Liu Zhuoquan - and some thoughts about China from home

Liu Zhuoquan, Display Box of 24 assorted glass bottles, 2010, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and China Art Porjects

After two weeks back in Sydney I am still waiting for my experiences in China to coalesce into somthing more comprehensible and coherent - and something which can be communicated to other people. I am beginning to suspect that, like China itself, which always seems to defy one's expectations, this isn't going to happen; or not at least in the way I anticipated. To this point I am still dealing with a chaotic jumble of impressions, ideas, thoughts and memories - a bit like walking in a Chinese city where your senses are assailed in the most extraordinary ways and it can be very overwhelming.

Back at work everyone asks 'So, how was China?' What on earth could be the reply to that? Magnificent, infuriating, fabulous, astonishing, incomprehensible, joyous, confusing.......and utterly, utterly fascinating. I am still dreaming about China every night, and often still waking up and wondering which city, and which hotel room I am in. I don't want my experiences to vanish without trace into the humdrum but absorbing realities of daily life, in the way that even fantastic holidays have a habit of doing. So I am trying to spend some time each week reflecting on the experience as I begin to write more formal articles and prepare materials for students about the practice of the artists I have met. I want to continue learning Chinese and reading about China, and about Chinese art.

I have just begun reading another book by Peter Hessler, who wrote the wonderful book about driving in China. This one, 'River Town', is an account of his two years in the 1990s teaching English in Fuling, a town in Sichuan on the intersection of the Wu and Yangtze Rivers. I think it may well now be a part of the vast city of Chongqing, and part of it also no doubt submerged by the Three Gorges Dam. One of the early chapters is about his struggles (and oh, God, how I empathise!) in learning Chinese: "I also wanted to learn Chinese out of stubborness, because as a waiguoren (literally, an 'out of country person') you weren't expected to do that. Such low expectations had a long tradition; even as late as the early 1880s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring young Englishman. This bit of history fascinated me: how many languages had been sacred and forbidden to outsiders? Certainly those laws had been changed more than a century ago, but China was still ambivalent about opening to the outside world and language was still at the heart of this issue".

Here is his account of his first lesson with Teacher Liao: " My first tutorial with Teacher Liao was scheduled for two hours but I lasted less than sixty minutes. I went home with my head reeling - had a human being ever compressed more wrongness into a single hour? Everything was wrong - tones, grammar, vocabulary, initial sounds." I vividly remember my own first lesson with the gentle Lian, when after about 45 minutes of the scheduled 60 minutes I said, "I'm sorry, but I can't do any more today because my head hurts too much and I have to go home now!" My own experience of trying to learn Chinese has been so difficult, so frustrating, and yet at the same time so interesting. It is rare as a functioning adult to have such a humbling experience - my only similar experience in recent years, due to being 'mathematically challenged', was being reduced to tears in trying to understand statistical analysis of quantitative research data in Masters lectures at university. It all brought back such vivid memories of my hopeless attempts to understand Maths at school. It is probably good for teachers to have experiences like this - might make us less impatient and more empathic! But it's not much fun.

Today I will go to the wonderful White Rabbit Gallery to have a second look at the exhibition, 'The Year of the Rabbit', which I saw before I went to China. They also have a film club once a month, and today it is the Zhang Yimou film 'The Story of Qiu Ju', with Gong Li.

I am currently writing about the work of Liu Zhuoquan, who works with the ancient technique of 'inside painting' (like ancient snuff bottles) but instead uses discarded bottles as found objects. His subject matter ranges from the contemporary (and sometimes controversial) to imagery which connects with Chinese tradition and history, influenced also by the extended time he spent in Tibet. Here are some images of his work:

Have also just discovered the new bilingual art journal 'Leap', and the current issue focuses on art education - very interesting!

http://leapleapleap.com/2011/04/the-education-issue/#2

Liu Zhuoquan, Three Black Fish, 2009, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and China Art Projects

Liu Zhuoquan, Four Red Fish, 2009, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and China Art Projects

Reflecting

Wall in Black Bridge Artists' Village, Beijing

A week ago I was still in Hong Kong, taking photographs of doors, windows and temples in Wan Chai, enjoying the visual chaos and contrasts. Today I felt compelled to go and eat dumplings in one of the Shanghai places in Ashfield to be surrounded by people speaking Chinese, and some of the same clutter and confusion that reminded me of China. I have been thinking about some of the artists I met in the last 5 weeks, and the works that affected me most profoundly, in ways that I am not yet quite able to articulate. In particular, there are works by the painters Hu Qinwu, Liang Yuanwei, and Shi Zhi Ying that I found especially beautiful and thought provoking. The practice of each of these artists seems so securely grounded, informed by their personal histories as well as culture and belief (in the case of Hu Qinwu and Shi Zhi Ying) and a deep knowledge and appreciation of art traditions both Chinese and Western in the case of Liang Yuanwei. Here are some of my favourite works.

Hu Qinwu, 'Earth Grid', reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

Hu Qinwu, Untitled, reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

Liang Yuanwei, Study, photographed by Luise Guest and reproduced with permission of the artist

Liang Yuanwei, Study, photographed by Luise Guest and reproduced with permission of the artist

Shi Zhi Ying, work from Sea Sutra series, photographed by Luise Guest and reproduced with permission of the artist

I also love the works of Hong Kong artist Carol Lee, which are both meditative and melancholy. I love their suggestion of 19th century photographic experiments, and the way that her technique of using the effect of the sun on yellowing paper carries within it her meaning of the passage of time, the brevity of life and the unreliability of memory.

