The Pond

The Pond is a series by Yang Qiong that begins with the image of a dried-up pond. It uses old objects that remain present to evoke time that has already departed. These include porcelain, furniture, and statues inherited from earlier periods. The series is anchored by two images: the discarded object and the empty pond.

The objects are not simply materials to be recombined. They function as evidence left behind by time: the lives, uses, and environments that once held them have disappeared, while the objects remain.

The emptiness of the pond follows the same logic. It is not pure absence: the pond is empty because water once existed there and has receded, just as the objects become visible because an earlier order has departed. Yang Qiong fixes them within surfaces resembling water that has stopped moving, creating the sense of time suddenly arrested.

The works do not reconstruct the past or tell a complete story. Viewers encounter the result first, then work backward from the remaining objects, their positions, and their relationships to infer what may have happened. In this way, the past and the present that is becoming past are compressed into the same physical site.

The Pond was the first major body of work Yang Qiong developed professionally after graduating from Chelsea College of Art and Design and returning to China. Through the series, methods, spatial experience, and approaches to material developed in the UK entered a Chinese context for the first time. His attention shifted from abstract relationships between materials toward objects that had actually existed in Chinese everyday life and history, and toward reconsidering their relationships with time, memory, and cultural experience.