Senbo Yang

Biggercode is pleased to present Fuyou: Staying Drifting, a solo exhibition by Senbo Yang. The artist will have a site-specific installation, as well as video and prints, showing at the gallery. After doing site-specific installations for a period of time, this is Yang's first New York gallery exhibition.

Fuyou: Staying Drifting examines a cultural nomads’ life, one that is both physically and metaphorically unstable. Resulting from his residency at I-Park Foundation, Inc. Fuyou is the first solo exhibition of Berkeley-based Chinese artist, Senbo Yang (b. 1990). Featuring more than ten installations and mixed media works, the exhibition explores tranquility in the face of precariousness through the artist’s multiple encounters with the same model of IKEA bed across time and space.

Placing the bed in unstable environments is a poetic abstraction of Yang’s state of constant flux during times of vagabondage. Through a landscape architectural lens, the bed became a register and metric of natural phenomena. When phenomena such as light and shadow, clouds and rain, wind and fog came into contact with the bed, all of these conditions were made more tangible.

The title of the exhibition, “Fuyou,” is derived from a line of a poem by Chinese poet Su Shi: “[Live like] mayflies thrown between heaven and earth, [like] infinitesimal grains in the vast sea.” Drifting and mayflies (insects that are believed to be born in the morning and die before sunset) are homophones, both pronounced as fuyou in Chinese. The works touch upon a philosophical question: Is drifting an ephemeral or everlasting status?

Senbo Yang (b. 1990) is an emerging artist. His site-specific works reveal the nuances present in nature by employing atypical pairings of contexts, mediums and materials. Born and raised in South China, Yang moved to Providence, RI to study landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and later relocated to NYC and then Berkeley, CA to pursue his design career.

Yang’s works include installation art, public art, ceramics and environmental art. In 2017, he was invited to be an Artist-in-Residence at I-Park Foundation, Inc. in Connecticut. There, Yang created his recent work “Drifting” (2017). Trained as a landscape architect and multidisciplinary artist, Yang uses architectural investigations as a means of revealing psychological, ecological, and sociological truths, especially regarding the relationship between humans and nature.

Co-Curators: Zi Gu, Jing Li, Ruixuan Li