Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world. Comprised of rudimentary planks of wood hammered together into a rectangular form, Yang’s work uses reclaimed materials from everyday life and seems deliberately in conversation with Arte Povera, the art movement that originated in Italy during the late 1960s where practitioners produced art from found and common materials as an act of resistance against the decided commercialization of the art world through market economies. Yang, by extension, pays close attention to his materials in attempt to release the forms within them rather than impose his own. He rarely adds anything to the materials that he uses; instead, he chisels, pares and scrapes the excess away, allowing his completed works to emerge through a combination of happenstance and almost meditative handwork. In Phenomena , Yang’s handwork becomes apparent in a constellation-like form scratched into the wood. Suddenly, the nails and knots in the wood’s surface become vertices in a larger web of connecting lines, suggesting the inexorable interconnections between our alternately fabricated and naturally occurring environments. Rather than privileging one over the other, Yang’s work invites us to contemplate these relationships and how these coessential phenomena define our existence.
Yang Xinguang is an artist whose work explores the interconnections between the natural world fabricated materials in a post-industrialist society. His work is deliberately restrained and frequently uses reclaimed materials such as found wood planks, a gesture that recalls the Arte Povera movement’s commitment to using un-rarified and common materials in art making practice. His work is also deeply invested in exploring the phenomenological relationship between viewers and artworks, and his sculptural installations gesture towards Minimalist traditions, inviting viewers to pause and consider their own relationship to their surrounding space.
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...