Art in Review, 2013: The Good, the Bad and the.....

 It's the end of 2013, another year over and a time to look back. Every writer of every description is doing their end of year roundups (aka "quick, make a list, rather than actually write something of substance") and "who am I to disagree?" to quote Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics. And that's always appropriate. Returned from a Chinese winter, exposing my startlingly white skin to the Australian sun and walking along the beach, instead of more practical and useful tasks I have been deciding on my top ten gallery experiences of the past year. I could have been thinking about New Year's resolutions such as, oh, I don't know, losing 10 kilos, going to the gym more often (or, in actual fact, ever), doing intensive Chinese homework every single week, being kinder and less impatient, being less of a workaholic. But instead, I decided to write a list of the aforesaid gallery moments of wonder and awe. And here they are:

1. Song Dong, Waste Not, at Carriageworks, Sydney, January 2013. This was magical and moving, a testament to family, to memory, a profoundly human elegy to the artist's mother and to times past.

Song Dong, Waste Not, photographs Luise Guest

When I wrote about this installation, which I had always wanted to see, I found it hard to express my own feelings of sadness that linked me directly with my own very complex relationship with my mother. Here is the start of my review for 'The Art Life'.

The Ancestral Temple: memory and mourning in the work of Song Dong

Ten thousand objects collected by the artist Song Dong’s mother Zhao Xiangyuan, over the course of her adult life, are arranged in neat rows and grids on the ground at Carriageworks. During the Cultural Revolution, a period of extreme uncertainty and privation, she began hoarding – drying out and keeping even her allocated bars of soap for fear of future soap shortages. Continuing right through to her last years, Zhao saved everything, in a process called “wu jin qi yong”, translated as “waste not”. This is the latest incarnation of Chinese artist Song Dong’s extraordinary installation, itself entitled ‘Waste Not’.

Song Dong: Waste Not (detail, installation view) Photograph by: Jane Hobson Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery.

Entering the vast space one first sees a row of old chairs, and beyond them the reconstructed frame of Zhao’s traditional timber home. Radiating from the skeleton of the house, the possessions it once contained are laid out on the floor: among them 4 TVs, 3 record player turntables, numerous clocks and watches, broken toys, lamps, old umbrellas, plastic buckets and tin washing tubs, rows of shoes, coat hangers, threadbare face washers, stacked quilts and blankets, polystyrene food containers, empty plastic bottles and their lids, and hundreds of plastic bags folded into neat triangles. They are unbearably poignant in their sheer ordinariness. To read the rest of my review in The Art Life, click on this link: theartlife.com.au/2013/the-ancestral-temple-memory-and-mourning-in-the-work-of-song-dong/

2. Liu Zhuoquan, Chang'An Avenue, at Sydney Contemporary, August 2013

Liu Zhuoquan. Chang'An Avenue (detail) image courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

I have loved the 'neihua', or 'inside bottle painting' installations of this artist from my first encounter with him at his Beijing studio early in 2011. A major installation at the MCA for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012 gave Sydney audiences a sense of his ambition and range. His recent work, shown here for the first time at the Niagara Galleries booth at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, is an indication of the way his practice is continuing to develop.

Here is the catalogue essay that I wrote for this work, which I just wish an Australian museum had the foresight to acquire: http://www.chinaartprojects.com/liu-zhuoquan-essay/

3. 'Serve the People', curated by Edmund Capon at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, August 2013

Each show at the White Rabbit Gallery of Contemporary Chinese art presents us with intriguing new works as well as old favourites in new juxtapositions. Edmund Capon, retired (liberated?)  from his role as Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated this show and it was excellent. Even the gallery spaces themselves looked different and the works were selected and arranged to elucidate his narrative, which related very strongly to his own memories of China during the Cultural Revolution. And why read John McDonald's review if you can read mine?

Jin Feng, History of China's Modernisation, Volumes I and II, 2011, rubber, marble, ricepaper installation, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Shen Shaomin, Laboratory - Three-Headed, Six-Armed Superhuman, 2005, bone, bone meal, glass, glue, dimensions variable, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Chen Wenling, Happy Life - Family, bronze with vehicle duco, 2005, (with Gonkar Gyatso Buddha at rear), image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Here is the start of my review for The Art Life:

Serve The People

Wang Zhiyuan ‘Object of Desire’, 2008, fibreglass, lights, sound, 363 x 355 x 70 cm image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

In Mao Zedong’s famous exhortation to the Red Army at the 1942 Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, he emphasised the close relationship between art and revolution, stressing that art must ‘serve the masses’. He probably wasn’t envisaging a gigantic pair of gaudy pink knickers made of fibreglass and car duco; a three-headed conjoined baby skeleton in a scientific bell jar; vegetables growing in an illicit Shanghai garden engaged in a sexually explicit conversation courtesy of Chen Hangfeng’s video installation; or a baby stroller customised with spikes on the wheels, symbolising the fierce struggle for success that characterises parenthood in today’s China. Imagine the bewilderment of Mao and his revolutionary comrades in an encounter with these works and others in the new exhibition at White Rabbit Gallery. ‘Serve the People’ has been curated by former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Edmund Capon, from Judith Neilson’s impressive collection of contemporary Chinese art.

