lightgallery: A Contemporary Gallery in Central London

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This was the lightgallery website.
Content is from the site's 2003 archived pages.

5A Porchester Place
London
W2 2BS
England

 

Welcome to the lightgallery website (circa 2003).
We are a new contemporary gallery in Central London offering a bright and elegant exhibition space in pleasant surroundings with easy access from the West End.

 

 

 

 

9 to 22 November 2003

JENNY CHU

Journey to Self

Tibetan girls braiding hair, Gansu Province, China 1995

Silver gelatin print 11'' x 14''

A Photographic Journey with China's Ethnic Minority Groups

Statement of the Project

China is viewed by the outside world, for the most part, as consisting wholly of Han Chinese. The truth, however, is that 10 percent of China's 1.2 billion population are from a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups, inhabiting approximately 60 percent of the total land mass. These groups vary greatly, ranging from the Muslim groups of Uighurs in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, to the Buddhist Tibetans of Tibet and surrounding provinces, to the matrilineal societies of the Chiang peoples in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces. The 55 ethnic groups officially recognized by the state include a mixture of cultures, customs and religions that are threatened with assimilation into the Han Chinese majority.

My first trip to China in 1995 began in my mother's family home of Shanghai. Shanghai is loaded with history but its vision of the future thrusts itself like an invasion upon the debris of old buildings and is certainly a blatant and somewhat horrifying reflection of China's frenzied strife to become the financial center of the world. From the eastern seaboard, I made my way across China to investigate the various ethnic groups of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guanxi, Qinghai and Xinjiang areas. Throughout these 10 provinces, I had the great pleasure of meeting and photographing the delightful and intriguing people of the Bai, Bouyi, Dai, Dong, Hani, Kazak, Hui, Hmong, Naxi, Qiang, Tajik, Uzbek, Uighur, Yi, Wa and Tibetan nationalities.

I hope to return to China to cover the remaining provinces and photograph, among others, the Jingpo, Lahu, Maonan, Miao, Mulao, Mongolian, Nu, Sala, She, Tu, Yao and Yugu in the southern and northeastern provinces. My contact with these remarkable people has inspired my photography and changed my life.

Bura Boys 1  China 1995

Silver gelatin print 11'' x 14''

I want to capture the present-day China before a sweep of change floods the land during this century.

China is an incredible array of faces, colors, fabrics, artwork, architecture, languages and customs which remain memorialized in my mind's eye, forged by the beauty of character and strength of spirit I witnessed through my encounters with the people of that land.

The hospitality, generosity and the immediate friendship often extended to me by perfect strangers left me humble and in awe. Through my photography, I have tried to capture the sense of closeness and love I felt for the Chinese people, as well as to document its cultures and society.

Brief Biography

I was born in 1967 in England to a Chinese mother and Malaysian father. Until 1995, I had never set foot on Asian soil.

My mother raised me as a single parent and we were isolated from our relatives who, like most Chinese families, are scattered around the world in places like Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. During my teenage years while living in California, my mother and I struggled through many conflicts.

In the early 1990's, authors like Amy Tan so eloquently and compassionately wrote of the kinds of experiences I had personally had -- of growing up as an Asian female in western society yet within the more restrictive atmosphere of Chinese home life. I began to acknowledge that the family troubles my mother and I had experienced were attributed to cultural differences more than I had previously understood.

Tong Ren view  China 2000

This propelled me to investigate my roots further and in 1995, I began a series of pilgrimages to China for purposes of visiting the home of my mother's family, of furthering the study of the Mandarin language, of becoming acquainted with Chinese culture, and finally, of beginning to produce a photographic body of work of the various cultures that exist throughout this immensely diverse country.

Jenny has recently traveled to Africa on assignment with International Medical Corps humanitarian aid group. She lives in California, USA

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My note: While I was supposed to be doing some research on home relaxation solutions, I stumbled upon this site. Lightgallery sounded so familiar, and then I realized when I was an art student in London attending the University of the Arts London as an exchange student, my friends and I would occasionally drop into this art gallery that frequently showed contemporary art. Occasionally one happens across an artist's work early in their career, and then five, ten, or twenty years later they have become well known. But it is more likely that the majority of artists have a gallery opening or two and then fade away. Out of curiosity, I decided to do some google searches for the artists that are shown here just to see what would turn up.

