Caroline Collier, 'Preface'
In: Shen Yuan. Edited by Sarah Campbell and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol, 2001, pp. 6-9.
This book is the first monograph on the work of Shen Yuan, who graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1982 and, with other Chinese artists of the avant-garde, migrated to the West in the late 1980s. She has been based in Paris since 1990.
The direct experience of migration is important to Shen Yuan as an artist. She touches on concepts such as globalisation, language, translation, meaning and subjectivity, in sculptures and installations which may be playful, alluring, repellent and unsettling. She appears intent on creating atmospheres and effects, enacting psychological states by engaging the senses. Central to her strategy is the potent image of the tongue as symbol and sensitive flesh.
There are also repeated references to toys, to food and to smell, triggers of childhood memories. Materials, objects and peculiar spatial relationships draw the viewer into participation in a state of dislocation where, as in childhood, the senses are the guides to learning concepts. Shen Yuan's subtle work is explored here in texts by Hou Hanru, Evelyne Jouanno, Martina Köppel-Yang and Gilane Tawadros, who bring out the fluid, performative nature of her practice. In England Shen Yuan's work has been included in group exhibitions such as Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, 1997) and Parisien(ne)s (Camden Arts Centre/inIVA, 1997). She has also shown in France, Japan, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, among other countries. The publication of this book marks the occasion of her first solo exhibition in the UK. The project began as a joint venture between inIVA and Arnolfini, Bristol. The history of Bristol's docks and Arnolfini's warehouse building makes this an apt site for the contemplation of the effects of migration. We invited Shen Yuan to Bristol and she spent the summer of 2000 in the city, with the artist and curator Gillian Cooper acting as her host. Shen Yuan was based at Station, the former fire station on the harbourside, near Arnolfini, which the artist Louise Short runs as a space for artists' projects.
The development of Shen Yuan's work for Bristol, in particular the creation of the installation Feel Just Like a Fish in Water, has been collaborative and the process is illustrated in the book. This process has brought alive many of the issues that Shen Yuan's work raises about the communication of ideas. Translation has been achieved, often, through making and seeing rather than talking or writing.
We are delighted that the collaboration has grown. At the time of the Arnolfini exhibition (which includes two major new pieces and earlier sculptures as well as, at Station, an interpretation of Shen Yuan's practice), there will be a simultaneous installation of a large recent work, Un Matin du monde (2000), at Chisenhale Gallery, London. A version of the exhibition will then tour to Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, a city that shares with Bristol a past as a maritime trading centre.
The book and exhibitions have been realised with the support of the Arts Council of England, with National Lottery funds, and the Association Française d'Action Artistique (AFAA). We are grateful to all those who have helped. Above all we thank Shen Yuan, for the enthusiasm she has shown for the project from the outset and for her dedication to it.