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Karin Weber Gallery is excited to announce British artist Emily Allchurch’s second solo show in Hong Kong.

Two years in the making, ’Mirrored Cities’ draws parallels between the ancient trading port of Venice, Italy with its historical and contemporary counterpart locations such as Xi’an, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Fenghuang in mainland China, the beginning and end points of the ancient Silk Road. In this new series, Allchurch engages with topics such as globalization, mass tourism and trade, searching for synergies and similarities — rather than contrasts and differences — between historically ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ locations.

Allchurch remains true to her signature digital photo collage style, drawing inspiration from Old Master paintings, for this series Venetian Renaissance works by Gentile Bellini (1429-1507) and his scholar Vittorio Carpaccio (c.1465-1526), as well as Chinese court paintings by Song dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). Allchurch also references literary sources, specifically Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972), a series of fictitious conversations between Marco Polo and the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

For the ‘Mirrored Cities’ project, Emily Allchurch was awarded the ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ Grant from the Arts Council England in 2019 to fund a prolonged period of travel and research. In 2020, additional support was provided via the Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund, created to assist artists through the COVID-19 crisis.

Says Allchurch, “I feel so privileged to have had the opportunity to travel so extensively in mainland China and Venice in 2019. It has been a wonderfully restorative process to be able to work every day during the UK lockdown with the over 40,000 images I took on my trips. My thoughts have often turned to the people I photographed last year, in cities so far away, and how much their circumstances must have changed in the subsequent year.”

About the Artist:

Born in Jersey, Channel Islands, UK, Emily Allchurch first specialised in sculpture before developing her unique approach to reimagining historical artworks in a contemporary photo-collage style. She shows regularly across the UK and internationally, and is a frequent participant in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, UK.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tokaido Hiroshige Museum, Japan; Minneapolis Museum of Arts, USA; Museum of London, UK; Manchester Art Gallery, UK; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; States of Jersey, Channel Islands, UK and the Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, Canada. Corporate collections include the Financial Conduct Authority, Unilever, Morgan Stanley, Schroders and Rathbones in London, Fidelity International in Tokyo, Gaw Capital and Link REIT in Hong Kong amongst many others.

Emily holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London and lives and works in Hastings, UK.