Dong people's well pavilion: functions, material, structure, construction

The Dong people's well pavilion is the main venue for cultural and public life—for the villagers to take a rest, elderly to tell stories, singers and theatre masters to teach apprentices, and rehearsals for lusheng (a reed-pipe wind instrument) performances.

Little Table and Stools of the Dong Minority in Liping and the Cultural Context of Daily Furniture

Just as the Miao Minority, the Dong Minority is also migratory. Therefore, people of the same nationality live together in a village according to their branches. From village to village, the large cultures are similar but with respective cultures of their own. For instance, when the aged in Dong Village of Tang’an passes away, he/she would be encoffined in the drum-tower and farewell to all the people from the same village. The time of entombment would be noticed, and some of the dead would be buried 20 years later. While such cultural conventions do not exist in the Dong Village of Dimen in Tong County (Liping).

Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari was born in Novara in 1932. The reference point of his work has always been the meaning of form and project. He has long-standing working relationships with leading Italian companies and his works and objects have been exhibited at, and included in the collections of, some of the foremost international museums and galleries. He has led teaching courses. He has received countless awards and accolades, including 4 "compassi d'oro".

Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi, born in 1904 in Los Angeles to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the American writer Leonie Gilmour, studied at Columbia University and the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. He subsequently established his first independent studio and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927. Noguchi became an assistant to Constantin Brancusi in Paris and presented his first solo exhibition in New York. After studying brush drawing in China, he travelled to Japan to work with clay under the master potter Jinmatsu Uno.

His experiences living and working in different cultural circles are reflected in Isamu Noguchi's work as an artist. He is considered a universal talent with a creative oeuvre that went beyond sculpture to encompass stage sets, furniture, lighting, interiors as well as outdoor plazas and gardens. His sculptural style is indebted to a vocabulary of organic forms and exerted a sustained influence on the design of the 1950s.

'My Father, Yone Noguchi is Japanese and has long been known as an interpreter of the East and West, through poetry. I wish to do the same thing through sculpture', he wrote in his proposal for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Isamu Noguchi died in New York in 1988.