INTO THE WORLD OF PALPABLE OBJECTS AND FRUITFUL DELIGHT | FAN CHON HOO

About

Eleven Spitalfields Gallery and Fountain is delighted to present the first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of emerging Malaysian artist Fan Chon Hoo. Shortlisted for the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4's New Sensations 2010, and recently selected for the Catlin Art Guide 'The artists to watch in 2011', Fan Chon Hoo is an artist with a uniquely compelling visual language. By assuming the role of a modern day amateur antiquarian and anthropologist, one informed by earlier figures of 18th and 19th century travellers and amateur naturalists, Hoo explores the role that cultural artefacts have as residues and deposits of the process of cultural translation. Amongst these cultural artefacts, the Willow Pattern chinaware and the Victorian copper jelly mould underline for Hoo the notion of cultural translation. In works such as the 'Blue and White Collection'; a series of paper earthenware works created in response to the Willow Pattern invented by English craftsmen in the late eighteenth century and embellished with imaginary landscapes made up of oriental architectural structures, exoticised follies from ornamental gardens found within the UK, Hoo playfully explores how a foreign culture can be appropriated and
translated then subconsciously tucked into the local culture. On the other hand, The 'jelly moulds' collection explores the seeming de rigueur of the decorative Victorian dessert to individual nostalgia and moral sentiment. Crafted from brightly coloured and luminous gelling agents imported from Indonesia and produced from moulds informed by Rococo & Neoclassical architectural details, these eloquent and beguiling works attempt to call attention to the incongruous relation of expropriation and appropriation.
Exhibited in the highly fitting setting of No. 11 Princelet Street. One of number of Georgian town houses built in Spitalfields in the late 17th and 18th centuries, a period defined by the 'new luxury' of Eastern ornamentation in affluent society of eighteenth & nineteenth century Britain,
'Into the world of palpable objects and fruitful delight' is an encounter with Fan Chon Hoo's prodigious talent for creating accomplished and thoughtful works that evoke and echo the authentic, and through his own idiosyncratic experimentations and irreverent exploration of artifice, question the positing of origin.

Fan Chon Hoo was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1982 and studied photography at London College
of Communications. Aged 28, he will be the youngest artist to exhibit at Eleven Spitalfi elds Gallery. Fan
Chon Hoo's work was exhibited at The House of Nobelemen, 2 Cornwell Terrace as part of Saatchi Gallery
and Channel 4's New Sensations 2010, organised to fi nd and support the most imaginative and talented
artists graduating in the UK.

Into the world of palpable objects and fruitful delight an exhibition by Fan Chon Hoo Curated by Keith Whittle
Exhibition Dates: 3rd - 26th February 2011
Opening Times: Tuesdays to Sundays, 12 ' 6 pm and by appointment
Exhibition Introduction: Keith Whittle
For further press material please contact
Eleven Spitalfields Gallery: 020 7247 1816 or info@elevenspitalfields.com - http://www.elevenspitalfields.com/
or Keith Whittle at Fountain: keithwhittle@fountainprojects.co.uk - http://www.fountainprojects.co.uk/