2010
Red Gate Gallery Art Residency, Bei Gao Studios, China
Encapsulating, my Residency. An opening in the Great Wall framing China's Emperial past & China 2010
'Wonderland' in the mist, instead of taking us to instructed section of the Great Wall our taxi driver drove us here. A poetic magical relic of a failed amusement park.
Shop Window Bei Gao Streets
Gate & Guard house to Bei Gao Studio Compound
Red Painted Doors to my art Residency studio
View inside the Studio
From my bedroom window looking across to adding compound
View upstairs of studies & work desk
Snow falling Studio view
Installing 'Great Wall meets Rabbit Proof Fence' works made during the Residency for Exhibition with fellow Bei Gao Red Gate artists
Exhibition Invite Poster, 2010
View of BBQ welcoming to Exhibition Opening in Compound
View from the Hutong with its concrete walls. Here the Street behind our Compound & its Coal fired Power Station.
View just outside the walls of the Hutong
Near the outside of the Compound's Gate, rubbish left from the melting snow. Vendor's table for cooked chicken & fish
Man & nature photo 1
Man & Nature photo 2_ nearby trees
Man & Nature photo 3
Photo of coal delivery cart taken at nearby demolished Hutong. Our Coal Station preserved Bei Gao's Hutong from demolition.
Portrait taken at local creek just outside the Hutong's Walls
Remains of Paintings at nearby demolished hutong
RED GATE GALLERY
BEI GAO STUDIOS 1- 24 March 2010
Impossible for me not to underestimate the importance of my month long Red Gate Gallery, Bei Gao Studio in North Beijing March 2010. The first contemporary art gallery in China in the 1980’s was Red Gate, a visionary Australian Brian Wallace who saw the amazing creativity & potential of a new wave of modern art for China & internationally.
His vision included setting up a creative hub for Chinese & international studios at Bei Gao Studios, a converted connected buildings in a traditional compound set in an old concrete’ Hu tong’ or village. A mixing place for interchanges of artistic ideas & daily mixing with a local community living a more traditional life in their narrow streets as adjoin & nearby hutong are being demolished for high-rise developments with undocumented migrants living on the edges of the village. Bei Gao was left as it’s large coal power station provided energy, located behind our compound meant breathing in coal dust as it fell of the melting snow.
Everyday I took long walks documenting the village & through drawings & camera, eating & shopping in the village with kind locals transmitting those studies into ideas & artworks in the studio and learning more visiting Beijing’s Main Art Galleries & unique contemporary art hubs like 929 where studios & galleries are intertwined with cafes.
Just as my 2006, month alone in desert stone country ravished by our millennium drought, my hut racked by dust filled global winds heightened my awareness of the fragility of balance of life for man & nature. The international scale of the time we are living in, a time of competing interests, cultures imploding on the natural world, vying for the limited resources of our planet, even the future control of man through AI surveillance all became more real and urgent. The streets and landscape of China would provide a rich source of metaphors, imagery and narratives for future artworks.