Peer to Peer at Open Eye Gallery and St. George’s Hall, Liverpool

Alison Criddle

Alison Criddle reviews ‘Peer to Peer’ at Open Eye Gallery and St. George’s Hall in Liverpool. The exhibition features work by 14 artists, who were each selected by one of 14 influential cultural leaders from across the UK and China. ‘Peer to Peer’ forms the centre of LOOK Photo Biennial 2019 (Liverpool, 17 October – 22 December) and will open at Shanghai Centre of Photography on 8 December.

I walked from Lime Street station down towards Mann Island on the waterfront on a Saturday whilst the House of Commons was debating no-deal Brexit options. It was a cool, bright autumn morning a few short weeks after the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Extinction Rebellion protests continued across London, and a ban on face masks was in place in Hong Kong. At Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery and St George’s Hall, 14 artists’ work had been hung, screened and positioned to ask questions of the state of art across the UK and China today. In encountering them, I found they posed questions of commerce, nationhood, consumption, decay, disruption and environmental impact.

At Open Eye Gallery, ‘Peer to Peer’ begins with a triptych of screens on which images of single tulips slowly pulsate. Playing with notions of value, both financial and aesthetic, Anna Ridler’s Mosaic Virus (2019) is created using a generative adversarial network (a form of AI) and couples contemporary crypto-currencies with the history of commerce of cultivated tulip bulbs in the Netherlands in the 1630s. Taking its name from the ‘mosaic’ virus that causes stripes to appear in tulip petals, increasing their visual appeal and their price, the artificial images of the flowers, with their morphing stripes that bloom and contract, are manipulated by the rise and fall of the value of Bitcoin.

Ridler’s work appears both uncanny and grounded in a history of tradition, archiving and still life presentation. Lined up like slides for a projector, Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is a presentation of a selection from the 10,000-strong (or, one myriad) dataset of images of flowers used to train the AI into making the life-like images. Laboriously hand-labelled by the artist and displayed in a large grid, Myriad is a collector’s dream – neat and considered. Recently included in the Barbican’s AI: More Than Human exhibition, Ridler’s tulips are both unreal and too real. The explanatory wall panel text is the reveal.

Text becomes image as a means of expressing thought in Chen Zhe’s An Expansion of Kobo Abe’s “The Red Cocoon” (Viewing) (2016) – a piece inspired by the Japanese short tale of a man’s isolation and disaffection as he wanders across an urban landscape. Through her glowing red and golden tones, the artist attempts to capture the fluid, fleeting moments of twilight and the ‘in between’ of slippage between the shades and emotions of daylight to dusk to darkness. Chen explores the archive of her own work to find photos that correlate with the mental afterimages evoked by Abe’s ‘The Red Cocoon’ (1950). Shadows, distorted figures, glittering constellations (skies or pavements, it’s up to the imagination to decide), textural surfaces that call out to be traced and a luminous orb sit together charting the artist’s dreamlike and personal flows of thought.

In a complementary and considered piece of curation, Sun Yanchu’s series Obsessed (2004-11) follows next. These black and white photographs, unframed and pasted to the wall in uniform rows, are loaded with the surrealism of everyday encounters with urban and suburban decay. The collection spawned from moments of boredom – whenever apathy struck, Sun would rouse himself and go out to walk or cycle, taking his camera with him. The blurred, cropped, fleeting moments captured feel simultaneously singular and universal. I think of Atget in Paris and Chris Marker in Japan – flâneurs of their moments but with an eye for provocation – striking images presented through the lens of the capturer. Inflatable Power Ranger dolls hang by men cloaked in $1 transparent ponchos caught in the rain. A pair of black patent boots draped in a white hand towel hold an eerie presence of an absent body. A cat peeks through a hole in a wall, whilst, nearby, a carefully shaved and clipped dog is frozen, poised, forever leaping from a paved waterside, always about to break the surface, forever before the moment of the splash. Presented in this way, Sun’s work quietly and powerfully looks to the history of photographic tradition and presents it anew, in a contemporary exploration of too-muchness and decay. A before and after of time and space held in each little, transitory moment of the photograph.

