LONDON.- Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery in London aims to present the work of artists who may be undervalued by the market, but are art historically important and influential. For its next set of concurrent solo exhibitions, opening on 8 June, the upper gallery will feature works from the 1950-60s by the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia and the lower gallery will present a selection of works from the same period by British artist John Latham. Both artists experimented with the representation of language in their oeuvres. Li employed the traditional Chinese literati practice of calligraphy to create a completely new visual language around the concept of the ‘cosmic point’, while Latham’s use of books as both material and symbol in his paintings reveal a desire to incorporate the spheres of literature, science and philosophy into fine art.

LI YUAN-CHIA (1929 - 1994)
Li Yuan-chia is an artist without borders. Born in Guangxi province in mainland China, he arrived in Taiwan in 1949 as a war refugee and orphan, only to then continue his journey by sea to Italy in 1962. Settling in Bologna, Li was able to refine his artistic style, developing his distinctive idea of the ‘Cosmic Point’ within a series of increasingly abstract works. He became involved with the work of Il Punto, a Milan-based group merging Eastern and Western artists that included Italian painter Antonio Calderara, and exhibited alongside artists such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. This third country of residence, however, would not keep hold of such a nomadic traveller: Li then found his way to Britain, having been invited to exhibit in London’s Signals Gallery, where he felt inspired by the youthful and experimental atmosphere of the city in the 1960s. In 1968 he moved to Cumbria, eventually settling in the village of Banks on the route of Hadrian’s Wall, where he bought a derelict farmhouse from his friend, the British painter Winifred Nicholson. Here he opened the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, which ran for over a decade and exhibited artists including Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash, Kate Nicholson and Bill Woodrow.

This ‘journey’, as Guy Brett has succinctly noted, ‘is not only travel in the physical sense but also a metaphor for moving between, or beyond, many different sorts of categories which are taken to be opposed.’ This notion of paradox and opposition fits elegantly into Li’s artistic legacy – the cosmic point – a simple gesture with infinite possibilities. A representation of the entirety or wholeness of the universe, it began as a calligraphic mark rooted in the long tradition of Chinese literati painting. The exhibition will explore this unique story through the wealth of archival and source material compiled and kept by the artist in his Bologna studio. Li’s work reveals an alternative and deeply personal art history, one which embodies fluidity and cross cultural experience which is so rarely seen and written about even today.

JOHN LATHAM (1921 - 2006)
Recently the subject of a major show at the Serpentine Gallery and a presentation in the current Venice Biennale, John Latham first gained international recognition for his work, Still and Chew of 1966-7. The work, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was produced when the artist invited students at Saint Martin’s School of Art to chew up the college’s copy of Clement Greenberg's Art & Culture. The pulpy remains were then distilled into liquid and later returned to the library. Born in Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1921, Latham remains a maverick within art history, creating through painting, assemblage, as well as through performance, film and an extensive writing career. The artist began incorporating actual books into his practice in 1958, beginning a series of work he entitled ‘skoob’ (or ‘books’ spelled backwards), of which there are examples included in this exhibition.