Carol Lee Mei Kuen, 'Baby's Wear', image reproduced with permission of the artist

Some Hong Kong street art - and some thoughts on driving in China

Temple, Wan Chai

On Friday in Hong Kong these stencilled images appeared in the subways of Kowloon and the streets of Central. I photographed them in the morning in Tsim Sha Tsui, as did many other people using their mobile phones. When I returned in the early afternoon a group of workmen were diligently covering them with white paper and sticky tape. Later still, I walked through the same subway to the Star Ferry Terminal and most of the paper had been ripped away. Passers by were again photographing them with their mobile phones.

 

Redbox Review is worth following for news of Chinese contemporary art, as is the journal 'Yishu', which I first discovered last year in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and which is now available online.

http://review.redboxstudio.cn/ 

http://yishu-online.com/ 

Although I arrived back home from China yesterday, I will endeavour to occasionally update the blog with observations, musings and random thoughts relating to China, Chinese art and artists - and of course I am already planning my next trip! There is too much that I missed, too many artists and galleries that I want to get to. By next time I hope my spoken Chinese (if not written - that would be just way too ambitious!) is much better.

I am reading a wonderful book, 'Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip' by Peter Hessler, an American journalist who lived in China for five years and then got his Chinese driving licence, in 2001. His accounts of driving in Beijing, as well as in remote areas of China including Mongolia, are fascinating and often hilarious. In explaining that Chinese drivers are essentially rookies, he says "It's hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly. On the open road it feels like everbody has just been unleashed from a hutong - there's a sudden rush of speed and competition, and the greatest thrill comes from passing other motorists. People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels. If they get passed themselves, they immediately try to pass the other vehicle back, as if it were a game. From what I can tell, that's the only question on the written driver's exam with three correct answers:

    77. When overtaking another car, a driver should pass 

           a) on the left

           b) on the right

           c) wherever, depending on the situation"

There were many times when, sitting in the back of a Beijing taxi, I thought I would never see my family again, so I can relate to this! He goes on to say that the questions on the driver's exam capture the spirit of the road (True/False: "In a taxi, it's fine to carry a small amount of explosive material")

In one of my trips out past Caochangdi to visit some artists' studios, the driver had to keep stopping to ask for directions from people riding bicycles and women pushing strollers on dirt roads. Eventually he drove off the road entirely and over a hilly demolition landscape of dirt and rocks. To my anxious question of, "Are you sure this is the way, is this OK?"  he gave the classic Beijing response, "Mei wenti!" This is the good-humoured Chinese version of "No worries, mate!" and you hear it a lot.

Here is Question 347 from the written driver's exam: "If another driver, with good intentions, warns you about something, you should

a) be open minded and listen carefully

b) not listen

c) listen and then don't pay attention to the advice

Beijing Street

Last day!

It is hard to believe that this is the last morning that I will wake up and look out at the water traffic on the harbour - a constantly fascinating overlapping frieze of tug boats, ferries, wooden fishing vessels, cruise ships, barges and other industrial vessels whose function is a mystery to me. The mundane realities of life await!

Kowloon Shop Front

My final few days in Hong Kong included a meeting with artist and social activist Jaffa Lam, visits to more galleries in Central and Wan Chai showing interesting work from the mainland (including the significant Schoeni Gallery, one of the first Hong Kong galleries to realise the significance of the new art from China) and a visit to a beautiful school, Hong Kong International School.

 View of courtyard at HKIS

It will take time once I am at home to sift through all my notes and impressions from my school visits and to be able to make sense of what I have learned. I have spoken with so many teachers and students, observed students ranging from Year 2 to Year 12 (and tertiary art students) at work, and taken note of many aspects of the culture and practices of the different schools and systems. I have been interested in the ways that technology is being used in art classes, the ways that teachers design programs of study for the cultural and specific learning needs of their students, and also the ways that teachers and students engage with their mainland Chinese or Hong Kong environments. The level of teacher and student engagement with traditional and/or contemporary Chinese art has been a significant variable. It has been fascinating to note  the differences and similarities between the approaches at different schools. I have been so interested as well in the kind of art practice that results from different curriculum paradigms, as I have seen the final year works of students from the British, IB, NSW HSC, Hong Kong Education Board, Ontario Certificate of Education and American AP syllabuses while I have been away, as well as the work done by students in the local Chinese school in Shanghai. All these different approaches have their inherent strengths and weaknesses, but all encourage students to be thoughtful and reflective, and most emphasise the conceptual intention of the artworks as the significant driving factor in production.

At the Hong Kong International School there has been some discussion about the introduction of the IB, however the students are currently studying the American curriculum, which offers (in the High School, Grades 9 - 12) 2D and 3D Studio Art at three different levels, as well as the more rigorous and demanding AP course, in which students must complete 24 works, five of which are sent away to be externally assessed. Students upload their works to their 'student profile' page on the AP web site, together with comments about their practice and their intention. They must show breadth, but also select 12 works for a 'concentration' series, which should be connected through subject, concept or technique. The online student profile is interesting, as students edit and refine it through the course of their studies, before that final decisive moment of clicking 'submit'. There is also a significant component of school based assessment, and I enjoyed observing a 'critique' session where the students had their works in progress up on display and critiqued each other, with the teacher's guidance and advice. Their comments were constructive and often perceptive. This method of encouraging reflection on art practice, together with the student podcasts I observed at the Shanghai American School, the students constructing their own web sites to showcase their art practice at the Canadian School, and the blog learning journals at Beijing City International School, are definitely aspects I would like to follow up and consider implementing.

