© 2003 Kevin Gregory & Tony Young (Ice Concepts Inc.) This ice sculpture was part of Winterlude in Ottawa, Canada and is not from Harbin, China.
updated 8/21/23 with links, seo, and updated info
not from Harbin
I used to get ice sculpture spam sorts of email forwarded to me. Obviously, someone thought I might be interested since I’m an ice sculptor. One email that I sometimes used to see (complete with misspellings) went like this:
There is a town in Northern China that does this every year. It is a great tourist attraction and is always beautiful. Most of them have
Lights inside and as you can see they are really big.
The town is Harbun, and this is a new set of pics. They get more fantastic all the time. This is the town where the Chinese had that chemical spill a couple of months ago.
Also included are several pictures of ice and snow sculptures. The sculptures are beautiful, but unfortunately, I don’t think any have much to do with the Harbin, China event, which is recognized as one of the most magnificent ice sculpture events in the world.
The first sculpture is a carriage (pictured at the top) that I had guessed was at a Canadian event. Julian Bayley of iceculture confirmed this, and credited the sculpture to Kevin Gregory of Ice Concepts Inc. I’m sure he had help, as the piece titled “A Winterlude Fantasy” is apparently 11 feet high and from 25 blocks, but the sculpture is also pictured on the Ice Concepts webpage here and with colored lighting here. As it turned out, in a comment from the original site (near the bottom), Kevin himself confirmed that he and Tony Young sculpted it.
Then there are six more pictures of various ice sculptures with similar backgrounds (pictured below.) Each has lots of trees, lots of snow, no visible buildings, and sometimes you see a large black backdrop tied to nearby trees. These sculptures look like they’re from Fairbanks, Alaska and these pieces really could only be part of the World Ice Art Championships (This is a gallery from the 2009 event, on this site. Even though it’s dark, the backgrounds are similar.)
Now you can take a look at ice sculptures from recent World Ice Art Championships and you’ll see similarities in the backgrounds. But it won’t be exact, since Ice Alaska has changed quite a bit in recent years. They even changed the site of the event. Their website is very different as well and doesn’t have nearly as many photos from old competitions. However, before the website changed, I was able to find all six photos in their past events galleries. All of them were from the 2002 event. More recently, I found a link for the “Decameron” sculpture elsewhere (see below).
“Vision of the Musical Box” by Abraham Ybarra, Chuck Mazurek, Robert Phillips, & Jeremy Massie (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
“Decameron” by Victor Solomennikov, Vitali Lednev, Carl Eady, & Dennis Wallace (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
“Love and Life” by Alexandr Zaitsev, Sergey Aseev, Irina Zaitsev, & Victor Belinski (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
“A Fairy Scene” by Uta Szczerba, Greg Bartholomew, Chuck Carpenter, & David O’Kelley (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
“Born of Foam” by Alexander Zaitsev & Sergei Aseev (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
“Thor” by Carl Eady & Charles Dash (in Fairbanks, AK, not from Harbin)
The next picture, a dragon, is hard to place except that there is lettering on the building behind that makes me think it’s in Japan. It could be Chinese writing instead, but I wouldn’t put any money on it. The carving seems to have been put together in the standard Japanese stacking technique as well.
Finally, there are three snow/ice pieces. The first of these has a Japanese flag in front of it. These all look to be part of the annual Sapporo Ice Festival in Japan. These monumental snow and ice structures are very characteristic of what I’ve seen from that event.
I found a Sapporo Ice and Snow festival site that shows a photo of the dinosaurs sculpture and another Sapporo site that shows the last building AND the dinosaurs sculpture. Finally, a link with a very blurry photo of the the first building shown just below has unfortunately become a dead end. However, in the past, the link did indicate that the sculpture was in Sapporo, not Harbin!
this is the sort of large snow sculpture most likely from the Sapporo Ice and Snow festival, not from Harbin, China.
it’s pretty easy to find that these dinosaur snow sculptures are from the Sapporo Ice and Snow festival, not from the festival in Harbin, China.
Harbin’s ice and snow structures have a distinctive look and this isn’t it. This is almost certainly not from Harbin.
In short, these pics are not from Harbin. NONE of these ice and snow sculptures appear to be from Harbin and it’s pretty easy to find out where most of them actually came from. If you think you have more information about any of these, please share it below, especially if you can prove that even one of these ice and snow sculptures is in fact in Harbin, China!
What it comes down to, is don’t believe everything you read on the web or get in emails. I know that “everybody knows that,” but if everybody actually did know that, then this sort of thing wouldn’t exist 🙄
Before you pass something on or comment on something, maybe take a second to make sure that it’s the real deal. Google and google search by image make this a really easy thing to do! And then when you didn’t pass along or get all upset about what you found out was a bunch of 💩, you don’t end up being a doofus 😆 And this is only going to get worse in the age of AI 😱
***Incidentally, if any of these are your photos, or I’m violating any copyrights with this entry, let me know asap and I will remove the photo(s) in question immediately. Misinformation on the web is widespread and I just posted this to take a tiny stab at making some corrections.***
links and stuff
You could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. You can comment there as well as below. And if it won’t LET you comment below, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
earlier comment on my "not from Harbin" post
The following comment was on the original blog entry. After some technical difficulties etc., the blog was reconstructed, and this was the only way to keep the original comments. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks from the original comments are gone in some cases. You can add your own new comments at the bottom.
Anonymous
Hey Dawson, how are you. Greetings from Kevin Gregory. Thanks for showing the carriage and crediting me for it. I did the piece along with Tony Young for the Masters Event at Winterlude in 2003. Hope all is well.
Kevin
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 – 05:42 AM
