Yang Guangnan: Temporary Building
2020.9.19 – 2020.11.15
Artists: Yang Guangnan

Temporary Building is serving as a carnival of provisional aesthetics, essentially as a product of social development and construction of a certain era. Temporary Building is both a social phenomenon and a particular perspective, which embodies the indecisiveness of wills, the inconsistency of orders, and their enveloping results in disparate nerves. And based on that, a provisional aesthetics was built to reflect the reality of the specific cultural context in an affective way.


Guy Debord expressed in the Society of the Spectacle, being forced to obey the spectacle at every moment of daily life, this obedience systematically destroys the ‘conflict capacity’ and replaces it with a social illusion: a false consciousness of conflict, a ‘fantasy of conflict’. In a society, where no one is known by others, it becomes impossible for every individual to know his own reality. The ideology masters the society, separates and establishes its own world.


In this exhibition, the upcoming wall is inlaid with a huge iron frame, or a photo frame, whose component is but a wall that is either solid or vacant. The sculptures made of wood and metal scattered on the ground, are akin to two groups of construction amid design and exam. Their shapes are familiar yet peculiar, seemingly to be constant or capricious and full of uncertainty. The inclined top of the wall is as though the time has frozen. The sky is entrapped by the timber, which echoes the fragments of time.


Moving forward, the entrance to the inner space was altered by a column that splits in two. When the audience passes through the cramped gap between the each half of the column, they could inadvertently see their own reflections in the mirrored cross section. Entering the space, the empty walls celebrate the uncertainty of the external space. The only extremely fast telescopic lens projected on the wall seems to be the absent image in the iron frame on the back of the wall.