Chinese Arts Centre

Born in Taiwan and currently living in New York City, Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, exploring issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. Lee's projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction, and take on different forms depending on the participants. Time is central to this process, as Lee's installations often change during the course of an exhibition.

For his first solo show at Chinese Arts Centre, he will be presenting two works: The Living Room, taking place for a limited time (28 June – 27 July), will invite volunteers to act as “hosts” in a specially constructed “living room”. These hosts will be asked to fill the room with their own personal collections, sharing and engaging visitors in a dialogue about them. The installation aims to create personal encounters asking questions such as "Why do we collect?" and "What does our collection say about us?" Hosts that will be occupying the space range from a knitting collective, a film enthusiast to a collection of inherited family heirlooms, and many more. So come and spend time in The Living Room, where there will be a different host each time you visit with a warm welcome, good conversation, tea and most importantly, cake! Inspired by the composition the American Quartet (1893) by Antonin Dvorak, The Quartet Project explores sentiments of migration by challenging viewers to expand their familiar aural experience of music to include visual and philosophical elements.

The installation requires the visitor to physically participate to make the artwork complete, where the visitor’s movements within the installation changes what they see and hear of the piece. Lee Mingwei received an MFA from Yale University in 1997. He has had solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and has been featured in biennials in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool (2006, 2010), Taipei, Sydney, and the Whitney. Furthermore, he has developed projects for the Echigo-Tsumari and Asia Pacific Triennials.

Suitable for

• Any age

Where

Chinese Arts Centre
Market Buildings
Thomas Street
Manchester
Greater Manchester
M4 1EU
England

Website

http://www.thelivingroomproject.co.uk

Preview 21st March 2013 (5:30pm – 7:30pm)

Designer talk in collaboration with Manchester Craft and Design Centre (MCDC): 25th March 2013 at MCDC (6pm)

Re-conventional is a new graduate Design Show celebrating the works of three UK-based Chinese designers, who work across the North West, London and Scotland. The show aims to highlight the changing shift in contemporary design practice and the increasing desire for young designers to reference back to classic and everyday objects for inspiration for their new products. From this year’s Degree shows, there was a clear focus on Contemporary design courses, both for UK and international students. In particular, the UK-Chinese design graduates work took on an organic approach responding to classic design - a visual consequence of an old idea, a vital function or a feeling towards an object.

Re-working these classic objects enables the designers to create a sense of nostalgia and memory for the audiences to respond to, as both a narrative through the object itself, and as a sensory response through the choice of material and ability to interact with the product.

This graduate design show reflects this focal point from three designers perspectives, each working with a similar conceptual belief but with three very unique end products.

Where

Chinese Arts Centre

The Poundshop, founded by designers George Wu, Sara Melin and Sarah Gottlieb in 2010, acts as a platform for designers to sell goods under the strict brief that they are sold within the affordable price bands £1, £5 and £10.They aim to share design, engaging a wider audience by making it accessible through price. For the first time, current members of Poundshop, George Wu and Sarah Melin, will be spreading their designer wings in Manchester, recruiting local designers and showcasing the best of local graduate talent – all at a very reasonable price for you, the lucky customer!

Jennifer Yang is a Taiwanese London-based artist, who graduated in 2012 with a MA in Textiles from Central St. Martins. In her practice, she is interested in bringing unique experiences to audience by using contemporary techniques to re-explore classic and traditional crafts. For the First Step showcase, she will display her new installation “Kaleidoscope”. The work consists of large-scale sections of paper origami, which through the clever use of light and colour interact with the viewer depending on their viewpoint around the stairwell.