Yona Lee Fountain in Transit 2024. Stainless steel and objects. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Gallery building; purchased with special thanks to Joanna Hickman, Charlotte and Marcel Gray, Janice Cowdy, Dame Adrienne Stewart and other generous individuals, 2024
Yona Lee Fountain in Transit (detail) 2024. Stainless steel and objects. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Gallery building; purchased with special thanks to Joanna Hickman, Charlotte and Marcel Gray, Janice Cowdy, Dame Adrienne Stewart and other generous individuals, 2024
Yona Lee Fountain in Transit (detail) 2024. Stainless steel and objects. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Gallery building; purchased with special thanks to Joanna Hickman, Charlotte and Marcel Gray, Janice Cowdy, Dame Adrienne Stewart and other generous individuals, 2024
13 December 2024 – 17 May 2026
A lively, restorative under-stairs sculpture for Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
Combining the intimacy of a domestic bathroom with the exuberance of a civic fountain, Yona Lee's new site-specific sculpture brings a lively, restorative energy to an understairs space. Fountain in Transit was commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation to celebrate the Gallery building’s twentieth anniversary and responds to its name – Te Puna o Waiwhetū – which can be translated as ‘water in which stars are reflected’. Using flowing arrangements made from the kind of stainless-steel tubing associated with urban spaces and public transportation, Lee connects us with the Gallery’s architecture and history and draws on connections between water and wellbeing, opening a space for reflection and regeneration.
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Curator:
Felicity Milburn -
Exhibition number:
1175
Related reading: Sculpture
Interview
Practice, Poetry and Precision
Artist Yona Lee has been preparing something very special in her Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland studio – a new commission that honours the history of the Gallery building, Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Lee took some time away from her workbench to speak with lead curator Felicity Milburn about her dream of filling the under-stairs space with water and light.
Notes
Face Five
Christchurch-born and internationally renowned artist Ronnie van Hout has had a huge hand in our latest outdoor installation. Quasi, a five-metre-tall sculpture of the artist's hand and facial features, was unveiled this morning on the Gallery's rooftop, next to Gloucester Street.
Interview
Not Quite Human
Lara Strongman: The title of your new work for the Gallery is Quasi. Why did you call it that?
Ronnie van Hout: Initially it was a working title. Because the work would be outside the Gallery, on the roof, I was thinking of Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I was coming out of a show and research around the idea of the freak, the outsider and things that are rejected—thinking about how even things that are rejected have a relationship to whatever they’ve been rejected by. And I called it Quasi, because it’s a human form that’s not quite human as well. The idea of something that resembles a human but is not quite human.
Exhibition
Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs
Exquisitely imagined, startlingly strange works by an internationally acclaimed New Zealand artist.