Telling tales of past and present, Wu Yue’s Red Lights Go Gray (2011) carefully and compassionately documents a sensational local media story and questions changing cultures within communities and care. Through still images and a short video piece, Wu explores the history and clientele of The Versailles Hotel in Changping Town on the outskirts of Dongguan. Once a party venue boasting hundreds of sex workers and clientele every weekend, the hotel closed in 2014 in response to a government crackdown on sex work. 2017 saw its metamorphosis and reopening as a nursing home, care and entertainment complex for the elderly. The images portray a lush, green courtyard space, undercut by artificial cherry trees forever in blossom, cracked tiles and empty birdcages – the layering of time and traces of experience revealed in the quiet framing of elderly subjects who are now resident in the complex. In her short nominee video (a small screen hangs beside each artist’s text panel throughout the show on which each nominee briefly discusses their choice) Director of the Shanghai Centre of Photography Heung Shing Liu draws attention to Wu’s ‘personal empathy for the people she photographs.’ The film piece shows archival footage of Versailles in its heady, nightclub days that juxtapose with the naturally lit tender still images of the Versailles care home. A carer drapes an arm over the shoulder of a frail resident in a wheelchair. Another resident sits in a room lined with peeling and faded wallpaper, children’s wooden games on the table in front.

With age comes the collapse of time – linear time and lived experience become present in the changing shapes of the bodies of the residents beneath their clothing as they sit in the new surroundings of their hotel home. There is a moment in the video clip where a subtitled interviewee states that the hotel is where working families choose to send their parents because changes in working cultures mean that they do not have time or space to take them in and care for them in their own homes. Like its previous clientele, the new inhabitants of the Versailles Hotel are framed in a periphery, transitory existence on the outskirts of town, seeking contact. 

Up the stairs, the final piece on display at Open Eye blows up photographic conventions on a grand scale. Royal College of Art graduate Alix Marie presents Orlando (2014) – a tumbling, towering sculptural installation that truly plays on the idea of the ‘close-up’. Comprised of detailed shots of a lover’s body, Marie crumpled and dipped them in wax, before scanning, enlarging and reprinting them. Assembling the parts into sculptural form, the pink, hairy, fleshy boulders are positioned into the corners of the gallery space, precariously balanced and spilling across the floor. Taking its title from the lover’s name, but nodding also to Virginia Woolf’s protagonist, the proximity of Marie’s lens to the subject results in Orlando blurring the boundaries between medium and encounter with the body as subject. Through her process, skin and photographic paper become incoherent and the viewer’s gaze slips over the waxed, glossy lumps before them. Moving into the space, the sculptural body invites a closer look – hairs sprout, skin mottles, and a pair of unblinking eyes peek outwards. These strange heaps both evoke chaos and invite intimacy. With a keener awareness of my own form, I headed over to St. George’s Hall to consume more.

I was greeted by Fan Xi’s composite, contorting Tree (2014-17). As dissections of original objects captured from nature, these strange orchards are a layering of time and space that echo themes encountered across the show – of an awareness of the strange abilities of man to manipulate the products of our planet.

Down the stairs into the basement rooms that were at one time cells, ‘Peer to Peer’ continues. I was greeted with work by artist I had encountered last year at Manchester’s Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art. Mandy Barker’s Soup (2011) presents detailed, large-scale ‘flat-lay’ compositions that, on first encounter, appear deeply rooted in a tradition of scientific presentation of organic objects, such as those prized by a collector of natural history. On closer inspection, the carefully composed pieces are anything but. The images make the viewer recoil – their familiarity provokes a desire to disassociate. Through her own meticulous collecting, Barker’s Soup confronts the accumulation of plastics in the earth’s oceans. Pocketing items that had washed up on beaches, she presents a horrifying spectacle. The ingredients lists of these assemblages are artificial monstrosities of the everyday. Carrier bags, fishing line, toy turtles, artificial flowers, food trays, bottle tops; it’s a still life menu to make anyone baulk. Selected by Impressions Gallery Director Anne McNeill, Barker’s Soup poses important questions about the role of the creative arts in bringing issues of climate crisis and the need to protect our ecosystems from our own harmful imprint to the fore. What is the next line in this difficult conversation of over-consumption and abuse of our planet’s resources? How, too, might we approach these difficult questions in internationally-reaching art exhibitions? And how might this be communicated in a way that galvanises artists and audiences alike? 

