During my one-month stay in Shanghai I noticed that there are people who collect and divide garbage. You see men with bikes loaded with only plastics or cardboards. Which I assumed could be traded for money somewhere else. Objects that are for one person seen as garbage are seen as ‘bread’ to someone else.

Therefore I decided to make work that questions the value of waste. I collected plastic packages; casted these in plaster and made porcelain models of these objects. Next to that I collected wrappings from the materials she used during her stay in Shanghai and requested a Chinese painter to make a painting out of these wrappings.

Another starting point for her work I developed during my residence were fish. In Holland fish are meant as some lovely decoration in ones house. Fish in Asia have a deeper meaning and are seen as fortune bringers. The character for fish means wealth and oversupply.

I carved five different fish in wood together with my Chinese friend and artist Li Xiau Fange and printed these in black on papers that are hanged in the gallery. First there are a few fish, then they swim towards each other and slowly meet, until there are too many of them to space themselves out on the paper.

Within the works I made for the exhibition at Pantocrator Gallery I opposed different questions that raised to me during her stay such as: ‘What is it that decides whether something is valuable or not?’, ‘When we appreciate art, do we appreciate its maker, material or context or is this a combination?’, ‘In the context of Chinese contemporary art, does it matter whether the artist actually makes the works him/herself or not?’, ‘Do fish actually bring luck?’, ‘ How does the use of certain materials in art reflect a certain culture?’.

Pantocrator Gallery