The notion of how art might “serve the people” has an entirely different resonance in today’s China. Artists born before Mao’s death in 1976 cannot help but look back and attempt to reconcile their life experience with the strangeness of the present day. The dislocations of social transformation, globalisation, demolition and urbanisation which have swept away the revolutionary past, ushering in a world filled with uncertainty, have rendered many of the tropes of the first 1990s wave of contemporary Chinese art passé. A new visual language is emerging, with which artists can respond to the strangeness of their contemporary world, in which enormous disparities of wealth, education and personal freedom are creating new schisms in the social fabric. It is in reflecting this 21st century world back to audiences, both within China and in the West, that artists ‘serve the people’ today. If you want to read on, click on this link: http://theartlife.com.au/2013/serve-the-people/

4. Shoufay Derz, Owen Leong and Cyrus Tang, Phantom Limb, UTS Gallery, September 2013

Shoufay Derz, On the other hand (detail), concept image for sculpture, 2013. Natural Indigo, blown borosilicate glass fountain pens, gold plated nibs, sandblasted black granite, black Chinese ink. Image source http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/events/archive/935

Three really interesting artists in an exhibition which explored "disembodiment and the attempt to bridge a physical or metaphysical divide."

In the interests of what politicians like to call 'full disclosure' I have to declare that Shoufay Derz is a friend and colleague, however that does not alter the fact that I consider her unequivocally one of the most interesting artists working in Sydney right now. Her commitment to a deeply philosophical practice based on her research and investigation of religion, philosophy, art and cultural history and the embodiment of materiality is impressive. She followed this exhibition with a show at Artereal Gallery (link here: http://arterealgalleryblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/luise-guest-on-shoufay-derz.html) and is currently completing a residency in Taipei. I look forward to seeing what she will do next.

Shoufay Derz, I Am Death, Destroyer of Worlds, image courtesy the artist

5. Yin Xiuzhen, 'Nowhere to Land' at Pace Beijing, October 2013

Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen at their Beijing studio, November 2013, photograph Luise Guest

Yin Xiuzhen, Portable Cities, Biennale of Sydney 2003, image courtesy the artist

I have loved her work since I saw the whimsical 'suitcase cities' at the Biennale of Sydney many years ago (seen again this year at the Moscow Biennale.) This exhibition was a revelation - her use of old discarded clothing is powerfully evocative and I particularly loved the moody, atmospheric paintings of Beijing streetscenes on cement road barriers. She combines whimsy and wit with a passionate and intelligent focus on issues and ideas. After I saw the exhibition, on my first visit to 798, I was determined to find a way to meet the artist. It took until the end of my residency, in the very last week, before we managed to arrange a time, and it was a highlight of my time in China. I just hope to have the opportunity at some point to see the wonderfully witty 'Collective Subconscious', shown at MOMA in 2010.

Installation view: Yin Xiuzhen. Collective Subconscious. 2007. Minibus, stainless steel, used clothes, stools, music. Collection of the artist. © 2009 Yin Xiuzhen. Photo: Jason Mandella.

When I met Yin, with her husband Song Dong, at their studio out near the Great Wall, she told me that her intention with these painted works was to reflect on China's appalling and worsening air pollution. She fears for her daughter, and sometimes feels hopeless and despairing. She said, "They (these paintings) may look beautiful and misty, but in fact they are poisonous." The visit was not without drama. Mr Zhang, my driver, nearly had a heart attack when he saw the complicated directions in their text message, which took up 3 or 4 screens and went along the lines of: "After you leave the expressway, drive past a group of dead trees, then when you see a factory with a red gate, take the next road on the left over a small bridge. Drive for a while. You will see a blue sign on a fence. Turn right at the next village....etc." We got lost many times, asking directions from farmers, factory workers, and women riding bicycles along the dusty road. The drive from central Beijing took nearly two hours and the drive back, in traffic that caused the usually placid and unflappable Mr Zhang to swear continuously and viciously, took three. As we left,and Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen were waving us goodbye from their gate, he asked dubiously, "Tamen youming ma?" (Are they famous?) I said, "Dui ah, tamen shi zhende hen, hen, feichang youming yishujia!" Which is bad grammar but gets the emphatic point across.

Pace Gallery exhibition page: http://www.pacegallery.com/beijing/exhibitions/12588/yin-xiuzhen

Yin Xiuzhen, Traffic Barrier, Chang'An, from solo show 'Nowhere to Land' at Pace Beijing, image source: ocula.com

6. Qiu Zhijie 'Satire' at Galleria Continua, 798, Beijing, November 2013

Weird and slightly incomprehensible, but oddly fascinating as this artist always is. When I went to his talk at the MCA last year and he presented his concepts for the Shanghai Biennale, I left the lecture theatre thinking that either I am very, very stupid ( always a possibility) or else that Qiu Zhijie is a very charming but alien being from a far far galaxy. His exhibition confirmed for me that while he may not actually be an extraterrestrial, he certainly doesn't think like other people.

