Since 2019, Yang Song has reinvented his art practice in a new approach to experience and creation, setting up an exhibition around his motorcycle riding. From the roar of the exhaust pipe and the scenery rushing past him - to the harsh vagaries of grassland plateau, seaside and desert, ‘speed’ has shadowed his every move.
Under the thrall of speed, position and perspective morph in Yang Song’s ever-shifting pupils. The vast information stream of passing worldly experience is reified into physical sensation - images like frames and the distant lay of the land. In this onrush, the furthest reach of one’s gaze is that most distantly held hope. The ‘vanishing point’ of art and photography. For those on the road, the vanishing point is always up ahead. ‘Vanishing point’ is taken from a Canadian documentary of the same name, but in its Chinese translation ‘Crushed Bones’, speed is imbued with a certain heft and even an intimation of cruelty.
This exhibition will showcase Yang Song’s works since 2017. In the span of these four years, Yang Song has taken the bodily sensation associated with motorcycle riding and channeled the violent and stimulating experience of speed into the poetic language of sculpture and installation. Countless layers of wire and thread were arranged by hand and painted individually. Favouring figurative expression which drives home the dynamic imagery of high-speed travel. The brio of the three-dimensional world is encapsulated in a two-dimensional texture which when viewed from different angles will emerge into visual uncertainty. From an abstract sense, the vanishing point is centred in the image and the lines are arrayed and diverge in all directions. The viewer, mesmerised by these outwardly radiating colours, becomes the rider.
The sculptural works present in the exhibition speak to Yang Song’s abandonment of convention in his use of industrial design software and high-precision industrial engraving machinery. Producing many forms based around spiral patterns while taking pains to retain the signs of industrial fabrication. And by so doing highlight the dizzying sense of speed in these traces of the assembly line process. Yang Song’s concealing of the background to the sculptures literalizes a clue to their production, drawing out the conceptual from the visual nature of the sculptures themselves and foregrounding the visceral and embodied nature of speed.
Note too that Yang Song has configured the current exhibition with the qualities of the space in mind. Constructing two large-scale installations along with a video-based piece. We look forward to welcoming gallery-goers to share in the Vanishing Point exhibition and experience the ‘speed’ it brings with it together.
