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| GINA TSANG |
| 13/03/19 - 24/03/19 |
| Gina Tsang is continuing on in OUTPUT gallery for our first back to back exhibition. This time around, the artist is presenting her 2018 installation 'Reproduction.' The work was first shown at Tsang's MA Degree Show at Liverpool John Moores University. The show brings together a video by the artist and a collection of paintings made by her father Bo, and acts as a portrait of the differences and similarities between them. Close replicas of well known Picasso paintings, Bo’s work sometimes incorporates his own image as well as his partner Dot. |
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| Why did you make this work? I went to visit my father at work one day, at the beginning of last summer. He was painting a Picasso mural on the wall at the back of his work. He's painted copies for years, as long as I can remember, yet at that moment it felt like something I wanted to capture. Perhaps for posterity. Also, my dad had a stroke a few years ago and has memory issues since and it seems so joyful that he's drawn to create these works so prolifically recently. I decided to make a work (the video) first for a show on my MA Fine Art last year. Watching my Dad, and reflecting on his practice made me question my own work and its contents. I depicted us both in the end - like a portrait of him, situated in his life (his work and home) and me making work on the rooftop of LJMU art school. There's a similarity in us both copying, outlining, filling in, reminiscing. Yet also differences in our levels of self-reflection, institutionalisation and the aesthetic qualities of our work. What are you drawing in the video? I went through a stage on my MA of making floorplans. Using paint, sports hall floor tape, water and in this, chalk. I started with a plan of the house I grew up (terraced house in the Welsh Streets in Toxteth) which I painted onto the floor, then taped in the art school foyer. This is that floorplan, from memory though so it isn't as exact as measuring it. I wanted it to be more child-like and spontaneous. I work much more intuitively with video now. I don't storyboard or plan out in advance really. It just felt like a suitably vulnerable and instinctive selfportrait which I filmed whilst installing the show for which it would become a part in comparison to my father's work. What I like about such plans is that you can neutrally inhabit a past space. Is your dad an outsider artist? I guess so. I really like Debuffet's term 'art brut' (raw art). Art that comes from the pure desire for expression without commercial, cultural or societal concerns. I think authenticity is key here. That creative urge that's not so self-conscious as you're making it for its own sake. What I love about my Dad's paintings is he has that respect for past 'great' artists but always puts little tells in them and personalises them. His wife's name 'Dot' on the ship and his work place 'Wirral Credit Union' on the building in his mural of Picasso's 'Mediterranean Landscape'. It's like an art-world biography of his own life. |
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