Hunsand Space (Beijing) is pleased to present SCATTERED ASHES, a solo exhibition by Yang Yang, opening on 22 May 2025. The works on view, created over the past decade, distill the artist’s fraught relationship with his homeland and urban existence. Like fragments of pastoral memory carried by the steppe winds across time and geography, these pieces “blow” into his current city—offering solace, yet pricking with unresolved tensions.
Yang’s upbringing forged his unique spatial consciousness. Childhood herding in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, imprinted a primal symbiosis with nature: dialogues with sheep, wind, and meadows attuned him to life’s rhythms. Later, his years in Guangzhou’s urban villages confronted him with urbanization’s contradictions—sweltering humidity, concrete sprawl, migrant laborers—fueling his artistic evolution. His practice is a resistance against collective aphasia. Trapped between steppe and metropolis, tradition and industry, Yang constructs poetic counter-narratives through art.
Rupture and reconstruction, futility and persistence in Yang’s works converge on a central question: As modernity erases regional identities and cultural roots, can art preserve “imperfect humanity”? Clues lie in his weathered plasters, faded poems, and twisted metals. In BEYOND HUMAN CONTROL, plaster bases etched with crude textures and pigment flows simulate grassland erosion. White plaster beneath green and ochre layers evokes “unexplored nature marked only by animal traces”—a metaphor echoing his childhood observations of grazing routes that simultaneously affirm ecological vitality and human intrusion. Dripping green paint breaches the canvas edges, compressing steppe seasons into chromatic spills. His 2014 video Sheep adopts a fixed camera moving in sync with the flock, reducing shepherding to a cyclical ritual through detached narration.
Yang deliberately preserves a sense of incompletion. In Grind off the horse harness , he spent six months hand-sanding ornate brass horse gear to strip its civilizational veneer, reviving primal animal forms. This dismantling of refinement resonates with Mongolian aesthetics of “truth in clumsiness” while rejecting industrial logic. Nightfall Leaves Resemble Mice casts brass as fallen leaves, freezing the moment a nocturnal walker mistakes them for roadkill. The cold heft of metal immortalizes urban anxiety—a jump of fear petrified.
BEYOND HUMAN CONTROL and Home fossilize ecological memory; Sheep documents pastoral time; Nightfall Leaves Resemble Mice captures urban dread and poetry. Through plaster, video, and brass, Yang triangulates nature, industry, and memory. By alienating readymades and fracturing narratives, he builds metaphorical ecological allegories. When “blowing” becomes nature’s motion, when homeland fragments into memory, when nature devolves into taxidermied spectacle—how do we resist silence? This exhibition lays bare the survival precarity and ecological ruptures veiled by nostalgic distance.