Student drawing goldfish pond in the garden at HKIS

In the late afternoon I caught a train out to Kowloon Tong in the New Territories to meet Jaffa Lam when she had finished teaching at the university, and we spoke over coffee in the huge shopping mall above the station. The mall was completely filled with excited chattering school students in a variety of uniforms, as Kowloon Tong is zoned for educational institutions, and has many, many different schools and university campuses. It was here that I came on my first days in Hong Kong, five weeks ago, to visit the Hong Kong Australian International School and the Maryknoll Convent School. So much has happened since then, it feels like such a very long time ago.

Jaffa's practice differs from that of many of the other artists I have interviewed, as she defines herself as an activist as well as an artist. Influenced by Joseph Beuys, she has worked with performance, documentation, and other ephemeral forms, as well as with sculptural installations. She prefers to use non-art, 'found' and recycled materials in her practice, and is focused on issues both local and global. We discussed some of the questions I have raised about the place of women in the Chinese art world (and in China more generally) and I was interested to hear about her recent work with local women in Hong Kong, which is focused on the way the city is being redeveloped at such a rapid pace, and in the process people, traditions and cultural practices are lost.

The exhibition at Schoeni Gallery, by a mainland artist, also focused on this issue, inspired by a newspaper photograph of a woman who refused to leave her home during a forced demolition and redevelopment, and was photographed crouching amidst the rubble surrounded by police. The artist has painted images on bricks and broken traditional rooftiles as well as on canvas - quite an apocalyptic vision, especially the painting of the pack or wild dogs amidst the rubble. But I have seen these images with my own eyes, on the outskirts of Beijing.

Two final snippets: an articlewith the headline 'Farewell My Concubine'  in yesterday's South China Post about a new education program in Chinese schools intended to discourage girls from seeing becoming a mistress of a wealthy man as the key to success and happiness. And someone has mysteriously stencilled 'Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?' onto footpaths around Wan Chai and Central, and the Hong Kong Police are investigating.

Carol Lee Mei-kuen and Wong Chung-yu

Interior, Man Mo Temple, Hong Kong

Outside my window this evening the traffic roars with much blowing of horns, and the toy-like Star Ferries slowly criss-cross Victoria Harbour, making their way from Tsim Sha Tsui to Wan Chai and Central. The Hung Hom route has been cancelled since last week, which caused numerous protesters to throw themselves into the harbour. Another loud and noisy demonstration has taken place protesting the arrest of an old ‘egg waffle’ seller by the Health and Sanitation Police. As one young artist told me, people in Hong Kong live and breathe politics and they love to make their opinions emphatically heard. Even the sound of spoken Cantonese is so loud and declamatory in contrast to Mandarin – old ladies, in particular, always sound as if they are having a passionate argument.

 Interior, Man Mo Temple

Since Sunday I have done a huge amount of walking around the streets of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, visited the Hong Kong Art Museum to look at traditional Chinese painting in greater detail, met two more very different and interesting artists and visited another impressive international school.

This morning I spent a couple of hours talking with Carol Lee Mei-kuen in her lovely, airy apartment which is  filled with orchids and other plants, books and artworks . She makes beautiful, elegiac and poignant works using a most unusual technique of her own invention, reminiscent of early 19^th century daguerreotype or cyanotype photographic experiments. Quite by accident, while involved in a project making a quick expressive drawing in ink on newsprint paper every day, like a diary,  she discovered that the yellowing of the newspaper was in itself visually interesting. It was also symbolic, representing the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of the world and of human relationships. 

Carol Lee Mei-kuen in her rooftop garden, photographed by Luise Guest and used with permission of the artist

'Dinner #2'

'Little Lace Frock'

Then, while removing books which had been on her bookshelves for many years, preparing for moving, she found they had also left paler marks on the shelves and on the wall behind them, again representing for her a kind of memento mori. Thus her technique was developed – she lays sheets of paper on the ground in the sun, under a window or on the tiles of her terrace, and places objects (a baby’s dress, a scarf, a curtain, or domestic objects such as lace tablecloths, brooms, kitchen utensils) upon them to create soft and delicate images like trace patterns of the sun's movement, in subtle shades of gold, yellow and warm browns. Some works also have sharper, clearer images created by cut stencils reminiscent of traditional Chinese paper cutting. Some have drawings applied in small areas of the surface in ink, referencing Carol’s original training in the traditions of Chinese ink painting. 

After much experimentation and research she is able to control the degree of yellowing on each sheet of paper, and manipulate it with great subtlety. These are essentially photograms made without chemicals, reliant upon natural forces, and by their very nature carrying within them a meaning of transience, change, loss and a sense of the impermanence of all things. They are very beautiful surfaces, sometimes pitted with the tiny marks caused by raindrops, falling leaves, or the passage of birds and insects across Carol’s  rooftop terrace garden. Some works are very large and multi-panelled, some are small and intimate, but all are at once deeply personal, dealing with relationships and the absence or death of loved ones, and absolutely universal. 

Carol Lee Mei-kuen, Close to the Dusk, 2009

http://www.carolleemk.com/index.php  

Later, in almost complete contrast, I met Wong Chung-yu in his office on the 15^th floor of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Community College, where he teaches in the Design faculty. We overlook vast towering apartment blocks - it is like looking out the window onto a painting by Jeffrey Smart. Like so many of the other artists I have met both in Hong Kong and on the mainland, Wong manages to layer a deep attachment to the traditions of Chinese art and culture, with new ideas and new forms. He has a commitment to ‘harmonise digital technology and new media with a Chinese context’. Influenced by a lecturer in Chinese painting who incorporated elements of western and modernist painting practice into his own work, Wong Chung-yu initially attempted to modernise Chinese painting, both in terms of the techniques he used and the subject matter. 

