Louis Porter

ARTIST CV

Exhibiting Wires at Night at Kazari Collector 2nd-30th April

During the buildup to the 2008 Olympics , I was sent to China by the Australia-China Council to undertake an artists' residency in Beijing.  I felt it important to look at the social and environmental upheavals the event was causing. However I did not want to fall into the trap of creating yet another stereotypical body of work on China, vast ordered groups of workers , sky scrapers and billboards photographed in mute tones. I therefore tried to produce a number of sets on the most simple things I could
: red carpet , the top of an escalator , flower beds and the images displayed here, wires at night. 

As part of the infrastructure created before the games , large areas of Beijing that had no or poor supplies of electricity and telecommunications were upgraded. This resulted in a lot more wire and unlike the rest of Beijing , many of these untidy bundles were missed out in what must have been the world's largest tidy up.

It became my routine , when weather permitted , to have a bowl of soup at a street eatery near my apartment as night fell , then to set off to visit and photograph the wires I had identified during the day.