Chengdu International Finance Square
Fifteen-meter bronze panda sculpture caught mid-climb up a shopping mall's glass facade.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Chengdu International Finance Square walks up to the fifteen-meter bronze panda climbing the mall's glass corner, ten stories above the street, and traces it back to a phone call an Australian sculptor named Lawrence Argent almost turned down. It follows why he refused to make another round, cartoonish panda, and built one climbing instead, muscles bunched, named I Am Here. You'll hear how critic Feng Huang read the pose as a rebuttal to how China usually pictures its national animal, and what warning Argent tried to hide inside a luxury mall. Ride the escalators to the seventh floor to stand face to face with the same claw from below.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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