Karamay

On 18 June 1985 I spent three hours birdwatching at an artificial lake near the power station in the Karamay Oilfield in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Peoples^([sic – meaning People's]) Republic of China. The site is approximately 46°N, 85°E, close to the oil town of Karamay and within 300 kms of the border with Kazakhstan in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is a desert region with rocky outcrops, dry ravines, rock and gravel desert plains, and saline flats.

1986, W G Harvey, “A Taste of Karamay”, in Oriental Bird Club Bulletin, number 4, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 8

This month he is in the news because the city of Karamay in western China is unveiling a sculpture that looks very similar to “Cloud Gate”, a no-tonne stainless-steel structure nicknamed the Bean, in Chicago’s Millennium Park, that is popular with Chicagoans and tourists alike....Determining “fair use” is complicated and to some extent subjective, but a prerequisite is that the artist accused of borrowing (or stealing in the Kapoor controversy) admits to using another artist’s art. That is not the case with “Big Oil Bubble” as the Karamay sculpture is called. Its defenders say that it was inspired by the city’s natural oil well (Karamay means black oil in Uighur, the local language) and that the blobs around the sculpture represent little oil bubbles.

2015 August 29, “The Bean and the Bubble”, in The Economist, volume 416, number 8953, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 27