Contrasting in both colour and content, on the adjoining wall, Jiang Pengyi’s In Some Time (2016) paints and dances with light. His camera-less photographs are the product of experimenting with darkroom techniques through chemically-created light. This contemporary return to the origins of photographic experimentation results in a form of accidental beauty in Jiang’s large-scale abstract works. As in Ridler’s piece, the intervention of digital and manipulated images here are suggestive of a new relationship between artist, photograph and viewer.

Familial relationships and proximity mark Sian Davey’s series from 2018 as both deeply personal and recognisably universal, charting the passing of time in the developing experiences she captures. Martha’s subject is, at her own request, the artist’s adolescent stepdaughter. Teenage girls at the river, tobacco for rolling, bottles of beer and crisp packets nudge up, defiantly, with tracksuit tops, long-plaited hair and new nose piercings. It’s Sally Mann, it’s Diane Arbus, it’s Martha. It’s also a powerful reminder of the intimacy that can be captured when subject and artist exchange trust in one another’s presence. The afterlife of Martha’s fast and fleeting teenage experiences lives on in these beautifully lit, charged images of becoming.

A complimentary portraiture series, Masculinity is both the title and the subject of Othello De’Souza-Hartley’s 2010 works. Presenting uniform portraits of shirtless men in jeans, he removes context in favour of black backdrops that serve to bring out the singular identities and impressions of each of his subjects.

Maisie Cousins’ Rubbish (2018) presents, in grotesque, sickly proximity, the horrors of detritus that slime across our everyday. She turns her lens to the bottom of fridge salad drawers and overflowing kitchen bins, blowing them up to enormous, too-bright, too-close proportions. Named in this year’s DAZED 100, she’s the Tumblr queen now recognised for her singular documentary style that utilises digital culture to re-present the banal dregs of our lived experience.  

Another artist achieving major global recognition, Dr Yan Wang Preston’s Excerpts from Forest (2010-17) includes work from the ‘To the South of the Colourful Clouds’ series that won the Landscapes category at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards. Here, the large excerpts from the series display an unnerving reality created by human activity. Selected by Thomas Dukes, curator of Open Eye Gallery, he praises her technical ability with large-format cameras with the ability to acknowledge an unsettling binary phenomena of our love of nature coupled to our unsustainable practices and the scars these actions leave on the land. Huge alien landscapes play out like scenes from a sci-fi film. Quarried rock faces are wrapped in artificial sea green netting, whilst strapped and severed saplings choke out from red brown dust of dry earth. ‘Our house is on fire’, Greta Thunberg said earlier this year. ‘Our house is inhospitable’, scream these images. What will remain of our generation?

Qin Yifeng’s Antique Wood (2010-) speak of ancient histories and peoples preserved through care, excavation and collecting. Their treatment contrasts starkly with that of Parker’s bare trees. Through contrasting styles, however, both artists capture a ghostly, surreal quality that alludes to the presence of an absent hand. Qin, a learned scholar and collector of Ming Dynasty furniture presents fragments from his collection through long exposures, presenting the images in negative. The titles of the works always include the weather conditions at the exact moment of the image being captured. This elemental impression places the object in a time not its own – like the photograph, it transcends histories; its present becoming that of the viewers who encounter it.

The photograph as a form of silent testament speaks loudly across Jonny Briggs unflappable and vital Unpalatable Truths (2017). Nominated by Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographer’s Gallery in London, this is Briggs’ first major work to shift its focus away from his own experiences and relationships. In a surreal examination of the cover-up of child abuse on the island of Jersey, Briggs’ archival excavation of spaces, documents and testimonies presents a photographic installation piece that resounds alarmingly. Briggs’ playful use of collage, composition, space and presentation results in a meticulously considered staging; a chilling court that houses institutional abuse and power. Bringing down the gavel, he set my teeth chattering. A brilliant piece of curation, Briggs’ manipulated images of men of power remain with me as I walk back out of the basement cells of the civic building.

‘Peer to Peer’ is curated by Lindsay Taylor (University of Salford Art Collection), Thomas Dukes (outgoing curator Open Eye Gallery), and Serein Liu (Shanghai-based independent curator). Anna Ridler and Wu Yue are the two selected artists who will each receive a £5,000 commission towards producing new work for the University of Salford Art Collection.