Artists
• Anna Boggon • David Cotterrell • Lu Chunsheng • Yue Luping •
Management
• Thomas Charveriat • Simon Kirby • Margherita Salmaso • Allard van Hoorn •

Less Travelled

Less Travelled is the road chosen by those who are willing to explore one step further. It refers to less frequented synaptic routes that mediate our new experiences and sensations. To forge new pathways creates original views and new insights. These are the roads less travelled.

To travel is to discover and to exchange, to carry with you, leave behind, to mix, grind and rediscover. Through reflection and confrontation in a completely new environment we may begin to form new views from the outside in and from the inside out. The works presented in this exhibition all respond to this dilemma. Anna Boggon's poetic reflections in cast glass and resin pieces combine with her periscope-cabinet which opens onto new vertiginous realities. Lu Chunsheng's 29-minute narrative video The History Of Chemistry leaves us with an unsettling sense of bewilderment. This feeling becomes even stronger in Yue Luping's Far People Project which deals with personal displacement within constructed and mediated group identities. Lastly, David Cotterrell's self-replicating portrayal of a projected maximum density urban settlement echoes the actual backdrop of a realised dream.

Less Travelled is the concluding exhibition of the Artist Links China programme, a joint project between Arts Council England and the British Council. Artist Links seeks to nurture a fragile cross-cultural environment between China and Britain through links between contemporary arts practitioners. As a development opportunity for artists, the programme has facilitated early stage development of over 60 artists' projects in China and in England. These artists are young, emerging and established practitioners. Their work covers theatre, dance, live intervention, new music, sound work, video and other lens based practice, installation, performance, ceramics, curating, digital work and other cross art form practice. Whilst some of the artists have international reputations, all are working very effectively within their own regions and countries. [ ↑ ]

Artists

Anna Boggon
Anna Boggon lives and works in London UK. Her practice includes sculpture, video and site specific installation. There is an ongoing curiosity relating to the adaptability of objects and subject matter and an additional desire to create shifting and altering perspectives. Objects are collected, reconfigured, placed or displaced. Boggon has shown extensively in the UK and Internationally. Recent solo shows include, “Little by Little”, Studio 1.1 Gallery, London 2005 ”Put em up” Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, UK 2004. [ ↑ ]

David Cotterrell
David Cotterrell is an installation artist working across varied media including Digital Video, Audio, Interactive Media, Artificial Intelligence, Device Control and Hybrid technology. Cotterrell'’s work exhibits political, social and behavioural analysis of the environment and context within which, he and his work exhibit. Recent work has involved research into computational models of conversational speech, an artificially intelligent pedestrian urban population and a self-sustaining gridlock generator. Over the last ten years, Cotterrell's work has been extensively commissioned and exhibited in North America, Europe and the Far East, in gallery spaces, museums and within the public realm. David has been a consultant to strategic MasterPlans, cultural and public art policy for urban regeneration, healthcare and growth areas. and he researches and teaches at Sheffield Hallam University Cotterrell was selected for the Becks Futures Awards at the ICA, London, 2002. He is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art and book, on his recent work has been published by Black Dog Publishing, entitled The Impossible Project (ISBN 1 901033 73 2) [ ↑ ]

Lu Chunseng
Lu Chunsheng has exhibited widely in China and abroad. Today he lives and works in Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include China Contemporary, Art, Architecture and Visual Culture at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2006), The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, USA (2006), Out of Sight, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2005), Double Vision, 1st Lianzhou International Foto Festival, Culture Square Lianzhou, China (2005), and Zooming Into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection at the National Art Museum, Beijing, China (2005) and subsequently in Mexico City and Shanghai. [ ↑ ]

