Welcome everyone to our symposium today, Typekit Chang Gunpowder Art accompanying the exhibition of the same title, so we'll see you later on.
I'm extremely honoured to include in this welcome cycle. Chang himself arrived a few days ago to finalise the exhibition installation.
Thank you very much for being here. My name Sheila van Karen.
I'm curator of the exhibition and curator of Chinese art here at the museum.
I won't introduce Cycle Chang in any detail at this point, as I expect many of you are here exactly because you're already familiar with the
background and achievements of such a highly acclaimed international artist,
and all of you are about to discover much more about him for us, because this afternoon I will have make a few remarks about the exhibition the
Ashmolean Museum founded in 1883 and arguably the world's oldest public museum,
as always in some sense, displayed contemporary works.
But it's only quite recently that we've developed a concerted programme of modern and contemporary exhibitions,
as evidenced by the current exhibition of works by Al Pink. In the gallery.
Almost adjacent to this lecture theatre, the Chinese modern and contemporary programme goes back a little further to the 1950s and has been boosted in
recent years by the bequest of Michael Sullivan's renowned modern Chinese art collection and supporting funds,
and also by funds for the establishment of the Chinese paintings programme, which has enabled us to hold conferences,
viewings and lectures to promote and raise the profile of modern and contemporary
Chinese art in the UK and museum as a great debt of gratitude to both.
The thesis, if you like behind the ash displays is one of highlighting connexions between cultures and across time.
The work of Typekit Chang has much to say in this regard,
but it's also fortuitously demonstrated by the fact that Cycle Chang's exhibition here follows on from and includes works associated
with his Pompeii Amphitheatre Explosion Studio event in February this year and coincides with the museum's main autumn show,
Last Supper in Pompeii. Furthermore, the 24th of October 1879 is the date on which Vesuvius is considered to have erupted,
making our exhibition opening exactly one thousand nine hundred forty years after the event itself.
A film of the Pompeii Explosion Studio is on view in the exhibition and is a reminder
that Cycle Cheng's work has consistently taken the form of large explosion events.
An artist who scales historical and geographical distances through working in such venues as the amphitheatre is perhaps
not an obvious fit for our university museum constrained as it is within the congested footprint of central Oxford.
And it does raise the question How is it? Then we are holding a fairly small indoors exhibition of an essentially outdoors artist.
It's important, I think,
to say at this point and to emphasise that this is in no sense an effort to tame an artist known for scale and energy of his artistic output,
for his enthusiasm for chaos and unpredictability. And his natural environment is rivers, desert landscapes and indeed the sky itself.
Rather, it's an opportunity to look in tight focus at the materials he's used in conjunction with the gunpowder medium that he has made his own,
exploding it across paper, canvas, silk and porcelain.
It presents a chance to consider the artist's selection of these materials, how he's used them in different projects over the course of his career,
and the extent to which the cultural origins of the materials themselves reflect the ideas, locations and historical periods with which he's working.
Typekit Young, having left China in his twenties and worked all over the world, is a truly international artist.
Yet China and in particular his hometown of Tokyo, are present in much of that work,
perhaps stemming from its historical and geographical positioning as an outward looking coastal port in a region separated from much of China,
and at some point at some points from developments there by a long mountain range.
These and other contextual aspects are explored in the exhibition catalogue,
while the exhibition itself provides a very much appreciated and immediate opportunity for the museum's audiences to become familiar
with Cycle Chang and his work through particular pieces from projects that are otherwise beyond the reach of most visitors.
Thank you so for creating these opportunities. So afternoon's symposium will have to parts three papers from academics from different disciplines,
followed after coffee break by comments from four art historians on individual works in the exhibition,
and we'll conclude with a much anticipated presentation from Typekit Chang himself.
But before any of that, by way of much more thorough introduction, we'll view his short film Rewind.