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.
Madam Butterfly,
her name actually is not Cio-Cio San, but
Gao Suyun (高素云)
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.
