This year’s Postgraduate Degree Show in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) showcased a dynamic group of young artists, and a wide range of medium-mixing, culture-blending, and self-examining art.
Students in the GSA Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice Programme spent the past 12 months in a studio-based, practice-centred course of study, engaging within and across research-intensive pathways including Painting, Drawing and Print Media, Photography and the Moving Image, and Sculpture and Performance. The programme hosts a mix of local and global students, and indeed the interaction between Scottish tradition and artists’ home cultures was an enduring theme of the show.
With 50 students’ work on display, the exhibit covers multiple floors; the five artists discussed below are only a sample of what’s on offer.
Ronghui Zhu’s paintings and sculptures combine the imagery of Inner Mongolia — what Zhu calls the ‘soul of the grassland’ — with scenes of Scotland. In The Symphony of Balhu and Glasgow (2024), an integrated-materials painting, a woman in national costume sits atop Glasgow Cathedral. She is larger than life, her orange and blue robes draping decadently across the landscape. Gothic spires of the Cathedral emerge in an otherwise flat, grassy landscape that suggests some combination of Mongolian prairie and Scottish lowland. A dreamy pink sky suggests the woman has descended from heaven.
Zhu’s Continued (2024)— an altered horsehead qin, or fiddle — continues this imagery in sculpture. The fiddle is broken, but flowers grow out of it, evincing a loss of traditional culture but also hope for its renewal. Zhu explains that the blossoms are Gesang flowers, a resilient plant native to the grassland. ‘Its inherent strength and spirit are like seeds, with [the] tenacious vitality able to breed new beauty and hope,’ Zhu writes. The flowers are optimistic, reaching upwards towards the sun and the future. But the fiddle sits on turf, false grass, cut in geometric shapes that connote artificiality and modernity. The piece feels cyclical; perhaps the fiddle has to break for new flowers to come forth.
Helen Chandler, a painter based in Seattle, Washington, USA, displays canvases that balance a photograph-style composition and verisimilitude with painterly use of shadow, colour, and contrast.
In JAYMN (2024), two young men stare at the viewer — a half-casual, half-menacing appraisal typical of young masculinity. At 100cm x 150 cm, it’s slightly larger than life; the man in the Bulls jersey looms, massive, brooding, and sinister. His tilted chin reveals a contoured Adam’s apple that invites confrontation. High contrast and color emphasize the tightness of his grip; Chandler skillfully evokes the transparent glass of his empty cup, which slightly distorts his shirt. His friend is half-cut off in an accidental, mobile phone picture way; he looks tired, maybe drunk or even high. The scene feels very real, the clothes contemporary and folding at the torso and collarbone, but both men have ghostly luminous skin, which makes them seem haunted, potentially tragic.
An untitled portrait of two women feels like a sister-painting to this one. The women are happier, but they glow with the same eerie whiteness; it suggests the flash of a photograph, the fleeting nature of the night out, of youth. The woman on the right is smiling, embarrassed, with what looks like a boy’s jacket draped around her shoulders and her head tucked against her friend’s. The setting is unclear – maybe the back of a club, or a taxi cub. Their intimacy is easy and comfortable, as if the artist is a friend just capturing the moment.
Yihao Li (Leonard Lee), a multimedia artist based in Glasgow, fills the room with his sprawling, steampunk sculpture Untitled (Somatic Circuit, 2024.) An organism of branches, body parts, bicycle wheels, and a digital monitor, Somatic Circuit could be a futuristic machine, a droid, a ruin, or a network of all these things, a community of the natural and the mechanical, the alive, the dying, and the inorganic. Ancient Chinese characters painted on parts of the sculpture are reminiscent of oracle bones, tying it to a rich and growing body of Asian-American science fiction that looks at ancient traditions as a way of reimagining the future of technology.
The installation suggests the extended body — a notion of the human phenotype (the characteristics affected by genetic-environmental interaction) augmented by technology; Li has rendered the anatomical structures — the spine and the pelvis — in ‘semi-opaque materials [that] evoke a sense of fragility and transparency.’ By contrast, the monitor is on and thus dynamic, the closest thing the circuit has to a face. In other words, the industrial parts seem more alive, more corporeal, more real than the human parts. Li writes that he hopes to ‘interpret and translate the concept of the absent body within the realm of pre-empirical knowledge.’
The installation is plugged in – a reminder that no system can exist in isolation. Visitors can walk in and around it, joining and leaving the system at will.
Mary Harker’s Chairs series is one of the most intimate and resonant pieces in the exhibition, created after Harker spent eighteen months back at home, caring for her mother who had dementia. In watercolour and bleach painted on cotton bedsheets, a woman — presumably Harker’s mother – sits in a chair, ages, and then disappears. Alongside the sheets, a real armchair sits empty.
By painting on bedsheets rather than traditional framed canvas, Harker is able to incorporate movement and light; the fabric shifts, creating transient shadows on air currents ‘like a shallow breath or sigh.’ Sheets are mundane and familiar: As Harker writes, they carry ‘a memory of the owner;’ they become ‘silent witnesses to the natural processes in life and the passage of time… witnesses to passions and dreams.’ Fabric also shrouds the exhibit, as if for burial, creating a quiet sense of privacy, and echoing the way elderly and sick people are systematically kept out of societal view, their lives circumscribed to a bed and a chair.
One feels Harker’s mother’s presence in her absence — the physical chair next to its painted depiction suggests different forms of afterlife, the way both artefacts and art can become vessels for memories. Walking among the soft bedsheets feels like inhabiting the home of the artist and her memories themselves.
In Qingzi Lin’s imaginative and uncanny SUB-WORLD (2024) series, a woman dons and removes a rabbit-head mask. The paintings are playful yet nightmarish: in SUB-WORLD II, for example, the rabbit-headed woman is clad in a girlish and innocent polkadot dress, but her reflection in the mirror is eerily knowing, her gaze somehow cast both inwards and outwards: She is watching us watch her watch herself. Her body is dark, her hand grasping, and there is a hellish orange tint in the rabbit mask and the dress fabric. SUB-WORLD III has a similarly chthonic (underworldly), realm-crossing feel; the mask of the rabbit has been separated into strips that transition from red to blue. The canvas descends into darkness from top to bottom; like SUB-WORLD II, the palette comprises the highly saturated complementary colours of blue and orange.
Lin was born in the year of the rabbit, and uses the rabbit mask to channel the ‘chaos of the spiritual world’ and the anxiety of the ‘unknown.’ Lin draws on childhood horror stories and the ‘wandering images of nightmares’ in this series, but it also captures contemporary adult questions of social perception and presentation: masking, mirroring, fracturing.
With thanks to Talia Blatt for this review.
