As happy as Larry

Larry Bell - painter, sculptor, long-distance driver, dog lover and 1960s icon - was in Hong Kong recently. Usually he divides his time between his studios in Venice, California, and Taos, in New Mexico, but he'd come here for the opening of his exhibition titled "Light and Red". His work is being shown at White Cube, which seems appropriate because if there's any shape with which Bell is associated, it's a cube.

For years, he created boxes out of glass. If you look at them now, you eventually reach a point where you can't quite decide if he's trying to express the beauty of containment or if he's signalling a desperate urge to escape. In 2011, as part of the 54th Venice Biennale, six of his 1960s cubes were set on six pedestals in one of the gilded rooms of the Palazzo Contarini Degli Scrigni. The photographs of the installation capture a wonderfully translucent zoo of caged light.

That exhibition was titled "Venice in Venice: Glow & Reflection - Venice California Art from 1960 to the Present", and showed the work of a group of young, experimental Californian artists who hung out together in Los Angeles under a sky so perfect it had, 50 years earlier, attracted what used to be called the moving-picture industry.

The Light and Space artists, as they were collectively termed, aren't internationally renowned - the most famous is probably James Turrell - but even if you've never heard of Bell, you'll almost certainly have glimpsed him. He's featured on the cover of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the 1967 Beatles album that became a defining moment of 60s iconography.

And the bronze stick-man outside Langham Place, in Mong Kok, which weighs an un-spindly 2,700kg, that's by Bell. It's No26 in a group of 27 works from his "Sumer" series.

The figures grew out of some electronic doodling on his Mac in 1993, which he initially sent to long-time friend, architect Frank Gehry, who wanted ideas for a client's house. The series takes its name from the Sumerians, who lived about 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the cradle of human civilisation, and it has been interpreted as a commentary on "the post-human condition". There may be those who wonder if this cultural reference in Mong Kok on a busy Saturday afternoon is, rather like the glass boxes, sending out a mixed message.

At any rate, it was the architect of Langham Place who called the figure Happy Man. Bell's namecard has a whole row of them stick-dancing, stick-bending, stick-arms-akimbo.