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Talented Chinese New Zealand artist Kerry Ann Lee returns to Toi Poneke Gallery in her home town with an exhibition of art she developed during her WARE residency in Shanghai and on a subsequent visit to the city during the World Expo in 2010.

This will be the first time these works are presented in New Zealand.

On show from Thursday 28 April at Toi Poneke Gallery in Wellington, Da Shi Jie/The Great World: Shanghai Works 2009-2010 will showcase three bodies of work whose aim is to provoke reflections on culture and identity through mixed media representations of fluctuating cityscapes.

Electric Warrior is a series of raw wire sculptures highlighting rapid urban development, while Chinese Relatives groups together paper-cut pieces set into recycled window frames, evoking the disappearing old world of Shanghai’s shikumen, or brick terrace houses.

These works were shown at island6 Art Centre and Shanghai Art Museum as a result of her residency in 2010. Da Shi Jie is rounded off by a series of photomontage pieces redolent of science-fiction and past World Expo pavilions. These featured in AM Park, Kerry Ann’s first solo show after her return to Shanghai during the World Expo.

It is no surprise that Shanghai inspired these musings on the multifaceted history and evolving identity of big cities and their dwellers. China’s most populous city and home to the highest number of standalone tall buildings in the world, Shanghai was undergoing huge-scale urbanisation in preparation for the expo.

Selected as the first New Zealand artist to spend time in China through the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE), Kerry Ann Lee was taken by the scale and pace of this “great facelift of the city”.

“I did a lot of research, maintained journals and took lots of photographs to process my situation and surroundings,” explains Kerry Ann. “I appeared as an insider to Chinese culture – visibly Chinese and of Chinese descent, yet a distinct outsider due to the language barrier and my disconnection from contemporary Chinese culture.”

Architecture, language and memory play a vital role in Kerry Ann Lee’s art. The unifying themes of this new exhibition are old versus new traditions played out against a backdrop of demolition and construction, enriched by local Shanghai cultural artifacts, everyday life and a futuristic vision of the Chinese city.

Inaugurated in 2008, the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE) is a programme of mutual artist exchanges between Wellington and Asian arts organisations, supported by Wellington City Council and the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

“Kerry Ann Lee has been a great example and catalyst of the sort of cultural connection between New Zealand and Asia that we aim to encourage through our professional development initiatives for artists like the WARE programme,” says Asia:NZ culture director Jennifer King. “She was very prolific during her residency and it has been great to watch her thrive as a result of it. I look forward to seeing the works she produced in China brought home to Wellington.”

Da Shi Jie/The Great World: Shanghai Works 2009-2010 opens at Toi Poneke Gallery, 61 Abel Smith St on Thursday 28 April 2011 from 5.30pm and will be on display until 20 May.

Come and hear a public talk by the artist at 6.00pm on Thursday 19 May. Titled “Deconstructing Heaven: The Fabrication of Urban Utopias and Realities”, this will be a conversation about cities, their dynamic possibilities and realities, and cultural production in flux in Shanghai and Wellington. The talk will be led by the artist, Kerry Ann Lee, with guest speakers, Sophie Jerram (Curator, Letting Space), Dr Luo Hui (Lecturer, School of Languages and Cultures and Director of The Confucius Institute) and David Cross (Associate Professor, Massey School of Fine Art).