Emily Allchurch is a British artist who specialises in digital photo collages. Her second solo show in Hong Kong, Mirrored Cities, will be displayed at the Karin Weber Gallery from October 23 to November 28, 2020.
Allchurch was awarded the ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant from the Arts Council England in 2019 to fund the travel and research for the Mirrored Cities project. Her work in Mirrored Cities masterfully blends the landscape of Venice, Italy, with Xi’an, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Fenghuang, Mainland China. The digital photographs compress the beginning and endpoints of the silk road into a single intersection of radically different cultures. The exhibition draws parallels between Eastern and Western locations to expose the world's rapid globalization.
For this project, the artist draws inspiration from Venetian Renaissance works by Gentile Bellini and Vittorio Carpaccio, as well as Chinese court paintings created by Zhang Zeduan during the Song dynasty. By using two contrasting cultures to create such harmonious, beautiful collages, Allchurch further subverts the stigma between opposing hemispheres and displays the effects of mass tourism and trade. Erika Yip