By way of thanks for your support and the continuation of the exhibition there will be a

Closing drinks
at Amilal 48 Shoubi Hutong (southeast of 66 Gulou Dongdajie) Beijing
东城区鼓楼东大街66号东南侧寿比胡同48号院内
Sunday 21st August, 4-8pm
Sponsored wine bar

Thanks to Rehan Jamil for the images.

Opening 7pm on Thursday 21st October. Then 22-24th October. Hanbury Hall, 22 Hanbury Street, (off Brick Lane) London E1 6QR

* * *

Cloud series, Yellow lining

This new, ongoing series of landscapes employs and variously combines – lino cut, woodblock, etching, embossing and one-off Chine-collé prints, and utilises as its point of reference cloud imagery. To some degree Couchman is paralleling cloud motifs, which she has observed in temples, public architecture and large courtyard homes, (siheyuan) across China. This traditional subject, being usually depicted in stone or wood, materials that are in acute contrast to the ethereality of actual clouds. This mirrors the printmaking process where the cloud is carved in lino or wood or etched in copper.

The inadvertent starting point for these works was Couchman noticing, as the plane in which she was travelling descended towards the as yet unrevealed Beijing metropolis, a thin layer of bright yellow cloud, delineating a relatively fine line of material through which the aircraft quickly passed. From the ground nothing of this curious narrow band was visible, only a clear blue sky.

There is some irony here in the application of the English expression ‘every cloud has a silver lining’, which suggests that everything bad has its positive, if perhaps at first hidden, aspect. In the present case the matter is reversed, the clear blue of the sky being discreetly penetrated by an invisible layer of tangerine haze. It is difficult to see the ‘silver lining’ in this ominous yellow vision.

Couchman’s depictions of clouds are somewhat stylized, presenting age-old Chinese imagery in a modern form that owes much to the technical devices and conventions employed in western comics. Her pairing of Chinese wood and stone clouds with references to 20^th century cartoons and design have allowed for a fantasised depiction of a grey and yellow cityscape.

Cloud series, Yellow lining No. 6

The Artful Scriptorium
Climate/Gallery
37-24 24th Street, Suite 406
Long Island City
NY 11101
www.climategallery.com

Opening reception, 10th April 2010, 6-9 pm
Thurs. – Sun. 12-5pm until 25th April

There and Everywhere
Helen Couchman     Liz Harrison     David Webb
5th November 6-9pm

PRESS RELEASE

Like the numerous luggage labels from different locations pasted onto battered suitcases, artists’ journeys now take centre stage on the cultural landscape. In his manifesto of altermodernity Nicolas Bourriaud proclaims that in our era of globalisation, artists have become nomads ‘wandering in time, space and mediums’. And that their work now ‘arises out of negotiations between different agents from different cultures and geographical locations.’

The impetus for There and Everywhere began with painter David Webb’s focus on his grandmother’s journey made by sea in 1955 from Tanzania to London. This personal history, and his experiences of residencies overseas have led to his making work about travel and ancestry, which he interestingly describes as ‘a turn inwards’.

Reflecting on these themes Webb selected Helen Couchman and Liz Harrison to show alongside him in There and Everywhere. Each artist brings a distinct perspective to the project revealing surprising and unexpected connections between their painting, photography and video installation, so that the general somehow becomes the specific.

Liz Harrison’s practice spans a broad range of media, incorporating site-specific installation, lens-based projection, illusion and image. She is based in London and recently co-curated Concrete Dreams at APT, London (2008) and had a solo exhibition Perch at Five Years, London (2009).

Helen Couchman is a British artist currently based in Beijing. Her most recent solo show was at Gallerie Perif in Beijing where she showed a series of woodblock prints. In 2008 her photo portraits of migrant workers building the Beijing Olympic buildings were published in a book, Workers (gong ren).

David Webb is a painter based in London. His most recent solo exhibition was at SE 1 Gallery in London where he showed work made during a residency at Yaddo, in upstate New York. He showed at Transition Gallery in The Painting Room (2008) and was selected for Jerwood Contemporary Painters in 2009.

Transition Gallery Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN

Update: 09/11/09 … Standing out for me are Couchman’s photographs so delicate and yet powerful. Corinna Spencer

Uncharted Stories
Private View –› 6 – 9 pm October 29

Daniel Baker
Pedro Carvalho de Almeida
Helen Couchman
Annabel Dover
Dettie Gould
Sara Angel Guerrero-Rippberger & Rossella Emanuele
Hannah Hurst
Ope Sarah Lori
Catherine Maffioletti
Aaron McPeake
Marcela Montoya-Turnill & Cayetano H. Rios
Idit Nathan
Jane Norris
Deepan Sivaraman
Tansy Spinks
Deborah True
Anna Vickers
Senem Yazan

28 October –› 5 November, 2009
11 am –› 6 pm

The Triangle Space
Chelsea College of Art & Design
16 John Islip Street
London, SW1P 4JU

http://unchartedstories.wordpress.com

Postcard

Private view: 6pm tonight
11th September – 26th November 2008

Collyer Bristow Gallery
4 Bedford Row
London
WC1R 4DF

PRESS RELEASE

An exploration of a modern day concept of Chinoiserie; relationships,
aesthetic responses and perceptions of China.