Galleria Continua web site: http://www.galleriacontinua.com/english/mostra.html?id_mostra=259

Qiu Zhijie, 'Satire' at Galleria Continua, Beijing, installation views, photographs Luise Guest

7. Yinka Shonibare at Pearl Lam Hong Kong in December 2013
To tell the truth, the major Yinka Shonibare show at the MCA in Sydney some years ago left me a little cold - I thought the messages about postcolonialism were obvious and a bit trite. The new show at Pearl Lam was different - multiple meanings and some witty and satirical views about Hong Kong's obsession with wealth and status as well as the fabulous characteristic use of textile patterns.

8. Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, December 2013
What can I say? His work is profound, beautiful and spellbinding, even in the context of this extremely swanky gallery where I had trouble attracting attention to ask for a catalogue because they were very busy doing a high pressure sales pitch to a glamorous, designer-clad, Chinese buyer.

9. No Country: Contemporary Art for South and South East Asia, Asia Society Hong Kong, December 2013
This was unexpectedly fantastic. One of the best curated exhibitions I saw in 2013, in fact. Curated by June Yap under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative , the exhibition included some artists whose work I know (Shilpa Gupta) and others who were new to me. My favourite was Bangladeshi Tayeba Begum's 'Love Bed' - a little bit Mona Hatoum, a little bit Lin Tianmiao, a little bit Ed Kienholz but without being merely derivative. And absolutely chilling.

Love Bed, 2012. Stainless steel, 31 1/4 × 72 3/4 × 87 inches (79.4 × 184.8 × 221 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund, 2012, 2012.153. © Tayeba Begum Lipi. Installation view: No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 22–May 22, 2013. Photo: Kristopher McKay

The catalogue provided insight without empty 'artspeak'. 

"For the artist, the nation’s political state forms the backdrop to another critical political concern: the gendered violence that was rife during both partitions. Her works reflect on both the double bind of the personal and the political, expressing and accentuating a sense of unease through a public form of gendered expression that also speaks to challenges faced by the artist and her contemporaries. In Bizarre and Beautiful (2011), exhibited at the inaugural Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, she transformed mock stainless-steel razor blades into the fabric of a feminine undergarment. Attractive yet threatening, the article is converted into a hard, gritty form, possessing the qualities of armor or a shield.

Razor blades return in Love Bed (2012), in which the shared space of domesticity, affection, and bliss glints with both threat and invitation. The blade here represents not merely the violence implied by its sharp edge, but also the object’s function as a basic tool to aid in childbirth in the absence of other medical support, a circumstance that the artist recalls from childhood. Printed on the blades is the Bengali name Balaka, a well-known Bangladeshi brand. Coming from a large family, the artist associates the strength of steel with the tenacity of the women who surrounded her as she grew up, individuals who defied the odds to keep their families and communities together. Yet these works resist interpretation according to simple binary opposition along historical, religious, social, or gendered lines. As much as the skeins of razors draped across the bed frame warn against our approach, they also, paradoxically, join together into a productive space for connection and dialogue."

Zhou Hongbin, image courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

10. Two exhibitions at the CAP Project Space in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong which neatly bookended my 3 months in China - the first, 'Aquarium' by Chinese photomedia artist Zhou Hongbin (definitely someone to watch) and the second, a show of new artists from Sri Lanka, 'Serendipity Revealed'. This last contained the extraordinary images of Anoli Perera.

Anoli Perera, 'Protest', black and white photograph

I also enjoyed 'I Am Your Agency', Jing Yuan Huang's November solo show at Force Gallery in 798, and 'I Love Shanghai', a group show at Art Labor Gallery which included works by Lu Xinjian, the ubiquitous Island6 (Liu Dao) collective - are they actually literally everywhere? - Emma Fordham (she's an art teacher - yay!) and a stunning photograph of the transformation and loss of old Shanghai, by Greg Girard.

Image source for Emma Fordham and Greg Girard: http://www.artlaborgallery.com/pages/artists/gourp_i%20love%20shanghai.html#

I also loved the concept behind Redgate Gallery's November show, which paired printmakers with significant Chinese poets. 'River on Paper' included some of the printmakers that I had met earlier in the month at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, and it was a delight to discover some of the poems as well.

River on Paper - Dialogue between Poetry and Prints

Lies, Poet: Zhai Yongming, Artist: Kou Jianghui, 2013, Lithograph, 56 x 38 cm, part of the River on PaperPortfolio, 2013, Boxed, 61 x 42 cm, image Redgate Gallery http://www.redgategallery.com/Exhibitions%201991%20-%202013/River_on_Paper/index.html

Earlier in the year I really loved Tianli Zu's work at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art in the group show 'In Possible Worlds'. And who could forget John Kaldor's '13 Rooms' - not all fabulous but the re-creation of the Marina Abramovic piece was extraordinary as was Xu Zhen's 'Blink of an Eye'.

