Whatever I Like (2010)

This portable version of Whatever I Like was part of the 2010 exhibition Dongxi Things curated by Ulrike Johannsen at the Kunstverein Baden (Baden, Austria). For this version, I created three prints representing the wall-text paintings initially exhibited in 2007 as well as postcards with photos from that installation. 

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 the initial version of 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 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.