My Visit to Vigeland Sculpture Park in Norway

By Fu Tongxian

Hangzhou sizzles in a 39-degree heat on July 24 while I am dressed in a sleeveless sweater visiting Vigeland Park in Oslo, the capital of Norway. The worlds largest sculpture park features 192 statues and 650 relief sculptures along an 850-meter-long axis.

After a long green corridor, two towering sculptures loom. They stand on either side of a bridge, each featuring a fierce fight between a man and a lizard. I take them to mean that evil is an indispensable part of human life and that one needs to fight bravely in order to achieve ones life goal. The bridge has 58 bronze sculptures featuring children as the theme: a baby with a young mother, a mother carrying a child, a son playing with his father, a daughter sitting astride on the shoulders of her father. However, many tourists choose to have their photographs taken with a statue of an angry boy. It is said to be one of the best sculptures in the park. The boy looks bad and mad, crying in anger and waving two tight fists, apparently expressing his frustration for having his request for something turned down.

The Fountain is in the center of the park. A huge bowl is uplifted by men in bronze, waters overflowing from the bowl. In each of the four corners of the fountain stands a set of 20 bronze sculptures, all featuring relationships between people and trees. The most spectacular set is a group of children suspending from a tree, like monkeys trying to salvage the moon from the water in a Chinese folk story. On the bottom of the fountain are dozens of relief sculptures tracing life and death.

The Monolith is the best part of the park, like the climax of a drama. It stands 17.3 meters in height and 3 meters in diameter and weighs 270 tons as a whole single piece of granite. The giant pole shows altogether 121 persons ascending toward the heaven. Their attitudes, gestures and postures vary, worth reading and exploring. It took three artists 14 years to translate the designers plan onto the monolith.

Around the Monolith totem pole are 36 sets of granite statues. I capture these statues with my camcorder while reading Chinese interpretations of the images, giving each statue a brief interpretation so that I can recall them back home.

The Wheel of Life is at the tail end of the park, composed of thousands of human figures. They look obscure in comparison with the Monolith.

I linger in the park after most of the fellows in our tour group have left, engrossed in the images I have seen. At the gate, I stop to admire the bronze statue of Gustav Vigeland, the designer of all the images of the park. The great sculptor stands with his feet apart, a chisel in the left hand and a hammer in the right. The statue itself silently relates the life story of the sculptor; on the pedestal are two lines of words: his name and the year of his birth and the year of his death.

When he proposed to build a sculpture park, the city government gave him the space he needed and the local people financed the project. It took him twenty years to design and complete the park, which belongs not only to Oslo but also to the world.

The park is a major tourist attraction in Norway. Thousands of tourists come to the park every day. I understand the park means that the beauty of life is to create and leave something meaningful behind even when an individual life ceases to be.