James Johnson-Perkins
/ China · United Kingdom

James Johnson-Perkins is a British artist living between
China and the United Kingdom. In 2021 he won the Alpine
fellowship prize. Institutions that have hosted his work
include: National centre for contemporary arts, Moscow; Arts
student league, New York; Chinese European arts centre,
Xiamen; Toyota museum of modern art, Toyota City; Centre
for contemporary art, Glasgow; Royal college of art, London.
He uses retro technologies, digital collages and toys to build
playful and ironic scenarios in which the dimension of play is
also the dimension in which contradictions explode without
any apparent ties to reality. In The great battle, a digital
giant, he cites Canaletto and Venetian Vedutism, but in a
perturbed and restless version in which the Venetian city
seems to be at the centre of every possible and impossible
conflict: in the paradox of the game he tells of the very real
rapacity of warrior and merchant Venice and its fantastic and
mythological atmospheres that in the artistic representations
of the 18th century seemed to place it at the centre of the
world’s imagination, just as America is today in Hollywood’s
catastrophic and dystopian films.