Xu Zhen, 'In the Blink of an Eye', image source: www.smh.com

I won't be negative and focus on the disappointments. But they included, most especially, the Hugo Boss Asian Art Awards at the Rockbund Museum Shanghai - this left me completely cold and utterly disengaged. So disappointing, as the show there last December which included Huang Yong Ping was one of my 2012 highlights. I was left unexcited by much of the Asia Pacific Triennial early in the year as well - unexpected as every previous show has been fantastic. I suspect that sourcing so many artists from Micronesia and Central Asia and pretty much ignoring China may have been one of the factors that left me less than impressed there. Not that I am biased or anything. And to even the balance, the new Fang Lijun show in 798 was very, very dull. I don't think he should bother returning to Jingdezhen to do any more slumped, fallen, collapsed ceramic pieces, frankly.

What am I looking forward to? Cai Guo-qiang at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art next week - watch this space!  Christian Boltanski at Carriageworks in January. And Beijing Silvermine at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art - intriguing!

What were your highlight exhibitions this year?

Happy New Year! 新年快乐！Xinnian Kuai Le! 
May 2014 (the year of the horse) be filled with interesting art, and fascinating conversation.

Looking for something more: the paintings of Shi Zhiying

Here is my article, published recently on The Culture Trip website, based on my conversation with painter Shi Zhiying in her Shanghai studio. My third conversation with this artist in three years, it provided further insights into the sources of her imagery and inspiration, and the way that she works. I have been watching the development of her practice with interest and admiration. She is gentle, quietly spoken and thoughtful - very intense about her painting but with a sense of humour and irony that emerges as we talk. We discovered that we are both HUGE fans of Paynes Grey, for instance, confirming that she is an artist after my own heart!

Shi Zhiying in her studio, December 2013, photograph Luise Guest

Now showing her work in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, New York - and of course her 'Sea Sutra' painting is in the collection of Sydney's White Rabbit Gallery - she is definitely one of my favourite painters.

We spoke on a day that could rightly be described as 'Airpocalyptic' in Shanghai - the air pollution index had climbed beyond 500 by mid-morning and was listed on every website as 'extremely hazardous'. Flights were cancelled, factories and some schools were closed. Most people in the street were wearing masks, except beggars with babies on their backs at the traffic lights on major intersections. The air smelt like burning metal. From my taxi on the hour-long drive to her studio I could see only the very nearest buildings - the rest of the city was shrouded in grey fog. Inside Zhiying's studio the smell of oil paint and turps would normally be a little overpowering but it was a welcome relief. On the return journey in the late afternoon, the sun appeared as a bright orange disc in a wall of grey. It looked like the end of the world.

Our conversation ranged across her new paintings, her experiences of the New York art scene when she travelled there for her exhibition this year at James Cohan, the differences between the art scene in Shanghai and Beijing, the differences between Chinese and Western audiences, between Buddhism and Christianity, and the movies of Yasujiro Ozu. Her favourite movie is Ozu's 1953 masterpiece, 'Tokyo Story'. She also loves 'The Matrix'! One thing you won't read elsewhere is that in her day job as an artist for the Shanghai government she has been painting enormous mural-sized panels based on old photographs of the city. We spoke a little ruefully about the necessity for so many artists to have a 'day job', whether that be teaching at a school or university, or working as a designer as many Chinese artists seem to do. I asked her if she had a really important mentor, teacher or influence and without hesitation she identified Yan Pei Ming, the Chinese painter born in Shanghai in 1960 who has lived in France since the 1980s.

Here is my brief account of our most recent conversation from www.theculturetrip.com - with a few extra pictures:

The Paintings of Shi Zhiying: Searching for the Sublime

Born in Shanghai in 1979, Shi Zhiying is an internationally acclaimed artist best known for her oil paintings, which entice and mesmerise the viewer with their monochrome detail. Chinese tradition and contemporary metaphor coalesce on the vast expanses of her canvases. Luise Guest talks to Shi about the impact of Buddhism, the ocean and infinity on her work.

High Heeled Shoes, Oil on Canvas, for Elle Magazine ‘Art That Heels’ 25th Anniversary, exhibition at V Art Space, Shanghai, 2013 | photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

The Shanghai studio of painter Shi Zhiying is a large, airy, quiet space, with a chair positioned at its centre where the artist can sit and reflect on her works-in-progress, propped around the walls and on easels. We met on a day in late November when the city was experiencing its worst ever air pollution, which made the familiar studio smells of turpentine and oil paint a welcome respite from the toxic air outside.

Shi is best known for her immersive monochrome oil paintings of vast expanses of ocean; fields of lawn in which each individual blade of grass bends to the wind; the pitted surfaces of rocks, and raked Zen gardens. The common thread, which emerges in any conversation with this artist, is the profound importance of her Buddhist belief. Shi Zhiying’s work, despite its contemporary appearance, is informed by her reading of Buddhist scriptures, and her deep understanding of Chinese history and traditional culture.

Shi Zhiying in her Shanghai Studio, December 2011, photograph Luise Guest

Sometimes she paints the apparently mundane objects of daily life – a pair of high-heeled shoes, a bowl of rice, a plate of cakes, some discarded clothing – and at other times she finds inspiration in literary works, such as her series inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Mr Palomar. Whether her subject is quotidian or sublime, her awareness of the oneness of all things in the universe inevitably underpins the way she selects her imagery, and the painterly techniques she has developed over time to represent aspects of her world.

