Sinopticon Review June 2012

SINOPTICON - 

{contemporary Chinoiserie in contemporary art}

A Review by Didge Dowley & Ami Lee

Authenticity, Culture Commodity, Consumer, Exoticism; words from Tsang Kin-Wah's Chinoiserie wallpaper describing just some of the issues raised in the current Plymouth City wide exhibition, Sinopticon.

This exhibition, the culmination of six years of dedicated labour by the curator Eliza Gluckman, is not for abstract art aficionados. Spread across four venues; Saltram House, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth Arts Centre and Plymouth College of Art, Sinopticon serves up a feast of vibrant colour, sensuality and political comment with something to please even the most general of public.

Chinoiserie, meaning Chinese-esque, refers to a wholly European aesthetic style developed in the 17th century based on a fictitious, utopian image of a China that was in fact hardly known. The European demand for the exotic created in turn a Chinese market for the production of these 'esque' artefacts and added to a complex cultural relationship between East and West.

The exhibition’s name comes from Sino-meaning Chinese and opticon-seeing from all around. The website states that the aim is to look at Chinoiserie "afresh, incorporating design, display, desire and frippery alongside politics and trade, authorship, interpretation and cultural misunderstanding, fantasy, escapism and fiction." 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this exhibition is the diversity of mediums and contributors, which include 13 international artists including the inimitable British Artist, Grayson Perry. Alongside the main exhibition are responses to the theme by students from Falmouth Art College, The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, and various local community groups. The curation of the exhibition has been no easy task but with the help and dedication of all of the people involved it has prompted the very best use of all the venues.

The North Gallery of the Museum can be described as the exhibition’s beating heart. As you enter the room your breath is taken away. The soap vases of the Ghost Series by Meekyoung Shin reflect and dance colours back into the room and onto the shiny wall-hungry triptych, Green Screen Goddess  by Isaac Julien. Just beyond, you are drawn through a winding road of coral like, temple shaped edifices of Laura White’s The Esque Collection,  set in front of the impressive pink and white wallpaper that covers the entire back wall.

The Esque collection, perhaps the piece that sums up the exhibition most is delightfully humorous, resourceful and irreverent. Trinkets, plastic toys and modern mass produced icons crest or sandwich between traditional chinaware. A straw waste-bin is the foundation for one delicate Temple-esque. My Little Pony crowns another while a third is draped in tartan with badges depicting William and Kate at their wedding. When we look at the sculptures, at first glance we can't help but smile at the apparent contrast between the modern plastic toys and the delicate Chinoiserie, however, White is challenging us with a more serious question: is there a difference in the intrinsic value of these equally mass-produced domestic items? In her website she suggests of the sculptures, “their identities are in crisis but each are bound by an intuitive formal logic and configuration.” There is something playful yet ominous about this work. It at once elicits feelings of attraction and revulsion, feelings that Emile de Brujin, the National Trust expert on Chinoiserie associates with the earliest Western interest in China. 

Chinoiserie is about imitating or creating the illusion of Chinese-ness, so authenticity or illusion is a theme that has captured the Artists’ imagination. Shin’s beautiful vases appear to be period pieces cast in glass and porcelain but are in-fact contemporary works made of soap, Kin Wah’s wallpaper designs seem to be white flowers but on approaching becomes strings of challenging and sometimes provocative text, Julien’s flying Green Goddess is clearly an actress held up by strings, Grayson Perry’s exquisite High Priestess Cape, 2007 in Saltram House is embroidered with the traditional Chinese Phoenix which on closer inspection is revealed as something rather more penile. 

Into the display cases of the second exhibition room housing the museum’s permanent Chinese collection and complementing the main exhibition has been cleverly integrated works by Falmouth Art students. Among them, Laura Beer, Rhiannon Palmer and Mayumi Yamashita have met the challenge with equally affecting work addressing political themes such as the continuing dialogue of animal welfare in China and population control.

