Die
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
03:55 minutes
Yang Song
Yang Song’s Die features a clay mask of the artist himself slowly dissolving into water. Clay returns to clay. Clay originates from and returns to earth, becoming a metaphor for life. Here influenced by the traditions of temples and Chinese burial customs, the simple gesture of creation-destruction explores questions of transformation to provide a vision of life cycle as nonlinear but continuous. The choice of materials echoes a fundamental divergence between Western and Eastern classical traditions of sculpture: if classical Western sculpture preferred materials like stone and bronze for their relative inflexibility while discarding clay for its malleability and fragility, classical Eastern sculpture commonly used clay as a primary material.
Yang Song was trained as a sculptor in both Western and Eastern traditions, which continue to influence his practice today. Yang’s sculptures often follow traditional methods, evoking ancient Buddhist status and the terracotta warriors of Xi’an yet leaving them unfired so they would crack and eventually crumble to dust. Similarly, Yang Song conceptually treats his videos and drawings as sculptures, specifically in their presentations. For him, a sense of permanence is intrinsic to sculpture beyond the sole materials that may span centuries. Yet, for the artist, inflexibility is not what gives sculptures a sense of eternity, but rather its fragility and transience inherent to our eternity and human condition.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Martin Creed
2003This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
© » KADIST
Pascual Sisto
2013All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature...
© » KADIST
Adelita Husni-Bey
2015After the Finish Line is a recent film by Adelita Husni-Bey produced for the exhibition Movement Break at Kadist-SF in 2015...
© » KADIST
Hamra Abbas
2010At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Celebrating the monstrous other: "Anak Pontianak" and "Nobody" at LumiNation | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Courtesy of The Filmic Eye August 5, 2019 By ila (1,100 words, 6-minute read) The year is 2049: two hundred years since the Pontianak first appeared in writing, marked insignificantly in Hikayat Abdullah as residues of superstitious and foolish beliefs of the Chinese and Malays that have persisted with time...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Organizers decry last-minute cancelation of Hanoi EDM festival (via Tuoi Tre News) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles November 27, 2018 An EDM (electronic dance music) festival scheduled to take place just outside Hanoi from November 23 to 25 was asked to cancel only hours before its opening, despite sold tickets and foreign and local artists and volunteers already heading to the venue...
© » KADIST
Goldin+Senneby
In Fiction on Auction , the site of the auction is used to stage a fiction where the right to appear as character in Looking for Headless is offered to the highest bidder: the name of the successful biddder as registered for the auction will form the name or identity of the character appearing in the novel...
© » KADIST
Sabelo Mlangeni
2019The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...
© » KADIST
Elina Brotherus
A subject’s back stands before a landscape of mountains, arid and majestic, Der Wanderer 3 revisits the theme of man versus nature dear to Romantic painting and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in particular...