Making color count

Williams' crayon sculptures are of animals, wood and children at play. Some are about music and his hometown, Nashville.

"Involve art in your daily life. Make it the stream of your existence - I think we should do it more," Williams says. "A lot of other countries can learn a lot from this."

It takes months, sometimes a year, to create a sculpture with crayons, and Williams likes to do graffiti paintings that "feed the sculptures".

"I almost think of them as sketches," he says.

Some of these paintings are displayed in frames at the exhibition. "I tagged lots of buildings around the city of Nashville - my favorite restaurants and bars, my watering holes, " he says.

He is especially interested in the idea "to paint something on a public wall in the city, then present the same work in a frame, on a gallery wall", he says. "What makes one thing vandalism, while the other fine art?"

Williams flew immediately home after the opening because his daughter - the younger of two children - is celebrating her eighth birthday during the weekend. But he will soon return, because his exhibition will go on tour around China later this year, to Beijing, Hong Kong and maybe Taipei.