- Venue
- South Hill Park Arts Centre
- Location
- South East England
With ever-expanding global mass communication, travel, work and immigration blurring traditional concepts and definitions of culture and personal identity, the world is becoming an ever-shrinking place. Depending on one’s espoused political or world-view, the resulting increased multiculturalism is in turn celebrated as the solution to and maligned as the cause of social and political problems throughout the world.
Jam: Cultural Congestions in Contemporary Asian Art, the current exhibition at the Bracknell Gallery at South Hill Park, explores personal responses and interpretations of such redefining cultural identity. With works in a variety of media including sound, film, collage, sculpture and installation by a number of emerging Asian artists including Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Tsai-Wei Chen, I-Ting Hou, Su-Chen Hsu, Emma Kwan, Feng-Ru Lee, Wang Ruobing, Bindu Mehra & Himanshu Desai, Hua Kuan Sai, Meng-Hung (Sam) Su, Pei-Shih Tu and Ming Turner, the exhibition is a multi-sensory experience which transports the viewer. Curated by Dr. Outi Remes, Madi Acharya-Baskerville and Yi-Fang Chen, the exhibition provides, sometimes poignant, insight into the artists’ experiences of and responses to the cultural congestion of contemporary society.
Presented in a variety of spaces throughout the South Hill Park complex, the exhibition is in turn thought provoking, evocative and surprising. The juxtaposition of sights, sounds and images that are at times familiar but often alien, create a sense of both connection and isolation as the viewer experiences the works. Such conflicting emotions are a common experience for the growing numbers of individuals who travel and live outside their “home” culture. The struggle and celebration of defining individual cultural identity while traveling, working and living outside of one’s “home,” is a recurring theme in and inspiration for the works of the exhibition.
An especially intriguing work is Insabbiati, a video/sculptural installation by Bindu Mehra and Himanshu Desai. Using statistical data from the 2001 Greater London Census, Mehra and Desai create an intriguing visual and auditory portrait of London. Through the use of music generation software, census data becomes a symphony, directly reflecting the migration patterns of various London boroughs. The music serves as soundtrack for images projected onto a screen. The screen, created from rice and polycarbonate sheets, signifies the basic needs of food and shelter, common catalysts of migration.
Another stand out work is the installation, Drawing Space-To Home, by Hua Kuan Sai. Occupying the whole of one of the Bracknell Gallery’s two main spaces, the work explores the concept of dividing and defining space with an overarching orientation inspired by the geographical location of Hua’s place of origin, Singapore. The work is visually appealing and invites the viewer to enter and experience the space, which it occupies and redefines.
The exhibition creates a jam of sensory experiences for the viewer. As much of the audio is available via individual headsets, each listener is, in a sense, alone, when listening in and reacting to the jam of sounds and images. Moving through the exhibition spaces, in the midst of the multimedia images, the viewer chooses their own way in which to interact with the works. Though a sense of alienation in the midst of the jam is at times palpable, the universality of this human emotion and the creative response to it are inspiringly present in Jam: Cultural Congestions in Contemporary Asian Art.
