Seeing Hand

Launch Pad is delighted to announce its inaugural commission in Shanghai. British artist Dryden Goodwin has been invited to make a new site-specific work for the Shanghai residence of Hong Kong collectors, Jane and Dominique Lee.

Dryden Goodwin’s work revolves around carefully observed social and environmental situations that he records in drawings and often combines with photography and live action video. His practice reflects a fascination with the distinctions between public and private, an inquiry that he develops most clearly in the context of the city where the two are often indistinguishable. Voyeurism and forensic observation are at play in equal measure in his intricate drawings of strangers, of bus passengers, for example, of restaurant diners, of people waiting in airports or hospital wards for loved ones.

For “Seeing Hand,” Goodwin made several trips to Shanghai for a combined period of 6 weeks. During this time, he lived with the collectors, familiarising himself with the immediate neighbourhood, the Lees’ friends and associates, and further afield, with the public spaces and environs of the city. He made hundreds of drawings that chronicle the people, places, and situations he encountered. Goodwin also recorded the process of image-gathering on film that will be screened as part of the exhibition. The result is a piece that captures in micro and macro the combinations of old and new, traditional and contemporary, familiarly Western and distinctly Chinese, which distinguish Shanghai and the hosts themselves.

An In-Conversation with the Artist and Karen Smith, British art critic and historian specialising in Chinese Contemporary art took place on 10th November.