Seeing: Out of Time, [a-n], May 2000

Michael Stanley, writer

The Chinese Art Centre's relocation to Manchester's Northern Quarter is just one of the key factors signalling the regeneration of this part of the city centre. Over the last few years the area has enjoyed a steady influx of artists' spaces, crafts outlets, American-style deli's and the odd tapas bar which, however temporary, have added new life to an otherwise derelict part of the city.

The exchange between the public life of the neighbouring streets and the private space of the gallery are subtly referenced in the centre's new commission by recent Goldsmiths' graduate Suki Chan. The gallery's large windows are the site for the visitiors first engagement with the work which can be viewed twenty-four hours a day. The artist has painstakingly but quite beautifully adhered a wash of single grains of dyed black rice to the inside of the gallery windows. Each grain follows intricate patterns, the internal structure of abstract shapes resembling stretched torsos, migrating birds, the outlines of shifting continents. Creating a veil-like effect, the installation both marks and transgresses the boundaries between gallery/street, inside/outside, public/private.

Inside, a mound of coal-black pigmented rice installed against the gallery wall is a slag heap in miniature. It forms a part of a second series of rice drawings which have been made along the gallery floors and walls. The drawings map the projected shadow of a small wooden chest placed in one half of the gallery space. The chest is positoned rather curiously next to a floor to ceiling swingometer-like pendulum, which for all its impact is perhaps too obvious a metaphor for the artist's concerns with the passage of time, ephemerality and memory.

More interesting is Chan's discussion of her work as a filter for controlling and modifying the levels of light entering the gallery space, creating shadows, non-spaces, voids. Perhaps the image which the work evokes of windows blackened by a veneer of industrial smog has a more lasting resonance in this district of Manchester with its labyrinth of derelict mills, deserted warehouses and ghosts of an industrial past.

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