Bon Voyage!

About

The exhibition is conceived and executed by two talented young Chinese curators Jingwen Weng and Yang Li who have brought extraordinary creativity and energy to this event. Artists: Shou-an Chiang, Hyemin Gil, Yu Yang, Kimie Minobe, Yuhui Li, Dien Berziga, Semin Hong, Amalie Gabel, Yijia Wu.

Bon Voyage! is an exhibition carrying sentiments of nostalgia, confusion over self-identity and position, and good wishes to those about to set off on a journey. There is a focus on people who travel from one place to another, a subject that often recalls memories of their hometowns and questions the uncertainty of home and an imagined future. The exhibition features nine artists coming from different cultural backgrounds. They incorporate their experience of ‘travelling’ to the UK as a temporary ‘pitstop’ in their artistic lives and capture the evocative resonance with specific venues that they call a real home.
The selected 22 works, in the forms of painting, installation, film, video, textile and performance, are accommodated into the house-boat in an attempt to mirror the dynamic route it takes on its daily voyage and dockings. In all these works, vulnerability and the haunting power of reforming an isolated being abound.
The discussion of the home is designed into three chapters. The curated viewing tour starts by offering a glimpse into a moment of domestic life through the artworks that trace the insignificant repetitive motions and the rhythms of everyday family life. It is then led by an obscure expression of intimacy and secrets about family. The exhibition opens discussions with artworks that illustrate the endless travelling and fragile facts of the alternative ‘home’.
The curators invite the viewer to experience several shifts in identity during the exhibition: from that of a ‘guest’, being offered a taste of home, to that of an ‘outsider’, peeking into emotional and spiritual privacy, and at last, being evoked by the temporary nature of their arrivals. They aspire to see how the re-definition of home activates a sense of absence and belonging, a sense of strangeness and familiarity.