Irish Wave

Travelling Quilt

Bow Arts Trust

Tsinghua Academy

SiNordic Arts Space

In March 2009 BIGsmall curated a group exhibition called 'Our Books, Our Lives' featuring contemporary Irish and Chinese art at the SiNordic Arts Space in Beijing. The idea for this exhibition grew from a seminar and exhibition of Irish Contemporary Art called ‘Through Irish Eyes’ which Fion Gunn organised in China, in September 2007. The Irish artists who participated in the exhibition and attended the seminar in Beijing sought to identify concerns that they shared with their Chinese peers.

Literature and the iconography of the book have a very central cultural significance in both Ireland and China. This exhibition explored both the shared and the differing aesthetics used in the treatment of this theme by the two cultures.

During the Cultural revolution in China books were targeted as ‘bourgeois artefacts’ and huge numbers of ancient texts were burnt. With the repositories of history destroyed the story of China could be rewritten with impunity. So in contemporary China the ‘Book’ has become a way of negotiating history and memory, a way of bridging the gap between China’s literati past, its cultural destruction and its increasingly capitalist present. More than ever the ‘Book’ remains an icon for all that is valued in Chinese culture and national identity.

Historically the art of the book and more recently internationally acclaimed Irish literature, have both played a key role in shaping the Irish sense of nationhood and legitimacy for a national identity. Despite the fact that much of what is perceived as ‘Irish Culture’ was constructed in the last 200 years, the Irish language does have a long historical link to the past, and this remains one of the most valid threads in Irish history. Language, and hence the ‘Book’, is arguably Ireland’s most authentic tradition and a way of keeping faith with the past.

To view these photos you must have JavaScript and Flash installed. Get Flash here.

Brian Connolly
Pan Yiqun
Bridget Flannery
Guan Donghai
Fion Gunn
Cheng Xiangjun
Ray Murphy

Zheng Xuewu
Mary Mackey
Liang Zhilong
Audrey Mullins
Zhou Ting
Li Fubiao

Designed by Ray Murphy