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Temporary Shrine 2

Medium: Installation, Photography, Publication

Dimension: Variable

Incense Burners; Architectural Negative Spaces

2022

This is a series of installations documented by photography. Zhang was inspired by the small shrines commonly found on the streets of his hometown in Southeast China. Street shrines are usually built from inexpensive materials and usually enshrine statues of deities. In front of it are placed offerings, normally inexpensive food. Incense is used as an offering and also as a way of communicating with the deities. It is a modest, grass-roots, non-opulent custom, but it reflects the piety of the people's faith. Zhang placed incense burners in front of some architectural negative spaces in London to create shrines, a potential shrine to Chinese folk beliefs or other different immigrant groups' religion. Meanwhile, the absence of deities placed in shrines is intended to make people rethink the object of worship and the nature of their faith. This may be the absence of Chinese deities in Britain, or perhaps the artist's confusion about his own faith. The Chinese folk belief shrine plays an important role in the Chinese New year. We do the new year ritual around the home shrine. So Zhang plans to install my work like a home shrine this time.

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2Shengjia Zhang- Dreams of a new moon - Shengjia Zhang

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Shengjia Zhang is a video and installation artist born in Guangdong, China and based in London. He graduated from Central Saint Martins in MA Fine Art as a holder of the Mona Hatoum Bursary (2020-2022). His recent research interests include Chinese folk beliefs, immigrant communities, Orientalism, etc. His practice is inspired by investigating marginal materials specifically from an auto-ethnographic perspective, and drawing out their specific minor social histories. He is also a mudlarker, picking up objects of archaeological value on the banks of the Thames and creating works based on the study of them.

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How Much Ink?

Dimensions: free

Video link: https://vimeo.com/789045223/2416102995

This installation/performance piece stems from a personal reflection and questioning on the functioning of traditional Chinese social and family constructs, especially regarding a “benevolent censorship” stemming from the traditional Chinese “virtue” of 含蓄 (being reserved) and a resisting attitude towards that which introduces instability and con ict to the “old” and habitual. This phenomenon seems to become particularly prominent during the context of a traditional holiday as revered as the Lunar New Year. As much as a time for celebration, the holiday also embodies social pressure and competition of self image, as well as a succumbing to traditional hierarchy, whether in terms of gender, age or the sociopolitical. Therefore, in conjunction with a desire to uphold peace and union during a holiday gathering, the conversations on Lunar dinner tables seem to be overwhelmed with a shared concept of “knowing what to say and what cannot be said”. And there are ideas that can only be exchanged furtively in the cracks and folds of conversations.

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Menglu Yuan is a Chinese-Australian creative currently studying BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Her work often explores one’s experiences of “growing up”, and investigates the bi-directional relationship between one and their social environment. Working across a wide range of media including installation, performance and painting, she also draws on her personal journey through different cultures and is interested in exploring shared experiences of this which is becoming increasingly prominent amongst the newer generations.

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Discontinuous festival

Single-frequency Colour Video with Sound

2’52’

2020

This work explored the family relationship reaction to the pandemic since the Lunar New Year Eve of 2020. The break out of Covid-19 led Chinese people to experience a very harsh situation, before every other country. People who worked outside couldn’t go back to their working cities, most people had gone back to their family house to celebrate. As a result of the strict “everybody stay exactly where they are” policy, people had to be temporarily detached from their living environment.

In this project Liu tried to show the emotional entanglement and social responsibilities individuals experience during this special period. And how affection in intimate relationships can be delivered through digital interfaces.

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Liu Ziyan (b.1997, China) studying in Contemporary Photography; Practice and Philosophy of the Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London. Technology and self-identity are the main subjects of her practice and art study. Her works attempt to expand the body through electronic media and in the post-network phenomenon. At present, Ziyan sets out to analyse multi-dimensional identities of herself through a series of digital objects.

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A New Beginning

Chinese rice paper, Chinese ink, watercolour

34 x 23 cm

2022

The name of the new work is A New Beginning. In China, the Lunar New Year focuses not only on zodiac animals, but also on many animals and plants with auspicious symbols. For example, fish appear in her work. Fish represent the abundance of wealth in Chinese culture. The small fish in the painting also suggest new life. In the post-epidemic era, although the environment is still full of crises, new life still brings new hope. In another painting, a lotus flower appears. The lotus grows out of the mud, yet it is not stained at all.

The Chinese are fond of metaphors for the lotus flower as a symbol of pure and high moral character. It also expresses the ability of people to live positively and hopefully in spite of crisis and chaos. These are the auspicious blessings and wishes of the Chinese people in the Lunar New Year.