 Wong Chung-Yu, photographed by Luise Guest and used with permission of the artist 

After hearing a lecture by a German digital media artist, Wolfgang Munch, he began to think about how he could integrate digital media into his practice, and created his first digital artwork in 2003. Since then he has been able to combine his knowledge of programming (his first degree is in Computer Science) with more traditional Chinese ink painting techniques, in works such as ‘Spiritual Water’. In this work a landscape painting lies flat, like a traditional scroll, with a central blank area which is actually a screen with back projection. When the viewer touches the screen, a web cam is activated and the work then digitally simulates the diffusion of ink marks made by traditional ink painters and calligraphers. Later works such as ‘The World’ (an audio and narrative work) and ‘Spiritual Water II’, in which a black ink waterfall splashes and tumbles in constant motion, use random animation techniques. In ‘The Memory of Stars’ an ink painting hangs on the wall and is juxtaposed with a screen on which a similar image is projected. This image, however, changes in subtle and continuous ways, and requires a computer running in real time. Wong Chung-yu will have a second solo show at Hanart TZ in Central this September, and he is planning some new computer applications and more interactive works which pose questions about the relationship between audiences and artworks. He says, ‘What I am interested in is how to reinterpret Chinese traditional art in a new way.”

 Spiritual Water 2 (non-interactive version) Detail 1
靈水二(非互動版)
Digital media
100H x 300W (CM)
2009

In their different ways these are essentially questions of identity and belonging, questions posed by each of the artists I have met. Artists everywhere, of course, are interested in aspects of identity, whether cultural or personal; however they seem to have a greater resonance in this Chinese context. They are also questions posed by schools – whether Australian schools thinking about the kind of school culture they wish to create for their specific students with their specific needs, or, as in the schools I have been visiting, schools which cater for a transient population of ‘third culture’ children.

Yesterday I visited the Canadian International School in Aberdeen,  a school with a most impressive campus, built on a steep hillside overlooking Aberdeen Harbour, catering for students of 40 different nationalities (although the largest group is Canadian or US citizens, and many of those with Chinese heritage). The medium of instruction is English, but all students from Reception to Grade 9 study Chinese, after which they may also elect French. Students from this school graduate with both the IB Diploma and the Ontario Certificate of Secondary Education, and teachers have integrated both curricula into their teaching programs. The art teachers told me they did this without any difficulty, as the philosophical basis of each curriculum was similar. The school is technology rich, with a Mac notebook for every student from Grade 3, and classrooms of Apple computers for the younger years as well. Like many Hong Kong schools, they learned some hard lessons from the SARS epidemic and are now equipped to run virtual classes in very quick response to a natural disaster, an epidemic, or any other event of such a magnitude that forced the closure of the school.

 I was fortunate enough to be able to see the exhibition of IB Diploma works, and was impressed by the thoughtful way in which these 18 young people had attempted to communicate significant issues relating to family, cultural and personal identity (yes, again!) and issues of significance to them, such as environmental degradation. I was impressed also with the ways in which students showed their awareness of contemporary practices in both international and Asian art, through their techniques and materials as well as their subject matter and imagery. One installation dealt with the thorny topic of family pressure in the student’s choice of career and university course. This student had been involved in some intense family discussions at the dinner table about his preferred choice of an art related course versus his parents’ desire for him to study law. He had covered a table and chairs, walls, windows and floor, rice bowls, chopsticks and spoons with newspaper covered in university entrance marks, college entry requirements and course listings, representing his feelings of being overwhelmed and pressured about these significant decisions. His parents were game enough to pose with him and be photographed for a ‘family portrait’ in this claustrophobic environment. A most interesting and truthful work by this young artist.

 The school is offering IB Film for the first time next academic year, and I had a very interesting conversation with the teacher about the demands and challenges of implementing such a course. I have been interested in speaking to IB Film teachers at Western Academy Beijing, The Shanghai American School and the Hong Kong Australian International School, to see how the course operates in both theoretical and practical ways, allowing students to work collaboratively, and to make works which show their knowledge and understanding of cinema history and film language. I have also been impressed with the content and pedagogy of the IB ‘Theory of Knowledge’ course. We often talk about metacognition and how to incorporate it into our practices, and this is a rich example in action. After I make my final school visit to HKIS on Thursday, it will be interesting to begin comparing and contrasting aspects of the different schools I have visited, to see what are the essential elements I can distil from these travels across 4 different cities.

 Looking from the art rooms over the playground at the Canadian International School, Aberdeen

Saturday in Hong Kong

It's hot and steamy, and the smells in the vegetable and fish markets of Central are very rich indeed today. I have seen two wonderful exhibitions, the first at Hanart TZ of works by Qiu Zhijie called Deja Vu. These works are laser cut metal 'worlds' akin to 3 dimensional traditional paper cutting, based on character archetypes from Chinese historic sagas (which fill the schedules of Chinese TV stations) and imagery from traditional landscape painting. But with a twist - there are also aircraft carriers and electrical appliances lurking within the visual narrative.

 The second exhibition, 'Capturing Cathay' at Galerie du Monde, showed the works of three younger photographers from Chongqing (which someone told me is now the largest city in the world, can this be true?) Like so many other works they are in part a lament for what is lost, and a protest against forced demolition in China. Like so many other works I have seen they also layer the lost past with the transformation of the present.

'The Old City'

Past and present, power and politics - heat and humidity!

Guangzhou Art Museum Sculpture Garden

It feels good to be back in Hong Kong, and coming towards the end of this adventure - although I am regretful as well, as this has been quite extraordinary. There have not been enough hours in every day to do all the things I wanted to do, and meet all the people that I wanted to meet. But when I think about the last 4 weeks, I have done a lot! It's interesting also to realise that now I can access Facebook, and this blog, and I am inundated with news about the detention of Ai Weiwei. Watching CNN News on TV in Shanghai the other day, the announcer said, 'Fears are growing for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.......' then the screen went black and transmission was cut.

