Maker PEASANT DA VINCIS
PEASANT DA VINCIS
Incredible inventions from Chinese villagers.
By Tom Vanderbilt
In 2004, the Chinese artist and collector
Cai Guo-Qiang began to hear stories about
fantastic “peasant inventions” trickling out
of the Chinese countryside: submarines,
airplanes, robots, and even “UFOs,” fashioned
in tiny backyard workshops by people without
easy access to technical information, tools,
and proper materials.
The following year, Cai would acquire his
first invention, a fish-shaped submarine —
replete with eyes, fins, and painted depth
markings on the side — named Twilight No. 1.
The sub, which is pedal-power-propelled by
its pilot, is one of a number of submersibles
built by Li Yuming, a 70-year-old with a grade-school education who lives in Wuhan. Having
mortgaged his house to fund his work, Li
rises each day to tinker with his submarines,
38 Make: makezine.com/27
working just outside the door from his wife,
who, as Cai recounts, “watches his shadow
at work.”
The life of a would-be peasant inventor is not
an easy one, Cai tells me over breakfast at The
Peninsula hotel in Shanghai one morning.
When Li built a second, larger submarine —
named, naturally, Twilight No. 2 — and set out
to sail it down the river, “the government was
worried that he would have a liability issue
if it sunk,” Cai says. Authorities were also
concerned it would clog the traffic of local
waterways. “So the government river authorities towed the boat to a subsidiary river where
there’s less traffic, and just let it sink.”
As an artist, Cai has become known primarily for his work with the traditional Chinese
media of gunpowder and fireworks (I first met
Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio