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A New Beginning

Chinese rice paper, Chinese ink, watercolour

34 x 23 cm

2022

The name of the new work is A New Beginning. In China, the Lunar New Year focuses not only on zodiac animals, but also on many animals and plants with auspicious symbols. For example, fish appear in her work. Fish represent the abundance of wealth in Chinese culture. The small fish in the painting also suggest new life. In the post-epidemic era, although the environment is still full of crises, new life still brings new hope. In another painting, a lotus flower appears. The lotus grows out of the mud, yet it is not stained at all.

The Chinese are fond of metaphors for the lotus flower as a symbol of pure and high moral character. It also expresses the ability of people to live positively and hopefully in spite of crisis and chaos. These are the auspicious blessings and wishes of the Chinese people in the Lunar New Year.

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Rui LiuI, a second year MAFA student at CSM. She usually works with sculpture and installation as her medium. She also likes to study Chinese culture and art, so Rui has created new works for this exhibition.

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Year of the rabbit

91 x 91 cm

2023

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Michael Li is a Hong Kong designer, photographer, entrepreneur, and art collector. Michael is currently doing a postgraduate course (Master of Business Administration) in Central Saint Martin while working closely with streetwear brands during his term of study. Michael has taken part in brand collaboration and art exhibitions over the past 3 years. With his connection in different industries, he recently created a Fashion, Art and Music collaborated platform: COLLAB DEPT, a platform based in London to link professions and brands from different industries to develop a new product.

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T A N G Y U A N. T I M E

Installation performance ,120 cm *140cm* 50cm

Wooden structure, rice flour dough, varied bowls and glasses,

paper shrine, recipe token, raw ingredients (sweet potato, ginger)

2022

Tangyuan Time lies under ‘A (possible) TOOLKIT: Towards a democratic/safe/creative space’, a compilation series of social experiments aiming to build a ground for post-production actions, such as dialogues, leisure, and meditation. The portable white structure is a hybrid of a kitchen table and a worship table. Jiaqi attempts to reflect on this phenomenon by deconstructing domestic and religious spaces - two fundamental components operated by invisible female labour in her family - and bringing them into a symbolically transparent but inherently privatised zone like the Street (CSM) in a juxtaposed manner.

The process is manifested by Jiaqi performing as the 'host' and inviting participants into the making. The installation itself acts as a platform for intercultural exchanges of food memories, that is achieved by inserting the specially designed recipe tokens into the paper shrine in exchange for the secret recipe.All the conversations and memories will be included in the toolkit.

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Jiaqi Zheng (she/her) is a Chinese creative facilitator. With a particular focus on participatory and socially-engaged art, she uses sustainable materials and arts & crafts workshops as her

methods to communicate. She has collaborated with many communities, including Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Sculpture Studio, Rumpus Room, Friends of Garnethill Green Spaces (FROGGS), in crafting site-specific creative projects. She is also a part-time Kids’ art teacher and workshop facilitator for Rethink Mental Illness, and was featured in the iJADE 2022 Conference with her project 'THE LOGBOOK'.

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Round Table / 圆桌子

17” x 14.5” / 45 x 34 cm

Oil, Latex and Charcoal on canvas

2022

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4Dreams of a new moon-compressed - dien berziga (1)

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Writing Desk / 课桌

17” x 14.5” / 45 x 34 cm

Oil, Latex on canvas

2022

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3Dreams of a new moon-compressed - dien berziga (1)

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画儿花

17” x 14.5” / 45 x 34 cm

Oil, Latex on canvas

2022

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2Dreams of a new moon-compressed - dien berziga (1)

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Crossing the Yellow River / 面对黄河, 我惭愧

17” x 14.5” / 45 x 34 cm

Oil, Latex and Graphite on Canvas

2022

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Dreams of a new moon-compressed - dien berziga (1)

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Dien Berziga is interested in the in-between state, the lack of certainty. This notion of uncertainty is reflected through different aspects of my practice, extending to the pictorial surface. This recent body of work reflects Dien's interest in understanding the artist identity of being biracial, and what it means being a contemporary Chinese.

A desk, a pen and a cutting knife constitute the main memories of Dien primary school days.  Dien didn't like studying at that time, so the artist always scrawled some doodles on his  desk to kill the boring time in class, like many kids who don't like studying. Such simple behaviour, the movement was unconscious and improvisational, but it kind of liberated something that embedded in Dien’s head - somethings that were occupying his mind, and he couldn’t even realise until he let them appear on the small desk. These doodles were like puzzles that to some extent pieced together his childhood memories, and then became the echo of his own painting practice now. He could not ever think about this small, messy desk unless he had painted them on this canvas with the similar scratches. At the moment of making this painting, it feels like the past is being re-enacted; it is still him, sitting in front of a brown board in a daze, using any tools he feels familiar with, to make a creation of himself.

