Alternative Spaces: Li Yuan-chia & Friends at Kettle's Yard
We visit the unique new exhibition at the Cambridge gallery...
November 28, 2023
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
%20-%20ink%20on%20rice%20paper.jpg)
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
%20%E2%80%93%20paint%20on%20fabric.JPG)
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
%20-%20archive%20photograph.png)
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
.JPG)
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
%20%E2%80%93%20paint%2C%20photographs%2C%20fibreboard.JPG)
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
.JPG)
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
.JPG)
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
.jpg)
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
The life of a polymath will always provoke interest, and Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) is no exception. An artist and poet, community organiser and part-time cook, to his curators he also boasts ‘one of the most unusual migration stories’ of the Century.
A refugee of the Chinese Civil War, the artist first migrated to Taiwan, where he practised as part of the Ton Fan experimental ink and abstract movement. Yet Making New Worlds skips over this fascinating moment in Asia – the subject of previous exhibitions in Taipei and, for Lesley Ma, a period of cultural flourishing born, paradoxically, out of young people’s suffering and boredom, complex sentiments of both nationalism and nostalgia. Instead, it goes straight to the latter, the local and familiar, in Li’s travels to Bologna, Italy, and major exhibitions at Signals Gallery and Lisson Gallery in London.
At Lisson, he enjoyed three solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s; this patronage, alongside the likes of Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono, provokes interesting questions on the positions of some migrant and diaspora artists in the UK. But, in line with wider curatorial trends, the exhibition focuses on the individual, ignoring the fact that most of the Ton Fan ‘bandits’ left Asia for Europe, and engaged in artistic exchanges which almost excluded Europe altogether - the presence of works on paper by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, two of Brazil and South America’s most significant modernist artists, get glossed over too.
The artist first visited Cumbria for Christmas in 1967; there, he would return and stay for the rest of his life - on display is an archive photograph of a Christmas card with the artist’s inscription, taken shortly before his death. A dilapidated farmhouse, bought from his contemporary Winifred Nicholson, became the LYC Museum and Art Gallery which, between 1972 and 1983, exhibited all manner of artists and media – and served as a community centre and shelter for those walking along Hadrian’s Wall.
Time Space Life, the Museum’s motto, lends its name to the second room which, alone, does all the exhibition’s work. Here we find the most diverse collection of artworks and artists; experimental hand-coloured prints and photographs by Li Yuan-chia, alongside modernist etchings by Donald Roller Wilson which appear almost inverted in colour. His painted textiles hang next to a circular rug by Nicholson; archive photographs upstairs indicate how the artist often exhibited small sculptural works atop of them in a layering of practices.
Layers are to be unpicked in individual works too. Indeed, the exhibition’s best works are multimedia, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as human and nature, in drawing from the surrounding landscape and natural environment. We find fibreboard canvasses, carved out to frame monochrome photographs, then intersected with found wooden slats. Just as playful are Claire Langdown’s set of cherrywood carvings of a curtain blowing, connected by colour to David Nash’s redwood crags, a remarkable, natural sculpture which would be at home in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard.
Installed in the museum window, Nash’s original mounted glasswork for the LYC looks onto the street, an invitation for passers-by - But why recreate this particular location and community in northern England here, in Cambridge? Whilst the Foundation is based in London, much of the archive remains in Manchester; a set of his photographs was shown at the Whitworth in 2020, and many more remain further north in Scotland (and online), in the collection of Richard Demarco.
Kettle’s Yard connects with the LYC’s ethos of collaboration, community-minded practice, and living with art as an everyday experience. Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Road Along the Roman Wall (Landscape with Two Buildings)’ (1926), which shows the path that leads to the buildings that would become the LYC, is one of the works taken from the house for this exhibition. Displayed in this context, we get a different understanding of the artist’s work, when put in conversation with, for instance, contemporary kinetic sculpture.
More interesting are the non-conventional displays of Grace Ndiritu’s Protest Carpets; where Nicholson’s rug is made static by its hanging on the wall, downstairs visitors are encouraged to congregate on Ndiritu’s round carpets, a nod to her wider body of shoeless, shamanic performances, and efforts in ‘Healing the Museum’.
Using archive photographs as her print or subject, she connects with the LYC’s domestic home-art setting. In their display on the ceiling, her work looms over the exhibition in a lunar fashion, a subtle link to the cosmic point which informed Li Yuan-chia’s practice.
Ndiritu is one of a few contemporary artists commissioned for, or included in, this exhibition, perhaps to better represent the diversity of those who practised at the LYC (though interviews with some of the contemporaries of the LYC still living, like David Nash, feature in the extensive exhibition book). Where the artist created a Children’s Room for play, Kettle’s Yard recreates a Drawing Machine; placed opposite Aaron Tan’s Kitchen Cabinet (2022), first commissioned for an exhibition of artist studios at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Tan’s cabinet serves as a reminder of the artist’s wish for visitors to help themselves to tea and biscuits; rest afforded to others, if not himself. ‘Time was his media,’ suggests co-curator Hammad Nasar, but we are also aware of his shortness of it in a film of his unrealised project for a spherical studio, here projected onto a frying pan. It’s another connection to his cooking and eating from a single pan, to save on washing up; perhaps a contradiction.
Like the LYC, Making New Worlds positions itself as its own cosmic point, a centre for the community. Its programme includes a ‘gathering’ at the nearby Wysing Arts Centre - where another contemporary artist, Charwei Tsai, has undertaken a residency – film screenings, and a companion ‘satellite’ exhibition at Jesus College.
Here we find more early works on paper and ink paintings, which mix Asian and Western European painterly traditions. With more space, in future, the exhibition might pick up on the mingling of ‘pre-modern’ and universal art forms, and abstract expressionism in the works of the Ton Fan set, and constellate with their non-European contemporaries.
It remains self-referential, returning to the ‘cosmic point’ of the first room of the main exhibition. Li Yuan-chia’s tiny dots from Taipei are briefly joined up with the wider context of moon landings and space exploration in the 1960s, and countercultural engagements with Asian philosophy and spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. There’s a playfulness too, in the works which transform scrolls and book forms, the odd splash of pink that colours the page.
The low placement of works near benches harks back to how paintings are hung at chair height in the house at Kettle’s Yard, by which we can sit and take time. Like Ndritu, contemporary artist Bettina Fung has been commissioned to here ‘activate’ the space with a performance drawing. But this curation in conversation is even more powerful, as we see how artists across generations engage and reactivate, rather than regurgitate tradition.
Co-curators Sarah Victoria Turner, Hammad Nasar, and Amy Tobin too take the title ‘and Friends’ quite literally. Having long worked together through the Paul Mellon Centre and the London, Asia Programme – connected with a concurrent exhibition of the sculptor Kim Lim, at the Hepworth Wakefield - the realisation of this project feels like a long-term achievement - one which, for Amy Tobin, connects too with her work on another cosmic artist, Monica Sjöö, currently on display alongside a celestial body of work at the neighbouring Murray Edwards College and in a solo exhibition in Oxford.
This constellation of academic locations is one of their own making, and can’t help but feel a little indulgent and detached. But it’s also light, in captions and content, and will no doubt bring some welcome respite to those who can access it. The building may have been a work of art but, as Nicholson’s grandchild and keeper of her estate suggests, it was not constructed with the arrogance or pretence to last forever. Neither models presented by the LYC nor Kettle’s Yard have yet to replace the conventional museum space just yet, but this temporary exhibition – like others - is a positive step which goes some way in imagining alternatives to it.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 18 February 2024.
