CHINA USA PAPER SCULPTURES (Chinese paper sculptures stretch imaginations in New York)

The line of pure white busts sitting amongst the dust in Li Hongbo's Beijing studio could be found in any art classroom around the world. That is until the 38-year-old Chinese artist places his hands on one, lifts gently, and what had seemed like solid plaster transforms into a live, amorphous mass. A roman soldier stretches like elastic, a pretty English maid suddenly rises like a terrible phantasm. They are neither plaster nor clay, but concertinas of thousands of fine pieces of paper.“At the beginning, I discovered the flexible nature of paper through Chinese paper toys and paper lanterns. Later, I used this to make a gun. A gun is solid, used for killing, but I turned it into a tool for play or for decoration. In this way, it lost both the form of a gun, and the culture inherent to a gun. It became a game,“ he said. To make his sculptures Li uses a stencil to paste glue in narrow strips across large pieces of paper that he then sticks together to form blocks of 500. He stacks