Artist 11: JOOheng Tan

I get bored easily. So in the spirit of keeping things summery and unique. This is a famous sand sculptor. He makes his living building sandcastles. I'm not going to lie if I could pull that off, I would. He works at the beach... at least most of the time. Some of them are actually at sites where sand was dumped specifically for him and/or others to sculpt.

The crazy thing about it is, sand is really a pain to work with. You can't build anything too far off the foundation. It's very limiting. And these are so intricate, but still creative in spite of all the limitations of working with sand. A lot of planning must have gone into these sculptures. It reminds me of my high school English teacher's idea of enabling constraints. She said that some boundaries are actually really helpful with creativity. They give us a starting place and something to push up against. I guess it gives you a goal: see how far you can bend the rules without breaking them. So maybe that makes sand an ideal medium to work with. Still, I think I'll leave the sand sculpting to the professionals.

Check out the Fstoppers article  with a video of the artist putting together some of these sculptures and as always check out the artist's website to see some more of his work.