Askr Yggdrasils

Gallery Yang will open Yang Song's solo exhibition "Askr Yggdrasils" on March 17, 2017. This is the second time Yang Song and Gallery Yang have collaborated on an exhibition. The exhibition will present new works by Yang Song that were created over the past three years and take “eternity” as their central theme. The primary artistic medium for these works is sculpture, yet they also include related video artworks and paintings.

Although he was educated in Western sculpture and aesthetics, Yang Song’s close attention to Eastern traditions of image-making has remained unwavering. A sense of eternity is one of the primary characteristics of his sculpture. Stone and bronze are relatively inflexible materials that were favourite choices in classical Western sculpture, whereas clay was often overlooked and replaced by other materials. By contrast, in the Eastern tradition of image-making, clay has been commonly used. For Yang Song, inflexibility is not that which gives him the sense of eternity; on the contrary, it is fragility, in so far as fragility’s transience is the eternity that he senses. In his previous work “Die,” Yang Song used clay to sculpt and water to destroy. Ultimately, clay returned to clay—within this cycle of constructing and deconstructing, he explored the meaning of what sculpture can sustain. Through the works in this exhibition, the artist will present a world that lies beneath the ground.

Yang Song was born in Liaoning Province, China, in 1987. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ Department of Sculpture in 2013. He currently lives and works in Beijing.