Whatever I Like Beijing (2007)

Whatever I Like (2007) came out of an artist residency at Pickled Art Centre (Beijing, China). During my time there I amassed a collection of branding imagery including pictures of t-shirts, food labels from the local grocery story, wall paintings and large scale vinyl advertisements which became the source material for my subsequent installations and accompanying publications.

For Whatever I Like I compiled photos of people wearing English-language message t-shirts in Beijing, then transposed a sampling of messages to fill the gallery wall. I designed the stencils for the wall-texts to resemble propaganda message-painting, echoing the once ubiquitous propaganda wall paintings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Copies of the accompanying artist book were placed on a traditional Chinese table which was integrated with the installation. 

A selection of 82 of the source t-shirts were included in the accompanying small-format book along with a list of all the t-shirt texts and writing to contextualize the work. For book purchase contact Art Metropole.

In my work Beijing Cube (2009) I repurposed photos from the installation process to create large scale prints. A portable version of Whatever I Like was also subsequently part of the exhibition Dongxi Things curated by Ulrike Johannsen at the Kunstverein Baden (Baden, Austria, 2010).