About

Selected Images

About

Optimism is a month-long live collaborative project between Duan Yingmei and Cai Yuan, supported by Arts Council England. The two artists, working together for the first time, are going to be based in the exhibition space during opening times for the duration of the exhibition.

Combining drawing, writing and performance, the project is designed to create a dynamic, multi-faceted process of collaboration and interaction of words and images. Communication and messages are indeed at the heart of the project, as engagements of psychological and political states of being manifested through inner and external experience. Here the title, Optimism, signals a message of hope, a glass half-full attitude and even a strategy of survival.

The two artists have created a site-specific gesamtkunstwerk, working both in their distinctive practices as well as engaging the public and participants coming into the gallery to contribute their own drawings and writings to the space. Duan’s work entails passing on messages in the form of speech, texts and drawings to visitors to draw out social and cultural articulations across differing individual and collective experiences. Sharing an interest in visitor experience and participation, Cai Yuan forcefully engages the broader political and cultural reality of the moment, using and manipulating texts from news and internet sources to contest and confound their assumed function. Using forms of intervention and satire to question one’s relationship with power and the institution, he poses incisive and often hilarious questions about the absurdity of the artificial structures of political or institutional power through the use of the body and everyday domestic materials.

The exhibition is curated by Katie Hill, Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art.