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Dien Berziga is a mixed-Chinese artist based in London. Interested in the narrative created through the process of seeing, Berziga uses layered pieces of latex, mixed with thin glazes of paint and thick impasto to depict a vision plane where numerous shapes and images fall in and out of focus and contain scattered information throughout its surface. Colours move forward and backward, surface rise and fall, narratives emerge and dissipate, just like a line becomes a shadow. His painting's inescapable relation to the surface strikes a muddy balance between the romantic and the realistic; these layers of paint unfold the narrative while simultaneously concealing what may be behind it.

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The Angel Wears Necklace

ink and watercolour on paper

(H) 68cm (W) 48cm (D) 0cm

2022

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Cave

watercolour and ink on paper

(H) 31cm (W) 43cm (D) 0cm

2022

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Enfolding

watercolour and ink on paper

(H) 33cm (W) 28cm (D) 0cm

2022

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Bolt from the blue

watercolour and ink on paper

(H) 97cm (W) 120cm (D) 0cm

2022

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A blink of the night

watercolour and ink on paper

(H) 80cm (W) 90cm (D) 0cm

2022

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Catherine Yuhui Li is a London-based curator and watercolour painter. Born in 1997, China, Catherine has built a long-term experience of making mix-media paintings centred on traditional Chinese wash paintings since childhood. During the years of studying art history, art philosophy, curatorial research and practices in both Beijing and London, Catherine has been gradually developing her aesthetic character - seeking a subtle balance between the implication of traditional Chinese wash paintings and the expressive abstractness of contemporary art.

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“Kami”

Mixed Media Tapestry

183 x 122 cm

2022

“Kami” represents God or a Deity in Shinto Japan. Focusing on materiality, and the process of life and death through burning, soaking, and embroidery to transgress and remould the representation of the identity as a mixed Japanese female artist.

Violence and tranquillity are themes within Japanese values and history that my works dive into. The extremity is reflected within the process which textiles are burned (death), buried in my paternal land’s soil; where my military ancestors have been continuously buried till today since the 1400s (representing a very patriarchal and timeless substance); the soil evokes closure, then allowing rainwater in London to wash away the sediments (a feminine wash of “God” and the higher sky to “rinse” the soil), followed by soaking the fabrics in Japanese teas (nourishment), and finally using Mizuki Nishiyama Sashiko (a traditional Japanese embroidery method) to abstractedly patchwork the textiles back together.

Menstruating women are banned from touching the 道場 Dojo; the platform Sumos or martial art practices are wrestled on. The platform is blessed by the 神 Kami; noting that the ring holds the essence of masculine physicality. Women are deemed “impure” by the process of menstruating; evading the fact that the bodies also represent life and fertility. The feminine body has historically been torn into dichotomies of beauty and brute. The violence of menstruating, shedding, reproducing; in conjunction to the fertility and humanity the feminine body is organically connected by. As a female artist, I reclaim. By burning, commencing death, followed by nurturing, and completing the experience with laborious stitch work; I repurpose and reconstruct what it means to be a modern Japanese woman.

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Mizuki Nishiyama is a London based, mixed-Japanese artist; creating raw, vivid and multifaceted paintings that explore the fragile human condition. As a mixed-Japanese artist, Nishiyama draws inspiration from the East and West. Bridging her Hong Kong, Japanese and Italian cultural heritages.

Embracing deeply personal experiences to craft each artwork: the artist’s ongoing relationship with anxiety and trauma has greatly influenced her practice, and has fuelled her to confront vulnerability, fragility and the human condition. Painting is a chaotic yet meditative process for Nishiyama that allows her to make sense of the more tempestuous periods in life.

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another bowl of lucky charms

Acrylic, chalk, and ink on canvas

61cm / 24 in, Round canvas

2022

Whenever Tam visits home in Hong Kong, she always grabs a bowl of cereal as a snack. Though she never craved cereal growing up there. Instead, she would have homemade Chinese soup with nearly every meal. It’s a standard tradition in Hong Kong and while living in the UK for almost 10 years, Tam has found herself reminiscing about the warmth and simplicity of her mum bringing her a bowl of soup at dinner when she has been away from home for a while.

The way food moulds Tam’s diasporic cultural identity, and the conflict between different ideas of where home is are continuous cycles which inspire her work through the exploration of memories and moments of who she was and who she is. Being in the UK for Chinese New Year 2023, it will be another year of having the familiarity of a bowl of cereal and missing the tradition of a bowl of soup.

