b.Florence, Italy
Lives and works between London and Florence
SOLO EXHIBITION
2022 Aground, 4cose, London, UK
2021 Becoming a Crane, Daisy’s Room Gallery, London, UK
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 Lateworks: Preparations, Cafe OTO, London, UK
2023 No More (Cruel) Optimism, SZN Gallery, London, UK
2022 Fertile Soil, V.O. Curations Project Space, London, UK
2022 you can’t discourse without disco, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, Croatia
2021 de nos jours, Osnova Gallery Off-site, London, UK
2021 Three Degrees of Seperation, Changing Room Gallery, London, UK
2021 Might Arrive, Safehouse 1,London, UK
2021 Walls All Around, Fusion Design Centre, Nottinghan, UK
2020
Unearthed, Cyprus College of Art, Lemba, Cyprus
2019 Twenty-Five Ponds, Off-site Group Show at Hampstead Heath, London, UK
2019 Get To Know You Better, The Cock Tavern, London, UK
2018 Young Modulus NW1, The Crypt Gallery, London, UK
2018 Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London, UK
PERFORMANCES
2019 Next Choreography Festival, Siobhan Davies Dance, London, UK
2019 Commixture: Performance Night, The Koppel Project Central, London, UK
AWARDS & RESIDENCIES
2022 WHW Akademija, Zagreb, Croatia
2021 Sid Motion Gallery Prize (shortlist), London, UK
2020 Grampus Heritage PEATS Program , Cyprus College of Art, Lemba, Cyprus
2019 Silver Arts Award
EDUCATION AND QUALIFICATIONS
2017-2021 BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins
2018-2019 Next Choreography, Siobhan Davies Dance
My recent enquiry concerns the complex relationship between migratory labour and international trade marked by my own experiences with migration. I have been exploring the forms of both product and process as a result of border-crossing and trans-culturation whilst paying heed to the cultural identities of Chinese diaspora communities in Florence, Italy. I work predominantly through personal encounters, looking at the social structures under which Chinese workers have toiled in restaurant businesses and clothing and leather factories in Florence. The shift in production of work in different cultural frameworks and the transversal act of labour made me reflect on the mechanisms of production across different geopolitical contexts. In response to this, the objects I make undergo a constant state of ‘shape-shifting’, which overtime creates a causal history of material and labour and are caught in their process of ‘becoming’.
Drawing on my continued interest in material culture in relation to transnational movement, place-making and industrial modernity, I have been juxtaposing industrial and craft materials alongside found and personal objects including ceramics, wood, steel and leather offcuts recycled from leather bag factories in Florence. Questioning the transient forms of existence, these leather bags are seen as commercialised carrier bags that hold a ‘belly’ and dressed in reincarnated skin; inscribed with unidentified or mislabelled labour. I have sought to assimilate the relationship between the production chain and those Chinese workers situated in the peripheral zones of the city. Trailing through the undercurrent of the labour forces behind the entanglements of today’s vast global trade network, I sense an urgency to generate artistic tools that offer a chance to anticipate it’s inherent power structures and susceptibility to misinterpretation.
In my work I am trying to toy with the ambivalence of how national identity is tied with the (in)visibility of labouring traces, meanwhile to expose particular social constitutions by questioning the interdependency, complicity and binaries between the authentic and the reproduced. I am less concerned with longing and belonging but choosing dislocation over location when the conventions of locating material culture, identities and practice are constantly destabilising.