Yin-Yang 1992

Victor Bonato made this Yin-Yang sculpture, and I find it to be so simple it’s almost like a koan. It reminds me of early conceptual art, like John Baldessari burning all his paintings, or Yves Klein selling empty space. What I appreciate is that Bonato isn’t trying to trick us or be mysterious. Instead, he wants to remind us that sculpture, like painting, is about material and form, about ideas and our minds. The Yin-Yang symbol is a visual representation of balance, and Bonato gets at this idea through his combination of black and transparent material in the shape of a circle, as well as through the sculpture’s surface. Artists are always riffing off of each other, so I wonder what ideas Bonato was mulling over when he made this? What other artists was he looking at? Ultimately, art is a conversation—a way of trying to express something that is often hard to put into words.