Sand Art

The Butterfly Love relates the doomed romance between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (Abdullah, 2010)

Sand animation or better known as sand art is simply the art of using one's hands to draw with sand. Artists create their master pieces by adding or removing sand from glass table lit from below. By using both positive and negative space, amazing images come to life before the audience. The presentation is often enhanced by the use of music and various lighting techniques under the table. Most performances follow a story line or script. This creates a sense of motion in the imagery and draws the audience into the creation process.

Initially a means to create animated short films, sand animation was brought into the live performing arts stage by Ferenc Cako. You may hear these live performances called sand art, or sand painting. Although the art itself has been around for decades, there are still very few successful artists. Many find that simply being able to draw images with sand is not enough to captivate observers. They must also be able to entertain and create and tell a compelling story. Today there are only a handful of well known sand animation artist within the community (adapted from Hubpages.com, 2010)

Loong Bee, using only his hands to create various animations (Abdullah, 2010)

As for our event, we're grateful to have Loong Bee, one of the prominent sand artist to perform a round of sand animation during our night performance on the 15th of September 2010. Loong Bee is famous for his Butterfly Lovers (Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai) and Titanic sand animation. So, do not miss the opportunity to witness this fantastic talent by our local artist!