Monumental 22-metre work The Awakening (1980) , by American sculptor John Seward Johnson II, depicts a giant apparently trapped in the ground, struggling to escape. Formerly installed at Hains Point, in Washington’s East Potomac Park, it was moved to nearby National Harbor, Maryland, in 2008. Camille Glass, co-founder and co-owner of Side Note Hospitality Group, which operates restaurants Brut!, Pondi and Fat Chad’s, and wine shop Crushed, in the Hong Kong neighbourhood of Sai Ying Pun tells Richard Lord how it changed her life. I saw it at Hains Point, in Washington. I used to play on it as a kid. I was young – about six to nine years old. I lived right on the edge of Washington, DC for most of my childhood. I remember it was quite a long trip to see it – or at least it felt that way when I was that age. When I was smaller, I’d play inside the face of the giant quite a lot, because that was what was accessible. When I was older, friends and I would try to run up the arm and get on top of the fingertips, but obviously we never could. Thinking back, it was a very cool place for a kid to hang out. What a wild thing to do as a child, to interact with something like that. I’m very grateful to my mother for taking me there. At Hains Point, right next to it, there was a huge playground with really cool stuff like jungle gyms, but we had no interest in it; we just wanted to play on the giant. What reading The Wisdom of the Enneagram taught a social enterprise CEO While both of my parents were artists, I didn’t really get into art myself. My mom used to restore paintings for museums around the Washington area, and as a child, I must have seen something in her and her work that drew me towards this particular sculpture rather than an actual playground: something that made me think it was the place to be. I was left on my own when I was really young. I started working early – I didn’t finish high school. My mom left DC when I was about 15. When I was on my own, I would go back to the sculpture every once in a while by myself, and just spend time there and think about her and about my childhood. A giant struggling to get out of the ground spoke to me on that level. She’d had a really complicated life and I’d had a really complicated childhood. There was something about that sculpture that represented struggle. I have to wonder what the artist was going through to create it. It was a powerful thing to look at, looking at it through different lenses at different ages. Now, at 35 years old, it represents a completely different message, watching my country go through what it’s been going through: the struggle for America, the struggles in D.C. It’s very representative to me of just how hard it is to get out of the ground. I think it would be too weird for me to see it in its new location. Even just seeing images of it there is very weird. I think I’d rather hold it in my memory the way it was.