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From: Dog
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 08 March 2001
The best thing on the Finchley Road, running its miserable course through unfashionably rich and stable north-west London, is the O2 Centre. It contains in its luscious post-modern architecture of waterfalls and fishtanks and glass ceiling , besides the big Sainsburys which I rarely visit,the crème de la crème of consuming pleasures. Basically it is a mall with a bunch of crappy chain restaurants, a cinema with big screens, a gym, and a Books etc. It is for me a place of many happy memories: eating a whole peri-peri Nando's chicken and quenching my thirst with unlimited Coke refills, drinking a coffee strolling through Books etc, sitting in the large comfortable Warner Village seats not really listening to, just gazing at the huge heads of my Hollywood idols. It is nothing special but I keep going back to O2. Further down the road is the Camden Arts Centre, which should be more accurately named the F.Road Arts Centre, or the 02 Arts Centre (though I believe O2 already have their own gallery). CAC could perhaps incorporate a much needed Starbucks and become the F. Road Starbucks Arts Centre. Li Yuan-chia was a boring minimalist abstract painter who set up a casual Museum in Cumbria, and made all sorts of art including videos, installations and photographs. According to the press release his " his inclusive approach and generosity of spirit anticipated the attitude and practices of many of today's artists." I found his double exposure slide projections unnervingly beautiful. Sitting on a stool in a dark room, images of flower petals over skyscapes, or projected on the floor a fishpond with candles and flowers, flash up and then shortly disappear. This sentimental and clichedly oriental stuff should be awful, and perhaps I was just hungover, but I didn't want to leave the room. The sky is beautiful and so are fishponds, flowers too, when you see them together it makes you happy sometimes. The rest of the show was junky. All the mystic characters and collaged reliefs looked like a bad day in the culture club, or a show in an American mall. Insubstantial and a little dusty, they should have been left in the attic.
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