Yellow Path

Yellow Path
2024
Nylon brush, PVC Board, metal
6(h)x500(w)x500(l)cm
Performer list:
Bao Rong, Li Yu, Zeng Jia Chen, Xu Zihan, Wang Ge, Ding Jiaying, Wang Ziying, Yuan Yuan, Li Mengxin, Yao Liangqi, Jiang Yifan, Zhang Xinyue


https://www.thecolab.art/mm-rong-bao

Rong Bao’s ‘infinite garden pathway’ is inspired by the tactile yellow paving slabs used to guide the visually impaired around Beijing. Following paths like this across cities worldwide, Bao realised that many led straight into brick walls, down blind alleys, or were being misused as zig-zag floor decorations. The visually impaired users have been forgotten as buildings rise and fall in the rapidly developing urban landscape.

Bao’s Yellow Path (2024) critiques the urbanists’ disregard for the visually impaired by creating a never-ending path, leading us anti-clockwise North for five metres then abruptly West, then South, then East. It presents a constant struggle with orientation, direction and ascertaining beginnings and endings. That is, until we yield to the invitation to experience sculpture and movement through senses beyond sight.

Bao playfully converts the brittle fixed concrete slab into tiles of lurid yellow, the last colour to be lost as sight deteriorates, densely bristled with raised dots forming the words of a poem-work in Braille, composed by visually impaired poet Alex Donnelly. Braille is the tactile writing system that contracts and abbreviates common word and letter combinations into patterns of raised dots, a process reflected in the condensing of meaning into the few laden words of the poem-work.

A Poem-work for Yellow Path by Alex Donnelly:

Carefully by rock or mural stray,
stoke river ply,
flex one pulse, far pad-tap inlay –
a latent night, tomorrow’s day,
like an imagination’s panoply
errs, amid a shadowed square, in play.

The sculpture-poem-work is formed using Grade 2 Braille, a system of condensed words and phrases, as opposed to Grade 1 Braille, which is an alphabet. There are two lines of text along each edge of the path. Only readable by two percent of people, Braille’s use in the work becomes a metaphor for the unheard voices of the visually impaired community. You are invited to walk on Yellow Path, with or without shoes, in either direction, and to listen to the audio description guide, which includes the poem in spoken form. www.thecolab.art/audioguideThe poem and sculpture are integrated into an experience of the obscure and the revelatory, which is accompanied by the aural experience of the downloadable audio description guide.

Yellow Path is supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant programme.