Thoughts on a grain of rice

hoooomg that detail

I have discovered the most stress-inducing art form ever – drawing and writing on rice. I don’t quite understand how this feat is logically possible for humans to accomplish. Seriously. My thorough two second research on Wikipedia didn’t help at all, so I’ve just decided that these rice artists must use scalpels carefully hand-constructed by ants and drink only free-range unicorn tears while they etch their singular rice grains that end up making my normal drawings look amateur. Because otherwise I’d need to think a bit too deeply about what I was doing in drawing class the past 10 years. And in case you’re not East Asian and haven’t eaten rice since you were in the womb, a single grain is about 5 mm long, or about half the length of your pinkie nail. So these guys are drawing on a space smaller than your littlest nail, nonstop for up to months on end, without shaking or trembling. Without even dropping anything. 

Just look again and appreciate this little miracle:

woah.

The two pictures I’ve posted above are both works that belong to one artist named Chen Forng-Shern, who taught himself to to draw tiny pictures on tiny cereal grains because the art was dying out and there was hardly anyone left who could teach him. He needed to develop special breathing techniques and muscle coordination to make sure he wouldn’t tremble while etching each little line of millions of little lines. I can’t even begin to fathom the patience, endurance and discipline this man needed to pursue rice art as a living.

Chen says about his work, “The seemed tiny objects actually hide the universe without boundaries. Each project takes me on an adventure of wonders; the wisdoms hidden within are beyond my grasping”. In a way, his words reflect my own thoughts about the whole process – that despite the fact that his art lives on a microscopic level, it is part of something far bigger. It requires the highest levels of discipline, skill and supreme patience to let the artist concentrate so intensely on a canvas where every twitch of the hand must be calculated, every breath must be controlled. Your senses are completely attuned to every little movement. Nothing escapes your notice. Your vision narrows down to one tiny little rice grain, and in those minutes, that rice grain becomes your universe.

And of course, I had to try it out. Here’s my attempt:

if you look closely, you can see the Mona Lisa.

-frog