The great facelift of the city: Kerry Ann Lee in Shanghai

Wellington artist Kerry Ann Lee spent the first few months of 2010 as the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE) artist-in-residence at island6 Art Centre Shanghai. With the support of Asia:NZ and Wellington City Council, she embarked on what she now sees as ”an incredible life-changing experience”.

Kerry Ann enjoyed working in Shanghai so much that she is now back with another exhibition entitled AM Park, complete with an indoor lawn. The exhibition runs from 7-20 July 2010 at am art space, Shanghai. It will feature surreal images of monumental structures with a real grass lawn grown in the main gallery of am art space.

The WARE residency offered much inspiration and helped develop Kerry Ann Lee’s creative practice in China. “On reflection,” she says, “those three months were one of the most productive periods of my life and possibly also one of the hardest. I found the day-to-day realities of working as an artist-in-residence in Shanghai extremely challenging, yet most rewarding.”

The artist gained valuable experience that has guided her personal growth and professional development.

Life as an artist-in-residence at island6 Art Centre Shanghai

Based an hour north of Shanghai City, the New Zealander set out to make connections and develop collaboration practices.

She was introduced to some inspiring people, in and around the city’s M50 Art District, who provided valuable critique on her practice. “It was also a lonely and isolating month as my own culture shock began to set in,” remembers Kerry Ann. “Each day brought about its challenges.”

As an ethnic Chinese, Kerry Ann had trouble convincing locals that she couldn’t speak any of the language. They didn’t see her as a Westerner. “Aren’t your parents sad that you’ve lost your native tongue?” asked one storekeeper. Kerry Ann Lee’s parents grew up in New Zealand speaking English. Explaining her family history to people she met would sometimes help. “I found it took longer to get around using my poor Chinese, hand gestures, and lots of good humour and patience,” explains the artist. “It was hard, but not impossible!”

Deciding she needed a better grasp of the language, she enlisted the help of “a terrific Mandarin Chinese tutor, Mr Gao Bing.” There was a lot of groundwork to be done in preparation of daily schedules, with distances in the city requiring careful planning. There was, of course, artwork to be produced and an exhibition to be arranged at the end of the residency.

The artwork

Two bodies of work came as a result, featured in two group exhibitions: Placebo in November 2009, and Fakirs in January 2010. At the invitation of the New Zealand Consul General Michael Swain, Kerry Ann represented New Zealand at the ‘Women Artists of the World’ exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum in February 2010.

“I did a lot of research, maintained journals and took lots of photographs to process my situation and surroundings,” explains Kerry Ann. “I appeared as an insider to Chinese culture – visibly Chinese and of Chinese descent – yet was a distinct outsider due to the language barrier and my disconnection with contemporary Chinese culture.”

It was this unique cultural position that framed the artist’s relationship with the city. Less compelled to seek remnants of traditional culture, she was instead taken by the scale and changing face of the Chinese urban landscape, which is striking in Shanghai, China's most populous city.

An initial difficulty sourcing her usual art medium, paper, resulted in the original idea of creating ‘objects of everyday desire’ out of raw steel wire, sourced from the local hardware store in Baoshan. These exquisite works, reminiscent of filigree jewellery, were exhibited at the island6 gallery.

The collection of 11 steel wire pieces is called Electric Warrior. It highlights rapid urban development and the need for self-protection in the city, and was shown as part of Placebo.

In Lee’s second work series, Chinese Relatives, Chinese faces gaze from behind iron bars or peek at passers-by out of old wood window frames. The inspiration for this came from a local shikumen (stone gated tenement) that was being demolished near the gallery.

Peering in through the gaping concrete walls and doorframes, Kerry Ann discovered various graphic reminders of the former inhabitants – torn wallpaper, stickers, lucky charms, posters of pop stars and calendars untouched since people left. These mysterious remnants of the inhabitants’ lives and how they made a home there intrigued the Kiwi artist – especially against the background of urban growth, what she calls “the great facelift of the city.”

Kerry Ann used images of Chinese actors from old movie magazines from the 1980s with superimposed quotes and lyrics in Chinese, cut into the surface of the paper. “Displaced and out of time, these ‘anti-billboards’ reveal the hypothetical states of mind of the former inhabitants,” is how she describes Chinese Relatives.

“The WARE residency was invaluable in enabling me to network and build relationships with the local arts community in Shanghai,” sums up the artist. Kerry Ann Lee now lives in Dunedin where she lectures at the Otago Polytechnic School of Design. She is planning another project in Shanghai in July of this year and hopes to exhibit her work in New Zealand soon.

Related pages:

• Watch Kerry Ann Lee interviewed at her exhibition in Shanghai by the Asia Down Under TV programme.

Photos:

1) Lilliput - digital collage by Kerry Ann Lee, 2010

2) L to R - Sharon Fraser, Director of Kea Shanghai; Kerry Ann Lee; Clara Swain and Michael Swain, New Zealand Consul-General.

3) A piece from Electric Warrior featured in the Placebo exhibition.

4) Ladyface/Almond Sugar by Kerry Ann Lee, featured in the Fakirs exhibition.