Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Plymouth Arts Centre and Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery
14 January – 25 February
Reviewed by: Zoe Shearman
Walking through Plymouth on the eve of Chinese New Year, through a city centre currently being ‘regenerated’, past groups of Chinese students at the university and the Sizzling China Takeaway, I’m greeted at the Arts Centre by the aroma of Far Eastern food, prepared as part of ‘Close Distance’s World Food Night’.
Curated by Zoë Li, ‘Close Distance’ commissioned artists of Chinese heritage to make work exploring migration. Lisa Cheung’s Qi Collection is an intelligent and subtle intervention in the Museum’s China Connection Gallery which re-connects the collection to local Chinese people. Exported to Europe in the seventeenth century, the gallery’s collection of porcelain, which we call ‘china’, is displayed alongside British copies in ‘Oriental’ style. These reinterpretations, combining Chinese motifs with others from Japan, India and Persia, were made for consumers of the world china represented, unconcerned by the differences between these cultures. Cheung’s beautiful ceramic archive, integrated into the gallery display, represents stories of Chinese people she met in Plymouth who travelled to Britain in the 1960s. Each ‘china’ pattern is inspired by a personal narrative such as ‘Washing the Big Coin’, a Cantonese expression used by people seeking their fortune in the West, and combined with traditional Chinese symbols such as the butterfly and lotus flower.
Xiao Bai Li’s deceptively traditional and accomplished series of portrait paintings represents different generations of a Chinese family living in Plymouth. Presented alongside humorous large-scale photographs of the sitter’s different attributes (wok, beer, chips), and text about their personal life stories, this absorbing work explores the cultural, social and economic complexities of Britain’s Chinese community.
Suki Chan explores her family history and childhood memories in Interval, including traditional Chinese Hakka culture, through a poetic examination of the relationship between film, sculpture and sound as a metaphor for cultural displacement.
Leung Chi Wo starts with the local and adjusts his concept, the ongoing project Domestica Invisible, to it. His series of interviews with Chinese people who moved to Plymouth about their homes and hyper-real photographs of the spaces they inhabit are fascinating revelations of different cultural journeys.
Writer detail:
Zoë Shearman is a curator and lecturer on the Spacex/Dartington College of Arts MA Curating course.
Venue detail:
Plymouth Arts Centre
38 Looe Street, The Barbican, Plymouth PL4 0EB
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