At the point of then year when even the most thoroughbred Wisconsinites whine about the frigid weather, one student had been toiling away on the frozen icescape of Lake Mendota for up to six hours a day in an attempt to celebrate Madison’s winter culture by sculpting a complete kitchen table and full set of chairs on top of and out of the frozen lake just beyond the Union Terrace.

Hongtao Zhou,a UW grad student from China working toward a Master of Fine Arts, has begun his second semester by focusing on sustainable furniture sculpting.

“I really want to raise up awareness for some people that we can make art sustainable,” Hongtao said in an interview at the Union Rathskeller, where he says he would frequently take breaks to warm up after hours of sculpting in the freezing weather.

“I make art that is functional, and eventually it will have no negative environmental impact,” added Hongtao, who continually emphasized his fascination with the natural processes his work has been undergoing and continues to undergo.”Like magic,” he marvels. “It is frozen automatically, recycled automatically … It’s part of nature; I don’t need to take it down.”

The unique inspiration behind Hongtao’s ice sculpting is that it is all done by hand, so no pollution or wasted material results. To form his chairs’ legs, for instance, Hongtao would take a bucket of water from an unfrozen part of the lake, scoop snow through it, and use the resulting slush as a sort of natural cement, building up and molding pieces of his furniture. He would then wait for it to thoroughly freeze before using a chisel to add detail and any finishing touches.”Basically, as a human you cannot work against the climate,” Hongtao said in reference to the winter weather doing much of his work for him.

“It’s easy. It’s easy from my perspective. Just the cold weather is very hard,” he said, although he admitted to having practiced with snow and ice in his own freezer.

Hongtao had also practiced more traditional methods of ice sculpting years ago in his hometown of Harbin, known as the “Ice City of China.” Although he won a few international ice and snow sculpting competitions there, he says, “I no longer like that way because you have to use a lot of energy to sculpt those pieces,” including chainsaws to sculpt and trucks to move enormous blocks of ice.

Hongtao recalled ice fishers on Monona Bay from his first visit to Madison almost exactly a year ago, remarking that people here seemed to thrive in the cold, that Madison has a unique winter culture, and accordingly this was the perfect place to work with ice.

Indeed, his ice table and chairs have been surprisingly popular by the Union. One woman was tracking his progress on the art — which he worked on daily for nearly a week — by consistently e-mailing Hongtao and stopping by to watch his progress every day.

“I did not realize there would be so many people interested. Sometimes I worked in the evening so there was less people to talk to,” he said with a laugh.

Still, it is for the people who care to enjoy it that Hongtao fashioned this piece from the lake. Grinning widely, Hongtao would speak of passersby gathering around to take pictures, ask questions, or pile snowballs on top of his sculpted furniture. Even after last weekend’s warm spell sadly destroyed most of his hard work, he still seems to derive glee from children playing with its broken pieces, and it’s a level of satisfaction that doesn’t end when winter does.”Later, when the furniture is gone, people can still go there to recover some of the memories,” he said.