British sculptor Antony Gormley (born in London in 1950) is one of the foremost sculptors of his generation. A winner of the Turner Prize in 1994, Gormley is a conceptual artist working in a physical medium: He revitalized the sculptural vocabulary of the human form to articulate the universal abstract qualities of human experience.
The basic concept of his global "Field" project, which began in 1989, is to go to a particular region and then ask people of all ages local to the clay, to form it into a surrogate world population. The project has now traveled to the four corners of the world including Brazil, Britain, Germany and Mexico. The Asian version of the project involved 350 people from Xiangshan village, northeast of the city of Guangzhou in south China, making 190,000 hand-size figures under Gormley's guidance from 125 tons of local red clay during an intensive five-day period in January 2003.
The result is a vast sculptural installation, which is currently on view until Nov. 28 in the gymnasium of a disused school in the heart of Roppongi, Tokyo. It stands as a unique image of self and community, invested with the time, love and personality of each individual maker, whose photographs are also on display.