M HKA Ensembles

Installation, Variable dimensions.

Collection: All works courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin.

Her sculptural trio Sonic Intermediates – Three Differential Equations consider the three artists Li Yuan-chia (1929–94), Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) and Naum Gabo (1890–1977), three artists who moved for various reasons to locations in the UK to undertake their artistic work. Hepworth a rare and influential female figure amongst the modernist artists of the early 20th century, moved to St. Ives at the outbreak of the Second World War to be part of the artist’s colony that became the core of modernist artistic practice in Great Britain. Gabo, a Russian Jewish artist of the avant-garde also followed artists such as Hepworth and Ben Nicholson to St. Ives during the Second World War. Chinese artist and curator Li Yuan-chia moved to Brampton the North West of the England and set up the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, where he organised exhibitions with artists including David Nash and Kate Nicholson and ran programmes and workshops with and for the local community. Each of the sculptural trio resemble formal aspects of the practices of these artists, but incorporating Yang’s signature materials such as plastic cords, turbine vents and plated bells. Yang inserts herself in this constellation of three historical figures and seeks to establish a non-conventional dialogue against the established narrative of history-writing. The sculptures are on casters and could be operated by grasping their handles, with their bells rattling 18 when moved. Through their life stories as well as their artistic achievement, Yang reflects on the migration between home and abroad, the legacy of engagement and interactions of these artists, as well as the cross-pollination of ideas it generated against the conventional logic of modernism.