After the partition of 1947 between India and Pakistan, Nek Chand (1924–2015) became a “displaced person” and left his small village situated on the freshly marked border between the two countries. He settled permanently in Chandīgarh in the 1950s and worked as a road inspector for the city while also obsessively collecting oddly shaped rocks. At this time, the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) was transforming more than twenty small villages into his vision of a modernist urban center, Chandīgarh, for the newly independent India. Witnessing this public project of a global scale, Chand borrowed concrete construction techniques from Le Corbusier and worked—in secret—on his private outdoor art installation of rock formations and numerous cement, figurative sculptures.
Nestled on the outskirts of the Indian city of Chandīgarh is Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, a magical environment that testifies to its maker’s life philosophy as a follower of Gandhi, his spiritual inclinations as a Hindu, and his approaches to recycling, the landscape, and environmental preservation. Discovered in the 1970s by local government officials, Rock Garden was at risk of destruction, but because of public support the politicians and leaders of the region finally embraced it. Today, Rock Garden is more than twenty-five acres in size and contains more than two thousand works of art. It is now the second-most visited tourist site in India; only the Taj Mahal attracts more people. In the mid-1980s, Chand was invited to build a "Fantasy Garden" for the National Children’s Museum, in Washington, D.C. The result was the creation of approximately one hundred sculptures representative of the much larger project in India. When the National Children’s Museum vacated its property in 2004, the American Folk Art Museum received twenty-nine of these artworks, creating a perpetual link in New York to Nek Chand’s remarkable art environment in Asia.
Adapted from Brooke Davis Anderson, Juliana Driever, and Lee Kogan, exhibition text for Concrete Kingdom: Sculptures by Nek Chand. Brooke Davis Anderson, Juliana Driever, and Lee Kogan, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2006.