Hong Kong is hot and humid, and seems so ordered in comparison to the mainland - people actually stop at red lights! And don't push and shove to get on the train before people can get off! And no-one is spitting in the street! Funny how you get used so quickly to things that seem extraordinary at first. I have been musing over how to make sense of all my experiences in some coherent form, and I think the key is the idea that has been expressed to me by so many artists in China - the layering of past and present. This idea is inescapable in China, as you are always aware of the weight of 5000 years of history, and the recent (often unspoken) past as well. And the present spins into the future so fast that who could keep up? I think this is the issue with the schools I have visited as well - both local and international schools are also dealing with the pace of change, and the questions raised about pedagogy,  technology, culture and how to equip students to live in this world.

 4th Grade students at Guangzhou Nanhu International School

 At Guangzhou Nanhu International School yesterday I watched classes of 3rd and 4th grade students work happily and independently on sculptural and painting projects with their dedicated and enthusiastic teacher. These small people, from so many different cultural backgrounds, and their families who have moved to Guangdong Province for work opportunties from all over the globe, represented to me the face of 21st century schooling. This school was the most multicultural I have seen in China, a country which is essentially very monocultural. Schools such as this are consciously and thoughtfully preparing  students to enter a fluid and changing world, and even the cultural and ethnic mix of the classrooms and the teachers are part of this preparation. We need to ask ourselves some big questions in Australia, I think, about how schools can meet the needs of students, families and societies for the future, without repeating some of the same old mistakes (for example, a naive faith in the power of testing alone to miraculously improve results!)

In 'Factory Girls' Leslie T Chang observes the new 'commercial' and 'self improvement' colleges attended by migrant workers in factory towns like Dongguan, "Dongguan learning took place in humble settings. Classrooms were bare and dim and plagued by power cuts, and computers so grimy and ancient they looked like archaological finds...Almost none of the instructors had a proper degree; many, like Teacher Deng, trailed a string of failed businesses behind them. But for all that, they were revolutionary." She compares the ruthless testing and competition, the authoritarianism, and the conservative and limited curriculum of the Chinese school system, with its traditional emphasis on rote learning and writing (the corner stone of traditional scholarship) with these often dodgy and makeshift, but vital schools which essentially teach people how to transform themeselves and become someone new. "As I sat through a semester of White-Collar classes I realised I was witnessing a secret revolution in Chinese education. The rejects of the traditional school system were given a second chance. The factory floor of the world was also in the business of molding people. These classes had no grades and no tests and that was as it should be. The test was the world outside the classroom; the test was life." If nothing else, being in China has made me think about the nature of the education we provide for a generation who will grow up to enter a world that is nothing like the one we currently inhabit. The pace of change in Australia may not be as fast as that of China, but it will increase and it takes a particular kind of resilience to cope and even to flourish.

One of my translators was a young woman in her thirties who feels old  because she is not yet married. She grew up in a Xian work unit with parents who had been denied an education due to the Cultural Revolution, left school,  became a welder in the same factory, but  became convinced that education was the key to a better life, a life unlike that of her parents. She supported her own studies in a local college for eight years, all the while working in the factory, majoring in English. She wants to be an interpreter, but most of the time she works as a tour guide. However she has transformed her own life, and has travelled to the United States and Australia on her own.

This is a woman whose grandmother had bound feet. What a novel could be written about the three generations of her family.

I find that kind of personal courage and determination so admirable, and I saw the same qualities in many of the artists and the teachers that I met over the course of the last month. She told me a saying from her home town: "A woman should have long hair but short vision" - summing up the traditional Chinese attitude to the place of women in the world!

Tung-Pang Lam in his Fo Tan studio

I spent an interesting couple of hours in the Fo Tan studio of Tung-Pang Lam this afternoon, an artist who like so many others combines his training in the traditional techniques of calligraphy and ink painting with a contemporary and conceptual idiom. His studio is on the 6th floor of one of the old industrial buildings found in suburbs like Fo Tan and Aberdeen which are now used for storage and artists' and designers' studios, as essentially all manufacturing and heavy industry has moved over the border. Through the window are views of the mountainside, high rise apartments, and industrial buildings pressing in close together.  His young assistant, a first year student from his class at the Chinese University, is painting a large canvas with gesso. Other canvases are stacked in piles around the walls. Shelves are sagging with the weight of Chinese and Western art books, as befits this scholarly artist's practice.

Tung-Pang usually works on large sheets of plywood, using images taken from Tang, Yuen and Qing dynasty paintings, but applying them as stencilled images, working with charcoal and acrylic, or sometimes attaching tiny plastic model figures and trees like those from a boyhood model train set. In studying for a Masters Degree at St Martins College in London, he began to ask the question, 'What shaped the way I see the world?', and turned to the Chinese literati painters, scholars who retreated from the world.

A quiet, gentle and thoughtful character, he tells me he is interested in the work of artists such as Sigmar Polke, the Belgian Michael Borremans, and also a Chinese painter, San Yu, who lived and worked in Paris in the early twentieth century.  He loves the tiny background landscapes found in medieval and early Renaissance paintings, and shows me a book of Italian frescos by Giotto and Piero della Francesca, which he sees as quite similar to  the tiny details of traditional Chinese landscape painting.  He wrily comments that in Hong Kong his work is defined as western painting, but in London he was defined as a Chinese painter. This confusion of identities is troubling, and is something he continues to focus on in his work. Lam feels that western painting is like opening a window in order to look out, but Chinese painting is like opening a space inside oneself to escape from the outside world. "I want to be in Fo Tan and face the mountain, but at the same time I have to face the issues in the world" he says. One of those issues is the freedom of artists to work without constraints - the topic of Ai Weiwei is on everyone's mind this week.

