Senbo Yang. Fuyou: Staying Drifting

About

Fuyou: staying drifting examines a cultural nomads’ life, one that is both physically and metaphorically unstable. Resulting from his residency at I-Park Foundation, Inc. Fuyou is the first solo exhibition of Berkeley-based Chinese artist, Senbo Yang (b. 1990). Featuring more than ten installations and mixed media works, the exhibition explores tranquility in the face of precariousness through the artist’s multiple encounters with the same model of IKEA bed across time and space.

Placing the bed in unstable environments is a poetic abstraction of Yang’s state of constant flux during times of vagabondage. Through a landscape architectural lens, the bed became a register and metric of natural phenomena. When phenomena such as light and shadow, clouds and rain, wind and fog came into contact with the bed, all of these conditions were made more tangible. 

The title of the exhibition, “Fuyou,” is derived from a line of a poem by Chinese poet Su Shi:  “[Live like] mayflies thrown between heaven and earth, [like] infinitesimal grains in the vast sea.” Drifting and mayflies (insects that are believed to be born in the morning and die before sunset) are homophones, both pronounced as fuyou in Chinese. The works touch upon a philosophical question: Is drifting an ephemeral or everlasting status?