West Sussex 2019

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. Standing at over six-metres tall, Identity by Wang Yuyang is a spectacular, monumental work commissioned for exhibition A Beautiful Disorder in 2016. Its colourful and convoluted folds of layered brass, metal, wood and stone appear at once natural and organic, as well as alien – like a fantastical apparition of what plant life might look like on a distant planet. Despite its otherworldly appearance, Identity, as its title suggests, is actually a product of distinctly human ingenuity, technology and culture. Using 3D rendering and modelling software, Wang has converted one of the most iconic and influential texts in modern history – Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) – into a binary code that entirely determined the material, colour and structure of the sculptural outcome. The work thus not only alludes to the collapsing boundaries between art and technology, but also raises pertinent questions concerning the power of ideology in today’s hyper-networked, globalized world. How do we ‘read’ a work of art? What socio-economic, cultural, political and inter-subjective processes are at stake in the act of artistic appreciation, and how are they converted into a system of values? How have these systems been determined, and what do they stand for?

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. Escape (My Family History) by Li Jinghu is a socially-engaged work made from quotidian materials, inspired by the artist’s personal experience of growing up in the city of Dongguan, on the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The work consists of two chain-link fences – universal symbols of restraint and division –standing opposite one another on a level plain of grass. Each fence is affixed with a roving searchlight whose illuminated trajectories occasionally intersect to form a cross on the ground between them. Over the duration of the exhibition, the grass that has been continually exposed to both searchlights will grow taller and more vibrant than the surrounding vegetation, thus creating an abstract, organic sign. Li’s powerful yet understated work thus evokes the geopolitical anxiety of border controls and illegal immigration. The title alludes to the human desire to seek out a better life beyond national borders; one shared by many of Li’s family members as well as countless people all over the world.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. For this exhibition, Lu Pingyuan has created a ghost story that occurs at Cass Sculpture Foundation. In this story the protagonist, a young man called Raymond, finds himself lost in the grounds where he is trapped overnight. As night falls, he sees all kinds of strange and horrifying things, which could be illusions caused by the various sculptures in the park or ghosts of these sculptures attempting to make him stay forever. The final sculptural works exhibited are two objects that remain at the end of the story; a dilapidated car and a rock inscribed with the story. This work reiterates a recurring question in Lu’s works: does the story serve as the reason for creating these two ‘artworks’, or do these objects serve as props for this story? Which is the actual ‘artwork’? Lu’s work provides viewers with new and unexpected perspectives for considering key concerns in contemporary art, particularly materiality versus immateriality and narrative versus visual form.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. For this exhibition, Lu Pingyuan has created a ghost story that occurs at Cass Sculpture Foundation. In this story the protagonist, a young man called Raymond, finds himself lost in the grounds where he is trapped overnight. As night falls, he sees all kinds of strange and horrifying things, which could be illusions caused by the various sculptures in the park or ghosts of these sculptures attempting to make him stay forever. The final sculptural works exhibited are two objects that remain at the end of the story; a dilapidated car and a rock inscribed with the story. This work reiterates a recurring question in Lu’s works: does the story serve as the reason for creating these two ‘artworks’, or do these objects serve as props for this story? Which is the actual ‘artwork’? Lu’s work provides viewers with new and unexpected perspectives for considering key concerns in contemporary art, particularly materiality versus immateriality and narrative versus visual form.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. For this exhibition, Lu Pingyuan has created a ghost story that occurs at Cass Sculpture Foundation. In this story the protagonist, a young man called Raymond, finds himself lost in the grounds where he is trapped overnight. As night falls, he sees all kinds of strange and horrifying things, which could be illusions caused by the various sculptures in the park or ghosts of these sculptures attempting to make him stay forever. The final sculptural works exhibited are two objects that remain at the end of the story; a dilapidated car and a rock inscribed with the story. This work reiterates a recurring question in Lu’s works: does the story serve as the reason for creating these two ‘artworks’, or do these objects serve as props for this story? Which is the actual ‘artwork’? Lu’s work provides viewers with new and unexpected perspectives for considering key concerns in contemporary art, particularly materiality versus immateriality and narrative versus visual form.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. For this exhibition, Lu Pingyuan has created a ghost story that occurs at Cass Sculpture Foundation. In this story the protagonist, a young man called Raymond, finds himself lost in the grounds where he is trapped overnight. As night falls, he sees all kinds of strange and horrifying things, which could be illusions caused by the various sculptures in the park or ghosts of these sculptures attempting to make him stay forever. The final sculptural works exhibited are two objects that remain at the end of the story; a dilapidated car and a rock inscribed with the story. This work reiterates a recurring question in Lu’s works: does the story serve as the reason for creating these two ‘artworks’, or do these objects serve as props for this story? Which is the actual ‘artwork’? Lu’s work provides viewers with new and unexpected perspectives for considering key concerns in contemporary art, particularly materiality versus immateriality and narrative versus visual form.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. In the late 1990s John Davies introduced monumental heads to his practice. For Davies, the development of this extreme scale provides new opportunities to explore how the human figure may be perceived and how one can relate to it differently. The minute figures within the monumental heads are intensely detailed and so endow the viewer with authority, as the figures are inspected. The large heads, with no less detail in their surface, reduce the viewer to a Lilliputian scale. John Davies spent much of the mid nineties working on a group of large heads, including Big Head, in an attempt to explore this subject further. Davies became interested in forcing a physical relationship with these works—in the way that two or three of these monumental heads, when placed close together would insist that viewers would have to squeeze between them. This action essentially proffers the sensation of being in a crowd or standing adjacent to large boulder standing stones.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. In this assemblage of forms, Sara Barker combines numerous unexpected textures including a hand-painted landscape on steel, honeycombed resin, brass, wood and the lacquer finish used on traditional Japanese boxes. Illustrative of the artist’s enduring interest in post-minimalist treatment of materials, warp- and weft- creates a tapestry of light and shadow and examines elements that influence our understanding of aesthetics, material, language and objects. warp- and weft- challenges the boundaries between sculpture and painting, distributing equal significance to surface and structure. The work was informed by Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, a 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics that commends all that is delicate, nuanced and natural in the world and suggests a state of mindfulness to beauty as being imperative to a rounded life. Central to Tanizaki’s treatise is the importance of light and shadow. Barker’s composition balances varying forms and materials, in order to create an ethereal interplay between the elements and their silhouettes. The ribbons of wood, coated in the evocative black of the lacquer box finish, have a figurative presence within the structure, capturing the directional lines of driving rain, calligraphy, and even the sweep of a kimono. Delicate and yet extremely present, warp- and weft- strikes up a relationship with the viewer in which one is invited to investigate the unique interplay between materials and forms.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex. 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.