East Meets West in Fink & Chen's Duets

After stepping down as CCO of Ogilvy China earlier this year, you might've expected Graham Fink, the brains behind such celebrated campaigns as BA Face and Coca-Cola Hands to take a little break from the creative world. A spot of gardening, perhaps. Or a little light reading.

Instead, Fink is throwing himself into his already well-established mutimedia career - his work straddles photography, film, painting, drawing and technology -with the launch of a new exhibition exploring "the dualities within people and places".

And though his seven-year stint among the neon lights and towering skyscrapers of Shanghai has ended, he's nonetheless keeping one foot firmly in the Pearl of the Orient by teaming up with one of the city's leading fashion designers on the project.

Duets, which opens this week at Rankin's Annroy galllery in north London, is a collaboration between Fink and Ziggy Chen, whose studio is known for its unisex designs tailored to fit different body shapes. Both artists are inspired by the duality and changing nature of Shanghai, a city which fuses East and West, tradition and modernity, past and present to confusing - but beguiling - effect.

For the exhibition, Fink has reconfigured imagery from Chen's latest collection "to create an immediate duality that occurs in any given situation – evoking our tendency for interchangeability based on external conditions and environments."

Using multiple exposure in the images produces a layering effect that, according to the exhibition notes, captures the pair's shared interest in fusing history, memory and time into one single aesthetic vision.

"I love new and interesting ideas in all forms of art, and I’m a fanboy of anyone who is doing something new and doing it well - it’s safe to say that Graham Fink and Ziggy Chen have both of these quotas in the bag" says Rankin. "It’s conceptually nuanced, visually fascinating and I’m really proud to have this work in my gallery."