Jun Yang

• 20.06.–18.08.2007

Galerie Martin Janda is showing new works by Jun Yang from June 20 until August 18, 2007.

The exterior walls of a single-family house create a stage-like space which serves as the setting for the presentation of Jun Yang’s most recent video, A better tomorrow. He created it for last year’s Liverpool Biennial to address the relationship between industrialization and architecture. Jun Yang tracks down the historical changes — visible to this day — in the urban structure and interweaves his observations from this foray through Liverpool with his family’s saga. Migration in the course of industrialization meets up with his family’s migration from China to the West — and the subsequent return to China. Migration as wish fulfillment: For a better tomorrow.
The video consists of a documentation of the types of residences in Liverpool, from the late Victorian era to the present day. The scenes were strung together as “establishing shots”, a technique which is employed primarily in soap operas in order to achieve the shortest possible transitions in the story-line. In Jun Yang’s film, the visual plot has been omitted; the verbal plot chronicles biographical matters, as narrative bracket, but also to contrast and complement.

Yang’s works Somewhere over the Rainbow I & II also address hope and wish fulfillment in this, his third solo show at Galerie Martin Janda. Yang revised Japanese and Chinese brochures advertising new houses and subdivisions. Idealized habitats which do not and will not exist in this form. The interchangeability of the sites and the homogeneity of these make-believe worlds evoke questions regarding the globalization of our dreams.

The globalization of our most intimate surroundings is also a theme in his most recent work, entitled Untitled (money tree, rubber plant, types of Dieffenbachia, …) (2007). A great number of indoor plants — exotic vegetation cultivated to thrive as potted plants — can be purchased worldwide, independent of provenance. In Asia, too, these life-style aesthetics are having a lasting effect on traditional relationship to nature. Jun Yang has made cardboard replicas of these plants, emphasizing their artificiality and underscoring their function as simple metaphor for nature.