Tuesday 12th February, 6pm – 8pm

Free Event – All welcome

Metropolitan Bar, Candleriggs, Glasgow.

Celebrate the launch of Takeaway China 2013 with Glasgow’s own Hong Lok Dragon Dance Group, songs by Fong Lui and the Glasgow Cantonese Opera Group.

Also on show Suining Children’s Folk Art.

Sun 25 April 2010, 19.00 – 21.00

Ricefield Arts and Cultural Centre, Albion Street

A unique event bringing together improvised music using traditional Chinese instruments, spoken word performances and projected artworks by German artist Thomas Jacobi.

This multimedia collaboration drew on Jacobi’s performance and works on paper, and featured spontaneous improvised vocals and music by the award nominated Harmony Ensemble; made up of the fascinating voice of Fong Liu, the haunting traditional Chinese sounds of Zheng and Percussion (played by Hooi Ling Eng) and bamboo flutes and bawu (played by Eddie McGuire).

Liverpool based poets, David Greygoose and Eleanor Rees, performed accompanied by live music with parallel Chinese translations supplied by Dr. Yupin Chung, Cuator of Chinese Art, Burrell Collection. The ensemble rounded off the evening with a selection of traditional songs and music.

The Black Obsidian, Gayle Chong Kwan 2010

Gayle Chong Kwan

March/ April 2010, Project Room, Trongate 103
A series of activities and events, based around memory and the senses and developed out of the series of new large-format photographic works created by the artist Gayle Chong Kwan during her residency with Ricefield.

Wednesday 7^th April, 6 – 8.30pm Symposium

‘The Obsidian Isle’ and the Ossianic Landscape

The symposium addressed the themes of landscape, place, travel and nation in relation to Gayle Chong Kwan’s development of her project ‘The Obsidian Isle’ and James Macpherson’s 18^th century ‘discovery’ of the epic works of the 3^rd century Scottish blind poet Ossian.

Speakers included: Gayle Chong Kwan, Prof. Fiona Stafford, Professor of English and Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford, Dr John Bonehill, Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow, Dr Dominic Paterson, Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow

‘The Obsidian Isle’

Gayle Chong Kwan discussed the development of her large-format photographic project ‘The Obsidian Isle’, a fictional island located near Staffa that houses many of the lost and destroyed buildings and places of Scotland, and the accompanying sensory experiments, objects and publication.  Chong Kwan discussed this work in relation to her research on Ossian, the blind 3^rd century poet who Macpherson supposedly ‘discovered’ from collecting oral sources and tales throughout the Scottish Highlands in the 18^th Century.

‘Ossian: Landscape and Place’

Professor Fiona Stafford analysed Macpherson’s texts together with a discussion of the nature of the landscape and places in his poems, and the ways in which artists have responded to the poems. Macpherson’s contribution to eighteenth-century culture was considered in the light of changing ideas about mountain regions and contemporary ways of seeing the world.

‘”New scenes drawn by the pencil of Truth”: Joseph Banks’ northern voyage’

Dr John Bonehill spoke about his research on the visual archive relating to Joseph Banks’ 1772 Iceland voyage, which brought Staffa to wider public notice, looking at landscape, travel and nation and at the islands encountered on the voyage from a variety of overlapping perspectives, economic, scientific, and cultural.

‘Utopia, Landscape and Nation’

Dr Dominic Paterson presented more widely on themes of utopia, landscape and nation.

Wednesday 31^st March and Saturday 3^rd April, 2-4pm Workshops with Gayle Chong Kwan
Gayle Chong Kwan ran workshops on photography and the senses, during which participants explored some of the themes and techniques used in the development of her series of large-format works and wider project, ‘The Obsidian Isle’.

Pamela So

18 – 21 August 2009
Pamela So had been photographing the lives of Chinese people who have made Scotland their home. The results of her investigations can be seen on the Edinburgh Festival website at www.eif.co.uk/diasporaproject.

4 – 18 July 2009
An exhibition of painting, prints and mixed media works from Chinese artists who have trained both at CAFA (China Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing) and Glasgow School of Art
BBC interview with one of the exhibiting artists Wang Yuan

2009 Art Graduates

Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
02 – 31 May 2009
An exhibition of photographs taken in Hong Kong by Glasgow-based photographer Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
Read the Review in the Scotsman by Susan Mansfield

Thomas Jacobi

14 February – 8 March 2009
Visual social history in ink rubbings and brick powder pigments on paper. Jacobi documents traces of traditional Chinese architecture and society in the objects and remains of China’s housing of yesteryear.

Sarah Kwan
31 October – 22 November 2008
Dundee-based artist Sarah Kwan searched for her own ethnic equilibrium in this fresh look at Scottish-Chinese identity.