Yang came to Beijing, became a director, did television programs, and also made documentaries. Probably because he did ice sculpture in his youth, Liu Yang simply quit his job, carried a sculpture knife and a giant hammer axe, and made a large-scale urban sculpture.

Without a studio or assistant, Liu Yang traveled all over the world alone, "building landscapes" in cities and raising bright five-star red flags.

"The purpose of our profession is to connect the world with sculpture." In his view, art is interconnected, sculpture is a durable art, although calm and quiet, but it can also express beauty, convey emotions, inherit culture, and show the style of the Chinese nation.

When he was abroad, Liu Yang often showed local friends photos of Harbin ice sculptures. "In the winter, we spent half a month building an ice city, with buildings, streets, as many as a dozen buildings, the highest being tens of meters, like a foreign town." Liu Yang said that foreign friends were greatly amazed when they saw it and praised the "miraculous work" of the people of Harbin.

In Liu Yang's sculpture works, sports-related sculptures account for a large proportion, and the works "Defense Line" and "World Cup on the Mountain" are all dynamic competitive sports theme sculptures.

In 2012, Liu Yang launched the "International Sculpture Creation Camp Alliance", and the multinational creation camp responded to every call and joined one after another. In Liu Yang's view, sports events allow athletes to have a stage to show, and art also needs a stage. Liu Yang feels that he has the responsibility to do this and let the sculpture industry get more people's understanding.

The Olympic Games is a grand event in the sports world, and it is also a cultural feast for people around the world to exchange and learn from each other. Liu Yang said: "Culture and sports are an important part of the spiritual and cultural life of the people. It is not just needed, but it can make life very beautiful and can enjoy your body and mind. ”

"More united" snow children

As a professional sculptor, Liu Yang set his sights on the Beijing Winter Olympics. All along, the dream of sports and the complex of ice and snow have made him want to create sculptures for the motherland and the Winter Olympics.

In fact, "Snow Child" in Beijing Winter Olympic Park is the fourth in Liu Yang's "Fangtou Snow Child" series. The creation of this series is constantly changing, not only in the shape design is becoming more and more cute, the body image is also becoming more and more blurred. If the original can roughly distinguish the positive and negative, the "Snow Child" placed in the Winter Olympic Park can no longer be distinguished.

As the Snow Child series slowly moves towards a state of cuteness and ambiguity, it is also getting closer and closer to the style of snow sculptures. "The changes between the blocks of this sculpture are also very soft, and I used a word called 'run'." Liu Yang said that culture is like water, moisturizing things are silent, can be very gentle to change some hard things, but also can make an original sharp stone become soft and smooth.

Liu Yang believes that the "Snow Child" placed in the Winter Olympic Park should be an image of unity and friendship, conveying the concept of "friendship first, competition second". "Enjoying the process makes life better. It's like running, every step is a lot of fun. Happy to win a championship, happy not to win a championship. He said.

These two "stupid" "snow children", one carrying the other, do not have any sense of competition. Onlookers could not see the identity, gender, occupation, or relationship of the snow children, nor could they see their status. The work presents "human interaction" and shows "human unity", which is the embodiment of the Olympic spirit.

Liu Yang said that it can be seen from the addition of "more unity" to the Olympic motto that the Olympic spirit pursues not only "higher, faster, and stronger" competition and breakthroughs, but also the unity and mutual assistance of mankind. He made an analogy that, like children playing soccer together, it may not be who wants to win, but everyone wants to play together, "Experiencing the joy of doing things together." ”

The authors of other sculptures selected for the Beijing Winter Olympic Park are many friends of Liu Yang. They come from the United Kingdom, Turkey, Italy and other countries, because of the sculpture and because of the Beijing Winter Olympics, so that their sculptures are displayed in the same space.

"So the world is one big family." Liu Yang said.

Text/Photo: Liu Changxin, reporter of Nanfang Daily in Beijing

Intern Yang Ning