The works in this show have come about through a steady process of placement and refinement by He Yida. The final installations project a feeling of extreme intention in the experience of their arrangements.
The process of the work moves from the selection of material, their arrangements in relation to each other, and their positioning with respect to the spaces. Overall there is an emphasis on the works' relationship with the floor (rather than a hanging relationship with the wall or ceiling), as they spread out along that plane, or rise up from it. The effect is of a sense of flatness in the planes and tenuousness in the upright structures. The elements of the structures are ready-made for other purposes, variously adjusted with painted additions. Each material adjusts the effect of the other materials they are placed in a relationship with: the hardness of the metal bar stands in contrast to the softness of the elastic strip that is wrapped around it; this wrapping conceals and reveals various parts, playing the materials off each other, changing the perception of the materials and their arrangements as they are viewed from different angles.
The works can be seen to pick up on Minimalism's experiments in form, and with the "anti-form" reactions to those hard geometries - Donald Judd's metal boxes with coloured plexiglass inserts an example of the former, and Robert Morris' felt works, for the latter. The simple forms of Judd's "specific objects" asserted themselves in the spaces in which they were placed; Morris' cut sections of felt hung loosely from the wall, their forms not dictated but an expression of gravity on the dense material.
He Yida's own works clearly follow a trajectory from these historical developments into forms of site specificity, the intervention and critique of spaces that became subsumed and formalised as institutional critique (Daniel Buren's striped inserts into spaces come to mind). Her works reflect an understanding of all these historical developments as well as their consequences, placing the entropic fall of softness against rigidity of form, the insertion of material into space, and its relation to space in material, form and meaning. These are seemingly fragile, ephemeral anti-structures, which play arrangements of the materials against their interactions with the spaces; playing the "natural" forms that the materials take under their own and external forces (gravity, entropy) with the adaptation of those materials and forms in the service of the artist.
In He Yida's work Buren's critique of institutional architecture becomes a more flexible and subtle activity. In her recent work Leg In (2012) the materials are sourced from shop display manufacturers, and so the work reflects forms and structures from this commercial context - the materials might be said to retain a residue of their original functions. However this original function is not directly referenced in her works, nor worked through as a reason for their being. Her structures divert this function into new meanings based on their current location in the gallery.
As the artist places and arranges the works, they become specific to their surroundings as interventions as well as reactions to the properties of the spaces.
The odd angle of one wall in C-Space's gallery is addressed by leaning a length of wood against it. This is, in turn, balanced by a smaller piece, made up of a shorter wood baton, its ends connected by a snaking length of black rubber tubing. This is not about presenting the objects as they are, or their uses, in a new context, thereby making them strange through that shift. The objects do not remain as they are, but are manipulated to adjust their forms and relationships. This, in some senses, uses the materials and forms against themselves. Fabric strips hang from bars, but the fall of the material is interrupted by being stitched, hoisting lengths up into loops; or they are pulled to the floor by heavy metal rings pinching the material at its base.
The combination of materials of differing qualities, the arrangement of works of differing qualities, the spaces they occupy in relation to each other, all these aspects are significant to the experience of the exhibition. No work stands alone, and no work is the whole work. In this balance of internal and external forces the resulting piece represents the cusp between the two, a creative reflection on space and its effects.
To try and rationalise the activity going on here: the works act as interventions into their spaces, but also exist in the reverse direction as the space impinges on the works. The works contribute and at the same time react to those spaces. In a third movement, the presence of the body acts as a subsequent element in this interplay of space and work. It can be said that the work exists both in the movement outwards of its interposing of itself into the space, as well as its movement inwards of the space's effects on the work. One can also speak of the space in a similar fashion, as having a movement outwards (which corresponds to the work's movement inwards) and a movement inwards (corresponding to the work's movement outwards). In a similar way, the body has its own set of movements in relation to the work and the space. This makes for a 6-fold set of movements of the work, the space, and the body.
This interplay of contribution and reaction is what creates a tension in the work in the link between work and the viewer as they are present in the spaces, and as they experience the pieces. This presence marks the viewer as part of the experience of the piece, completing the works' work by adding the experience to the list of effects of the work – in this case in the personal space which moves through the institutional and architectural spaces that the work exists within. Each node of this set of movements depends on the others for an understanding of the whole. The work is but one part, and meaning is understood as the whole system.
Text by: Edward Sanderson
Image: © Yida He, C-Space
