The West Gallery, Quay Arts. Saturday 22 September – Saturday 1 December 2012

Private View: Saturday 22 September 5 – 7pm ALL WELCOME.

Artist Talk: Thursday 25 October Starts 5.30pm FREE.

Quay Arts presents a newly commissioned work by artist Suki Chan. First shown at aspex in Portsmouth earlier this year to mark Dickens 2012, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the artist has created the sound installation A Hundred Seas Rising inspired by his novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

This work explores how literature might be implicated in the imagination and trajectories of revolutions, referencing the ‘Hundred Flowers Movement’ in 1950s China. The movement invited a variety of views and solutions to national policy issues, the name of which originated from a poem: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

The installation uses the sound of one hundred individual voices as a sculptural material, re-imagining Dickens’ French revolutionary mob sonically by creating surges of ideological thought that reverberate across the gallery. Contributors of all ages and diverse social and cultural backgrounds from Portsmouth and further afield were encouraged to describe the cause or structure they would like to transform, the motivating ideology for this change, including books that might have inspired their ideas, their objectives and how this would be achieved.

Suki Chan was born in Hong Kong and lives and works in London. Chan graduated from Goldsmiths in 1999 and completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art in 2008. Her recent solo shows include: Utopia on the Horizon, Tintype, London; and Sleep Walk Sleep Talk, a major video installation commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, shown at Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of London.

A Hundred Seas Rising is part of RELAY: Contemporary art in the South East of England commissioned in response to London 2012. A partnership project between: aspex, Portsmouth; Space, Creative and Cultural Industries Faculty, University of Portsmouth; and Quay Arts, Isle of Wight.