Pamela So: The Collector’s Garden
Until March 5; Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews

As we enter the Chinese year of the dog, St Andrews University will be celebrating more than most. Thanks to Scotland’s longest running Chinese foundation course, nearly 5% of St Andrews’ student population is Chinese, and what’s more, they got Friday off in preparation for today’s New Year celebrations.

Conscious of this strong Chinese community, the Crawford Arts Centre joined forces last year with the Fife Chinese Cultural Society to find a Chinese-Scottish artist with a contemporary approach. The hunt wasn’t difficult: Glaswegian artist Pamela So has built up an impressive body of work exploring her Chinese roots, and she agreed to become artist in residence for 2005.

So made herself pretty busy with community workshops over the course of the year, culminating in the colourful exhibition, Exchange, at the Crawford late last year. Not only that, but her exquisite paper cut-outs simultaneously decorated the walls of Edinburgh’s Stills Gallery, and all the while she was in preparation for this solo exhibition at the Crawford, with another to follow, hot on its heels, at Glasgow’s Collins Gallery.

In 2003 So took over a basement in Merchant Square with her installation Tea Trade. The atmospheric set-up combined projections and Chinese dolls with opium poppies and a decorative carpet made entirely from tea leaves. The installation explored how Chinese porcelain – used as ballast in tea ships – was linked not only to the tea-trade of years gone by, but by association, to the scourge of opium addiction in 19th century China.

So’s interest in Chinese porcelain led her, during the St Andrews residency, to visit Hill of Tarvit, the mansion house near Cupar. There, she explored the large collection of Chinese porcelain which forms the starting point for this show. Its floral patterns became templates for So’s paper flowers, appearing and reappearing in various guises.

The show is dominated by fifteen squares of plastic grass in a neat grid on the floor. As well as strictly geometrical arrangements of plastic flowers, the squares contain exotic paper flowers on tall wire stalks, each made from the Hill of Tarvit templates, by participants of So’s community workshops in Manchester (another of the residencies which So squeezed into her busy year). Down the corridor in the activity room, you too can make a floral masterpiece to add to The People’s Garden.

The paper flowers appear also in large photographs, nestling surreptitiously amongst weeds in an old greenhouse, and in shrubs at Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Other photos, taken by her father, show So’s family in their Chinese garden (now a public park) and inserted like ghosts on the stairs at Hill of Tarvit. Her show at Collins Gallery will, apparently, extend the artist’s interest in landscape gardening, stimulated at the stately home.

Working in parallel with the paper flowers, a series of slides, both digital and actual, catalogue Chinese plants now naturalised in Western Europe. The metaphor is clear, that people, like flowers, have been transplanted from China to Scotland, but aside from the sideways reference in her title, The People’s Garden, to China’s political past, the work on show remains too under-developed to sustain interest.

It’s no wonder that So has over-stretched herself in recent months, given the number of commitments she has taken on. But the artist has shown flair and ingenuity in her past work, and the research from this year’s residency in St Andrews will no doubt prove bountiful in time to come. So far though, it’s best described as work in progress.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.01.06