Pig

Designer-mentee: Tin Lau
Collective Master-mentors: Freeman Lau, Cynthia Sah
Lead Curator: Marisa Yiu

L 30 x W 8 x H 30 cm
PETG, Vero (special resin for polyjet 3D printing)

This work references Bing Feng, a mythical animal found in the Classic of Mountains and Seas. It is two half-pigs linked together at the waist, facing opposite directions. The two sides of the Bing Feng in this work face the past and the future. In the past, we have domesticated pigs for 9,000 years. “The earliest known Chinese domestic pigs have a direct connection with modern Chinese breeds, suggesting a long, unbroken history of pigs and people in this part of East Asia.” (Larson, 2010)

The snout and nostrils were picked as the main sculptural feature to represent the Bing Feng. The designer designed an icon of the snout, which when turned up-side-down becomes a heart. The snout and the heart are placed on opposite sides of the sculpture to create the volume in-between with parametric transition of the two shapes. The sculpture is 3D-printed in two parts as an homage to the designer’s father, Freeman Lau’s pig sculpture, which was also a two-part sculpture. One part of the sculpture is printed with fused deposition modeling (FDM), a relatively primitive method. The other part is printed with state-of-the-art full color polyjet technology, achieving a subtle grey to white gradient. The two parts, one old, one new, illustrates the concept of time when put together. One may look through the nostrils and see “past” from “future” or “future” from “past”

Shi Zhe by Freeman Lau (2019)

When Freeman Lau worked on the Year of the Pig for Project Twelve, the Chinese character “family” popped into his mind. The upper of it refers to a house while the bottom, a pig. This coincides with the concept in Chinese culture that a well-off family always raises pigs. He tried to visualise the feeling of being blessed and transformed it into an image of two people standing hand-in-hand, that was the Chinese character “happiness”. A family could only be formed when two people stay together. Composed of two connected pigs, the sculpture was named “She Zhe”, symbolising a sweet and close-knit family.