FollowThe Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester presents “Aquatopia”, a group exhibition about water and water scarcity.
“Aquatopia” features 6 artists from China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Art Radar looks at the show’s themes and the works on view.
“Aquatopia”, 2018, installation view at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
Water is a natural element, an inorganic compound essential to life, and a universal symbol of purity. It unceasingly changes shapes and transforms itself while it constitutes the major component of every living organism and eco-system. In our current climate of environmental precarity, the current exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in Manchester (CFCCA), entitled “Aquatopia”, creates a space for engaging and reflecting on water – what it means to our communities and our environments, and the impact of water scarcity and water pollution from different global perspectives.
The show brings together six artists from China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom – Kingsley Ng, Lucy+Jorge Orta, João Vasco Paiva, Chen Qiulin, Liu Shiyuan and Liu Yujia – who work in a range of media, including moving image, film, photography, sculpture and installation. At the intersection between fantasy and critical observation, the different artistic positions on view in the show examine matters of scarcity, pollution, uncontrolled development and the effects of climate change, where ultimately imagination and reality are tightly intertwined with one another.
“Aquatopia” marks the start of CFCCA’s “A Season for Change”, six months of events and exhibitions designed to use contemporary art as a platform for raising awareness of pressing environmental issues.
“Aquatopia”, 2018, installation view at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
Through present urgencies and imagined futures, the artists explore ways contemporary art can provide an alternative platform for addressing pressing realities and imminent disasters. The exhibition has been curated by Marianna Tsionki, the Research Curator at CFCCA and the University of Salford.
“Aquatopia”, 2018, installation view at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
Kingsley Ng, who was born in Hong Kong in 1980, is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily on conceptual, site-specific and community-oriented projects. He creates site-specific participatory experiences that craft the relationship between the work and its context through media and formats, including interactive installation, public workshop, sound, spatial design and experiential design.
Kingsley Ng, ‘Horizon’ (installation view), 2014, installation view at Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
The artist often uses ephemeral materials such as light, sound, space and time. In this exhibition Ng presents his work Horizon, a playful installation and participatory artwork that invites visitors to share water and collectively create a symbolic horizon on a set of communicating bottles. Horizon was originally commissioned by MaD (Make a Difference) in 2014 and 1,500 participants took part at the organisation’s annual forum.
Kingsley Ng, ‘Horizon’ (detail), 2014, installation view at Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
João Vasco Paiva (b. 1979, Coimbra, Portugal) is a Hong Kong-based artist who observes the complex and continuously shifting characteristics of objects and spaces. A graduate from the Porto Arts Institute in Portugal, Paiva moved to Hong Kong in 2006 to complete a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Media. Paiva creates works in multiple media that consistently explore how urban spaces may serve as catalysts for aesthetic production. While Paiva’s work is intrinsically tied to Hong Kong, his oeuvre resounds with dense urban environments around the globe. It suggests that cities, regardless of location, share certain visual and physical characteristics that, following a process of documentation and abstraction, may be reduced to readable and informative truths.
“Aquatopia”, 2018, installation view at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
Presented as part of “Aquatopia”, Paiva’s work Green Island consists of bags and water containers cast in cement that lie amid a swathe of sand. In this installation the artist focuses on the impact that rapid urban development has had on the natural environment and resources in Hong Kong. The title Green Island refers to a cement brand from an island of the same name and plays with the irony of a company taking this title with so few green credentials.
Liu Shiyuan, ‘The Edge Of Vision, Or The Edge Of The Earth’ (film still), 2013, single channel video, color, sound, 6m:00s. Music and sound production: Kristian Mondrup Nielsen. Image courtesy the artist.
Born in 1985 in Beijing, Liu Shiyuan is now based in both Beijing and Copenhagen. Having grown up in China during a phase of unprecedented technological advances, global commercialisation and popular culture assimilation, and later travelling and living between China, the United States and Europe, Liu adapted and cultivated an innate sensibility unique to the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Her practice explores a complex, transcultural ‘identity confusion’ – a lack of any specific identity confinement, so to speak, wherein one’s lived experience and self-understanding derive from fluctuating components of rationality and mystery, reality and fiction.
Her work The Edge of Vision, or the Edge of the Earth is a film of synthetic futuristic representations depicting a watery earth and an uncanny procession of people mourning for humanity’s uncertain future. This work is purposively misleading in both audio and visual content, questioning the credibility of images and narratives.
Liu Shiyuan, ‘The Edge Of Vision, Or The Edge Of The Earth’ (film still), 2013, single channel video, color, sound, 6m:00s. Music and sound production: Kristian Mondrup Nielsen. Image courtesy the artist.
Liu Shiyuan, ‘The Edge Of Vision, Or The Edge Of The Earth’ (film still), 2013, single channel video, color, sound, 6m:00s. Music and sound production: Kristian Mondrup Nielsen. Image courtesy the artist.
One of the leading figures in China’s younger generations of artists, Chen Qiulin (b. 1975) works primarily with the moving image but also with performance, photography and installation. Interested in reality for ‘ordinary’ people living in China today, in her practice she explores notions of memory, social injustice, rapid development and displacement, while capturing a sense of nostalgia, confusion and hope.
Chen Qiulin, ‘The Empty City No.3’, 2012, photograph. Image courtesy the artist.
In Manchester, she is exhibiting Empty City, a series of photographs in which she documents the return to her hometown Wanzhau, on the Yangtze River. The series explores the social impact of China’s rapid urbanisation, and particularly the experience of the entire population of her hometown, who was relocated following the Three Gorges Damn Project. Chen Qiulin’s images are both personal and socially relevant, and highlight the tensions between the individual and society in the context of China’s accelerated emergence as an international superpower.
Chen Qiulin, ‘The Empty City No.1’, 2012, photograph. Image courtesy the artist.
Lucy+Jorge Orta is an artistic partnership between Lucy Orta, born in the United Kingdom in 1966, and Jorge Orta, who was born in Argentina in 1953. Together, their collaborative practice focuses on social and ecological issues, employing a diversity of media – sculpture, installation, couture, painting, silkscreen, photography, video, drawing, light and performance – to realise major bodies of work. In recognition of their contribution to sustainability, the artists received the Green Leaf Award (2007) for artistic excellence with an environmental message, presented by the United Nations Environment Programme in partnership with the Natural World Museum at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.
Water fountain by Lucy+Jorge Orta is a sculptural installation that evokes the cycle of gathering, purifying and distributing water, a visualisation of a low-cost solution to problems arising from water pollution. The work is part of their ongoing “OrtaWater” series that reflects on water scarity and explores solutions for access to clean water.
Lucy+Jorge Orta, ‘Orta Water – Portable Water Fountain’, 2005. Image courtesy the artist.
Liu Yujia was born in Sichuan in 1981 and graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004, later obtaining her Master’s Degree from the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts London in 2009. In her video works, objects, time, space and landscapes are reconstructed and narrated in fragments, as a situational experience that is “in common”.
Liu Yujia, ‘Waves’, 2015, installation view at Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester. Photo: Michael Pollard.
Liu Yujia, ‘Waves’ (film still), 2015. Image courtesy the artist.
Presented here, her film Wave poetically depicts the ebb and flow of tides, triggering a contemplative oceanic feeling but also warning for climate change oceanic anomalies, as it lets the sublime power of the water to speak for itself.
Jessica Clifford
2341
“Aquatopia” is on view from 6 July to 7 October 2018 at the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art (CFCCA), Thomas Street, Manchester M4 1EU, United Kingdom.
Related topics: museum shows, installation, video, multimedia, photography, Chinese, events in the UK, environment
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