Wanlan Chen (Amber)

Wanlan Chen (Amber) featured image

About

Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways


Blue Space is a collaboration between the artists Priysha Rajvanshi and Elise Guillaume. The project has been brought together by a team from the RCA’s Curating Contemporary Art programme in partnership with the host venue, Gasworks.

The Global Climate Emergency and other issues we face with nature largely come from our (human) exploitation of it. We often share stories in relation to our experiences with these challenges; our feelings of injustice, the discomfort we experience, our fears, and even at times, our tales of displacement. Yet, despite our fraught relationship with our living environment in which we co-exist – we persist.

In the Blue Space, each artist responds to our evolving relationship with nature through the creation of a provisional shelter that gives voice to the environment. Large cyanotype sheets made in the River Thames by Rajvanshi have been adapted to form the tent’s canopy with a related projection across the interior walls. While, an original soundscape produced by Guillaume incorporates the vibration-based audio of natural elements with spoken word, to allow for a speculative conversation between humans and our surroundings to occur. Through this, the artists invite visitors to slow down and listen to the earth, as to hear its perspective as we look to adapt to our changing world. 

This project was formed from recognising the stresses that our friction with the environment are inducing. As a proposed place of solace for local people, it aims to offer a soothing and open-minded plateau. Here, through interacting with the artistic practices brought forward, we introduce a moment of calm confrontation and learning by hearing. Through this, we look to present an opportunity to begin the process of healing a fractured but essential relationship with the place we live. Crucially, to consider the Blue Space in a gallery in London, this also connects us with the other people we share our earth with, whose struggles like the environment are not always acknowledged. 

Through entering the space, audiences are invited to not only take from nature, as is too often the scenario, but by listening to it; acknowledge it as a collaborator, a living entity, to recognise its stresses and its sorrow, its moments of courage and its ailing contentment. In embracing this meeting of perspectives, one can slow down, be immersed in the comfort of the shelter, and take advantage of the moment of reflection, familiar recognition, and re-connection being offered as we look to adapt to our changing world. 

Statement

Wanlan's current research and curatorial practice mainly focus on different types of Asian art. She is the initiator of the curatorial collective Backitchen. She started Backitchen in early 2022 with Jiayue He and Youjia Qian, and through it they want to give voice to themselves and the Asian diaspora. Backitchen is a research-oriented curatorial collective devoted to establishing an ongoing platform to promote Asian art, its social intervention and care. By facilitating art creation, collaboration and communication, Backitchen unpacks the historical and social construction of “Asian” and supports the Asian artists obstructed by the structural inequality in the cultural industry. Their recent exhibition projects include commissioned curatorial exhibitions The Quack Agent: Triss Solo Exhibition (2023); and self-initiated curatorial exhibition Home | Away: Narratives of Dislocation and Estrangement (2022).


Beyond that, in her experience of communicating with artists, she noticed that many potential artists often support their creations by selling peripheral products of their work or by producing other creative products. And this is what inspired her to establish and become the initiator of Lighthouse Art. At the first Lighthouse Art Festival, it provided a reasonable booth for over 50 creative practitioners to sell their pieces. At the same time, Wanlan collaborated with Mint Chinese Film Festival to bring the films of young talented Chinese filmmakers to London, screening 11 outstanding short films with a critical perspective and one feature film. Through this platform, it hopes to cross geographical boundaries to seek out and bring together a diverse range of emerging creative practitioners.


In terms of dissertation, she focuses on the negotiation between power dynamics and the role of the curator in a particular context in China. By considering the interconnectedness of the contemporary Chinese political framework, her research examines the impact on the 'freedom' of the curators and the curatorial discourse that was excluded.

Graduate project | Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways

Curatorial collective | Backitchen

Art Festival | Lighthouse Art