I can hardly think of a more uplifting show for the dying days of autumn than Making New Worlds at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Everything about it is bright, beautiful, hopeful and as amiable as the subtitle suggests. For the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia (1929-94) had many friends, and attracted so many more to his extraordinary “museum” in Cumbria in the 1970s that over 300 artists eventually came to work in Banks, a remote village beside Hadrian’s Wall. This show is filled with their spirit.
Li, as he was known, was born in Guangxi and studied in Taipei, where he co-founded the Ton Fan group, who found global fame as Taiwan’s first abstract artists. He was rapidly spotted by European curators and shown alongside Derek Jarman and Yoko Ono in the newly opened Lisson Gallery in 1967. He was much praised for his airy white panels of magnetic discs that could be moved in endless permutations, casting an infinite variety of shadows; objects of contemplation that are exquisitely made.
There is one here, in an opening gallery of Li’s own works introducing his idea of the “cosmic point”. This is both Blakeian – the world in a grain of sand – and spiritual, drawing on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. The dot becomes a circle, embracing a world within itself. It becomes a disc, then multiplies, unfolding in delicate paint across watercolour scrolls: grey, vermilion, gold and night black in sequence, condensing the diurnal passage of time.
It proliferates on paper and canvas, in loops and bubbles, rising upwards like laughter; it is a disc hanging over an undulating line like the moon over evening hills. It is a drop of water, a second in time or a dark medallion, black on white, expanding like radiating sound.
Li’s kind of abstract painting was at once poetic and conceptual, played out in sparse tones and elegant forms. Some of the earliest works here, from the 1950s, conflate overtones of Joan Miró with ancient Chinese watercolour. But with the move to the village of Banks, into a stone farmhouse with outbuildings on a patch of land loaned him by the painter Winifred Nicholson, the local landscape begins to enter, quite literally, with the bark and branches found on the ground.
Installed upright, in a vertical pageant, these fragments of a wood amount to a glade in themselves. A series of Li’s discs, mirror-bright and suspended before them, turn the scene into a living, open-air day.
Li’s art – so lyrical, so condensed – sets the tone for everything that follows. The young Andy Goldsworthy came to work at Banks. Photographs record his early land art, in which Goldsworthy walks the locale, collecting sticks around Hadrian’s Wall, which he then throws into the air above him like spillikins: dark fireworks against a pale sky. The young David Nash also arrived, turning twigs into drawings and sculptures, piling branches, ragwort and peat into sculptural forms on the floor.
Artists used humble shelves and cupboards for their installations at the Li Yuan-chia Museum and Art Gallery (LYC). Shelagh Wakely’s array of fragile containers in transparent resin, unfired clay and papier-mache, conjuring the memory of a long-ago urn, are laid on a slab just above the floor. Li’s own calligraphic abstractions, painted on hessian and given to friends, occasionally doubled as draught excluders.
There was no hierarchy at Banks. Rag rug workshops went on alongside high-end conceptualism, children’s print-making beside the most refined abstraction. Some of what you see appears timeless – haiku carved into modest wooden tiles – and some of it exactly of its time: a pair of clear Perspex cylinders, inside which pink and blue discs seem to multiply through their own dancing reflections.
Unlike the Bauhaus, with its academic programme, the community at the LYC was never doctrinaire. This art is always expansive in its notion of what could be made with, and of, the landscape. Here is a silver-leafed stone, dropping like some shining meteorite from the sky. Or a miniature ship nearly lost between towering waves, all made from shards of local slate.
The music of the spheres, as it seems, ripples through the galleries. This is a homage to Delia Derbyshire, pioneer of electronic music, composer of the Doctor Who theme, who went to live and work with Li in 1976. True to the LYC ethos, her work has been remixed with ambient sound from present-day Banks by the academic David Butler. You might hear a sheep bleating as you look at an image of the landscape.
Most works are by artists who visited the LYC – the Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, whose concrete poetry evokes the waves of time and tide; the light works of Liliane Lijn. Others continue what was there. An ephemerally beautiful film by the Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai (b.1980) shows a dark circle, described with a Chinese watercolour brush, appear and then gradually dissolve: a storm sweeping in, then passing away.
The curators of this show have worked with exceptional dedication to present another story of art in this country, patiently rediscovering many works by Li that were scattered after the closure of the LYC in 1983. They even found an early stained-glass panel by David Nash among the relics of Li’s great enterprise. It is suspended in a tall window at Kettle’s Yard, its beautiful blue disc rhyming with the clock of the Cambridge church outside.
And time, in the end, becomes the essence of this captivating show. Not just Li’s own idea of time as constantly circling, and never linear; but of a time when the art world was open-hearted, nobody was restricted by museum and market structures, by who’s in and who’s out of this colossal money-spawning industry. When a spirit of generosity and curiosity prevailed, and everyone was invited to make something out of almost nothing, to make a new world of the imagination, as envisaged by this remarkable man.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends is at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 18 February 2024
