The Lion Looks Both Ways

The lion is seventeen centimetres high. Two faces look out from opposite ends of one compact body, sharing the same pink, gray and orange mass. Fine ridges run around its surface. Chips of mica and quartz catch in the resin. It is immediately recognizable as the kind of guardian that belongs in a public park. No single front shows the whole animal.

Chan Yung-jen calls the work Qiāomǎoyuán — Lion. It sits on a narrow white shelf at Soil Space in Tainan beside Qiāomǎoyuán — Pine, another sculpture scarcely larger than a household object. The pine is a crimson block. Trunks and branches rise over its sides while low relief gathers around the base. What might have been a view of a tree has been folded around a solid object.

The two works are made from resin, mica, quartz and pigment. Chan's materials give civic ornament and landscape the same granular, manufactured skin. The lion measures 17 × 20 × 15 centimetres; the pine, 19 × 22 × 20. A photograph of a visitor standing before the wall shelves shows their scale against a body. Below them, brown granular material covers much of the gallery floor.

A tall white curved fragment stands near the center, with smaller forms around it. The shelves carrying the lion and pine sit above this terrain. Familiar park and architectural forms now range from compact shelf objects to a floor-sized field.

During a late-2025 residency at Zit-Dim Art Space, Chan worked with field observation and scans. Other sources include an imagined family trip made by an earlier generation, digital material that remained after a studio fire, urban architecture, and manufactured or recycled objects he collected. These sources meet in the room without forming a single recovered memory.

Chan's broader sculptural practice often begins with the mold. A mold keeps the shape of another object after the two have been separated. The lion and pine retain recognizable park forms in altered bodies: the lion faces two directions, while trunks, branches and ground relief wrap the pine's crimson block.

Accretions of Time closes on September 6. Soil Space has an exhibition catalogue available by request. Asking for it is a direct way to see the wider body of work and to support Chan and the small Tainan space presenting it.