'Poly & Chai', installation by Yung Ho Chang

[Yung Ho Chang] My name is张永和 (Zhang Yonghe) in Chinese and actually I spent a lot of time in the U.S. they call me Yung Ho Chang, but I guess it’s all the same. Anyway I’m an architect, based in Beijing and my office and myself designed this installation in the garden, courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. With a very single idea, we know that people here would spend a lot of time autumn or in the summer, or rather as much as they can and so that we wanted to make the courtyard at the V&A more liveable. So we thought initially, when I first visited the museum, my thought was all about providing shade. If we could have… really a roof, say over the courtyard I would have probably do that but it turns out that we can’t attach anything to the wall, of course this is a historic building and we were studying this very unique material. Unique rather, probably for the UK, for China, it’s a kind of popular material we use a lot to pave say a parking lot, a driveway which is a plastic, a polyethylene paving blocks. Because the grass can grow through these paving blocks, actually in China we call them eco-blocks. With that we thought maybe that’s where the shadows and the shades for the V&A are going to come from. These translucent qualities of the eco-blocks will do their magic, so we started to experiment with different kind of structural ability, potentials of this material and then we came up with one solution which still would offer us quite a bit of translucency and yet is still very thin and very light. And then we started gradually to have these image of the labyrinth either side. And even the colour, which is a typical colour we used, however we could have ordered a different colour, but somehow… I think the first visit is very important. The very red brick of the V&A building also stuck in my mind. So I wanted to make a contrast and then I wanted to transform the green colour and make it into something interesting because originally when I see it in a parking lot I didn’t like it at all. I thought the colour is almost vulgar but you know we took some risk in these cases and I have to say, sitting here I think that we succeeded to bring a nice side of the green and it really came together with the V&A in a very nice way. And I heard that kids, children, tend to like it a lot and I’m also super, super happy with, it means I tell you something, it’s accessible… by common people and the museum and visitors. It’s not a piece people need to think about, we hope it’s just simply to enjoy them in an afternoon. That’s where the name came from you know. Poly for polyethylene, chai is for tea, for chai in Chinese. The whole idea that come out here and enjoy the garden under our, just be surrounded by these plastics. It’s kind of our idea in one way, but I hoped it worked.