In a recent series of paintings, Shi has taken inspiration directly from Buddhist imagery. She recently visited the cave paintings of Dunhuang in Gansu Province, at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, and one of the best preserved and most extensive collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures in the world. As we spoke about a work-in-progress for a planned exhibition in Beijing in mid-2014, inspired by the images she saw in the Mogao Caves, we leafed through some of the many books she has collected. I could see how she has been inspired by the images of flying asparas and other deities, with their complex draperies and beautiful viridian greens underlying subtle faded colours. I asked her to tell me why these paintings are so important to her. She thought for a moment, then said, ‘It’s another kind of time and space, very different from our time and space. It is much larger… we can feel we are a very tiny grain of sand in the universe. This makes me feel (that) I am nothing.’ ‘Is that a good feeling, or an unnerving one?’ I wonder. ‘When I feel that I am nothing, I can hold everything, and everything can hold me – it’s a good feeling,’ she says.

I had seen the artist’s vast image of an endless ocean, ‘High Seas’, in Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery. This is a painting which audiences often mistake, initially, for a large-scale black and white photograph, until they walk closer and see the loose individual brush marks and the drips and dribbles of thinned-down oil paint. In 2008, Shi based her ‘Sea Sutra’ series of paintings on her experience of looking down over the Pacific Ocean and suddenly being overwhelmed by a profound sense of her own insignificance, a feeling she described as ‘ceasing to exist’. These paintings of sublime vistas remove all unnecessary detail, focusing our attention on the boundless immensity of the ocean. It’s an immersive experience in the same way that observing a colour-field painting by Rothko envelops the viewer in its shimmering glazes. In these works, we see the familiar (the ocean, vast expanses of lawn) in new ways.

Shi Zhiying, 'High Seas' oil on canvas, 2008, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

‘High Seas’ reveals Shi Zhiying’s control of her medium. Stripped of all colour, her intention is to show the vastness as well as the unity of the world. She works slowly, often making several studies and small versions of a painting before transferring the image to a large canvas. With her very thin washes of oil paint she controls the drips and dribbles and stains of paint, always aiming for an internal truth. Shi has worked in monochrome for many years, initially inspired by the black and white photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto. ‘Simplicity is reality’ she says. In my first conversation with this artist some years ago, she likened her practice to the daily discipline of meditation, ‘a slow and peaceful process that takes a long time to develop.’ Later she clarified this statement. ‘Painting is not meditation. Painting is painting. But it can be like meditation because I do it carefully, honestly and truthfully.’

Shi has now embarked on a process of attempting to put the colour back into her works, beginning with a carefully nuanced approach of adding warm and cool tones to the blacks and greys, and using Mars Black due to its warmth. There are hints of Paynes Grey and indigo underlying the dark washes that form the background to new large paintings of a Buddha figure. This reveals the sculptural approach to painting that distinguishes her work –successive planes and shapes are laid down, rather like building up facets to create a fully realised and modelled form. The artist tells me that she visited Shaanxi Province to look at the ancient sculptures and relics found in tombs there, most particularly in Xi’an, which has informed her recent series of paintings of Buddhist reliquaries and other ancient artefacts, ‘The Relics’ shown at the James Cohan Gallery, New York, in June 2013.

The Relics, installation view of solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery New York, image courtesy the artist

Whilst in New York she visited the Chelsea galleries and major museum shows. Seeing Edward Hopper’s paintings, which she had previously experienced only in reproduction, was a revelation. ‘The structure and the colour!’ she exclaims. ‘When I see the real paintings, the colour is totally different! His colour is very… empty.’ She expounds on the purity and singularity of his use of colour. ‘This makes me re-think the structure and composition of my painting. Paintings have rules (of structure) whether in the western world or the Chinese tradition. The name of the rules may be different, but I think they are the same. I can use the rules of traditional Chinese painting to read Edward Hopper’s paintings.’

Reliquary, 40cm x 50cm, 2013 | image courtesy the artist

Shi Zhiying is increasingly making interesting connections between East and West, between different traditions and histories. She singles out James Turrell’s transformation of the Guggenheim rotunda as a profound experience during her visit to New York – seeing everyone looking up at the core of daylight with five elliptical rings of shifting, coloured light made her think of her previous experience of looking down at the vastness of the ocean. ‘I can see the same thing in Western paintings before, (in Renaissance and Baroque frescoes) when they painted heaven on the ceiling.’ She enjoyed the shared experience of being part of the audience looking up to Turrell’s version of the sublime. She also visited Rome, and likened its weight of history and imperial power to her experiences of Chinese antiquity. Visiting the Pantheon, she says she felt the same as when visiting the Buddhist frescoes at Dunhuang. ‘There is something higher than us. Something more. This makes me feel very moved.’ Her works tell us about the connectedness of the universe. One can look at the repetition of brushstrokes and see the repetition of sutras, Buddhist prayers, and the repetition of rituals that provide meaning to human lives. In the Buddhist reliquaries and traditional Chinese vessels, bowls and sculptural forms, paradoxically both solid in form and evanescent, the real, lies a desire to distill the true essence of each tangible object.

theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/the-paintings-of-shi-zhiying-searching-for-the-sublime/
( On this site's 'China' page you can also find my articles about Bingyi Huang, Lin Tianmiao, Liang Yuanwei, contemporary ink painting, and a range of contemporary artists in Hong Kong.)

