Artists from Swansea try to collaborate with artists from China. Over many years and several (failed) attempts. Dealing with bureaucracy. Trying to find Chinese artists to collaborate with. How do you even meet artists in China, when you are sat in a boardroom with gallery owners? These are some of the problems that beset the Glynn Vivian’s attempts to facilitate Welsh-Chinese art relations. The result was 3 artists from China (especially Xiamen) and 4 artists from Wales not collaborating overtly on work, but living together, talking to one another, visiting each other’s countries to create their own work, or cross cultural engagement. This was a wonderful exhibition that was, I think, aided by the fact that the Glynn Vivian is closed and the exhibition venues were dispersed off-site across multiple sites, in buildings that gave greater resonance to many of the works presented.
I hope to write about this exhibition because rarely have I come out of an exhibition feeling that it was so incredibly geographical. I don’t usually wax lyrical about such things, but every piece was just rich and complex spatially. Just a few images and examples:
Theatrical Geographies 