OK that search is done, now onto looking up JENNY CHU, PIERRE AMIEL, and FERESHTEH STOECKLEIN.
Quick Update of what I found:

JENNY CHU is too common a name and I could find nothing. Sure there are a lot of Jenny Chu search results but nothing that appeared to actually be about this particular person.
PIERRE AMIEL, another dead end? No! Although at the top of the search there is a Pierre Amiel who was from 1226 to 1245 an archbishop of Narbonne. That is obviuosly not the right person. However there is an artist by the name Pierre Amiel that is represented by Saatchi Art. Bingo, this is the same artist that showed at the lightgallery. Glad to see he is still painting and selling his art.
FERESHTEH STOECKLEIN is also still painting. She too is visible on the Saatchi Art website. In fact she is represent at five online galleries. In addition she has her own website called Visual Poetry.( www.visual-poetry.com) This artist appears to be doing very well. Kudos to her.

Now it's time to get back to work editing my photographs that need to be sent out to a client.

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18 October to 1 November  2003

PIERRE AMIEL

'Mes petites toiles d'ete'

 

My painting is abstract since it doesn't call on figuration; actually it is in between both expressions.

By colours and movement I try to :

- trigger a strong emotion, pleasant or annoying, serene or oppresive; a pictorial projection of my sensitivity to life.

- induce the oblivion of material reality so as to provoke an immersion in a personal and unique emotional world.

Visually no element should interfere with the 'imaginary'; that is why my signature is at the back of the canvas.

Every painting has a title, since it's necessary. For the painter, it's an emotional key to his state of mind when he created his work.

The spectator has to ignore the titles. His sensitivity prevails; it is through the emotion he feels that he will be able to meet the painter and his reference.

Pierre Amiel was born in Perpignan, France from a Chinese mother and a Catalonian father.

As a young man, he admired Salvador Dali, doyen of the Old Royal City of Majorca and dreamed in front of the works of Zao Wou Ki who has developed his own unique abstract and still oriental style.

At 17, having completed classes in drawing, copying old Masters and reproducing adinfinitum line drawings and watercolours in Pre Raphael style, he decided to use painting as a form of self expression.

During 1969 and 1970, he exhibited at Deauville and worked later with the group "Jeune Peinture, Jeune Expression" in Paris. From 1980-83, still working with the 'Group', his work was shown at "Le Grand Palais". Further solo exhibitions soon followed in Vernon (1984), Chartres (1984-85).

After a break of many years, Pierre started painting again while staying in London in June and July 2000, in his native town of Perpignan, he has exhibited to great acclaim at "La Galerie Serra" and at "Le Palais des Rois de Majorque"

He now travels all around the world while working and living both in Paris and London.

PRESS REVIEW

June 2002 - Jacques Duplouich (Le Figaro)

Pierre Amiel: Liberating Colour

Colour is a tool for Pierre Amiel, a faithful observer of Matisse, who appreciated it as an 'instrument of liberation'. Families of blues enchant him Tthe dynasty of reds fascinates him. He is smitten with yellows. He instills in his canvasses squirts of bistre borrowed from Braque and sharp tips of ebony to provoke strong emotions. Such chromatic combinations could not be farther from pictoral zen. Such is precisely Matisse's teaching, so concerned with exploiting colour  'for its action over the feeling of the observer, as important(...) as the energetic sounding of a gong'.

Facing the universe, Pierre Amiel dives into the quick of colour; capturing the essence of things-events and beings -without make up, without blinkers, uncompromising and stubborn like a hunter on the prowl the image caught, he never lets it go. He fixes. It is there, presenting violence, burst or contained. The artist is not looking to please or swagger. A regard for gentleness and the beautiful art of luxury, utilitarian and made to measure for decorative purposes, does not cross his mind.

He is painter of thoughts, moods and impressions. Emotion is his raw material-pangs, overcome furies confronted with unpunished barbarity, hopes of rebirth, yearning, battles of the memory...

