rockgarden

Nek Chand Saini (1924-) is an Indian outsider artist, famous for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, an 18-acre sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India. He moved to Chandigarh following the Act of Partition as a refugee. The city of Chandigarh was built as a new city and capital of Punjab following the loss of Lahore to Pakistan. It was to be the first planned city in India, and Nek Chand found employment with the Public Works Department in 1951, as a road inspector and overseer of upto two hundred labourers.

His initial development of the garden began when he started collecting natural rocks and stones from the local rivers. He would cycle upto twenty miles on his bike to gather unusual rocks which he felt had interesting forms or were figurative.

In his spare time, Nek Chand began collecting materials from demolition sites around the city. He recycled these materials into his own vision of the divine kingdom of Sukrani, choosing a gorge in a nearby forest for his work. The gorge had been designated as a land conservancy, a forest buffer established in 1902 that nothing could be built on. Chand’s work was illegal, but he was able to hide it for eighteen years before it was discovered by the authorities in 1975. By this time it had grown into a twelve acre complex of interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of pottery-covered concrete sculptures of dancers, musicians, and animals.
His work was in serious danger of being demolished, but he was able to get public opinion on his side, and in 1976 the park was inaugurated as a public space. Nek Chand was given a salary, a title ("Sub-Divisional Engineer, Rock Garden"), and a workforce of 50 laborers so that he could concentrate full-time on his work. It even appeared on an Indian stamp in 1983. The Rock Garden is still made out of recycled materials; indeed, with the government’s help Chand was able to set up collection centers around the city for waste, especially rags and broken ceramics.
When Chand left the country on a lecture tour in 1996, the city withdrew his funding and vandals attacked the park. The Rock Garden Society took over the administration and upkeep of the world’s largest visionary environment. The garden is visited by over five thousand people daily, with a total of over twelve million visitors since its inception.
His statues have found their way into museums across the world, including an environment at the Capitol Children’s Museum in Washington, DC and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. There is even a Nek Chand Foundation in London founded to raise funds for the garden.