Trips & Adventures – 7 March 2019

We met at Dough Pizza Kitchen, an independent pizza restaurant in the heart of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, at 12.30pm and enjoyed various pizzas, pastas and salads (including beetroot risotto). The service was excellent and we were seated quickly and given our drinks orders very promptly. There was also a really good ambience in the restaurant and overall the food was good. Some people even managed a sweet!

We then crossed the road to the Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art, where we had a private tour of the Chinternet Ugly – a group exhibition of young artists working in video and digital media, part of the Art and Resistance programme.

Today, China is home to 802 million internet users and is the world’s largest online community. The exhibition exposes the reality of an internet with Chinese characteristics of censorship, hyper-regulation and surveillance. The young artists use humour, irreverence and wit to confront the complex and contradictory facets of China’s digital realm.

This was followed by a workshop on wax resist painting, lead by Jo.

Jo demonstrated this simple form of decorating cloth, using wax and dye, which has been practised for centuries.

When we posed for the group photo, someone bent over and revealed their “Lucky Pants”. Once seen, it was an image that cannot be erased from the memory!

Thanks for a great afternoon to Alistair for the tour and to Jo for the workshop.