你吃了吗？ Have you eaten? Best and Worst Food Moments in China

As this seems to be the time of year when every newspaper, magazine, journal, website and blog descends into 'best-of' list territory, why should I resist? And as my brain is addled by the general craziness and mild panic of this festive season with its worries over whether the oven is big enough to hold the turkey (or, in the case of my planned meal, enormous hunks of lamb to roast slowly for hours on a day that I hope will not hit the 40 degree mark of Australian Christmases past) what better list than one involving food? Food in China, to be precise. In a culture where it is not uncommon for people to greet each other with "你吃了吗？ Have you eaten?" it is evident that food is taken very seriously. Go out to a restaurant with Chinese friends and you find the perusal of the menu is not taken lightly, often involving a debate about the merits or otherwise of particular dishes.To the point of tedium, sometimes, or to the point where I begin to think that I will be willing to eat the boiled frogs, the donkey pastrami, or frankly ANYTHING AT ALL.

In my first 2 weeks in Beijing, while I found my feet and learned to navigate the city from my base in Tuanjiehu, I was restricted to what I could buy in my local supermarket, or in the streets of the neighbourhood. Breakfasts for a while consisted of 'Bimbo' brand bread (awful!) with marmalade or 'Skippy' brand peanut butter (also awful) with black Nescafe. At first I couldn't find anywhere to buy milk, butter, real coffee or decent bread. The moment, 2 weeks into my 2 month residency, when I found a lone packet of Lavazza coffee on a hidden shelf of the Jinkelong Supermarket was a very joyful one. I embarrassed myself by loudly exclaiming "Yes! Thank God!" Locals doing their shopping stared for a moment, then put it down to the general weirdness of foreigners. One memorable dinner was intended to be Pasta Napoletana, until I discovered (after I had sauteed onion and garlic) that my apartment had no can opener to open the tinned tomatoes. And then I boiled the pasta and found I couldn't turn the gas off, or relight it. I struggled in a quiet sweaty panic for 20 long minutes with all the windows open and gas leaking into the kitchen, then ate cold spaghetti with onion and garlic. Yum.

But I soon enough discovered that in today's Beijing you can get pretty much anything you want - although I never did find Vegemite, that Australian staple that people from anywhere except the Antipodes think is like eating axle grease. And, of course, eating local foods - even moving right outside your comfort zone of language and food experiences - is all part of the adventure. I came to love the local markets and snack stalls, as well as all the many different restaurants - northern Chinese, Uighur, Cantonese, Sichuan, Japanese (controversial, this one!) and Shanghainese - in my immediate surroundings. A little further afield, just across the 3rd Ring Road, I could find Mexican, Italian, Thai, or rather the Chinese-infused versions of these cuisines. And watching people at the noodle stands stretching the noodles ever thinner between outstretched arms, and whirling them about over their heads as if in some kind of strange Olympic event like ribbon twirling gymnastics, never fails to fascinate.

Having returned to Sydney (summer mangoes, peaches, cherries, salads - ah, so good after 3 months away!) I herewith present a list of my own personal top ten food-related experiences in China. The sublime to the ridiculous, the (relatively) expensive to the ridiculously cheap. So, in no particular order.

1. Dinner at 'The Temple Restaurant', Beijing. This was definitely in the sublime category - food, architecture, impeccable service, atmosphere. All extraordinary. I enjoyed the sommelier who basically ignored my order of a second glass of pinot gris and brought me different wines to try throughout the meal, including some Mongolian red (not bad!) from a wine label launch happening in another part of the restaurant. None of these extra glasses of wine, nor the sparkling wine at the start of our meal, nor the additional dessert brought to me because they didn't want me to miss out, ended up on our bill. It was restaurant theatre in the best possible way. Check it out here: The Temple Restaurant
2. Fruit from my local street market - apples, pears, pineapple, pomegranates and best of all, the tiny, intensely sweet mandarins
3. The discovery that egg fried rice for breakfast is GREAT!
4. The craziness of the 4-storey 24-hour Cantonese restaurant, Jin Ding Xuan, which has several branches in Beijing. I went several times, alone sometimes and at other times with fellow Redgate residents, to the one on my street. Lots of shouting is involved and a somewhat brusque ( for delicate western sensibilities at least) method of slapping down food on the table, and some degree of surprise at the entry of westerners has to be anticipated, but good, clean and cheap. The branch at the entrance to Ditan Park is more spectacular. Neon lit, in the manner of completely over the top Christmas decorations, with flaming urns outside, this is unbelievably noisy ("renao", just the way the Chinese like it!) Waitresses finish the meal by saying "Do you like me?" and then ask to have their photograph taken with you and give you a heart-shaped sticker to be placed on their incentives chart. Great dumplings and wonderfully sticky black sesame buns in soup, which I have hoped in vain to find elsewhere.
5. A huge Sichuan restaurant in Chengdu with a stage on which performances of fire-breathing, acrobatics and face changing Sichuan opera were taking place to the delight of the local crowd, all armed with mobile phones to record the experience. Enormously crowded and noisy, great fun, and with the best 'Mapo Doufu' I have ever eaten.

