Cardboard Sculptures Link a Tribeca Artist to His Ancestral Past

Warren King with the untitled cardboard sculpture he placed in Tribeca Park on the morning of April 20. Early that evening it was taken. "I liked your work of art," the person who removed it wrote to King. "I coudn't leave it in the park. I took it and now it's in my house. It's very beautiful." Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Around 7 a.m. on April 20, the figure of a man arrived in Tribeca Park. Made of cardboard, yet uncannily lifelike in expression and bearing, he sat pensively on a bench for the next 12 hours. Througout the day, his mysterious presence grabbed the attention of passersby, and then he was gone. Only a QR code, discreetly affixed to the man’s hollow back had provided a clue to his maker: the Tribeca artist Warren King.  

King, 51, crafts cardboard figures as a way, he says, to connect to his own Chinese heritage. Each of his finished, featherweight pieces, many painted and looking every bit like carved wood, take up to three weeks to complete. He finished the work in Tribeca Park in two-and-a-half days. “If it’s gone, it’s ok,” he said that day. 

The widely exhibited artist, who has engineering degrees from MIT and Stanford, began making art full-time just eight years ago. He works out of his apartment on White Street, where he and his wife, Rochelle King, and their two sons, have lived for three years. King recently talked with Trib editor Carl Glassman about his art and the cultural and family influences behind his creations. Below is an edited transcription from that interview.

Since before I was born my destiny had been decided for me. My father was an engineer, so I was going to focus on math and science and eventually take over his business. I always had an interest in art but never pursued it. I only took a handful of classes here and there just for fun. 

After getting a masters degree, I spent about two years designing stadiums and parking structures before realizing it wasn’t for me. When I decided to leave my father’s company, it was like an earthquake in our household. My dad was very upset, and our relationship was strained for a long time.  It was very hard on him, as a Chinese father, to accept that I wouldn’t be following in his footsteps. 

I went into a software startup just at the beginning of the dotcom boom. The company was blowing up. It went from 200 people to 1,500 in three years, and we were working crazy hours week after week just to keep up.  I went up the ladder pretty quickly, moved to a few other software companies, and eventually ended up as the executive in charge of professional services. By then, my father had forgiven me for leaving. He was proud. 

But after 17 years in software, I got burned out and decided to take a sabbatical. At the time, my wife had an opportunity in Sweden, and we took it almost on a whim. I wasn’t going to look for a job there, so I just focused on the kids. I had been making masks and costumes for them since they were young, using whatever we had around the house. When their teachers found out that I had a skill with cardboard, I was called on for every school play or event to do costumes and props. Sometimes I would make 20 or 25 masks. Wolves, cats, dogs, armor... I was getting a lot of practice, and the projects were getting more and more elaborate.

Once we had settled in Sweden, I thought, hey, why don’t I try to make something for myself? I thought that doing a life-like figure would be challenging, but who?

A few years before, we had taken a big family trip with my parents, my aunts and my brothers and their families to Shaoxing, the village outside Shanghai where my dad grew up. My family had lived there for generations, but when the Communists took control, most of them left for Taiwan and never went back, so we lost a lot of those connections.

The town had become pretty run down. My dad was showing us where he had grown up, when an older couple came out of a building to see what was going on.  They were suspicious at first but very quickly they were laughing and talking with my father and my aunts. It turned out that they were neighbors of my family over 50 years ago, and actually remembered my grandparents. It was surreal, because their faces and gestures reminded me so much of my grandparents.

After that trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about how our lives had completely diverged. My brothers and I  grew up in affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, and here we were in the middle of China chatting with people who used to be so close to our family. The idea that we had connections to people who seemed so different was always on my mind. So I decided that the first figures that I would make would be based on the photos of the people I met that day.  

It took about two or three weeks to make each figure. I only met these people that one time, but crafting their faces meticulously by hand built up this feeling of a connection that I couldn’t get any other way. I felt a closeness to them by studying their faces so intensely for so long.  So I kept making more. I’ve made almost 20 of them so far.

I had a chance to exhibit some of them at a tiny gallery in Stockholm, but then somebody saw them and invited me for another show, which led to another, and it kept going. Eventually I thought, I guess I’m an artist now.

For about two years I worked on another series that was all about my family history, based on stories about my parents, my grandparents, my relatives in China who left during the Communist Revolution. There’s a lot of war, turmoil, and migration, but I was trying to relate to all of that from the perspective of a child of immigrants. I talked to my dad for hours, trying to get all the history and his feelings about that time.

The biggest thing for him was that he felt somebody was interested in remembering, that what I was doing was honoring the culture. He sent pictures of my work to his relatives.  He was proud to have an artist in the family. 

