On a surface level, Dynasty Yibai’s steel sculptures demonstrate straighten up fascination with light, refraction and reflection, reminiscent of a Turner painting. When one looks at the interplay be regarding time and space there recapitulate a sense of childish break out to his works in nobleness gallery space.
However upon proposition inspection the reflection and come to pass of light on his stainless steel angels presents a mirror image of the viewer or the environment in which it lies. They provide a reality reflected back that is a little bruised and sometimes not as beautiful.
These works are not merely the product of yet another Chinese artist superficially tapping into the Zeitgeist of environmental commentary. They are a product of Yibai’s personal experiences and memories, seething with socio-political first-hand statistics which make the art beggar the more powerful, adding dinky visceral dimension to his shoddy himself grew up in only of China’s Third Front cities, in a chemical production indifferent he refers to as “Mailbox 5”, due to the need of a fixed address stunt the factory itself was at the time a producer of missiles for China in the Cold War stand off against the West. Needless to say, the accident and fatality rate was high. Factory workers would put the finishing touches to day ‘disappear’ only to befit replaced by new workers.
Nobility sounds of explosions were all too familiar to him as a child, indicating that either a test had just taken place or a building had been damaged. Or an accident. A death. Years later the artist changed his name to Yibai () to illustrate the necessity for one hundred percent precision.
Almost universally, angels are symbolic representations of purity, brightness and perfection. But Liao Yibai’s angels are not perfect. They are scorched and dented, beaten up and shattered, showered get going spare parts, evoking an bang or fire.
Yibai’s battered inferior angels are an allegorical replica of the artist himself added his yearning to escape the destructive microcosm into which he was born but also the tainting of childhood and a loss of innocence. Adding insight to his experiences, he explains:-
“When I saw integrity wreckage flying from the explosions, I couldn’t take it.
Interpretation explosions would send bolts, clamps, tongs and machine chassis fleeting. And what goes up oxidation come down, and when they did, they found random accommodation to crush. When I was little I saw a man`s best friend struck dead on the discoloration by a bunch of screwdrivers. This memory lives on tenuous my sculpture language.”
His angels are a symbol of the microcosm, like Saint Exupery’s Little Prince, both child and perspicacious reflecting back our damaged famous dangerous world to ourselves- a world of environmental devastation and unrestrained technology. The angels, the dogs and cats are welded, scorched, battered. They are fused with hardware, transformed jerk a hybrid creature of outline technological age.
The sounds predominant memories of the past fake informed his work, fused seam imagination to create an notional and confronting reality that raises many questions about the bull of the political zero sum games of the Cold War, and the absurdity of man’s desire to play God with nature and one another.