6. A tiny local restaurant in Xi'an where I ate fabulous dumplings filled with lotus, fennel and spinach with my translator 'Rocky' and his young female friend who drove us around the city in her brand new car. She had just got her licence, so the drive was somewhat nerve-wracking. Rocky didn't hold back with the driving advice either - despite not having a car or a licence himself. And also in Xi'an, the Xinjian flat bread sold in the Muslim Quarter, cooked by sticking round discs of dough on the inside curved surface of a metal drum over a fire. Flavoured with fennel seeds and salt, they are chewy and delicious, best eaten hot straight from the oven.

7. Lunch at the bizarre 'French' chateau and winery 2 hours outside of Xi'an, where I ate with a property developer, two Xi'an artists, a Chinese movie producer and 'consultant' who had spent 25 years in Hollywood, and my translator 'Rocky'. The purpose of this meal remained mysterious, and the location was, frankly, bizarre, but the food was fabulous. Local produce, beautiful fresh flavours, and every time I thought the meal must have ended, more dishes were brought to the table. We finished with beautiful noodle soup, and much toasting with bai jiu and very strange red wine. Gan Bei! You can read more details of my trip to Xi'an here: Beijing Diary: Suddenness Happens

8. The tiny noodle and baozi stand right near a friend's apartment in the back lanes of Tuanjiehu. Really good hand-shaved noodles made from scratch in a bowl of broth for 5 kuai (that's less than a dollar.)

9. Din Tai Fung. Always good, every time, in every city, despite being ludicrously expensive by Chinese standards. Love those Xiao Long Bao, shrimp and pork wontons, and black sesame buns.

10. The duck restaurant, Jing Yaa Tang, in The Opposite House Hotel in Beijing. In an interesting building designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the hotel is filled with contemporary art and the interior spaces are very beautiful and restful in a sparse way intended to reference traditional Chinese simplicity. New, and strangely empty on the night that I visited with friends, the food was beautiful, as was the design of the restaurant. I have never been a big fan of duck before, but this was a revelation. As were the noodles in a tiny space called The Noodle Bar in the 1949 Hidden City, which is a serene space of courtyards, gardens, restaurants and bars behind the crazy traffic of the 3rd Ring and Gongti Bei Lu. You sit at a three-sided counter (there is space for a dozen patrons at a time, at most) and watch the chefs making the noodles from scratch. And those noodles - oh my God! So good!

Foyer. The Opposite House, Beijing

And my least favourite food moments?

• The ridiculously expensive and pretentious Italian restaurant in Shanghai where they strangely served the bread (slightly stale) with tiny bowls of what was very unmistakeably tinned tomato soup. Not olive oil. But tinned soup.You read that right. By this stage my husband had joined me in China and was keen to have a western meal. We were so flabbergasted by this culinary aberration that we decided not to question it. The chef then appeared at our table and in a highly theatrical Italian accent told us all about the provenance of the mozzarella and prosciutto. I just wanted to know "Heinz or Campbell's?" Perhaps it was a postmodern Warhol 'hommage'. Or, as my husband suggested, a mean trick to see if they could get away with it. He suspected they were all falling about laughing in the kitchen.
• The platter of ducks' tongues served up as an appetiser at the Sichuan hotpot restaurant in Chengdu. Even to be polite to my hosts I could not take one.
• The mystery meat in a bowl of soup in a randomly selected restaurant in Xi'an where everyone stopped eating and stared when I entered, some openly giggling and whispering. I asked the waitress what meat was in the soup and she said, "Maybe pork?". I had already scanned the menu and rejected boiled frogs in broth, tripe, brains, pig kidneys and was desperately hoping for vegetables with noodles. The 'maybe pork' was the best option. But not a good option.
• I still hate: stinky tofu, hundred day eggs, beef tendon, goat's feet boiled with chilli, and offal of all descriptions. Sorry to be unsophisticated and all that, but I just can't do it.

All photographs, Luise Guest, shot in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Xi'an, October - December 2013

• And I never did find out what 'pale baby soup', a mysterious and terrifying menu item seen in a Sichuan restaurant near Nan Luo Gu Xiang in Beijing, could be.

Never Sorry?

Stencilled graffiti photographed in Tsim Sha Tsui subway, Hong Kong, April 2011, photo Luise Guest

I have just returned to Sydney from Hong Kong, and as I walked through the Tsim Sha Tsui subway to catch the MTR last week, I remembered my passage through the same pink-tiled subway in April 2011, when I found it lined with stencils asking, rhetorically and unnecessarily, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" I think we knew the answer to that question. Later that same day, as I returned to Kowloon, I found police and station workers taping pieces of paper over the stencils, all the while being filmed by people using their mobile phones. Later still, artist activists cleverly projected the same images onto the glass facades of the skyscrapers lining the waterfront, from boats in Victoria Harbour at night. A lot has happened since that time, in China and the world, and Ai Weiwei was released, but he is still unable to travel and is subject to constant surveillance.

