This pairing of abstraction and realism in this work is remarkable...and according to T.K. Sabapathy a direct response to the demands of the patron, who unusually received higher billing in the label on this work than the artist himself.

Yu Yu Yang (aka Yang Ying Feng) produced many realistic sculptures in the 1940s and 50s, but the realistic figures and reliefs at the bottom of this work look like his first return to such realism in many years. Yu Yu Yang was born in 1920, in Taiwan. His family moved to Beijing to work in the film business, and he spent his seconday school years under the Japanese occupation. He went to Japan to study art, but returned to Beijing without finishing his degree after the bombing of Tokyo. In later years he returned to Taiwan (the biographies gloss over the exact circumstances here).

After some years in Rome, he set up a studio in Tailuge, on the east coast of Taiwan. In the 1980s he participated in the planning of Beijing's Pingtai district. In 1983, he drew up plans for a Space & Technology Art Centre in Singapore.