Bai Yiluo works often incorporate photography and traditional sculptural techniques, media disparate in their ancient and contemporary connotations. Bai draws upon these to develop installations which reflect the human condition as a cyclical struggle, torturously beautiful and poetically triumphant. Bai’s Civilization is a haunting monument enshrining imperious power as a corrupted vision built on labourers’ toil. Made from terracotta, classical busts pose as emperors and slaves, pierced through and defined by agricultural tools, a life force and bane. Set upon twelve individual plinths, Civilization bridges reference to both Eastern and Western spiritualism, while its violent form suggests revolution, conflict, and rebirth as the isochronal quality of nature.