V&A Friday Late China Through the Looking Glass

In January 2011 Eliza Gluckman curated a V&A Friday Late – a one-night only, free event. Over two and a half thousand people attended.

View images on Flickr

Event details:

Explore and explode the myths and stereotypes of Chinese culture. Through an evening of fashion, film, music and contemporary art.

During the exhibition of ‘Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City’ and nearing Chinese New Year, we take a look at China through the murky lenses of chinoiserie, fiction and myth. A vision blurred by tall tales and Chinese whispers.

Play chess in the Export Art galleries, smoke opium in the ceramics galleries, enjoy some karaoke with a friend in an intimate booth, record your sensory memories tasting spring rolls, watch out for the remote controlled chinoiserie figurine and enjoy films and installations in the British Galleries.

Taking part are: Audio Architecture and SubJam, Suki Chan, Gayle Chong Kwan, Stephanie Douet, WESSIELING, DJ Lukasz, Ed Pien, Karen Tam and Erika Tan.

The British Galleries, housing centuries of ceramics, ornament and furniture referencing a mythical China, chinoiserie, created in the 17th c. by European travellers and fantasists that captured a Western imagination. These galleries will host Suki Chan’s Interval II and Erika Tan’s Shot Through; two films looking at journeys through and to China, real and imagined.

Exploring imagination and the unreliability of human recollection, Audio Architecture and SubJam collaborate on, Local Whispers; an immersive, interactive installation of audio and visual snapshots captured and collected from modern day China and Britain by Yan Jun, Ruan Qianrui, Experimenter En Couleur and Christian Krupa. In the British Galleries and the V&A ‘Tunnel’ Experience urban, natural and everyday sounds in an environment of silent moving image and physical objects captured and collected from China and the UK.

Emile de Bruijn, National Trust’s expert in chinoiserie will lead you through ‘A stroll through the history of chinoiserie in Britain’. The British Galleries reveal the huge influences China has had on our visual culture. From seventeenth century English imitation lacquer, chased silver with ‘Chinese’ scenes and the first chinoiserie wall decorations. The Badminton bed and mid-eighteenth-century Rococo borrowings, ending with objects inspired by the Royal Pavilion and the continuing popularity of Chinese design in the first half of the nineteenth century. Emphasising how the image of China in the British consciousness slowly changed over that time (c.1680- c.1740), but how the mechanics of exoticism were always at play.

In the Grand Entrance DJ Lukasz will subvert the traditional chimes of Chinese symbols under WESSIELING’s National Flags. The Chinese national flags, transformed in to the traditional cheongsam dress, tell a long tale of national identity, femininity and sexualisation which you can hear told by Dr Wessie Ling in an illustrated talk held in the National Art Library. WESSIELING will also be showing her chess sets, remodelled to show two cities at war over the contemporary trade of fashion. Visitors will be able to play these sets in games of simultaneous chess against a ‘master’ of the Imperial College Chess Club

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image: Alice Liddell and her sister, taken by Lewis Caroll

The café will host Gayle Chong Kwan’s ‘Manipulated Memory Tasting Booth’; a participatory piece inviting visitors to taste spring rolls whilst they listen to other recorded stories and memories relating to them. Visitors then have a chance to record their own.  Chong Kwan has exhibited this up and down the UK creating an ongoing sensory conversation between people who do not meet, in a highly manipulated setting of a temporary booth based on the design of Luke Lightfoot’s Chinese Room at Claydon House.  The ongoing recorded sound piece has become a way in which people talk much more about aspects of British culture through the prism of the spring roll and include stories and reflections on domestic abuse, school dinner times, death of parents, lovers and more!

Stephanie Douet will be lurking with a remote control ‘Nodding Mandarin’ giant, a 7ft tall pseudo-porcelain brute of a mantelpiece ornament, twirling and bobbing along the corridors. Loosely based on C18th meissen figurines, its progress is accompanied from beneath its skirts by an ear-curling soundpiece of tortured Chinesesque cymbals, drums and strings by music producer Tudor Lukies.  Dancing around with them like a real-live china figurine from the mantelpiece will be members of the Guerilla Dance Project. Shadow Play, a recorded performance by Ed Pien enters in to Pien’s mythical and unsettling works in the National Art Library. Known for his intricate paper cuts this hybridized work reveals the artist’s continued fascination with light, shadow, movement and transformation.  In this piece Pien incorporates his own body, manipulating lights, cut-outs, ropes and simple props to create ghostly shadows and mysterious beams of light. Both his body and the set transform as he moves through the installation, slipping seamlessly, between two-dimensional and three-dimension realms. As if through a looking glass.

Through the British Galleries and up the stairs in Room 138 of the ceramics galleries is a quiet enclave; an opium den. Karen Tam pulls together tourists trinkets and cheap replicas to create her opium den. With the intricate narratives of her screens and the backdrop of the V&A ceramics collection she challenges the crass stereotypes of popular culture by holding them up to the light. Part of a larger body of work, Tam creates interior spaces inspired by traditional Chinese interiors and western conceptions of Asian cultures and aesthetics. She calls her installation a “mythical” opium den. “It’s a Chinese space that’s recreated in the west for a western audience,” she says. It is witty but also unsettling.