12 May – 2 July 2006
susan pui san lok is an artist and writer whose practice includes installation, sound, video and text-based works. For Golden (Years), her first major solo UK exhibition, she has been commissioned to develop new work as part of an ongoing series exploring notions of place, nostalgia, and aspiration in migration and diaspora.
Triangulating San Francisco with Hong Kong and Britain these related works aim to evoke the ongoing negotiation of ‘place’ and displacement from multiple historical, cultural and generational perspectives. Golden (Years) will shift the focus in part to an idiosyncratic portrait of two immigrants who arrived with the first major influx of Hong Kong Chinese to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, now coincidentally approaching their golden wedding anniversary.
More broadly, Golden (Years) is concerned with such leisure practices as ballroom dancing or allotment tending. Approaching these as metaphors of ‘cultivation’, or tactics of acculturation and identification, nostalgia and aspiration (or not). Golden (Years) aims to examine the ‘tending’ of memory and territory, both subjective and cultural.
Biography
susan has recently exhibited at Duolun MoMA, Shanghai, 798 Space, Beijing, and in London at SPACE Triangle, Beaconsfield, Café Gallery Projects, and the Hayward Gallery. Residencies include Electric Greenhouse, an Artquest/b3 media digital arts project showcased at the ICA, London, and Necessary Journeys at the Media Archive of Central England, part of an Arts Council England programme that takes its cue from the BFI’s ‘Black World’ initiative, culminating in a publication and symposium at Tate Modern.
Her writings appear in Mieke Bal & Joanne Morra eds. Discerning Translation (forthcoming), David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom & Sonia Boyce eds. Shades of Black (2005), Dennis Atkinson & Paul Dash eds. Social and Critical Practices in Art Education (2005), the journals Third Text and parallax, a guest-edited issue of www.chinese-art.com [1998-2004], and various exhibition catalogue essays. She is currently Research Associate in Visual Culture at Middlesex University.
