5 . Inside the low lighting of Gather East Rock, the smell of coffee beans swirls (打旋) through the air. Art adorns (装点) the blue walls, but one painting stands out among the others. The painting’s name is “Mother Divine”, by the artist Sarahi Zacatelco. The mother in question is a green woman, with colorful plants adorning her head and water dripping (滴下) down her neck. In every brushstroke, Zacatelco pays homage to the man who taught her how to paint: her grandfather Agustin.

Born in 1982, Zacatelco learned how to create art from her grandfather in Oaxaca. At the time, her grandfather lived with her while her mother worked. Together, the two spent hours going out to the central plaza in Juchitán, where she let her senses take over. “You can see the food, you can smell it, you can see the lady selling flowers, and you can see everything,” she recalled excitedly. When she was six years old, her grandfather gave her a piece of paper and watercolors and showed her how to put the colors on it. She hasn’t stopped making art since.

Zacatelco’s grandparents made chess pieces out of rocks and wood to sell. They also made Talavera pottery (陶器) pieces, which Zacatelco described as “a Baroque tradition” that one might see in old colonial (殖民地的) homes. She no longer has any of her grandparent’s Talavera —“the tradition was lost due to being poorly paid and a lot of effort going into each piece.”

In the 1990s, Zacatelco’s mother decided to move her family to give them a better life. She moved her children to Mexico City, then to the Bronx, and then to the Brownsville neighborhood in Eastern Brooklyn. The family moved to Fair Haven, where Zacatelco still lives, in 2001. She called it the perfect place to raise two boys and two girls. Her family did not keep any of her grandfather’s old art before he died. But his artistic spirit did not die with him. Zacatelco carries on his legacy today with her art.

6 . Mary Shelley bends over her latest creation. Although the carving is only half complete, the image of a waitress holding a plate of eggs comes out from the board. Of Shelley’s nearly seven hundred carvings, many show scenes with cows on farms and people in restaurants.

From memories to carvings

“My work is a visual diary, ” Shelley says. “The carvings describe things I have experienced and felt at different times in my life.”

Every one of her carvings tells a story. Many of the stories in Shelley’s woodcarvings come from memories of her childhood in a rural (乡村的) area outside of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Shelley’s family managed a small farm. Mary was a serious girl who spent a lot of time raising animals, exploring outdoors, and reading. Although Shelley never felt especially artistic as a child, there was always an art project in the works in the Shelley household. Her grandmother painted. Her father was a commercial artist, who drew and wrote to make a living.

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Shelley attended Cornell University and hoped to become a writer, but an unusual present took her in another direction. At age 23, she received a gift her father had made-a woodcarving of her as a girl on the farm. The gift caught her interest. After gathering boards from a building site where she worked as a carpenter, Shelley bought some tools and taught herself to carve.

Shelley soon realized that she loved the slow, thoughtful process of working with wood and painting. “A carving is like a jigsaw puzzle (拼图游戏),”   she explains. “I didn’t know how it would all fit together, but the process of solving the puzzle kept me going.”

The Shelley style

Early in her career, people hired Shelley to carve special pieces that took four or five weeks to complete. The money she received motivated her to try more complicated scenes created by carving deeper in the wood. Over time, Shelley’s art began to have its own style. In a typical Shelley woodcarving, some objects seem to reach out of the frame while others drop back, creating a feeling of depth.

8 . For Vishwanath Mallabadi from Bangalore, India, there is no such thing as a useless object or “waste”. Give him anything—abandoned metal or plastic items, old devices, dysfunctional printed circuit boards — and he’ll create art out of it.

Vishwanath’s passion is particularly relevant in the current age, where India generates more e-waste than it can recycle. From 2019 to 2020, the country generated a total of more than 1 million tonnes of e waste. Of this, only 22.7 percent was collected, taken apart and recycled. The eco-artist has upcycled and transformed nearly 200 kg of e-waste into usable products and proposes eco-art as a means to deal with waste management.

Vishwanath’s father, D M Shambhu, was a famous sculptor and painter, but he wanted his son to choose medicine and become a doctor. However, Vishwanath, who was interested in upcycling second-hand objects right from childhood, decided to pursue a BFA in Applied Art. He later went on to work in a company as a high-level administrator and retired two years ago. “In my free time and during the weekends. I used to conduct experiments in e-waste and try to develop something unique,” he recalled.

So far, the eco-artist has created more than 500 objects. These include a six-foot tall sculpture made from upcycled computer keyboard keys, and a painting inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, using upcycled resistors (电阻器) on wood. Among his other artworks are a 42×38 inch figure statue created from upcycled keyboard keys on a sun board finished with plastics, a deer made of colorful used wires, plants and flowers from computer parts, and eco jewellery from upcycled digital wrist watch parts.

“The work involves selecting the e-waste objects—the texture, shape, and colour etc, and visualising and conceptualising the final product. It might take weeks and months for sculptures. However, sustainable initiatives and upcycled art are nowadays in demand in multinational companies opting for a sustainable culture,” he said.

Releasing her first album in 1999, Jolin quickly rose to fame in the following years.     1    (know) as the Dancing Queen of C-pop, Jolin Tsai has achieved everlasting popularity by releasing a series of     2    (commercial) successful albums, having sold over 250 million records since 1999. In 2003, her new album, Magic 72 , enabled her to become the female best selling artist of the year. Despite these remarkable     3    (honor), Jolin continued to strive for more. For instance, she     4    (choose) to represent Taiwan in the Expo (世博) 2010 in Shanghai, China by     5    (sing) the Taiwanese theme song Heartbeat of Taiwan. Throughout her career of more than 20 years, she has won     6    (number) awards such as the Golden Melody Awards,     7     enable her to be crowned the official Guinness world record (吉尼斯世界纪录). What’s more, she is also     8     social activist. She has attended countless events throughout the years to show her strong support     9     different causes.

Over the past 2 decades, she’s already reached an incredible degree of success. Her persistence and diligence has led more common folks     10    (pursue) their own goals.

Few people would consider a pair of scissors to be among the     1     (thing) that they need to take with them at all times. But for Shi Qinling, this tool has been with her everywhere she goes for the past decade, not as a way of self-protection, but     2     expression of art.

Scissors to this paper-cutting artist are just like pens to writers. Always having a pair of scissors with her     3     (allow) her to create art whenever inspiration (灵感) hits. Most of her paper-cutting works are from the moments in daily life, such as a very     4     (friend) dog, her own pets and scenes on the streets.

“Some people like to pen their feelings in diaries,     5     I prefer to cut them out,” says the 35-year-old woman     6     is now working at the Fenglin community cultural activity center in Shanghai.

Shi developed an interest in handicraft when she was a child who often found     7     (she) alone at home. This interest later developed into a passion and encouraged her to take arts and crafts design class during her university time. After her     8     (graduate), however, she landed a job at a ship design company, as she was unsure about what she wanted to do with her future. About a year later, the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Research Institute     9     (offer) her a position in their paper-cutting department. Realizing that she still had a love for the craft, she decided     10     (follow) her heart and go in for her favorite career.