There are a few pieces in the Exhibition that it may be easy to overlook, potentially overshadowed by their more colourful compardres or in Saltram house by the splendour of some of the real McCoy of the permanent collection. In the museums North Gallery Blueprint, 2012 by Gayle Chong Kwan is a series of blue architectural c - type photographic prints. They seem inconspicuous but what they depict is the expanding influence of Chinese building projects in Africa, an important contemporary issue.

Another issue still pertinent in modern China is the role and rights of women so it is empowering to see a refreshing number of female Artists involved in Sinopticon. As you drive into Plymouth you can see Wessieling’s National Flag, 2011, on the distant horizon. The flags have been transformed to resemble Cheongsam dresses steeped in narratives about gender and sexual identity. Her Fashion Chess, 2011 is brilliantly stylish with the lacquered main pieces represented by buildings from the great cities of fashion and power, Shanghai’s Pudong Tower is the King and the frontline of pawns dress makers female dummies.

In Erica Tan’s film Sensing Obscurity, 20I2, showing at The Viewpoint Gallery in PCA we have the 180 degree perspective of the Sinopticon. In this film, national trust workers are replaced by Chinese housekeepers who restore and mend fake chinaware in the grandiose surroundings of Plymouth’s quintessentially English Saltram house. Many of the poses of the women in the film emulate those of the figures in the stunning Chinese Wallpaper found in several of Saltram’s rooms.  A replica painted carpet used in the shooting of the quintessentially English film Sense and Sensibility (directed by Chinese born Ang Lee) is carried around, then unfolded, stored and left in the stillness of a house captured in a historical time capsule. 

It is exciting that the National trust have opened their doors and set up their ‘Trust New Art’ programme which means that a wider audience will get to experience Contemporary Art.  Seeing the modern works such as the soap vases and the intricate paper cut wall-hanging by Ed Pien in a setting which is home to original Eighteenth Century Artefacts and witnessing the relationship between past and present makes the exhibition a unique and rich experience. 

The work in the Arts Centre however is a bit more problematic. Covering the entire wall space of the cafe is Tsang Kin - Wah’s provocative work You Are Extremely Terrified of Them but You Are Definitely Not a Racist, 2012. Like his other two exhibits, the wallpaper is designed to imitate the traditional flower print used by the native Hakka people in South East China but is made up of text .The Arts Centre exhibit uses racist insults, stereotypes and expletives. The close proximity of the work to the comfortable leather loungers makes it easily readable. The question is raised as to the effect this piece will have on the unsuspecting coffee drinker. 

In his work is Kin Wah trying to affect us in the way he feels racism itself operates; sometimes in your face, hard to escape, within the very walls themselves, raising its head in unexpected places? Is he trying to bring to the surface what he feels lies beneath our modern day political correctness? Will it provoke thought, offence or numbness for those who visit only this venue in isolation? While the North Gallery may be the heart of the exhibition, the Arts Centre cafe is perhaps it’s guts and its bold decision to present this controversial work highlights the importance of supporting our small independent organisations, able to take risks, communicate with and challenge us.

In order to respond to Chinoiserie, the contributors have created art that must "appear to be" something we recognise. This invites playfulness and wit and makes it necessarily accessible so an excellent exhibition to draw the attention of a wider audience. Gluckman certainly successfully achieves her objectives. While this exhibition is one of the most enjoyable I have seen in this area, raising regular smiles with its fripperies and poking fun at imitation, it also peeks behind the curtain at some of the harsher realities of a country at once belittled by Western racism and political mistrust but growing increasingly powerful with the help of Western desire.

Sinopticon is showing until 7th July at the following venues: 

Plymouth City Museum and Art gallery, Drake Circus 10am-5.30pm Tues-Fri/10am-5pm Sat

Free admission

Saltram House, Plympton, 12pm-4.30pm, Mon-Thurs & Weekends, £10.40 adult / £5.10 child / £25.90 family (2 adults) / £15.60 (1 adult), National Trust members  free

Plymouth Arts Centre, Looe Street 10am-8.30pm Tues-Sat/ 4pm-8.30pm Sunday, Free admission

Plymouth college of Art, Tavistock Place 9am-5pm Mon-Fri,  Free admission