55 is pleased to announce Colin Chinnery’s first solo show in Shanghai, Decomposed Compositions.  For this show, Chinnery has created a series of collage pattern works that comprise of historical photographs, art history, current events images, and contemporary art.

For the past two years, Chinnery’s work has been exploring how objects and images create relationships with each other in an exhibition or artwork.  As an artist and curator, Chinnery has been creating both art installations of his own making, and organizing exhibitions by other artists.  The central concern in both of these practices is generally an attempt to create something that is more than the sum of its parts, but in the process, the individual parts lose something of their autonomy.  In this way, an artwork in an exhibition, or a component in an installation is like the relationship between an individual and a social group.

Chinnery has been exploring how to alter the dynamic within an artwork by using components to create formal and rigid patterns, thereby undermining the creation of meaning.

In this series of collage works entitled Decomposed Compositions, Chinnery has brought together four different elements that regularly inform artistic practice today - historical photographs, art history, images of current events, and contemporary art.  Instead of mutating the visual vocabulary of each image as is customary in collage work, Chinnery has created patterns that divide each image into symmetrical parts.  In doing so, the autonomy of each image is preserved, but at the service of the larger pattern that dictates the terms of the arbitrary meaning created.

Colin Chinnery is an artist and curator based in Beijing.  For the last two years he was Director of ShContemporary Art Fair in Shanghai, and before that he was Chief Curator / Deputy Director at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing.  Chinnery's own work has been presented shows such as the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005, NONO at Long March Space in 2007, and a solo show of his work at Pekin Fine Arts in 2009.