The Sculpture of He An, Lam Tung-Pang, and Yu Bogong
Text by Robin Peckham
Light sculpture is a relatively well-established mode in international contemporary art, existing somewhere in the territory between a sculptural medium and a conceptual movement. Growing out of minimalism proper, its best-known practitioners generally work with neon tubing as the preferred material of choice. This neon is usually put to one of two divergent uses: shaped into text or environmental alteration. The first type is related to both poetry and the introduction of text into visual art discourse during the 1960s, especially the work of Bruce Nauman; in recent years, younger artists like Terence Koh have occasionally created light sculptures of sketched imagery, humorously referencing the often solemn attitude of their predecessors. The second direction, environmental alteration, has a more complex history related to minimalist sculpture that attempted to co-negotiate the space of the gallery along with the body of the observer; in terms of light sculpture, this often means the use of color or intensity to transform what would usually appear as a white cube into something else entirely. Here, James Turrell is the exemplar par excellence. Recently, with the explosion of the discourse new media art after the collapse of netart in the 1990s, this style of light sculpture has been revived through projection and a range of other immersive technologies.
Chinese artists have never fully latched onto this discursive genealogy, revealing a fear of committing to a material so profoundly related to specific developments in international contemporary art. We may trace experiments with light as material to Qiu Zhijie’s light paintings, which appropriate a creative hobby beloved by hipster teenagers with a pedigree leading back to Picasso and Man Ray: writing words with a flashlight pointed at a camera set to a long exposure. The resulting images reveal a shadowy or absent figure whose hands trace radiant shapes across the night landscape, in Qiu Zhijie’s case spelling out ephemeral and calligraphic names of seasons or literary excerpts: “I have seen tears in the emperor’s eyes.”
Light sculpture proper may be more visible in the work of Li Hui, whose massively-scaled neon-frame works have proved popular within the narrow conversation on new media art from China. Recalling the worst of the spectacle that accompanies use of specific technologies without conceptual rigor, his exhibitions generally recreate cars, dinosaurs, and bodies–all in his trademark light frames.
For more interesting light work, we must look to another generation. One of the strongest representatives of this genre does not generally work with light as a medium at all. He An, who has long since abandoned the category of “young art” but continues to be regarded as an emerging artist, has repeatedly shown his piece “What Makes Me Understand What I Know” across the country over the past year. The work is poetically rich, and offers ample layers of interpretation each time it is installed. The artist created the work in the months following his father’s death, when he combed the streets of his native Wuhan to collect fragments of the radicals and characters that make up the names of both his father and a Japanese movie star.
The medium of these characters, of course, is light. More specifically, they are the remnants of the ubiquitous backlit plastic signs advertising restaurants and other storefront business across China. In exhibition, He An arranges the character components of various colors and sizes such that the names are more or less properly spelled in repetition across the wall. Some signs light up, cracked and exposing bare bulbs, while others no longer function. No neon is used.
This work clearly diverges significantly from the other work discussed; here, light is less a medium than an industrial consequence, a signal of the urban fabric of Wuhan displaced onto a gallery wall. This fabric exists on the register of the sensible, a poetic counterpart to the linguistic play of American neon text work. This is a memorial, in a sense, and a serious one that distills a life into, quite literally, into a proper name–the name of the father. But on the other hand–on the opposite wall–we find the name of a Japanese actress perhaps best known for her pornographic work, a name through which the artist retains a lighter, almost humorous element.
This play of gender is significant, given that the style of the wording does not change even as its discursive register shifts almost entirely. The emphasis wrought by this grammar of light slides from the broken, in a capacity of mourning, to the profane, in a reminder of the nighttime uses of brightly colored light: far more effectively than Qiu Zhijie, He An manages to use light as substance in a way that employs its natural ambiguity to find resonance with the trials of human life.
Less poetically but in keeping with the usage of light as an industrial element of urban space, Hong Kong artist Lam Tung-Pang presents a textual triptych of work in neon entitled “Shaking China.” Each segment was produced with the same budget of approximately HKD$1000, but fabricated in different locales: one in mainland China, one in Hong Kong, and one in the United Kingdom. The smallest sign, reading “Made in UK,” is around half the size of that reading “Made in Hong Kong.” That reading “Made in China” is many times larger, but, due to quality control issues in the manufacturing process, it fails to function. When installed in London, this last component lay broken on the gallery floor, illuminated only by the ambient light from the two smaller signs hanging on the wall above.
Perhaps most interesting here is the contrast between the ways in which He An and Lam Tung-Pang give form to the light they wish to harness in their work. He An is clearly navigating the vocabulary of the readymade, even if the installation involves his own sense of arrangement. This last technique could, arguably, be a form of curatorial activity more than anything artistic. Lam Tung-Pang, on the other hand, functions through phone-call art, contacting industrial suppliers to manufacture finished products to his specifications. Notably, he makes a point of personally painting a dimming tint over the neon tubing.
It may be important to note that both of these works function through a derelict condition. The pure white radiance of traditional neon-based wall sculpture is discarded; though both He An and Lam Tung-Pang create largely two-dimensional linguistic hangings, both rely on the imperfect aesthetics of urban ruin and the politics of the broken lamp to complete their respective projects. The mere placement within the gallery walls, of course, is an act of repair–a show of compassion towards a darkened element.
The work of Yu Bogong, vastly more legible to those familiar with previous light sculpture, stands in sharp contrast to these lights no longer lit. At a recent exhibition at Magician Space in Beijing, the artist presents two major installations. The first, installed as if recessed deep within a cave, is a blindingly white neon text that takes up an entire wall, reading simply: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“work makes free,” the motto infamously hung over the entrance to multiple concentration camps). This work, which does little to extend already-existing experiments with language in neon, largely appropriates this style and replaces it within a Chinese context.
In the adjacent room, hundreds of miners’ lamps hang suspended from the ceiling in the shape of a massive chandelier that drips down almost organically to the floor in a pool of wires. Titled “Heartbeat,” the work sits dark for minutes at a time before suddenly erupting into bursts of strobing light–suddenly, the poignancy of the cryptic German sentence becomes apparent. Though perhaps impervious to criticism on a moral basis, the political message of these works is too straightforward to offer any degree of conceptual robustness. Instead, it is the use of medium that makes this exhibition, entitled “2025 Project,” truly stand out.
“Heartbeat” is an electronic installation built on a very human scale, reminiscent of the best of minimalist body-oriented sculpture in shape and position. Through its technological base, however, it is also able to extend itself to project an environment across the gallery space, interacting with the body of the viewer on two levels. It is both the body of the other–a dark and hovering organic mass–and a collection of absent bodies. It is both the specter of elsewhere and a very specific vessel bound to the hundreds of miners that, presumably, lend their own technological extensions to this piece–ultimately, a plea for visibility.
What is at stake with light work as genre is just this: the conditions of visibility. The logic of sculpture relinquishes its status as object, as the passively lit center of attention atop a pedestal, and allows itself to be transformed into an active apparatus that illuminates both itself and its immediate environment. In such a scenario, sculptural work becomes installation almost by default, interacting with its architectural environment and any embodied viewer through a vastly different mechanism. This genre-cum-media may just be entering maturity in the Chinese context, but it is clearly entering the conversation at a high level of discursive complexity.