Lately,  I’ve been making sculptures of people whose lives intrigue me somehow. I always wanted to live close to Chinatown but I didn’t realize how much inspiration I’d find there. I go there twice a week to walk around and be revitalized. In my graduating class of some 400 kids in school in Wisconsin there were maybe a dozen minorities and only a few Asians. So coming to Chinatown and seeing such a rich community is incredible. I like to feel immersed in that.

After about eight years of doing this, I’m still learning how to use cardboard. It’s an industrial material made to be really strong, but it has a lot of limitations as well. A lot of the appeal is just figuring out how to make it work. When I curve the cardboard I only bend it along the corrugations, so with that limitation you can’t make a truly round shape. But the human figure is full of round shapes. So instead of making a real round surface, you’re really using edges and shadows to make it appear as if it’s rounded. There’s a lot of geometry involved in the process, but that just goes to the math and engineering part of my brain. 

The interesting thing about the human figure, especially with the face and the hands, is that just a millimeter of difference can totally change the expression. But I’m not trying to achieve total realism. Sometimes when you make it with more detail it actually loses something. There’s a fine point where it’s abstract but yet recognizable, and when you hit that sweet spot then a lot of the emotion you see in it is really projected onto it by the viewer. 

I’ve exhibited and sold work in the past as a means to get it out to a wider audience, but to be honest, I’m pretty attached to my stuff because it’s so personal. At this point I’m lucky enough not to have to rely on it to live, so I’m just using it to explore some of my own ideas and try to connect to people in different ways.

I had been thinking about public art as a way to do that. A lot of statues in parks are there to memorialize an important person or moment. That’s actually the opposite of what I want to do, which is just to capture an everyday point in time and place. Just something mundane. 

I’d thought about leaving a piece out in public before but if I’d spent three weeks making something and then it got taken or vandalized after a couple of hours it would be kind of a bummer.  But I’ve recently been trying to make figures as fast as possible as an exercise to loosen up.

The piece I put in Tribeca Park took just two-and-a-half days. After placing it there at 7 a.m., I went back around 9 a.m. and hung out for a while just to watch. Most people walked by, or took a snapshot or a selfie. It was rare for someone to stop and really observe it.

Around 9:30 or 10 two younger guys showed up, dressed like they were on a break from a construction project. I didn’t understand what they were saying because they were speaking Spanish, but they were obviously enjoying it and having this intense conversation about it. They looked at it from different angles, crouched down, climbed onto the bench to look behind it. They pointed at the face and hands. It was 20 or 30 minutes of this. I was so touched that I was actually thinking, wow, I should just go over there and tell them they can just take it home. But I was too shy to approach them. Then they spotted the QR code that I had taped to the inside of the sculpture, which linked to my Instagram account.

They scanned the code, and then I got a notice on my phone that I had a new follower. You could tell it was a brand new account, because there were no posts and I was the only one they were following.  Eventually, they left, and I also left for the day. At 6 p.m., I went back and the sculpture was still there, but when I went back again at 7, it was gone.  Not a trace left.  I asked some people if they had seen anyone take it, but no one saw anything.  That evening I made an Instagram post saying the figure had been taken. It wasn’t an angry post, it was just, Oh well, it's gone. I wrote that I didn’t know what happened to it but I chose to believe that someone decided to give it a better home. 

Then about 30 minutes later I got a new comment on my post. It said, “I liked your work of art. I couldn’t leave it in the park. I took it and now it’s in my house. It’s very beautiful.”

I was a little stunned. And so I clicked on the profile and there was only one post, a photo of my sculpture in someone’s living room.  But then I realized that the username sounded familiar. I went back to my Instagram interactions and sure enough, it was the account that was created that morning by those two guys who were looking at it. 

I wasn’t upset, I was actually happy that they got it because they really appreciated it. So I wrote back to them and said, “Were you there this morning at 10 a.m. with your friend? I was there and I saw you. I could see that you truly enjoyed the sculpture and I appreciated it very much. To tell you the truth I thought about giving it to you and I almost did. I’m very happy for you to have it. Thank you for letting me know.” 

And they replied and said, “Thanks to you for that work of art and your time. I hope the next project of yours I will be the chosen one again. Gracias.”

This whole project of putting a figure out in public has been fascinating. There have been all kinds of reactions to the figure, and to the fact that someone took it.  Some people were angry that it was “stolen.” but some people said they would have taken it, too. It did rob other people of the chance to see it but I was thinking, when you sell your work you’re giving it to a collector and they bring it home and put it in their living room and no one else ever sees it either. As far as I'm concerned, this is better! I got to see someone really connect to it. These guys might not have the opportunity to acquire art, but they had a genuine love for it. I can’t imagine a better outcome.