Imitations by Amateurs Harms Professionals’ Creations
The road of innovation is undoubtedly difficult to walk on. He asked, “If what a husband does all day long is to pour sand onto the glass tea table in the living room and draw all kinds of things in it, what do you think the wife will think?” And in order to use both hands adroitly, he once placed his right hand in the pocket for a whole month and did all things using the left hand. In 2007, he was invited to perform on the stage of the Golden Horse Awards presentation ceremony, which was his first performance in public ever. His performance was amazing, so he became famous overnight, and the audiences in Taiwan were able to enjoy a brilliant sand animation performance for the first time.
After the sand art issue grew hot, what immediately ensued was the emergence of followers. As for this, Minta remarked that the pioneer will certainly have many followers, and if this can result in more innovations and further progress in sand art, then the whole matter can develop positively. What he fears is that the followers do nothing but to roll out shoddy imitations and only pay attention to superficial “stunts” rather than internal “significance.” “In so doing, the followers will instead lead to the elimination of truly professional works."
He added that presently in mainland China and Taiwan, there have emerged quite a few so-called “sand artists” who originally worked as extras or street performers and who might use a pre-shot clip of sand animation performance and pretend to be performing live; or they might just copy another artist’s work to perfection, but are lacking in creativity and skill. If such impostors can win acclaim as much, then it will be unfair to those genuine aesthetic designers and artists. It’s just like the last time when he launched the trend of body painting and ended up walking away from the art because some imitators had contaminated the art with their low-quality work so that the trend could be watered down and the true face of the art regained.
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