The Communications Department

Accepted/In Press date: 2001

Additional Information: Luxury Goods is a series of paintings concerning Chinese workers at a commercial painting workshop in Shenzhen, a ‘special economic zone’ in Peoples’ Republic of China. I took photographs of workers cleaning luxury yachts at a harbour in the West Indies and emailed them to China for reproduction as oil paintings. The finished paintings were flown to London for exhibition. I painted a series of portraits of the Chinese workers based on photographs I had asked them to take of themselves while working on the project. My paintings were included in the exhibition. This project addresses the effects of the dramatic growth and realignment of the Chinese economy and its impact on contemporary Chinese artists. In its overt use of yacht-cleaners as a subject Luxury Goods also addresses the increasingly casualised nature of employment encouraged by neo-liberal economics. This condition relates to the Caribbean subjects of the paintings as much as to the Chinese artist-employees painting them.

Local EPrints ID: 160249

URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/160249

PURE UUID: 4e7b3344-5741-4ed1-8457-08bfb8dfd5c6

Date deposited: 12 Jul 2010 13:24

Last modified: 10 Dec 2021 18:23