Part of Current, Contemporary Art from Scotland, curated by Sophia Hao and leading Chinese curator Wang Nanming. A major solo Museum Exhibition, including lectures, talks, workshops, gallery talks, in China and Scotland. This solo exhibition was the culmination of an extended project in China spanning multi venues over 4 years. The Curators in China and Scotland invite me to initiate a project that would engage Chinese audiences with this form of practice creating a novel creative dialogue in the Shanghai context, acknowledging me as one of the leading artists based in Scotland whose research has addressed socially engaged practice internationally for the past 20 years. The exhibition was presented alongside a solo exhibition by Bruce McLean.
This was the first project conceived since the modification of my Real Life tattoo that has formed a critical component of my ‘durational performance project’ over the past 25 years. The research activity for this took shape when I had a new addition made to this tattoo that now reads, ‘Real Life is Dead’. This reignites the critical contextual relationships I have explored since 1994, when the original tattoo was made in new ways, concerning the social, economic, geographic, historical, cultural paradigms addressed in relation to the audience. It proposes a question, Can the propositional Death of Real Life be understood in a positive, forward facing manner articulated through an interactive exhibition, or does it merely reflect a nihilistic race to the bottom of culture and the human race. Can this new paradigm be a tool. The exhibition makes the end of this first phase of the project and the start of the next iteration, with each component marking the passing of time and all the various incarnations of this work, shown all over the world.
The exhibition included many components, the heavily treated film of the tattooing, projected 8 metres wide, and 4 m high, 23 Whale Paintings, each standing for one year on the Real Life Project, 276 vinyl records, each standing for one month of the project, 8395 Posters for each day of the project declaring Real Life is Dead/Long Live Real Life with images of the tattooed body 23 years apart, before and after. Banners were constructed by factories in China in a traditional manner, with silk tassels and embroidered lettering, all in both Chinese (Mandarin) and English. A commercially produced shop sign reads Real Life is Dead on one side and Long Live Real Life on the other. The visitor is invited to ‘spin me round’ in both languages caught forever between the positive and negative. Video Juke Boxes punctuate the space offering a series of videos I’ve made over the lifetime of the project, introducing and contextualising the Real Life project for this new audience. The Chinese Scottish Real Life Orchestra performs at the launch of the show and the artist is present to initiate workshops and collaboration where the visitors are invited to ‘Paint what you think’. An interesting proposition for the cultural climate in the local area.
This project has been produced by Cooper Gallery at DJCAD, University of Dundee, funded by the Scottish Government, involving an earlier site visit to Shanghai and various other group exhibitions, research lectures, symposia and research over this period. This involved initiating social engagement and participation with the Chinese public in a context where this remains an unusual and novel strategy. Some works for the show were rejected by the state censor.
GSA Director, Tom Inns visited the exhibition in Shanghai and also visited Academy of Arts in Shanghai SADA who’s students had engaged with the project at the Museum thus enhancing the international presence of GSA. I initiated a collaboration with GSA students throughout the development, realisation and production of this project, and this formed a component of the final exhibition. I continue to initiate and nurture external relationships and the project was supported financially by Creative Scotland, The Scottish Government and the British Council. The exhibition in Shanghai was supported and launched with speeches from Martin McDermott, the First Secretary Scottish Affairs, British Embassy, Beijing, representing the Scottish Government in China, and Nick Marchand, Director of Arts & Creative Industries, British Council, China. Meetings with potential touring partners Orlando Edwards, Consul, Cultural and Education Wuhan. All of these distinguished and influential visitors were well aware of the importance of my work through GSA and how the research and practice feeds back in to the institution.