Another Chinese saying: "All crows are black". Loosely translated this is a pessimistic view of humanity and suggests that nobody is to be trusted. Tung-Pang has produced a conceptual work called 'Where is the White Crow?'. This consists of 365 small square canvases with a different black crow painted in a calligraphic manner on each one, one completed each day for a year. In itself this practice is akin to meditation. As he translates the saying for me "There are no good guys". Except, of course, there are, and it is my good fortune to have met so many of them in the last month.

Days 24 and 25 – My final day in Shanghai, and one bizarre and surreal day in Guangzhou

 View of Duolun Street

Today I heard some very interesting perspectives on the Chinese and, specifically, Shanghai artworld from some gallerists, and also from 2 very different artists. It has taken longer for me to feel comfortable and confident in Shanghai, even though comparatively it has a more European and less Chinese feel, with the old European architectural heritage always evident. It has subtly insinuated itself now, though, and I feel sorry to leave when there still seems so much more to discover. This trip is just the tiniest exploration of the incredible richness of contemporary China, so I very much hope to be back again in the not too distant future – hopefully speaking more Chinese by then!

I met with George Michell, the Australian (who once upon a time in the distant past taught Chinese language and drama at Adelaide High School) who now runs Studio Rouge Gallery at its two locations in Shanghai. The gallery has been established for 8 years, and represents a range of very interesting artists including the abstract painter Qu Fengguo, whose work I much admire. George explains to me that the tradition of abstraction in Shanghai, in contrast to the figurative painting more dominant in Beijing, stems from the strong international influence in the 1920s and 1930s, thus an awareness and acceptance of modernist architecture and design, and so a sense of the modernist aesthetic, was already present in the city. In the 1980s during the ‘opening up’ period, young artists used abstraction as a means of seeking individual expression in defiant opposition to the proletarian realism in which they had been so rigorously trained. We also discussed the interesting manner in which foreign diplomats were the originators of the current Chinese art ‘boom’ – as virtually the only foreigners in China prior to the late 1990s they were the people interested in the work of Chinese artists, and were able to buy their works (at very low prices!) before any galleries, or an art market as such, came into existence.

According to George the huge and significant catalyst for the current art scene was China’s winning bid for the 2008 Olympics, as then the foreign media came to China and were amazed at what they found. "They expected people in Mao suits riding bicycles", he says, and instead found themselves in this ‘new China’ of booming industry, futurist architecture, boundless enthusiasm and determination to succeed in a global marketplace. 2004, he believes, was the start of the real art boom.

Now, however, the position is less certain, as with the sale of Baron Ullens’ collection, and also that of Charles Saatchi, buyers may be wary. Local Chinese art buyers prefer to buy in the secondary market of the auction houses, through Christies or Sotheby’s, essentially buying a ‘brand’, rather than take a risk on a new artist purchased through an independent gallery. However, George takes heart from the hordes of young people who flock to M50 galleries each weekend. The older generation are still dealing with a very complex set of circumstances stemming from the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, whereas the younger generation are design-savvy and interested in the possibilities of art, design, information technologies and their interconnectedness.

Shi Zhi Ying in her studio

Later in the day I met Shi Zhi Ying in her large studio near the ShanghART Warehouse at Taopu, on the city’s edges. A quiet and thoughtful painter in her early thirties, she tells me her work is akin to meditation, and embodies Buddhist principles of simplicity and the connectedness of all things. Her ‘ocean’ paintings (one of which is in the Sydney ‘White Rabbit’ Gallery collection) were inspired by her travels back and forth across the Pacific Ocean since 2006 while her husband, an architect, was studying in America. On one trip they visited a lighthouse, and looking down at the ocean she had the sensation that she herself vanished, and what remained from this strange but not unpleasant sensation was a sense of her connectedness with the world. After this experience she read Buddhist scriptures in order to try to understand what had happened to her. She talks about the ‘me and we’ relationship within Buddhism, and emphasises that her work relates to this notion of connectedness between people, objects and the natural world. Her interest in Buddhist principles is also evident in the removal of colour from her palette – all her works are painted in subtle gradations between black and white, and in this are reminiscent of the subtlety of traditional ink paintings.

Shi Zhi Ying with her painting of the cloth shoes 

 I ask her whether as a young woman artist she has found it difficult to be taken seriously as a painter, thinking about some of the stories I had heard from other artists such as Liang Yuanwei and Monika Lin, but she just smiles and says she has had no problems. I wonder if the fact that her galleries in both Shanghai and Beijing are run by women has been helpful, but I am aware that she does not think the fact of gender has much relevance. She tells me she has not felt much pressure; after all, unlike a male artist she is not expected to support a wife! Chinese views about gender roles, and about social expectations, are often surprising, and it is easy to make the mistake of assuming a shared understanding in a conversation, only to discover at some point that you have been speaking at cross purposes.

I admire many works in progress in her studio – she is obviously both dedicated and prolific in her practice. In particular, I am drawn to a painting of a bowl of rice on a patterned tablecloth, where she intends to paint every individual grain, just as she paints every detailed wavelet on the ocean, and every facet on her current series of diamonds, in slow, measured layers of thin paint built up to create works of great detail and visual complexity. This work was inspired when she was stuck for a subject and finding painting difficult, and went out to dinner with her husband. There she saw the bowl of rice on the restaurant table and realised that it contained all the elements she was seeking to explore in her work. I ask her to tell me about a small painting of a pair of Chinese cloth shoes, and she explains it is a wedding present for a close friend, a painting of her favourite pair of shoes. Her works are both small and large scale, and focus on the small details of everyday life - a bowl of rice, a bra, a window, a pair of shoes – as well as on the enormity and vastness of the ocean. In her view, these things are not different, they make up the pieces of a whole existence in the world.

