Canal Cheong Jagerroos Floating Island – Utopia, 1.2.–31.3.

1.2.–31.3. Gallery

The Charm of the Floating Island

Look at the sunset 
floating fire-islands move 
imperial over cream green seas. 
Islands on fire! Islands like torches! 
Islands on victory parade! 
- from "Landscape at Sunset", by Edith Södergran

Canal Cheong Jagerroos (b. 1968) from Macau, intriguingly combines past with present art, the East and the West. Her art is influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by the different cultural spaces in which she has lived and worked. She is inspired by old Chinese philosophy and poetry, as much as by contemporary society. 

Canal Cheong Jagerroos’s abstract artwork is made with multimedia techniques, which often include calligraphy and block prints. She combines different materials, there might be several layers of rice paper on canvas in addition to colours in acrylic, inks and traditional Chinese pigments.  Colour is important and meditative for this artist who works in intense painting sessions. Influences from Chinese art and elements from contemporary art are combined into the language of Art, through which she pursues a utopian world of peace, harmony and positive energy.

Canal Cheong Jagerroos studied graphic design in Hongkong and continued her artistic education in China at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. But, even as a young child she had already studied traditional Chinese ink and brush painting with her father; an artist himself.  Over the past 30 years, the international contemporary artist has lived and worked in many different countries of Asia, Europe and Africa, following her Finnish-Swedish partner, for his work. She came to Finland for the first time in 2005, and today, lives and works in both Shanghai and Helsinki.

Floating Island

The exhibition, Floating Island, is a kind of allegory of the artist’s spiritual state of mind, which come from her experiences in life and identity as an artist. The exhibition conveys concepts of opposites: permanent and ephemeral, self and stranger, change and stability, the past and the present.

The exhibition installation Context of Innocence (2019) symbolises the cosmos and how everything can be broken up into small pieces which float in the air like particles in the universe.

Over the years 2018–2020, the Floating Island exhibition will be shown in the art museums of Salo, Jyväskylä, Joensuu and Rovaniemi. In addition, the exhibition will also tour parts of China and the United States.

The travelling project Blue and Red

Between 2015–2018, Canal Cheong Jagerroos and Nanna Susi, the Finnish painter, worked together on the art project Blue & Red, for which the artists travelled together to each other’s home countries, learning about each other’s cultures.  A short documentary about the art project is shown on the third floor of the museum.

Website: https://www.canalcheongjagerroos.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/canal.cheong.jagerroos/