Things of a Kind

Artwork Introduction

Things of a Kind is a series by Yang Qiong that tries to compress emotions that cannot be accurately expressed in words into physical objects. Developed after he graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and before he continued his studies in the UK, it was also his first solo exhibition. The works sit between painting and sculpture. Seen from the front, they appear almost flat, yet they occupy real space, with thickness and internal volume. Small bulges, folds, cracks, and depressions are enough to give them spatial presence. They are neither quite paintings nor conventional sculptures. Their surfaces are calm and restrained, while holding private feelings that are difficult to name clearly in language. After leaving academic training, Yang Qiong began moving away from traditional sculpture’s reliance on materials such as wood, stone, and metal, as well as its conventional relationships of mass and volume. He turned instead to industrial materials closer to modern everyday life, including Bakelite, ABS, acrylic, rubber, and fur. These materials carry their own tension: they can appear smooth, uniform, and nearly perfect, yet also fragile and unstable. Yang Qiong does not try to explain these emotions. He translates them into form, allowing unstable and ambiguous feelings to exist directly as physical things. Things of a Kind established an early formal structure that continued to develop in his work: frontal viewing, vertical presence, an appearance close to flatness, and real thickness and internal space. The loosening of conventional boundaries between media also began at this stage to become one of the basic methods of his practice.