leviathanation excites Year 8

Huang Yong Ping, Leviathanation, Tang Galleries, Beijing

My Year 8 students today were fascinated by Huang Yong Ping's gigantic installation 'Leviathanation', which I photographed at Tang Galleries in Beijing in March. I showed them half the image without any other information (the train carriage) and asked them to guess what was on the other side. Variously they thought "Godzilla', a 'giant caterpillar', 'a tiger' (quite prescient!), a human head, a spider (they have seen works by Louise Bourgeois!) and a whole range of other animals. When they saw the entire work they were amazed, and engaged in very animated conversations about how it was scary, funny, surprising, and overwhelming, and were able to suggest a surprisingly diverse list of possible meanings for the work. I am so interested to observe the reactions of young teenage students to contemporary art, as they come to it with such fresh eyes. Next lesson with this class we will write about the work using a range of critical thinking techniques. I am looking forward to this as they were so enthusiastic this morning that it just made my day. Among the many more tedious aspects of the working day I kept thinking about their open faces and their genuine spontaneous responses to the work. More on  this work and how students respond to it later!

Huang Yong Ping, Leviathanation, in Tang Galleries Beijing - note the tiger between fish and carriage!

song dong

Song Dong, 'Waste Not'

I was envious of friends who saw Song Dong's work at the recent Venice Biennale, as it looked both beautiful and profound, and then found this slideshow relating to his earlier work, 'Waste Not', documenting the lifetime possessions of his elderly mother in her Beijing apartment:
song dong slideshow from new york times 2009

There are a number of works which resonate and connect with this, including Chen Qiulin's reconstruction of the traditional timber houses drowned under the Three Gorges Dam, and of course our own Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy. My first experience of Song Dong's practice was his fantastic imaginary 'Edible City'  made of thousands of biscuits and installed in Selfridge's Food Hall in London - this prompted some interesting discussions with my Year 12 class about contemporary art practice and the connections between materials and meanings.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4732886.stm

Thinking in 3 dimensions: Chinese concepts of time and space

Temple Market, Hong Kong, 2010

A little insight into the way that language forms the way we think, and vice versa. In my Chinese class on Tuesday night, after having to 'eat bitterness' to some extent about the hopelessness of my tones (Teacher Xu keeps saying "What? What on earth are you trying to say? Say it again. What? Again!" So humbling!) I found myself struggling with remembering the words for time concepts such as 'next year', 'last year', 'the day after tomorrow', 'three days from now' etc. Another perceptive student in the class pointed out that English, as a language read from left to right, is linear in thinking about time, whilst Chinese uses the prefixes for behind, in front of, above and below e.g 'the month below' is next month. This seemed to my tired brain to be deeply philosophical - our teacher agreed, "English simple, Chinese complex". Too complex, and so very, very hard to remember when questions are being fired at you in Chinese: "Luise, what makes a good teacher?". I was proud of myself for being able to come up with "A good teacher must like their students", and get the sentence out in Chinese. Our class seems at times to be moving in slow motion, as we try so hard to listen and grasp each other's halting Chinese sentences....sometimes I think you can hear the mechanical grinding noise of the gears in our brains! I am trying hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of one day being able to speak the language.....

I have continued to read older accounts of the travels of Western 'weiguoren' (foreigners, but more accurately 'barbarians') in China, most recently 'Iron and Silk' by Mark Salzman, an American who taught English in Changsha for two years in the 1980s. So interesting, and of course a very different China. However his description of his first sight of his new city sounded familiar to me in some respects, "He started the engine, held his palm against the horn and gave it a long blast to warm it up, then shot full speed into the crowded streets. He swerved and braked violently to avoid pedestrians who darted into the road without looking, swarms of bicyclists who rode in the middle of the street, trucks, jeeps and huge buses that careened as if driven by madmen...at no time during this ordeal was our horn silent, nor was that of any other vehicle on the road, rendering them all essentially useless. I asked Comrade Hu why the driver held the horn down like that, and he answered, without a trace of irony in his voice, 'Traffic Safety'." Now that could describe any of my trips in taxis or hired cars through the frenzy of Beijing traffic nearly thirty years later!

learning chinese - shi ma??!!

