Yu Honglei’s “Fat Mouse” looks like a primitive land infected by space-age aesthetics.Three spheres on tripods, each 1.5 meters in diameter (Mud Ball 1, Mud Ball 2, Mud Ball 3, 2014) recall Eero Aarnio’s famous “Ball Chair,” yet possesses the texture of crude pottery. There is also a line of totem poles made of bright green wigs (A Week of Hers, 2014) that formally suggest Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. In a work inspired by Wolfgang Laib’s piece of the same title (Rice House, 2014), three metal objects sit on a light olive-yellow block: a long house, an eight ball and an architectural structure formed by a sphere, a cube, a pyramid and disks. Like Rice House, Woman in Venice and Fat Chair adopt the same (non-linear) logic and methodology; they start with reproductions of works of the same name by Alberto Giacometti and Joseph Beuys.

Unique among even this peer group, however, Yu is a keen observer of the translations, transitions, and circulations of imagery throughout art over time. As he demonstrates with this exhibition, he is as comfortable quoting Brancusi as he is The Shining; media artifacts from both end up in the digital spaces of his video. Forms from these moments in art history—and many, many others—appear again in his sculptural practice, for which a deft hand with material molds intensely awkward forms that harbor memories and impressions of culture as it is and as it might have been.

Liu Chuang’s latest work, Segmented Landscape (2014), consists of six metal window grilles, each bearing a distinct geometric pattern. Installed above visitors’ heads in the main hall of the Power Station of Art, the venue for the 10th Shanghai Biennale, it is lit by spotlights while an artiȷcial breeze causes pieces of white gauze, hanging like curtains behind each grille, to shift gently. The shadows cast by the grilles appear as patterns transposed onto the fabric. The overall eȴect is of a series of photograms, which seems ȷtting since the work is, to some extent, a snapshot of China in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when such window guards suddenly began appearing on houses and apartments across the country. At that time, they could be seen as a visual reminder of China’s burgeoning prosperity; here, they seem a quiet lament to the individualization that has been a by-product of economic growth.

No stranger to the American art scene, Liu Chuang’s conceptual art has been featured in several outstanding group shows in the United States, including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” (2009) at New York’s New Museum, “28 Chinese” (2013) at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, and “My Generation: Young Chinese Artists,” which recently debuted at the Tampa Museum of Art as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.