Artist Bill Aitchison has recently been awarded grants by Arts Council England (South East Region) and The British Council to go China in January 2011 to create a new show which he will be bringing to Portsmouth next May. He will be going to Xiamen a university and port city on the south coast and will be an artist in residence at the Chinese European Art Centre (CEAC). Over three months he will create a new piece that will be presented in Xiamen, Beijing and Shanghai and then, back in the UK, in Portsmouth (guildhall square), Brighton and London. This new work, dryly titled ‘The Customer Is Always Wrong’ will use the state of being a foreigner to creatively plot the intricacies of national and cultural identities. He says the inspiration for it came “when I was working as foreigner in Beijing last year, I started to realise how British I actually am as everything there is kind of different. As people here in Britain are talking a lot about what is British, and nobody can exactly agree, I thought it would be interesting to go into this subject more, but from a different angle.”

More on this new project can be found here: www.billaitchison.co.uk and a blog will be kept whilst in China so it can be followed from back home.

Portsmouth born Bill Aitchison is a theatre and performance artist and the artistic director of Bill Aitchison Company. He has presented his work in galleries, theatres and festivals in Europe, Asia, America and The Middle East. His relationship to China is a long one: he was first in China in 1997 returning in 2009 to a transformed country as an artist in residence at Theatre In Motion/Institute For Provocation in Beijing. He later presented the results of this residency at the 10th Open Performance Art Festival in 798 Art Zone Beijing also in 2009. In 2010 he visited with a British Council Connections Through Culture Development Grant to set up the present residency. www.billaitchison.co.uk