Die

2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
03:55 minutes

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.

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