Lisa Cheung, Gayle Chong Kwan, Helen Couchman, Stephanie Douet, Ed Pien, Neil Stewart, Pamela So, Karen Tam and Erika Tan

This exhibition brings together artists from the UK and Canada whose work or practice is affected by their connection to China. The exhibition explores how pervasive Chinese culture, industry and aesthetics are in our everyday lives, be them actual or perceived.

‘Chinoiserie’, a French term meaning ‘Chinese-esque’, derived from the Seventeenth Century as an entirely European style that was influenced wholly from China and the East. The China that was being emulated was in fact fictitious. Very few real images of life in China had reached the west. Instead a Utopian land was described and repeated through the use of decorative motifs and styles. The influence and desire for China, it’s trade and culture ramified in to the 19th century, opium wars, trade and colonialism.

In Contemporary Chinoiserie we look at the work of nine artists’ whose practice explores their relationship with China through photography, prints, film, sculpture and ceramics. The artists all reference a contemporary response to a China, neither fully understood nor real; from stylistic responses, mythical tales, and references of racism and displacement to a desire to understand what China means to them. Whilst many of the artists’ are of Chinese descent, others are linked to China through family or, in one case, live in Beijing.

Artist Stephanie Douet is interested in Chinoiserie as the birth of leisure in Europe. The fractured, fictional idyllic life the aristocracy in Europe imitated of China is explored in her bizarre sculptures. Douet, whose two young nieces are adopted from China sees a similar distance in Europe’s understanding of the country today and a continuation of trade and misunderstanding from that of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The sculptures resemble furniture and antiques with indiscernible meaning and use. Their quirky shapes and beautiful craftsmanship are a contemporary take on the curios that came from trade missions in the beginning of Chinoiserie.

Karen Tam, based in Canada, creates installations looking at the influences and cultural particularities of Chinese communities. Her work, like Douet’s, directly references Chinoiserie as she looks at contemporary issues and misconceptions of the culture. Paper cuts, a traditional Chinese craft, adorn the walls, referencing take away menus, railway posters, racist political cartoons and export chinaware.

Ed Pien, also Canadian, was born in Taipei, Taiwan and in this exhibitions presents new work including The Blue Vine. The blue references the Delft Blue colour iconic of exported Chinese porcelain whilst the drawing technique mirrors the hand-painted effect of glaze. As with his earlier works, creatures of all sorts abound. Here the politically motivated and denigrating caricaturization of the “Orientals” in the late 1800′s to the early 1900′s comes into play.

Lisa Cheung works often works with people, creating events and group activities. For Contemporary Chinoiserie she will show work created over the past few years for various commissions. One such piece is from a project in Plymouth with the local Chinese community. Working inside the Plymouth City Museum she made new porcelain pieces to go along side those exported though Plymouth’s history as a trade seaport. The crockery showed stylised portraits of the people she worked with at the time they first came to the UK. A recent work used light to shine the last texts messages of the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers to their loved ones in a haunting installation.

Erika Tan’s work evolves from an interest in anthropology and moving image having studied Social Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge and film at the Academy of Arts in Beijing. In Contemporary Chinoiserie she shows ‘Shot Through: Journey of Connections’, a film looking at her own relationship with China through the memories and notes of well known philosophers such as Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.

Pamela So employs the manipulative qualities of digital photography to re-interpret and re-present history based on her Scottish/Chinese background. So looks at the pick and mix attitude towards the use of Chinese motifs and extravagant and playful elements of Chinoiserie. Developing a lightbox piece, ‘Gaming with pigs‘, based on her own family history of gambling and her own fortunes of being born in the year of the pig she explores the destructive decadence of the genre.

Helen Couchman is currently living in Beijing. As the Olympics approached she sought to understand some of the human impact on the site. A new publication of her photographic portraits of the workers on the iconic ‘Birds Nest’ Stadium and ‘Water Cube’ has just been published with funding from Arup. For Contemporary Chinoiserie she shows a series of woodblock print landscapes. A traditional Chinese medium Couchman has learnt since living in the country. The images, striking on the surface, question the current regard for culture in the city she is watching change before her eyes.

Neil Stewart’s, whose wife is Chinese, has long standing interest in Chinese philosophy, which informs his work. He uses video to explore the very different concepts of time that exist in Chinese and Western cultures. Stewart videos of a traditional Chinese landscape and the room in which Mao lived after the Long March are in fact models.

Gayle Chong Kwan also creates models with everyday objects to investigate cultural environments. Her work is crammed with historical references that comment on contemporary culture.

At The Photographers’ Gallery
Thanks to JC for the photos

Park Court
Pacific Place
88 Queensway
Hong Kong

Solutions for a Modern City runs: 13st July – 3rd August

Thanks to Darren for the photos