Week 17, A Hundred Seas Rising, 40 Stories

Joanne Bushnell, Director

This story is about how we came to invite Suki Chan to make one of the most stunning and powerful installations we’ve ever had the pleasure of showing at Aspex. I’ll save how I came to be in China in 2000 for another week, but during that visit I met artist Zhao Bandi, who later came to Portsmouth to do a residency. During his trip he was excited to learn that Portsmouth was the birthplace of Charles Dickens, and he provided me with an insight into what it was like to have grown up in the Cultural Revolution. Dickens was one of few western authors who was acceptable to the Communist regime, and at that time the only Dickens I had read was ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, powerfully depicting the French revolution. Connections and coincidences stick in the mind and if you are lucky, situations occur which start to make sense of them.

Heading towards 2012, we were preparing to mark the Cultural Olympiad, following Bejing 2008, and also planning to mark Dickens’ 200th birthday. Finally I saw an opportunity to bring these disparate thoughts together and thanks to Oliver Sumner who helped develop the project, Suki Chan was commissioned to make sense of it all, and boy did she do that!

Referencing the Hundred Flowers Movement, Suki explored how literature might be implicated in the imagination and trajectories of revolutions. The installation used the sound of 100 individual voices as a sculptural material, re-imagining Dickens’ revolutionary mob sonically by creating surges of ideological thought that reverberated across the gallery space.

It’s a joy to remember this work, and to have commissioned Bettina Fung as part of ‘Aspex (life begins) at 40’ to make a new digital performance, ‘The Sea Changes into Words’ in response. Please see our new website to access the work, read a conversation between Suki and Bettina (coming soon), or see our archive for further information about the installation.

Supported by CVAN SE, Arts Council England, and Interreg Europe.