Arts Works and Artists

Arts Works and Artists

Artists

Wang Yuyang

Wang Yuyang was born in 1979 in Harbin, and educated at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. Wang lives and works in Beijing.

Wang’s work has been shown in major exhibitions and festivals internationally including UNPAINTED Media Art Fair, Postpalast, Munich, Germany (2014); Asia Triennial Manchester 14: Harmonious Society, Manchester, UK (2014), John Rylands Library, Manchester, UK (2014); CAFA Experimental Art 10 years, CAFA ART Museum, Beijing, China (2014); ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, UCCA, Beijing, China (2013); Reactivation The Theme Exhibition of The 9th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai, China (2012); The Unseen, The Theme Exhibition of The Fourth, Guangzhou Triennial, China (2012).

Wang Yuyang is one of the most accomplished Chinese artists of his generation, whose multi-medial practice encompasses sculpture, painting, photography and video. At the heart of Wang’s oeuvre is the question of how technology – both cutting-edge and obsolete – affects and challenges our perception of everyday life. Many of his works incorporate modern technology, such as motors, lights and electricity, but reference traditional Chinese philosophy; both ancient, contemporary and historical. The use of modern analog technology is employed as a metaphor for China's philosophical history and its binary sensibility, which he describes as "on and off, black and white, something and nothing".

Song Ta

2016, Fiberglass, Fibreglass, Limewash

780 x 400 x 320 cm

 Song Ta’s humorous installation centres on a political figure that has become synonymous with China itself, both nationally as well as internationally. The work consists of a grey, large-scale bust of Chairman Mao – copied from a well-known sculpture ubiquitously seen throughout China – and absurdly transported to the grounds of the Cass Sculpture Foundation. Song is a member of the so-called ‘post-80s’ generation of Chinese citizens who did not experience the Cultural Revolution first hand. Thus, his personal impression of the Great Helmsman has only ever been hazy at best.

This is reflected in the formal presentation of the sculpture itself: like so many monuments throughout the world, Song’s sculpture of Mao is leeched of colour and vitality, and in addition, Song has sprayed the surrounding vegetation a neutral shade of grey to match. In typically ironic fashion, Song has created a picture-perfect monument– inviting visitors to photograph themselves in front of this ‘readymade’ black and white image of an historical figure, and playfully asking us to question our own relationship to cultural memory and national identity in an era of spectacle and simulacra.

 

Cui Jie

Pigeon's House

2016

, Stainless steel, Coloured stainless steel, Coloured aluminium

260 x 450 x 245 cm

Edition of 1 

Pigeon’s House is a work that superimposes the ‘beautiful disorder’ of the contemporary Chinese urban environment onto the pastoral landscape of Cass Sculpture Foundation. The 4.5 metre tall sculpture is in itself an amalgamation of the hybrid architectonic features that now characterises China’s modern capital: elements of Bauhaus practicality, Soviet rigour, Japanese vitalism and the dynamism of the International Style are impossibly twisted together into a singular vertical structure, as if by the very torsion of China’s urgent socio-economic development. While many Greater Chinese artists, who have centred on urban change in China over the past 30 years, have nostalgically focused on the ruins of the past and lamented the demise of Beijing’s traditional dwellings, Cui represents a new generation of Chinese artists whose work unflinchingly explores the failed experiments of modernity, architectural or otherwise.

To date, Cui Jie is best known for her ambitious architectural paintings, characterized by a distinctly fractured, multi-perspectival and non-linear aesthetic. The various layers that Cui applies to canvas are based on real as well as imaginary images, which equally represent the surreal transformation of China’s urban landscape over the last thirty years. Pigeon’s House is thus a unique and trailblazing work – the first instance in which this promising young artist has effectively translated her accomplished painterly practice into an evocative three-dimensional form. Cui Jie’s painting work derives from her interest in absurd contemporary Chinese socio-political behaviour. She is greatly inspired by Orson Welles multifaceted perspective which is evident through her application of various metaphorical image layers, each composed of imaginary and realistic scenes on canvas. Every layer is meticulously executed exposing art-historical moments and sculptural impastos to represent the transformation of China's urban landscape over the course of the last century. Her compositions are eclectic and anachronistic, folding conflicting time periods and architectural styles together to create a confusing plateau of ambiguity and madness. For instance her works meld Bauhaus, Chinese propaganda and Soviet communist aesthetics into one world creating condensed irrational and nonsense paintings that re-imagine and coagulate the past, present and future.