Apparatus #9 (The China Watchers: Oxford, MI6, HSBC)
2014
Wood
Commissioned for Lookout: 2014 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, United Kingdom
Held in the permanent collection of Folkestone Artworks/Creative Foundation, Folkestone, United Kingdom
Apparatus #9 (The China Watchers. Oxford, MI6, HSBC) is a wooden sculpture built with traditional joinery techniques and influenced by wooden latticework found in Chinese design, especially screens used in architecture to partition space or control sight lines. Commissioned for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial for a public site overlooking the English Channel, Apparatus #9 frames a commanding view of a sea lane that has linked Britain and China for centuries and continues to be a heavily trafficked trade route that underpins Europe’s relationship with Asia. In Folkestone, the work also evokes Chinoiserie pavilions that contain fanciful Western imitations of Chinese ornamentation built for estate gardens and other leisure spaces throughout Britain in the 18th century. Instead of a decorative design, Apparatus #9 depicts the organizational charts of the University of Oxford, HSBC Holdings PLC, and MI6, three British institutions invested in a very different enterprise of interpreting Chinese culture. The artwork sets up numerous oppositions between flatness and depth, the pictorial and the schematic, looking at and looking through, appreciation and misinterpretation.
Exhibition history
Lookout: 2014 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, United Kingdom, 2014, curated by Lewis Biggs
Installation view, 2014 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, United Kingdom, 2014
2014 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, United Kingdom, 2014