Highlights From Chelsea College Of Arts’ MA Summer Show
By Something CuratedChelsea College of Arts’ MA Summer Show, running until 14 September, features works from diverse graduates, including students of Fine Art, Curating & Collecting, Textile Design and Interior & Spatial Design. The school boasts a long list of eminent alumni, including greats like John Berger, Steve Mcqueen and Quentin Blake. This show follows the college’s undergraduate exhibition back in June, and offers viewers a glimpse into the future of contemporary art and design. Something Curated highlights some of the most intriguing artworks on display at this year’s presentation, speaking with the young artists behind them.
Find Peter || Li Fang Yin
Find Peter, 2017 is made of a series of stacked sculptures, created using assorted found objects by Taiwanese artist Li Fang Yin. The title, Find Peter refers to a narrative built around a tiny succulent plant, belonging to the artist’s friend, that is hidden somewhere in the midst of the sculpture. She explains that the sculpture’s inception began six months ago, and had gone through numerous levels of refining. The series of objects, all in varying sizes and materials, is based on “the process of precarious stacking and balancing.” The artist goes onto explain that she wanted to “create this inseparable relationship between the work and the artist, and a structure that reflects our inner brain.”
FICTIONPIXELS, The Library of The Live or What The Eyes See || Ant Hamlyn
British artist Ant Hamlyn’s sculptural work explores themes across sculpture, digital, social media, installation, moving image, drawing and performance, and aims to undermine habitual assumptions made surrounding contemporary technology and questioning the information digested through smartphones and computer screens. FICTIONPIXELS, The Library of The Live or What The Eyes See is a mechanical sculpture that performs a series of moving images and visual illusions at fifteen-minute intervals. Hamlyn’s works have earned him the Cecil Lewis Sculpture Scholarship and have also been exhibited in prestigious galleries like The Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Museum of National History in Albania.
Room || Ryohei Oba
Ryohei Oba is a Japanese artist, set designer and photographer, whose practice focuses on establishing a fresh perspective on the perception of human beings. Elements of photography, theatre, performance, fashion and costume intertwine within the artist’s works. Conceptualised, built and photographed by Oba, his inspiration behind Room derives from a questioning of the relationships formed between human and man-made objects, succinctly capturing a moment in which both exist in a state of equality. Oba told us: “If a body is defined as an empty container, how would we be different from man made objects around us? If we allowed them to be released from our control, how would they show their own identity?”
A Meeting Place || Kyungryul Park
Behind Kyungryul Park’s playful and imaginative paintings are words, carefully dissected and rebuilt with a fresh narrative, through the usage of language, stories and paint. “My practice is a place where constant association from the subconscious is realised, and subsequently, an unexpected story comes about,” the artist explains to us. “I try to chase intuitive and playful imagination behind word that I find from a mundane text. I rebuild its narrative system through subconscious involvement with the usage of language, collecting stories, and the form of painterly materiality; then they eventually become a huge, complex ‘installation’ residing in a space so that it allows me to give a volume to systemically even text.”
Subliminal Mirage || Jia Qing Mo
Artist and filmmaker Jia Qing Mo’s video installation Subliminal Mirage first catches your eye with its bold hues of blue, pink and yellow. Qing Mo told Something Curated: “My work centres on the relationship between human and objects, between artificial and natural. In this work I try to talk about consciousness exchanging and spiritual traveling.” The installation was built as an abstract underwater space serving as a backdrop to her video, which you can watch here.
Untitled || Alex Urie
Winner of ACME’s 2017/18 Chelsea MA Studio Award, Alex Urie is a painter whose work specialises in residual spaces. His signature choice of colours, pastel pinks, blues and greys, are splashed across many of his paintings, inspired by cartoon landscapes, film stills and interior spaces. Urie explains the significance of “a stretched canvas” as a “dumping ground for obsolete, itinerant forms” and that his focus on paintings as a medium is due to the fact that the intimate touch of an artist is still widely present in a painting, even after being translated into the digital realm.
Open to the public till 14th September at 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Words by Trishna Goklani | Feature image courtesy of Li Fang Yin