Karin Weber Gallery is excited to announce British artist Emily Allchurch’s second solo show in Hong Kong.
Two years in the making, ’Mirrored Cities’ draws parallels between the ancient trading port of Venice, Italy with its historical and contemporary counterpart locations such as Xi’an, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Fenhuang in mainland China, the beginning and end points of the ancient Silk Road. In this new series, Allchurch engages with topics such as globalization, mass tourism and trade, searching for synergies and similarities — rather than contrasts and differences — between historically ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ locations.
Allchurch remains true to her signature digital photo collage style, drawing inspiration from Old Master paintings, for this series Venetian Renaissance works by Gentile Bellini (1429-1507) and his scholar Vittorio Carpaccio (c.1460-1526), as well as Chinese court paintings by Song dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). Allchurch also references literary sources, specifically Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972), a series of fictitious conversations between Marco Polo and the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
For the ‘Mirrored Cities’ project, Emily Allchurch was awarded the ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ Grant from the Arts Council England in 2019 to fund a prolonged period of travel and research. In 2020, additional support was provided via the Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund, created to assist artists through the COVID-19 crisis.
Says Allchurch, “I feel so privileged to have had the opportunity to travel so extensively in mainland China and Venice in 2019. It has been a wonderfully restorative process to be able to work every day during the UK lockdown with the over 40,000 images I took on my trips. My thoughts have often turned to the people I photographed last year, in cities so far away, and how much their circumstances must have changed in the subsequent year.”
For further details, please visit: www.karinwebergallery.com