 High Seas (Series: Sea Sutra, 2009) Shi Zhi Ying

Shi Zhi Ying - Sea Painting - photographed by Luise Guest and used with the permission of the artist

Yang Zhenzhong in his studio 

Later, I meet another of the pioneers of new media and video in China, Yang Zhenzhong, who is re-editing his earlier work ‘I Will Die’, in which he asked random people found on the street and in shops and workplaces in 4 different countries to speak those words to the camera. The result is startling – both funny and disturbing. He wanted to explore the taboo subject of mortality and force people to confront it, but also to see how people altered their behaviour and ‘acted’ when faced with a camera. Like his peers Hu Jieming and Pu Jie he talks freely about the days of the student  movement of the 1980s, and also the way in which the ‘opening up’ of China introduced him to the work of artists such as Bill Viola. He will show ‘I Will Die’ in its new version (on a single screen rather than the original 10) in Beijing, together with the project completed with support of the giant Siemens Factory, ‘Spring Story’ in which 1500 workers at the factory were asked to recite a few words each from Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Southern Campaign Speech’. This was the famous speech which foreshadowed the complete transformation of China through the introduction of foreign capital and the creation of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province as the world’s factory. As workers on the assembly line know only their single task and not the whole, so the people in the video knew only the words they were allocated to speak and not where they came from or their meaning. Thus the process of creating the work aligned itself to the nature of work in a factory – a metaphor for modern China.

I have been reading an interesting book, ‘Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China’ by Leslie T. Chang, which connects directly to this theme. She puts a human face to the economic phenomenon of modern China, interviewing many young migrant workers in Guangdong Province in pieces originally written for the Wall Street Journal. “Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, house cleaning, child raising, garbage collecting, barber shops and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe for over a century.” Her book explains how the history of modern China actually begins with the Taiping Handbag Factory in Dongguan, near Shenzhen.

On gallery rooftop in Weihai Lu 

On Thursday I left Shanghai on an obscenely early flight to Guangzhou, where I visited a teacher at the Guangzhou Nanhu International School, and also interviewed Professor Li Gongming at the Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy (more on those experiences later). Guangzhou didn’t feel like China to me – the difference between the north and south is so stark. It is subtropical, lush and humid, with gardens and parks filled with bougainvillea, palm trees and the beautiful bauhinia trees also seen in Hong Kong. The streets are lined with stalls selling snacks and tropical fruits. It is also extraordinarily multicultural, which I noticed on my visit to the school, and also at the airport later that night. This is really unusual in China – Shanghai has many westerners and expats but in Beijing, for example, I was often the only western person on the streets or in the markets in the area where I was staying. Even in tourist destinations such as the Forbidden City or the Summer Palace, most of the tourists are Chinese, not westerners.

At Guangzhou airport last night about half the travelling passengers were African, with many departing flights to Ethiopia and other African destinations listed on the electronic screens. My hired translator for the day, whose command of English was not entirely convincing, actually learned both French and English whilst working in Senegal. He spoke English with an African/French/Chinese accent, which is quite something, but makes for difficult communication in an interview with a third person!

Now back in Hong Kong, with the news about the detention of Ai Weiwei in the Hong Kong press, I will have some time to process some of the experiences and encounters of the last month. I want to think especially about the different schools and arts academies I have visited, and how those experiences may connect with what I have discovered in my meetings with the artists. I will be visiting the Hong Kong International School and the Canadian International School next week, and interviewing some more young Hong Kong artists here.

Shikumen(Stone House) doorway in Shanghai

Tuesday, 5 April: 2 artists, 2 galleries – and an experience of the Chinese medical system

Homage to Duchamp - Wan Liya

Image used with permission of Twin Cities Gallery Shanghai

The last few days have not been easy as I have been struggling with a viral infection that has turned into something worse. Eventually I had to admit defeat and realise that over the counter vitamins (with Chinese packaging, so I am not entirely sure what I have been taking!) and paracetamol was not going to stop the coughing, and began to research how to go about getting some medical attention. The online research suggested 2 public hospitals with 'Foreigner's Clinics' but on ringing one of these I was not encouraged to be told to call an ambulance and go to the general emergency ward. I have heard many stories about peoples' experiences of public hospitals, and I wasn't too keen to have my own first-hand knowledge.  Eventually I found the name of the clinic that services the expat community and found it efficient and accessible, although extremely expensive, with a waiting room full of 'laoweis' such as myself. I was all too aware that the medical care I was provided with so quickly was just not available to an ordinary Chinese person - there is no socialised medicine in this socialist society.

My health dilemma aside, my day also involved 2 separate trips to M50, the Shanghai version of the 798 Art District at 50 Moganshan Road, where old factories have been turned into an art zone of galleries and artists' studios. While there are still numerous shopfront galleries selling Chairman Mao statues and Cultural Revolution style images to tourists, these are not as prevalent as in Beijing, and there are many galleries showing very interesting work.

I visited Art + Shanghai, in another location in the city, and had a long conversation with art director Diana Freundl which ranged across many of the issues which my observations and interviews have thrown up - the status of women artists in the art world in China, the state of art education and specifically of curatorial practice and museology, the differences between the Beijing and Shanghai artworlds, the possibilities and future of a post-'bubble' art market, and the work of specific artists. The exhibition in the gallery, 'A Room of One's Own', of 4 very different and interesting women artists, is another indication of the vitality and freshness of the Shanghai art scene. I am able to arrange an interview for tomorrow with a young painter, Shi Zhi Ying.

