Three Degrees of Separation:
Voonpow Bartlett, Neil Stewart, Erika Tan
In this exhibition three UK-based artists explore their own particular relationship to China. Through connections of the ancestral, the return, the journey, the philosophical and the everyday, the artists question in their own way what it means to 'understand' China – past, present and in the future.
Voon Pow Bartlett is a PhD student at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Her interest in contemporary Chinese art derived from her studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Her practice is a dialectical investigation of a society of consumption, of an art firmly rooted in popular culture that acknowledges a wider epistemological basis and reflects a cosmological concern, a timeless reality that lies behind the prosaic and the commonplace and the ability of the banal to accommodate the sublime.
Neil Stewart was born in London of Scottish parents, and has a half-Chinese son with his wife Shuk Chan. His long standing interest in Chinese philosophy informs his work, particularly through using video to explore the very different concepts of time that exist in Chinese and Western cultures. He is Director of the 'Global Art Practice' programme for post-MA international artists, primarily from Eastern Asia, at Chelsea College of Art & Design.
Erika Tan explores ideas of proximities both far and near. Connected and disconnected to China through diasporic family stories and re-told through the warp and weft of time, inter-linguistic translation, photography and video, Tan seeks through her own journeying and re-journeying to find connections, both new and personal. A re-visiting or return to a journey taken in 1993 with her father and brother to find their ancestral village in Fujian province forms the basis of one work. The second, is a return to video material previously shot in Shanghai in 2004. Both works continue Tan’s interest in the transnational and translational as artistic strategies, and in this case questions the notions of authorship; legitimate, intentional and otherwise.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a colour catalogue containing work by the three artists.
CHELSEA FUTURESPACE
Hepworth Court, Grosvenor Waterside
Gatliff Road London SW1W 8QP
Open seven days a week 11.00am - 6.00pm
Telephone 020 7514 6000 ext 3710
Director of Exhibitions: Donald Smith
