Alice Tye

0:04[Applause]

0:14thank you very much for that nice welcome.

0:16And so as I said I'm Alice Choi and I'm an illustrator and a painter based here in London I graduated from BA illustration at Camberwell College of Art in 2013 and I've been living and working here since so I've always been really inspired by cinema and architecture and my work. And I'm interested in the relationship between the world filtered through pop culture and the reality of that world and also incredibly inspired by my travels capturing this experience of a place or a journey and I've painted numerous series based on trips to the US and Japan the latter is the project I'll be talking about this evening but first I thought I'd give you a quick overview of my commercial and self-initiated projects so I always work in oil paint mainly on paper and occasionally on canvas and the Commission's I get for Commission work are commercial work are quite varied so this is the work I did for salon magazine and it was part of a series of still lifes to accompany our write-up about different champagnes another example of quite a different editorial illustration.

1:29This is the cover of the lit review section of the Guardian from last year and these are two of the portraits I made for LVMH is cloths 19 website which sells all the wines champagnes and spirits made by LVMH cheese drinks brands like Belvedere Vodka Moen Shandong champagne and Dom Perignon alongside the commercial side of my practice I try and always have a self initiated project going in 2015 I traveled across the US with my boyfriend for two months and painted a series called USA I are when we got back which you can see here and here.

2:10I also painted a second series from the trip based on one specific day where we visited a road in Palm Springs I painted from Google Street View during my degree in 2017 I painted a series that I titled untitled film and the idea was that each canvas used the visual language of films and would read as a still taken from a film it doesn't actually exist the lack of dialogue minimal use of figures and strange subtitles are intended to let the viewer piece together their own idea of the film's narrative so now that you know a little bit more about my work let's get talking about the series mono noir a so in the spring of 2017 I went on a three-week trip to Japan my u.s.

3:01Trip in 2015 I knew that I wanted to do a project based on my real-life experience compared to my previous perception filtered through TV and film but when we visited Japan I didn't have any preconceived ideas I just knew that I would get some sort of project jobs a trip and I would also like to apologize now for all bad pronunciations of Japanese phrases and places I will do my best to say them accurately so it never been anywhere in Asia before. And it was a massive cultural shock I tried to document as much of the trip as I could on film and on my iPhone I'm not someone who carries a sketchbook around and I actually really like having a break from making work well.

3:46So I'm travelling so that I can come back with energy and I can feel like I'm actually engaging with things and taking part whilst I'm there rather than just observing I'll talk you through the timeline and locations of the trip so for the first few days we were in Tokyo before we went to visit the Keizo Valley and we hiked between the postal towns of tsumago and Megumi and here's a picture of me bringing a bear Bell really a little fact about me as I'm terrified of bears and my overriding memory of this part of our trip was ringing every bear bell Bell that we found in the forest as loudly as I could this is also my main memory of hiking in Yosemite in 2015 and both times we didn't end up seeing any bears or wildlife at all.

4:39This is the first of the mono noir a paintings the views from the momosuke bridge near nagisa station we were actually there by chance waiting for our train to Mount Koya where we had an hour or so to kill and that's one of the things I really love about travel photographs and work is that none of us have a planned and the best shots and experiences are often the bits are in between the plans so after the Keizo Valley we went to visit Mount Koya to see a lot of Buddhist temples and we even stayed in one for the night however I didn't make any work based on Mount choir so in the interest of keeping this quite brief I will move on to our next stop of our trip after Mount Koya we took the train to a soccer and stayed there for about a week the pace took quite a bit for justing too after the mountains and but it was a incredible place to explore mainly on foot just with no particular destination wandering the city this painting is one of the first I'd done on canvas and it's a lot bigger than I would normally work.

5:43But the cities in Japan were so tall with high-rises and buildings stacked on top of each other that I really wanted to reflect that scale in the work the cherry blossom was just starting to appear it was the beginning of Sakura season when we were there and the craze for that was that surrounds it was also starting which is Sakura flavored food plastic sakura hoards of photographers around the first signs of sakura on trees and the painting set up on screen is sort of behind the scenes this is what my studio looks like and how I go about starting a painting we also visited Hiroshima for the day from Osaka just to go to the her off my peace memorial me.

6:30And I really love the architecture of that Museum it was felt kind of space-age II but also appropriately Samba for the reason that exists a monument to the bombing of Rush mo and world war 2 my boyfriend Sam then got 24-hour flu the first of things to go a little bit wrong on our trip and we actually had to cancel an overnight trip to now Ashima the our island and booked a hotel in Kyoto which meant that I had 24 hours of exploring a city alone which I'd not done before especially in a place where I don't know the language and I can't read the signs but I surprised myself by not only navigating the city but also observing details that I might have missed otherwise so things like the telephone lines chaotically crossing overhead in all the tiny streets and the mix of old Kyoto with the new bright signage Sam then recovered and we continued exploring Kyoto together we've been warned they was incredibly touristy and I wasn't really expecting to find much inspiration for work here.

7:37But actually I found the contrasts of tourists with these ancient and sacred temples really visually interesting I am very aware saying this that we were also tourists so we eventually did get to now Shima just for the day from Kyoto and I actually found that the small towns like the one shown here we're almost as interesting to me as the actual islands these were places we stopped out as changing trains and buses on the way I've got a bit of a thing about car parks I seem to collect car park images both from Japan and the US.

8:15And so many other places we visited and you can see that from the previous slide I showed as well when we did eventually get to now Shima after multiple trains and a ferry it was like a desert island I kept thinking that the view from the winding roads onto the bay look like the setting for a James Bond film Nash EEMA is home to three galleries they're all potato hand oh and as well as the incredible art works that they house the buildings were what really interested me the most the concrete almost brutalist structures that really play with light in an interesting way unfortunately I don't have any photos of them as they're quite strict on photography there.

8:58So I didn't make any paintings but they were really fascinating and introduced me to a new architects work the last stop of our trip was Tokyo and I think this is the best design of traffic cone I've ever seen it pretty much sums up every detail that would normally be mundane seeming really playful the toilets play birdsong the train stations will have their own jingles and the traffic cones are straight shaped like bunnies it was in Tokyo that we fully experienced the Sakura madness it was fully in bloom by the time we got there.

9:33And it only lasts for about two weeks the title I chose for the series mono no RA we originally learnt that in relation to this Sakura or cherry blossom season it translates literally as the pathos of things. And it captures this idea of the awareness and appreciation of the impermanence of life and the idea that our appreciation of beauty can be heightened by this awareness of its transiency and he felt really embodied and how much both the people in Japan were enjoying the blossom for the limited time.

10:06That's there. But also very fitting for our experience in Japan for such a short time Tokyo with the end of our travels in Japan and when I got back to London I began editing and curating the images to pain the resulting series was all of the paintings that you've seen this evening just as throughout the photographs that is all thank you very much for listening [Applause]