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Outside in
In the jungle outside the growing city of Chandigarh, twelve-year-old street child Ram discovers a hidden rock garden, befriends its creator--a factory worked named Nek--and tries to save Nek's garden when it's threatened with destruction.
Book
A GARDEN OF FIGURES MADE FROM THE RUBBLE OF A CITY BRINGS A SMILE TO MY FACE
The artist, Nek Chand, was a victim of Indian Partition in 1947, in which the newly independent India was split into two, Pakistan was created to house the Muslim community, and the largest human migration in history began. Chand was born to a farming family in Balian Kalan, a village in Shankargar, now in Pakistan. There were no artists in the family but Chand, inspired by his mother's stories of kings and queens in a magic kingdom, played in the local forest and river, making model houses and little sculptures. Being Hindu, the family was forced to relocate to India in 1947. They came to Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab. Remarkably, Chandigarh was in the throes of being re-designed as a Utopia by the Modernist architect Le Corbusier. He planned it along severely rational lines, with grid-like streets and starkly functional buildings. In its quality of obsession, it reminds me of Sir Peter Blake's studio in Shepherd's Bush, London, where whole sections of the different floors are filled with toys, crockery, German helmets and Victorian dolls. I once asked him what lay behind his collector's instinct: he said it might have been the moment when, walking through London with his mother, he discovered that his favourite toy-shop had been bombed to smithereens. Perhaps his collecting, he said, was a way of bringing the lost toys back. Given which, it was a lovely surprise to find, from Simon Martin, artistic director of Pallant House, that Blake is a fan of Chand and has two of his sculptures in his studio. Chand died three weeks ago, on the eve of the new exhibition. Martin went to Chandigarh in April to see the Rock Garden, and receive Chand's blessing for the show. \"It was like meeting the Wizard of Oz,\" he says. \"He sits quite outside any progression of the history of art. People respond immediately to his direct, unacademic creativity. In a word, his sculptures make people happy.\"
Newspaper Article
The secret kingdom : Nek Chand, a changing India, and a hidden world of art
\"The ... story of the world's largest visionary environment: the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, kept secret by outsider artist Nek Chand for fifteen years\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Nek Chand obituary
[Nek Chand] began his vast creation in secrecy. From 1952 he was working as a roads inspector as part of Le Corbusier 's huge construction project of Chandigarh, the new capital of the half of Punjab remaining in independent India after partition in 1947. Outside that work, however, he had begun to build his clandestine garden in a forest clearing in 1958. Hardly anyone knew about it until, after 15 years, it was discovered by the city authorities. He was potentially in serious trouble: he had been building illegally on city land in an area under strict control, and he was a city employee to boot. While he was on a visit to his exhibitions in the US in 1996, his few remaining staff were taken away, leaving the garden unattended. As a result, vandals damaged many of the sculptures. Eventually Chand's international admirers formed the Nek Chand Foundation and sent volunteers to work at the garden. The attraction is now as popular as it has ever been. Chand was the first person in his village to go to high school, and after studies in Lahore returned to work on the family farm, where he built huge scarecrows out of cloth and rag. But his peaceful existence received an almighty jolt with partition, when sectarian violence forced his family to leave the ancestral home. They trekked in a refugee column for three weeks before finding safety, and Chand eventually found employment in Chandigarh, supervising road construction.
Newspaper Article
Making Fantasy From Scrap
The Capital Children's Museum is a ''hands on'' museum popular with Washington children and their parents. Situated at the corner of Third and H Streets, Northeast, the museum is a wondrous playland that teaches children how to enjoy, and cope with, daily life. Some of the most popular exhibits include the ''city room,'' which contains a fire engine, a city bus and a telephone booth; the ''simply machine room,'' where children learn how to use scales, pulleys and other tools; and the ''future center,'' where children can play the educational computer games.
Newspaper Article
Nek Chand
The Indian artist [Nek Chand Saini] created the Rock Garden, a sprawling display of sculptures crafted out of discarded household items and waste in the northern city of Chandigarh. He began working on his craft in the 1960s, when he cleared a small patch in the forest behind Chandigarh's Sukhna Lake and started creating statues and figurines using everything from discarded rubber tyres to colourful glass bangles.
Newspaper Article
Nek Chand, 90, Creator of a Sculpture Kingdom
Mr. Chand's life's work, known as the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, covers several acres and is populated by rock sculptures and figures of dancing women and animals, many of them fashioned from found objects like the mudguards of motorcycles and broken bangles.
Newspaper Article
'Kingdom of gods' in India casts spell on visitors
\"After seeing all the things thrown along the roadside I thought maybe I could create something beautiful out of them,\" [Nek Chand] recalls. \"My idea was to create a kingdom of the gods.\" Chand, who still spends at least 10 to 12 hours every day creating human, animal and abstract forms, has made versions of his garden in Paris, Washington, London and Germany. The garden has 14 different chambers including a forecourt housing natural rock forms, a chamber for a royal poet and a musician complete with a pond and a hut. The centrepiece of the main court is a royal throne with natural stone forms depicting gods and goddesses lining the walls.
Newspaper Article