End of Century

Intentionally working within the context of a unorthodox gallery space, Seldon Yuan has chosen to create a site specific installation entitled Where we are comprised of his sculptures within a working store. Utilizing the space and the wares of a functioning store, he has rearranged the entire store to play with not only the spectacle and arrangement of art, but also concepts of shopping, commerce, and vanity in both enabling and impeding it.

With the perspective of an artist and poet, Seldon Yuan has purposely decided to acknowledge the typical final destination of art and process of art making by placing his work directly in the context of a common understood live/work environment (in this case a store) instead of the white walled gallery in order to alter that experience. His work both references and plays off of domesticity and the landscape of modern living.

Under the influence of poetry, Yuan's work focuses on a personal poetics of multiple perspectives that extends across a spectrum that plays on optical incongruities, absurdity, poetry, surrealism, familiar objects and spaces, and personal struggle while oftentimes literally inventing a filter or lens to reexamine the everyday. Yuan's work is at times entirely functional, yet at other times critical of functionality. His works play with dialogues on design and art; craft and art; the functional and non-functional; fine art and decorative art; the readymade and the intervention; fine art and fashion; art and commodity; and the unique and mass produced. With the intention of expanding the meanings of his work by carefully situating them in a context of a living and working scene, he frames an exchange between all elements and objects of the space on their use, label, meaning, and status.

Seldon Yuan is an artist and poet living and working in New York. He received his MFA in visual arts from Hunter College and has shown his work nationally and internationally. His work has been show at MoMA and Detroit's MoNA.