Two Outdoor Art Projects Take Shape

There’s a three-tiered skeletal tower taking form in the Kaiser Permanente parking lot at College Street and Chavez Ravine Place. And part of a fence on Adobe Street now appears to be made of rusty shovels and pitchforks.

The tower and fence are two public art projects nearing completion in Chinatown. Financed by developers as part of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s public art program, the works by Chinese-American artists Carl Cheng and May Sun are expected to be finished by the end of the month.

Cheng’s Water Lens Tower, perched in front of Kaiser’s mental health facility on a bluff overlooking Chinatown, is a 30-foot-tall, painted steel tower resembling a telescope. When completed, water will drip from the top of the tower through two large plastic lenses into a lighted pool at the bottom.

The ripples caused when the water hits the lenses will be projected onto the ground by the sun, the artist said. “It’s a play on sun and water,” said Cheng, a Santa Monica resident who was born in San Francisco and raised in Los Angeles. “It’s a contemplative piece.”

Sun, a Hong Kong native who now lives in Hollywood, chose to create a historical work that memorializes the first Chinese immigrant laborers. She used coated, rusted steel to fashion an 8-foot-tall, 15-foot-long piece of fence that appears to be made of shovels and pitchforks.

In between the bars of the fence, which is across the street from the Chinatown Professional and Medical Center, will be four panels of photographs and text that explain the immigrants’ lives.

The photographs, which Sun obtained from the Chinese Historical Society, show an herbal shop, agricultural workers, a produce peddler and immigrant wives.

Sun said she chose the rustic theme because the work is located near active oil wells and not far from Union Station and the railroad tracks, which many Chinese immigrants helped to build.

The Community Redevelopment Agency in 1985 established a public art policy that requires developers to contribute 1% of the total development cost to on-site artworks, cultural programs and projects on public sites. Cheng’s work cost $41,000 and Sun’s cost $22,000, according to CRA officials.