Whatever I Like (2010)

This portable version of Whatever I Like was part of the exhibition Dongxi Things curated by Ulrike Johannsen at the Kunstverein Baden (Baden, Austria, 2010).

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. 

For the portable version, I created three prints representing each of the original wall-text paintings, as well as postcards with photos from the initial installation. 

A selection of 82 images of the source t-shirts along with a list of all the shirt's texts are included in the accompanying small-format book, available at Art Metropole.