Hutong View, Dazhalan, March 2011

Am feeling just very, very slightly less daunted by this huge project of mine - of one day being able to have a conversation in China, in Chinese. Am I mad? Quite possibly! In last night's lesson, with my 3 fellow struggling students, all hopelessly mangling our tones, I felt a little more confident to begin to speak and construct awkward, simple sentences. I love it when you feel you have actually mastered a colloquial phrase - the incredulous "shi ma??" or the dismissive "suan le". And how good to know that chocolate is "qiao ke le"! Our teacher finds it hard to disguise her dismay at our ignorance, and how slowly she has to read a passage in order for us to understand it. Who makes up the passages in language textbooks anyway? They remind me of my French textbook at school, with Nicole et Robert, and their Maman who was always, but always "dans la cuisine" in those pre-feminist days. In this case people are always introducing their friends to their older sister, or showing them a photograph of their younger brother, and politely asking them to go dancing, play ball or sing karaoke - not requests particularly relevant to the middle-aged in the middle kingdom, such as myself.

Wall photographed in Dazhalan, March 2011

I bought a book today on contemporary Chinese architecture, which includes those beautiful, minimal and simple Coachangdi courtyard studios and galleries designed by Ai Weiwei. I was so impressed when I visited Three Shadows Photography Gallery and F2, on the same day that I interviewed the wonderful Liang Yuanwei. The driver had become so hopelessly lost driving in circles around dusty roads, and stopping many, many people on bicycles to ask directions. I think an Australian taxi driver may have given up in a fury, but this guy was so cheerful, and so determined to help me find where I was going. I learned the phrase "Mei wenti", "no problems" from him. And subsequently heard it cheerfully uttered all over Beijing. Not so much in Shanghai!

Hutong Doorway, Beijing, March 2011

Learning Chinese Makes My Brain Hurt!

Shi Zhiying, 'Rice', 2011, image courtesy of the artist

Zhi

It's official - learning Chinese is impossibly difficult. My brain is still hurting from last night's class, where the teacher is very adept at pushing us outside of our comfort zone and forcing us to speak. She is lovely but also a master of that particular Chinese pedagogical style that makes you feel very, very stupid. I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I knew earlier in the year, and am struggling to form simple sentences about food and drink, much less anything more complex. I did at least learn the word for 'chocolate', which falls into that useful category that I discovered in Beijing when I experienced a great sense of triumph at being able to order a cheeseburger and fries in Chinese. Ironic really, as in Sydney I would never even enter through those golden arches!

Shi Zhi Ying, whom I interviewed in Shanghai, sent me this picture of her completed 'Rice' painting because she knew how much I liked seeing the work in progress in her studio. I was fascinated by the shift from painting monochromatic waves on the ocean, to blades of grass, to the textured surfaces of rocks, to the facets of diamonds, and finally to individual grains of rice in a bowl. She told me that she was searching for a subject to paint when she went out to eat dinner with her husband, and when she saw the rice on the table she knew it related with her 'sea sutra' series in which everything in the universe is seen as connected with everything else. She says, " My painting is like meditation; a slow and peaceful process that takes a long time to develop. Buddhist scripture suggests eliminating all that is inessential to distil the essence. Simplicity is reality".  Xing Zhao said of her brush strokes that they echo  the recitation of the sutras over the ages. "Like the pathways of one’s life, the brush strokes can be seen, although their ultimate destination remains unknown.”

I have seen the 'Chinese Nexus' exhibition at Stella Downer Fine Art, where I loved the new works on paper by Hu Qinwu in particular. Much as I enjoyed his earlier works with their rich and pulsating reds and blues, this 'Buddhist Volume' series, in which all unnecessary colour and expressive mark has been stripped away, revealing a spare visual language of the characters from Buddhist sutras underlying layers of tempera in a grid of subtle grays, is particularly beautiful and meditative. I plan to take my senior students this week, and I hope they can appreciate the subtle moderation of mark and grid found in Hu's work - they have been studying Mark Rothko, so I hope so.

http://www.stelladownerfineart.com.au/

Hu Qinwu, Buddhist Volume, 2010, courtesy of China Art Projects