Yue Luping
Yue Luping was born in 1975 in Xiangzhou county, Guangxi province of China. Yue Luping produces art that challenges and inverts our existing ideas on belonging and cultural identity. Taking the interplay between "the West" and China as the focal point for much of his work, he explores concepts of migration and diasporas in an increasingly interconnected world. In different photographic and video projects Yue Luping explores and documents the notion of the outsider and the otherness. In 2003 he graduated from the school of traditional Chinese painting of Xi'an's academy of fine arts and received his Master's degree in literature. He continued to work in the department of Fine Arts in Xi'an's academy of fine arts as a teacher. He has shown widely in exhibitions like City_net Asia 2005 in Seoul Modern Art Museum and Far People Space Station at Gasworks, London in 2005. [ ↑ ]

Management

Thomas Charveriat
Thomas Charveriat (Paris, 1974) lives and works in Shanghai, China. He studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and obtained a master degree in sculpture from Columbia University. After finishing his studies in America, he moved to Barcelona, where he obtained a master degree in digital arts at the Pompeu Fabra University. Thomas Charveriat creates animatronic installations with GPS, SMS, video, sound, electronic data and humour that interact with the viewer. Complexity and elegance are combined to create sensorial atmosphere associated with vulnerability and apprehension. Charveriat has won a number of scholarships and prizes and exhibits on a regular basis in international new media arts shows, such as Art Futura and Observatori. He has shown in various art institutions such as Museo de las Ciencias Prìncipe Felipe, Museo Amadeo de Souza--Cardoso, the Museo Maritimo de Barcelona and the CCCB. [ ↑ ]

Simon Kirby
Simon Kirby has 20 years experience in international cultural exchange as producer, and critic. He began his career on the EU China Desk and went on to produce with IETM ground breaking publications that led to mainstreaming cultural projects into EU funding structures (Bread and Circuses 1 & 2). He is a fluent Mandarin speaker who has been a frequent visitor to China since the mid 1980’s. In 2002 he was recruited by Arts Council England, from his London base to work with the British Council to establish the Artist Links programme in China. [ ↑ ]

Margherita Salmaso
Margherita Salmaso (Padua, 1978) studied Social Sciences in Trient, Italy and graduated in post-modern cultural management. She worked in Verona four years, in the studio of Christophe Demaître, assiduously frequented by intellectuals, artists and writers. A laboratory of collective creation, discussion and the sharing of ideas, it has also been the place where she developed her first project as a free-lance curator for Art Farm '03, an annual show on land art and site specific installations. She undertook a year in Barcelona and took part in “Las escrituras del arte”, an art criticism research program coordinated by the Cultural Institute of the University Pompeu Fabra and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). After being Mana Art director in Brussels for two years, she pursues her work as a senior curator in Island6 Arts Center Shanghai and other Art Institutions in Europe. [ ↑ ]

Allard van Hoorn
Allard van Hoorn creates a visual language made of signs, symbols and demarcations that indicate alternative routes in contemporary society. It is a visual code he co-develops with people he works with in all parts of the world and, specifically, in local communities. His complete body of work is aimed at assisting mankind in obtaining an other way of looking and seeing, discovering that we now have the option to make it work for all of humanity. His work has appeared in publications like the book On Barcelona, in the streets and in exhibition venues like the Stedelijk Museum CS in Amsterdam in November 2005 and CCCB in Barcelona in 2003. He has intervened with special projects during the biennales of Venice in 2003 and 2005 and has taken part in activities like the Design Science Summer Lab 2005 organized by the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the United Nations and has given lectures and organized workshops, like the one on temporary and mobile architecture and exhibition spaces, executed with kind support of Hans Ulrich Obrist for UIC / ESARQ in May 2005. With his Platform for Urban Investigation he participates as Project Collaborator of Urban China Magazine in Documenta XII's project Journal of Journals that is to be exhibited in Kassel in 2007. [ ↑ ]

Special thanks to all who have helped to make this exhibition a reality.
Especially: Piccia Neri, Zhang Liting, Zhou Peng, Yang Longhai, Zhu Yumei, Ophelia Huang, Wang Jungeng, Yan Jiaging, Chen Zhaojin, Chen Baotian, Tian Jun, Chen Jianjun, Yang Qingyan, Dong Ernian, Dong Zhaobao, Wang Xu, Gu Mingfei, Jin Zhongming, Zhu Fengyin, friends and families.