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Heiyi Tam - another bowl of lucky charms

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Heiyi Tam is a Hong Kong-born artist based in London whose work surrounds childlike wonder, the intangibility of childhood memories, and the experience of the gradual merging of eastern and western cultures since moving to the UK at the age of 15. Tam’s fun and colourful style swirls around the nostalgia of her childhood memories of western animated films and television, sweet confectioneries, and ancient Chinese landscapes and calligraphy. Her work centres around reconstructing fractured memories from her childhood and building relationships between the real and the imagined, the conscious and unconscious, and the present and the past.

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My Father Was Born in 1963 Installation1m x 1m

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The work is a found object and sound installation commenting on Wu’s personal illiteracy with the Chinese languages due to the artist parents’ immigration into the UK upon Wu birth, and how this rears its head at Lunar New Year, when they make a rare, annual attempt at dining together. It is about first-generation immigrants, desperate attempts at cross-cultural communication, and dysfunctional families trying to make holidays work for them. Wu uses a diverse range of objects in this work, some related to being Chinese and some just based on their visual appeal.

The audio element consists of a pitched-up recording of Wu attempting to read a children’s story in Mandarin. Wu’s mother and the artist used to read it together when Wu was younger, and then the artist sadly started to grow up and lost literacy. In this recording, Wu is only capable of reading the pinyin.

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Kelly Wu is  a queer Chinese-British artist reading BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. The artist specialises in sculpture, performance, and experimental filmmaking. Wu's interest in the language of found objects, and in the idea of bringing something mundane or ordinary into a fine art context.

The artist finds delight in the quality of material things; Wu likes objects that possess an edible quality, even if they are made of an inedible medium. The core of Wu’s practice is always intersectional feminism, anti-racism, and queer love.

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Phases of the Moon is a performance video where Kosasie performs an embodied reaction to a nonsensical, unfiltered text about her fears of womanhood, constantly filmed by three cameramen who were given no instruction on what to film. Originally a 40 minute performance, each file from the respective cameramen were edited in a 1 hour and 20 minute montage, and then looped to create an illusion where Kosasie was constantly moving.

Phases of the Moon is a world-play that references the metamorphosis of creatures during a full moon, and also the menstrual cycle of a woman. In this work Kosasie addresses the transition from a maiden to a woman, through contemplating interactions between the female members of her family. Whilst never explicitly said, the looming questions, “When will you get married? Have kids? Settle down?”, manifested their way to her conscience. Kosasie perceived these women in her family as the different phases of womanhood predestined by a so-called “god”: maiden, wife, mother.

Kosasie wanted to reject how these phases were defined by our bodily functions to produce offspring. Questioning her body in its social context, she has compiled my daily writings and notes to produce a text that confesses the fears of herself as a maiden before transition. She asked her mother to read it and send me a voice recording. This voice recording was then rearranged without audio-previews to ensure she was hearing the order and voice for the first time during the performance recording.In this sterile studio, Kosasie arranged an environment similar to an interrogation room, as she put herself on the spot to react to this recording. Kosasie has been studying the principles of the Amerta Movements, a non-stylised movement practice by Suprapto Suryodarmo focusing on how a human body perceives an environment as it is, rather than what we have identified it to be. By prizing sensory perception as opposed to logic and reasoning, she moves through embodied responses. Like a baby in a mother’s womb, Kosasie reacts sensorily. “AMERTA", meaning nectar of life, suggests that the ‘moving self’ is, in fact, a multiplicity of changing selves in a constantly changing environment.

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Victoria Kosasie is an Indonesian artist based in London. She works with performance and video. Her practice is a scrutiny of conflicting values; values that she had internalised without question when she was younger, against her current values adopted as an adult woman. Informed by postcolonial feminist literature, Victoria interrogates the conflation of womanhood with motherhood in Indonesia, and whether maternal piety may silence or empower the feminine subject. As she reconfigures traditions, idioms, and habits distinct to her upbringing, you witness the Victoria that is unlearning, relearning, and making sense of herself on her own terms. Victoria is a member of Unamed, an artist-run collective of Southeast Asian artists in London. Victoria is the winner of the Barry Martin Prize for Experimental Art 2022, the Central Saint Martins Dean of Academic Programmes Award 2022, and the Seventh biennial Bandung Contemporary Art Award (BaCAA 7).

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Dreams of a new moon will take place from 20th - 25th January at The Central Saint Martins Lethaby Gallery and the street, with a private opening night held on the 21st of January from 2 pm – 5 pm. The opening will be open to the public and everyone is invited.