the ANONYMOUS STUDIO

I have a wandering ‘eye’ that constantly surveys a local terrain in search of something beautiful or strange, something previously hidden. I am an artist and a collector of after-images and oddities of life. The artists’ studio gives me, as the Chinese say, Double Happiness. It is not just a ‘warehouse’ of finished art but also an archeological site where I can unearth and frame my own images from their leftovers. I can show them a part of themselves they perhaps have not seen before. As a curator I not only look for finished artworks to exhibit but also for the processes, accidents, refuse, and raw materials of art and life. The studio is like a drawing. It is a work in flux, one that is created by an artist without thinking about a grand finished object. It is the thing artists do when they don’t ‘think.’

These are some of my “wandering eye” images from the studios and environs I have visited in China since I arrived in 2008. It is an ongoing project... --James Elaine