Sand performer Xiao Gang and his sand painting world

Picking up a handful of sand, one person can trace out a life-like portrait, paint a picture of landscape, or tell us a touching love story. This is the performing art called sand painting, which enjoys increasing popularity in China. Today let’s step into the world of a famous Sand performer Xiao Gang.

Xiao Gang got to know sand painting by chance when he went to Italy in 2007. He encountered with a street artist and moved by his performance. After that he came back to China and started to learn sand painting by watching overseas video websites. Although his major in university was engineering, he never gave up practicing the sand painting. Relying on his accumulated fine-art skills and persistent efforts, he was highly adept in handling the sand performance. After two years practices, he joined the rank of excellent sand performers.

Sand paintings were not widespread in China in the early period. Xiao Gang made enormous efforts in finding sand for performance. Nowadays he can buy readily-made sand in different colors. Xiao Gang is satisfied with his handmade light box, which can release colorful lights such as red, yellow, blue, and green etc. He changes the lamp tube into LCD TV, thus making his static sand painting more vivid and expressive.

It takes Xiao Gang five or six minutes to finish the performance, but he has to prepare for it five or six days in advance behind the stage. His flexible fingers, along with palm and nails, present many beautiful sand paintings.

Xiao Gang took part in the competition of China's Got Talent in 2013 and performed the light paintings in this competition.