Later in the day I visit 'Two Cities' Gallery at M50, and speak with director Eva Ting and curator Shannon Guo.  Shannon is an associate professor in the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, teaching postgraduate students in the 'Jewelry and Metals Studio'. We talk about the always controversial boundaries between art and craft, form and function. Shannon is a feisty confident woman who says she considers herself a 'warrior' in a battle to ensure that the traditionally 'lesser' artforms of ceramics, glass, and metalwork are given equal status with the 'fine arts' of painting and sculpture. The gallery has presented some very interesting exhibitions which show work by artists who clearly blur these boundaries and work in conceptually interesting ways.

Hu Jieming on studio balcony at M50 old and new Shanghai

My day began with a really great honour: meeting Hu Jieming, a pioneer of digital art in China, a venerable artist whose work has been shown throughout China, and internationally in New York, Chicago, Seattle and the V&A in London. He now also teaches a new generation of artists in new media at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.  Mr Hu welcomes me into his new studio - he has just moved, and the three rooms are completely filled with as yet unpacked artworks, books, furniture, and computer parts.

A gentle and unassuming man, he is happy to talk about his new work to be shown in Shanghai and Shenzhen in June this year. He is developing and applying new computer technologies to create an imaginary world using the internet. He wants to use science and technology to reveal how we are now all connected in a digital world "like a kind of socialism of the future". Like many other artists of his generation (he was in Elementary School during the Cultural Revolution, which affected him most powerfully) his work reflects China's past and its often uncomfortable trajectory into a new way of being. He says he has seen a 180 degree shift in Chinese society in his adult life - things once valued and cherished are no longer considered important and there is an urgent seeking for new values to replace the old. The title of an exhibition in which his work was shown in New York last year, 'Speed and Chaos' seems very apt, we agree. Even looking out the window of his new studio we see the change of the city - the old factory rooftops of M50 are overshadowed by new high rise apartments.

Mr Hu tells me that since he graduated in 1984 he has been a part of the dramatic changes that have swept through China in the 35 years since what Chinese often call 'the opening up'. It was an exciting time in Shanghai, with artists beginning to experiment with new forms as the ideas of the western avant-garde reached them. In the days of the 1989 student movement he remembers the whole city being paralysed, with cars burning in the streets, and the artists became part of an underground world. Later, as newer technologies became available, Hu was one of the first Chinese artists to realise their potential for art, perhaps because he loved mathematics and science as a boy, and wanted to apply these talents to his art practice. He also loved the work of American video pioneer Bill Viola, and this spiritual and lyrical sensibility is evident in some of Hu's works. We talk about the news in today's paper of the record price (HK 79 million) achieved by a Zhang Xiaogang painting as the Ullens Collection went under the hammer at Sotheby's Hong Kong. He laughs and says he thinks this new Chinese art world is a 'kind of miracle', but adds that those artists of the 1990s are already part of China's past, and that the future lies in new media. Young artists such as Lu Yang (and he shows me a work of hers that he has bought) are the future wave of Chinese art, as they can see the possibilities of technology for creating a new kind of art, and are also fully aware of its commercial potential.

Hu Jieming's works, such as 'The Raft of the Medusa' (2002) which was one of the first Chinese works to explore the possibilities of appropriation, or the more recent 'One hundred years in one minute',  layer the past with the present. He shows us the enormity and significance of the past and the way that time is a continuum. This awareness of 'the presence of the past in the now' seems to me to be a thread which connects the work of so many different Chinese artists working in many different forms. As I walk down many flights of stairs from his studio I am hoping that Australian audiences may have the chance to see these works, the product of such a reflective and incisive intellect.

Hu Jieming - 'Raft of the Medusa'

Image used with the permission of the artist and ShanghART Gallery

My next visit, through a red steel door to another new and dusty studio in M50, is to meet with the painter Pu Jie, whose work I have already seen and admired in Beijing at the Redgate Gallery. In fact we met at the fabulous dinner at Middle 8 hosted by Brian Wallace, but the 3 artists were at the centre of an admiring and somewhat boozy entourage on that occasion. Today in the virtually empty studio I am able to look very closely at his paintings, which are always built up in two layers, again representing past and present.

Pu Jie with work in studio

His works are based on 'the opening up' of China to the world, and in fact he defines two exhibitions of foreign art as crucial to his developing practice. One, an exhibition of French art in 1982 which included 3 works by Picasso, was a revelation to him. The other, even more significant, was a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition seen in Beijing in 1983. Pu says these exhibitions were 'unforgettable' and shaped his own practice as he sought new modes of expression in the days following those dark times when artists were told both how and what to paint. In fact, his own work was not shown in China for many years as it was considered too subversive.

Pu Jie small work

Pu Jie work showing underpainted layers

Images used with the permission of the artist and ShanghART Gallery

Today his paintings reveal an interesting tension between their beautiful surfaces and stylised, almost 'Pop Art' linear images, and the symbolism which lies beneath the surface. Every painting has another image hidden beneath it. The yellow painting of two modern young Chinese women is painted over another figure from the days of the Cultural Revolution. Another painting on a red background, the Heavenly Gate in Tiananmen Square represented by curved and straight nails (which themselves represent both violence and construction), is a potent, politically charged symbol of 1989. The gate is painted over another sad recumbent figure of an old man. These are subtle encoded references which allow him to layer past and present and express his own story and that of China generally. In this way his material and conceptual practice are seamlessly woven together to express what he identifies as 'the conflict of all Chinese people', the transition, sometimes painful, from one kind of society to another.

Pu Jie work 2

Image used with the permission of the artist and ShanghART Gallery