His retrosepective show, 'So Sorry' at the Munich Haus der Kunst in 2009 - 2010 featured the work 'Remembering' on the facade of the museum. Nine thousand children's backpacks spelled out the words of a grieving mother who lost her child in the Sichuan earthquake, 'She lived happily in this world for 7 years'. It would seem that Ai's stubborn insistence on investigating the deaths of these victims and attempting to force the government to name each and every one of them was something of a turning point in his art practice. It becomes imbued with a deeper seriousness from that point, and with a sense that the stakes are high, that certain things really matter. The title of the show was a pointed dig at the insincere apologies offered by officials when disasters occur, whilst burying the facts and preventing any public accountability. Certainly not something restricted to China, one must acknowledge. Ai suggests that they are, in fact, never truly 'sorry', and also that he himself remains utterly unrepentant about his continuing campaign, using his documentary films, his artworks, his international stature and the power of social media to attempt to force a reluctant bureaucracy to open itself to greater scrutiny.

'Never Sorry' is  the title of Alison Klayman's doco about Ai Weiwei, which I saw in a packed cinema at its Sydney Film Festival showing in 2012. The film is fascinating, and Klayman has created a successful narrative arc in editing a huge mass of material filmed over a number of years,  recording the artist in both his private and public personae. One cannot avoid some doubts throughout about how much is performance art from this very savvy operator and how much is 'reality'. The domestic detail is engaging: his elderly mother nags him about eating too much mung bean ice cream, and his little son follows him around his Caochangdi courtyard, feeding him pieces of melon. Food features in many scenes in the movie, including one where Ai and his followers are eating at an outdoor restaurant in Chengdu, enjoying a Sichuan speciality of pigs' trotters, when a crowd begins to gather, apparently summoned by Twitter. The police arrive, and turn out to be rather confused and hapless figures in crumpled, ill-fitting uniforms rather than the bully boys one had been led to expect, and keep asking when he will be finished eating. The absurdity of this scene is interspersed with interviews with fellow artists and activists, and with footage of Ai and his supporters filming the police, who are filming them.

Klayman began the film in 2009 at the point where Ai began his campaign (or, perhaps, more accurately, attached his clout to the campaign) to name all the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. Many of these  deaths were attributed to corruption and shoddy 'tofu' construction, most especially of government schools, so the investigation set the artist on a collision course with the keepers of official secrets.

The aspect of the film which interested me the most was Ai's obsessive use of Twitter to document every aspect of his encounters with bureaucracy. His art and political campaigns for greater openness and democracy have  become inextricably enmeshed, and it might be suggested that in a post-Beuys, post-Warhol world his life has become one long performance piece. The absurdity of the now constant surveillance which has surrounded him since his release from detention is highlighted with his own self-surveillance, his marble sculptures of surveillance cameras, his (foiled) attempt at a 24/7 'ai weiwei cam', and his  invitation to the guards outside his studio to come inside and join him - he made them an offer to become his studio assistants.

However for me the most memorable sections of the film are those dealing with the past - the humiliation and banishment visited upon his father, the famous poet Ai Qing, during the Cultural Revolution has obviously had a profound impact on the son - and with the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake and the campaign to name every victim in the face of government secrecy. The creation of a memorial wall in Ai's studio with the name and birthdate of every victim of the earthquake listed on endless sheets of paper is a testament to the sheer perseverance and indefatigable energy of the artist and his followers. He organised a project in which these names were read out by volunteers,  recorded on their phones and then uploaded. Listening to this litany of names, and knowing that so many of the victims were the child owners of the little backpacks and exercise books that we had seen strewn amongst the rubble in the earthquake news footage, was almost unbearably sad.

Stencilled graffiti photographed in Kowloon, April 2011, photo Luise Guest

Even here in Sydney, much less in China, opinions about Ai Weiwei are polarised, with some dismissing him as a relentless self-promoter. I must say that I am dubious about the western tendency towards hagiography, and the over simplification of all the complexities of contemporary China. His time in New York in the 80s, working in his studio in PS1 (and gambling in Atlantic City!) and his consequent epiphanies about the significance of Duchamp and Warhol, might go some way towards explaining his 'life as performance'. Eminent art critic Jonathan Jones believes that Ai is the Duchamp or Beuys of our time. Sometimes (as with the 2013 installation of baby formula cans in Hong Kong in the shape of a map of China) the art suffers at the expense of a very simple polemic. At other times, as with the installation of straightened rebar, taken from the collapsed buildings of the Sichuan earthquake zone and simply titled 'Straight' at the last Venice Biennale, or the increasingly complex and beautiful installations of 'Forever Bicycles', the work has a greater power. His real significance cannot yet be known, perhaps, but he has made people think that art actually matters, and for that we should all be grateful.