Metropolis Rise: New Art from London
This process isn’t necessarily bad. It is a symbiotic form of capitalism that suits everyone for brief moments. The process also ties naturally into the career path of the emerging artist: the student shows, the studio groups, the ad-hoc collectives all have public activities that typically take the form of self-organised exhibition. This activity is both independent from the commercial mainstream and also ‘training’ for it. There is therefore an ambiguity which is not necessarily a contradiction - that of the self-organised project having a ‘political’ position (the anti-establishment position, the ‘alternative’) whilst also feeding the art infrastructure of a city from the bottom-up. Some of the participants are well established, and have been instrumental in shaping current UK activity. Here they rub shoulders with artists who have just emerged from the semi-protective shell of the art college and other artists who have been going it alone successfully for some years. What unites them all is attitude - a fearlessness that allows them to produce despite it all.
		Lindsay Seers
Anat Ben-David Dungeness, 2005	David Burrows Out of Sight	The artists in the exhibition are wanting dialogue, are wanting to enagage in scene, in the culture production of their city. Some respond to the white cube of a gallery and others to the pages of style magazines. Some are nearly pop stars and others counter-culture icons. We felt it was important - and created the opportunity - to present this self-organised project in China. Maybe surprisingly, cities like Beijing or Shanghai will seem very familiar to a Londoner. The pioneering, entrepreneurial attitude feels the same - the combination of archaic and D.I.Y elements right next to high-tech ones also. The exhibition coincides with specific shifting world relationships - partly due to the changes of manufacturing and labour which creates in China a new population wealth, and, maybe radically, a new shift from a position of cultural export to that of import. NEXT...