Melanie Jackson’s new video installation Made in China will be screened at Matt’s Gallery for two weekends only. This work brings three short videos into one space: two are presented as projections back to back on a large suspended screen, and one plays on a monitor. The exhibition weaves together the tales of two Chinese women and their experiences of work and migration: One girl travels from the rural provinces of China to the city, uprooting from the family farm to take up work in a cosmetics factory, making false eyelashes. The other, a musician, takes a journey from China to London to study the traditional Chinese string instrument the ‘erhu’ under English tutorage.

Melanie Jackson uses a mixture of animation, staged film and straight documentary to set up a complex set of relationships between the personal impulses and external influences that lead to certain working and living conditions, and fantasies of escape. The films focus on the girls’ patterns and structures of work, depicting the discipline that this entails in each case. The work also reflects on their inevitable implication into patterns of economic and cultural consumption in the West.

This is Melanie Jackson’s fourth project with Matt’s Gallery.

Made in China will also be screened at HanartTz Gallery, Hong Kong in June 2005.

Acknowledgments: Picture Research China: O Zhang; Camera for Performance: Lynda Hall; Lighting for performance: George Duck; Sound Post Production: Dave McGuire; Animation Consultant: Christina Vilics; Performer: Wei Ying Jun; Teacher: Colin Huehns, Lecturer Royal Academy of Music Students: Weiying Jun, Jacqueline Leung, Benjamin Trigg, Wang Yan.