Yao Cong

Golden Words, 2020, photography, dimensions variable

Golden Words is a series of photographic installations. The phrase “AN ARTIST WHO IS NOT BASED IN THE GOOD PLACE IS NO ARTIST”—rendered in gold—is the only language that appears in the work. Bedsheets embroidered with this sentence cover unidentified bodies lying in desolate natural landscapes. These figures seem at once like languid, resting bodies and mysterious, long-slumbering corpses, stranded in an expanse with no clear origin or destination.

This sense of stretched—or even suspended—time, together with an unspeakable state of displacement, becomes a playful provocation toward the capitalist modes of production under globalization. More crucially, it questions notions of “value”and “identity.”