Ya-Wen Tang

Ya-Wen Tang marvels at the way every square meter in the Netherlands has been planned and designed. She had seen images on Google maps, but once here, the physical reality still surprised her. In response, she took a typical intersection with its roads, tram lines, safety islands, traffic signs and guides for the visually impaired, and gave each element a subtle twist. The colours and textures are off, the guides curl up slightly, signs become plain elementary shapes, the safety islands seem to expand in all directions. To offset this flat urban landscape, Tang introduces small posts she noticed in the forest. Stripped from their directional shields, they act as random barriers, their surface mimicking moss on a snowy day or some other idiosyncratic sensation. Add bits of real rubbish, and the result is a whirling installation that simultaneously exposes and shatters the rigid organisation of Dutch public space. Tang began her residency testing pigments in percentage ranges in EKWC’s coarse white clay body, WB 1795. Once thoroughly tested, she determined her working palette and then mixed, high fired and pulverized the clay to produce her own rough, colourful grog. Then, using differently pigmented clay, Tang built her sculptures solidly (using her own grog in the outside layers to mimic concrete) before precisely segmenting, flipping over and carving them out. To ensure that the segments did not slump or crack during firing, she left neat ribs of clay as supports on the undersides and dried the pieces slowly with ratchet straps around them to keep tension and prevent the segments from warping. In the meantime and in-between times, Tang also worked with milled waste Styrofoam to produce one part press moulds, conducted glaze research and produced plaster moulds, casting a series of tile and block-like pieces in stoneware. Her works were once-fired at high temperature.