- Venue
- Centre for Chinese Conetemporary Art
- Location
The catchily titled 2:1 Discussions with artists of Chinese descent in the UK is a publication marking 21 years of the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester. Made up of 21 interviews with artists and a discussion between Chinese Arts Centre curators past and present, this book arrives at a time when China is hot property on the contemporary art circuit.
The Beijing Olympics catapulted China into the British consciousness and resulted in a smattering of Chinese contemporary art events across the country. Meanwhile the value of Chinese contemporary art is the fastest growing world wide, and while the international art power list has only been infiltrated by one Chinese artist, the explosive Cai Guo-Qiang, others will doubtless follow. The time is ripe for a review of the work of artists of Chinese descent working in the UK, and a book which so easily could have been relevant only to the British Chinese art community in Manchester now has far wider significance.
The short yet revealing interviews make this book easy to dip in and out of. Whilst each one focuses on an individual artist’s practice, elegant parallels are drawn between reoccurring themes which are central to the artists work. One controversial topic is the world of ‘diversity’ funding initiatives, from which almost all the artists in this book have benefited. Do these programmes help or pigeon hole artists? As Erika Tan puts it:
‘Celebrating shorthand tokenistic gestures is something I struggle to find ways of circumventing. However with so many ‘diversity’ strings attached to current project funding, it has an insidious way of raising its head over and over!’ (p56)
In 2:1 the depth and breadth of artist experience neatly illustrates the short-sighted nature of these policies, as the experience of one British Chinese artist with a background from Singapore may be very different from one whose family comes from mainland China, just as an artist who practices in Edinburgh will feel differently to those who work exclusively in London. But this is something that seems unlikely to end as we move towards our own Olympic extravaganza which can easily provoke a ‘we are the world, we are the children’ mentality in the minds of funding bodies.
On a more appetising note food is a key feature of many of the artists work and is enticingly explored throughout the text. For Gayle Chong Kwan it is a siphon for memory and a sit of cultural conflict. Similarly, both Kwong Lee and Anthony Key discuss their use of food as a shared language which can bind disparate communities.
Although generally well edited, 2:1 inevitably suffers from the email interview format. Questions seem confusing and prolonged and answers a little overworked and lacking in spontaneity (something not helped by the small font size), but overall the conversations are easily accessible to the reader. The graphic design has a strong sense of identity, combining bold block lettering with spacious page layout to complement the well chosen images of artists work.
As Anthony Key comments in his interview, British Chinese art history is yet to be written and this book is an important step in that direction.