Madam
Butterfly is 80-year old now, and never met
Captain Pinkerton in her life, and never been
in love with any American Navy officer. No!
But she has always enjoyed watching
butterfly, whether they are in a garden or on
a piece of artwork, and has always enjoyed
watching sports, in this case on television
only. When she was 77-year old back in 2004,
she decided to do something about the two
hobbies that she loved most, and thus an idea
of embroidering 2008 butterflies as her gift
to Beijing Olympics 2008 came to her mind.
So
the stage for her monumental artwork is set,
not in a Japanese house in Nagasaki, but in a
Chinese flat in Zhenzhou, on a piece of white
cloth, about 27-m long by 1-m wide. Since
then, her masterpiece was unfolded by the
day, with a new butterfly emerging almost
every hour.
When
she bred her first 100 or so butterflies, as
it is reported, she just carelessly released
them into a total free world where there were
no rules or regulations to govern their
behaviour. But as the population grew, the
Garden of Eden gradually demonstrated a sign
of descending into the hell of chaos. And it
was by then she realised that she needed a
development control plan. So she invited her
teenager grandson, a gifted award-winning
stamp designer, to draft a DCP which could
meet her policy objective of ensuring that no
individual butterfly would take too much
spatial resource in the name of freedom of
expression to the point that suppresses other
butterfly’s basic butterfly rights of
showing up. Since she replaced her farcical
utopia vision of wild free world with her
grandson’s realistic idea of orderly
co-existence, peace was re-installed on her
cloth and the butterfly community prospered.
Of
course, it is never easy to live up to the
expectation of being a creator, and when this
creator is merely a human being, it is twice
difficult; and when this human being is in an
advanced age of around the corner of 80, the
hardship has to be tripled, considering each
butterfly requires hundreds even over a
thousand stitches to take shape, which hurt
her back, neck and eyesight greatly. But she
kept on keeping on. And then two and a half
years later, in early March 2007, a
triumphant announcement by her family on her
behalf was heard all over China that the
mission of creating 2008 butterflies was
accomplished.
A
portion of the butterfly community created by
Madam Butterfly
It
is said that with the faithful implementation
of her grandson’s practical DCP, the
masterpiece has not only been able to
accommodate over 2000 acrobatic butterflies
that each assumes an unique identity with
distinctive colour, shape and size, but
facilitates some basic infrastructure,
including a 2.8-m track and 35 sports images,
as well as an information board, containing
the Olympic logo, the maps of the world and
China, the flags of the countries that
participate the games, and the names of
Chinese Olympians. Its grand title is the
theme slogan of the Beijing Olympics: One
World One Dream (同一个世界，同一个梦想) – very much to the
envy of Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese
philosopher lived more than 2000 years ago.
“Am I Zhuangzi who has dreamed to be a
butterfly? Or I’m actually a butterfly who
has dreamed to be Zhuangzi?” he might well
wonder again, hehee …
Right
now the butterfly creator’s biggest dream
is to go to Beijing presenting in person the
2008 butterflies to the Olympics on the 8th
day of the 8th month in the year of 2008. By
then our Madam Butterfly will be 80 plus
1-year old.
