North East artist Steve Messam goes big in China with giant artworks

For North East artist Stever Messam, there has been a double helping of New Year celebrations thousands of miles apart.

On New Year’s Day, having seen in 2025 at his County Durham home, Steve flew out of Newcastle Airport for the Chinese city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. There he has installed one of his trademark inflatable artworks between two footbridges in the city’s Tiangfu Art Park- an installation which has become part of Chengdu’s Chinese New Year events.

En route he stopped in Shanghai for a last look at another of his works, titled Packaged, which has just ended its run after being installed in October. The success of Packaged saw Steve invited back to China for his Chengdu project by UCCA, one of the country’s major galleries.

Steve’s work has seen him take a dozen trips to China over the last 20 years. His giant polyester artwork, called Below, was made in a small curtains factory in the mountains, and has grabbed the city’s attention just as the Shanghai venture has done.

“Each half of the Chengdu installation is the size of a house and people love it,” said Steve. “I like bridges and I’ve done a few artworks around them over the years. With this piece I was interested in the function of bridges as something you go under as well as over.

North East artist Steve Messam goes big in China with giant artworks
Steve Messam’s Chengdu artwork
(Image: supplied pic, free to use)

“At Chengdu I wanted to play with the space beneath the decks as well as being something you could walk over the top of. The forms fill the space beneath the deck and burst out in an array of spikes to extend that space. A two-metre wide gap between the forms keeps the route through functional. Visitors passing through them are dwarfed by the forms. “

The installation’s radiating form and vivid colour evoke the blooming of the hibiscus flower, which is part of the cityscape.

Packaged, an inflatable installation on a former warehouse on the banks of the Suzhou Creek in the centre of Shanghai, featured a series of large rounded yellow box shapes appearing to burst out of the doorways, filling the balconies and squeezing between the architecture.

Steve said: “Packaged temporarily transformed the river frontage of the 1920s warehouse building and echoed the building’s heritage, drawing equally from the bundles of goods seen bursting from the warehouse in historic photos of the quayside, and the equally packaged loads still transported on cargo tricycles up and down the riverside as a convenience and low traffic route for bicycles.

“I’ve been visiting Shanghai on an off now for nearly 20 years. The speed of change in the city over that time has been immense and it’s been fascinating to watch that change in the small parts of the city I’ve come to know.

“One of those was the roads up and down the Suzhou Creek. This smaller navigable river has always been a quiet backwater just a few minutes walk from the centre of People’s Square and the main shopping districts- real life of ordinary Shanghai in the streets amid the derelict warehouses.

“I became fascinated by the volume of goods being transported up and down those back roads on bicycles, tricycles and petrol engined cargo bikes. These were mostly carrying used packaging for recycling. I’ve always seen Shanghai as being years ahead of the UK for recycling everything.

“That movement of goods along the river I saw as a continuation of the river traffic that once dominated this part of the city and the warehouses were once the core of trade and commerce in the city.”

The warehouse Steve chose for his artwork was built for the China Industrial Bank. The piece was made at the factory Steve used for Chengdou.

“Over 1000m of polyester fabric was cut and sewn by a team of tailors in just four days. I have so much respect for their knowledge and skill in handling such large volumes of fabric,” he said. “But that connection with industrial scale manufacturing in the part of the country long associated with historical landscape painting in my mind was all part of the final piece. All those stories bundled up in packages.”

View news Source: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/north-east-artist-steve-messam-30925457

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