Here great fields of pure colour collide with fulgurating flashes into metamorphosed still-lives. Imaginary tumuli and invented megaliths stylise free spatial architectures, as if flung by magicians or gnomes, and enliven reality with total weightlessness and exceptional vigor. Ripping at deserted horizons, these shapes fix the figurative world in one of plastic abstraction. There is a freshness of the soul and a rigor of the retina within a rigor of the structure that are particular to Pierre Amiel, image catcher and memory arranger.

His brush tears space into shreds with a personal vehemence, a violence even. Such is his desire to seize life at its source, in its spontaneity, as it is. Scales of blue infused with black tell the same tragically bare decor of the world. Ranges of red capture his painful convulsions, his uncertainties, his dawn sufferings.

'To lay colours that render sensations', such is the abject of Pierre Amiel's work. There is often a gravity to his paintings, an austerity, at times a density, with their semblance of doomsday; always a powerful lyricism, insofar as they allow the eye to accustom itself to the mystery of the invited images.

We are brought to reality's boundaries, in an oniric kinship established as if to better fix the world's backgrounds. Pierre Amiel's work is a collection of sensations emerged from exposure to current events and to memory, of sequences barn from perceptible irradiations projected with his inner tonality into a conquering and beaming expression. The act of painting is for the painter a renewal with the moment, appeared/disappeared in colossal, subtle and cruel hints, certain that art is re-birth. it is also a continuous dissatisfaction, marking the issue of inner conflicts particular to the artist in his sensitive ties to everyday life and containing him to a certain violence. Because he is not spared either.

Far from hackneyed notions and schools, Pierre Amiel reads life day to day and paints his everyday readings. The eye and the hand obey the same passion. The painter's vocation is to reveal. To express the invisible. The unheard of. The joy of painting, heightened by a perfection of agreement between mind and brush wins approval at first glance.

Jacques Duplouich
Le Figaro

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12 - 18 October 2003

FERESHTEH STOECKLEIN

 

Artist Information

FERESHTEH STOECKLEIN studied Interior Design in U.S.A and Dusseldorf in Germany. Studies of Fine Art began with oil painting the "French Impressionist School of Painting - Ecole des Arts Francais".
As she lived in many countries in the world and her search for fulfillment of her art, it was during her stay in the Far East (Malaysia) that she was inspired by Chinese Brush Painting. She joined the Academy of Chinese Brush Painting and also learnt from three Chinese brush painting Masters in the art of Calligraphy, Chinese Ink & Colour Brush Painting. She learnt that every brush stroke has special meaning that symbolizes and is influenced by Chinese tradition, religion and philosophy.

 

 

Charissa 40cm x 50cm oil & acrylic

Later she returned to Germany where she joined the "Fachhoch Schule" in Duesseldorf  and studied at the German School of Expressionist Painting working with watercolours and acrylic paints on large canvasses and  paper.

With the artist's form of expression in watercolour, Chinese brush, or acrylics, she recreates scenes from Africa, Far-East, South America, and Europe, that mediates a calming peaceful impression allowing a temporary inclusion of the observer to enter and experience the unique and spontaneous harmony of the paintings.

The Artist is a member of the Autoren Galerie and Atelier Project in Munich, Germany.

Previous Exhibitions

1986 Hilton Hotel Kuala Lumpur Malaysia
1990 Hilton Hotel Duesseldorf Germany
1990 Schnitzler Beauty Spa Duesseldorf Germany
1991 University of Duesseldorf Duesseldorf Germany
1994 Galerie Am Bachfeld Muenchen Germany
1994 Autoren Galerie Muenchen Germany
1995 Safir Hotel Kuwait Group Exhibition
1996 Das Sekretariat Gmbh Muenchen Germany
1996 Autoren Galerie Muenchen Germany Group Exhibition
1997 Autoren Galerie Muenchen Germany Group Exhibition
1998 Autoren Galerie Muenchen Germany Group Exhibition
1999 Autoren Galerie Muenchen Germany Group Exhibition
1999 Sheraton Hotel Muenchen Germany
1998-2002 Permanent Galerie Muenchen Germany Arabella Haus Sheraton Hotel

 

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