Blending inspiration

"The title of the exhibition Where Mr Wong Sent Me is named after a famous fortune-teller from Hong Kong," explains Galerie Urs Meile artist Tracey Snelling. "Although he is now dead, I like the idea that I might have sat down with him and been advised where I would end up in my travels."

Snelling arrived in Beijing last fall from Oakland, California. As a part of the Galerie Urs Meile artist-in-residence program, she spent three and a half months around China, traveling through Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region (where she was inspired to create) before returning to the Caochangdi art district of Beijing to start working.

"What I found, in both my short yet interesting travels and in my experiences in Beijing, were unreal, surreal, fascinating, frustrating, beautiful, awful, crazy, mundane, and very wonderful experiences," says Snelling. Most of her work over the years has consisted of sculpture in combination with photography/film. She has exhibited in London and was initially introduced to the Galerie Urs Meile by a gallery in Chelsea. Before visiting China for the first time this year, she photographed and collected images in San Francisco's and New York's Chinatown districts.