马年吉祥! The Year of the Horse

I know it's Australia Day, but I am pretending that I never saw those teenage girls dressed in flag-adorned costumes, or the many people sporting temporary Australian flag tattoos - it has all become way too creepy. And, frankly,dare I say it, "un-Australian". What happened to our famously laconic and cynical national character? So this post is ignoring January 26 in favour of the lunar calendar.The Year of the Horse approaches. In fact 2014 is the Year of the Wooden Horse, which is regarded, I discovered in a rapid scroll through a few Googled web pages, as a year of quick victories, unexpected adventures, and surprising romances. Those born in a horse year are supposed to be strong, courageous, independent, creative free spirits. Possibly, as a monkey year person, I am a little envious. Sydney is currently filled with red lanterns, many opportunities to eat noodles and dumplings, and a plethora of events in the lead-up to the enormous street parade in celebration of Chinese New Year. In addition to Mahjong, food, music and lion dances, art is also getting a look-in, thank goodness. 'Crossing Boundaries' is an exhibition of Asian Australian artists - some young emerging artists and some, such as Guan Wei and Lindy Lee, who are extremely well-known and celebrated. Curated by Catherine Croll of Cultural Partnerships Australia, and currently showing at Sydney Town Hall, the exhibition is an important part of Sydney's Lunar New Year celebrations. And, appropriately, many of the works are equine and celebratory in flavour.

Hu Ming, Wishes for Every Success in the Year of the Horse, 2013, oil on canvas

This is the third consecutive year that the exhibition has been held to coincide with New Year celebrations, and this time around it includes a number of the same artists as last year, as well as a host of new, previously unknown artists. Not every work in this highly eclectic show is great, but most are at the very least interesting, and the exhibition as a whole suggests evocative connections and parallels between works by very different artists. Croll says, "Artists participating in Crossing Boundaries have created new work that reflects upon individual journeys undertaken, boundaries crossed and new territories explored to provide a dynamic exhibition with strong celebratory flavour for the Year of the Horse."

Hu Ming, represented by two works quite unlike her usual repertoire of voluptuous revolutionary soldiers, is an interesting case study of a diasporic Chinese artist. In fact the artist herself spent 20 years of her life in the People's Liberation Army, from 1970 to 1990, eventually becoming a major. During this time she saw the last bitter years of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao, the 'opening up' under Deng Xiaoping and the tragedy of Tiananmen. She was given leave to study art and learned the painstaking hyper-realism of the traditional Chinese 'gongbi' style in Tianjin. She arrived in Australia in 1999 and now lives and works in Sydney, producing works that, albeit in a Pop idiom, are thoroughly immersed in traditional imagery and techniques.

Two panels of black paper, pitted with burned holes and marks, form "1000 Blacks & Myriad White', created  by Lindy Lee in collaboration with Elizabeth Chang. For both artists black has deeply ancestral connections to Taoist traditions and the principle of Yin/Yang. Yin, the black, represents earth, darkness and the interior. Yang, the white, represents heaven, lightness and the exterior. One cannot exist without the other. Lee has long been interested in ways of making the immaterial,the evanescent, take on a  material form. In these works she and Chang have created a powerful and mysterious diptych.

Somchai Charoen, Landmind, 2013, ceramic installation (detail)

At the entrance of the space is a floor installation by Thai ceramic artist Somchai Charoen. Deceptively pretty, his field of ceramic flowers, sitting lotus-like on the polished floor, conceal in their midst weapons of terror and destruction. 'Landmind' was created following his visit to the Landmine Museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia. "Landmines are one of the most horrific inventions," he says in his catalogue statement. "The consequences of war on the landscape inflict a trauma for people who travel through the land where an unknown terror lies beneath the surface. This remains decades after the conflict subsides. I am fascinated by how the regeneration of land works to conceal the mines as part of the natural landscape." Certainly his invitation to audiences to walk through the installation was not being eagerly embraced yesterday - the installation is a sobering reminder of the appalling consequences of war and conflict.

Tianli Zu has contributed one of her characteristic paper-cut works celebrating Nuwa, a powerful creation figure in Chinese mythology. Around 179-122 BCE in remote antiquity, so the story goes, the four pillars that supported the universe collapsed. The world became dark and chaotic. Nüwa tempered five-coloured stones to repair the heavens and held up the sky with four legs that she cut off a tortoise. According to the Chinese myth Shanhaijing (山海经), she created the horse before she created humans. Sometimes this artist works with video, however in this installation she has chosen to add evocative forest sounds which echo around the space, so realistic that they apparently caused maintenance men from the Town Hall to investigate whether an owl was trapped in the ceiling.

Tianli Zu,  Nuwa Created Horses on the Sixth Day, 2013, Chinese ink and tea, Hand cut cotton rag paper,
and sound composition

My 2013 interview with Tianli Zu, in which she revealed the ways in which her Cultural Revolution childhood continue to impact her work today, can be found  HERE: Tianli Zu: The Power of the Shadow

Tianli Zu,  Nuwa Created Horses on the Sixth Day (detail), 2013, Chinese ink and tea, Hand cut cotton rag paper,
and sound composition

Other interesting works included Ahn Wells and Linda Wilson's 'Ten Thousand Horses' which consists of 60  rosewood tiles with wax painted symbols referencing the power of the horse moving en masse in Chinese military history, as well as shamanism and Ahn's Korean heritage.

Ahn Wells and Linda Wilson, Ten Thousand Horses, 2013, Rosewood and Wax installation

 Guan Wei's panels from his recent dark series of constellations, 'Twinkling Galaxies' are beautiful, of course. In my conversation with him at his Beijing studio in November he reflected on the contrast he sees between Australia and China, now that he divides his time more or less equally between Sydney and Beijing. http://theartlife.com.au/2013/floating-worlds-a-conversation-with-guan-wei/  

And I did enjoy a work made entirely of used teabags. Born in Indonesia, Jayanto Damanik now lives and works in Sydney and has recently returned from a residency at Redgate Gallery in Beijing. He has been collecting teabags since 1997, seeing them as a memory of family, a reminder of ceremonies and as an offering for the dead. Tea has both mundane and spiritual connotations, and is both deeply personal and cultural. He said, "My current project is focused on the psychology of family and home... I collected my tea bags from family and friends and each tea bag contains a memory... every teabag tells a story of daily life’s grievances and joys."

Jayanto Damanik, Conversations, 2013, used teabags, Chinese paper, glue

In amongst the dragon boat races, night noodle markets and (I hope) a revival of the wonderfully funny Pandas on bicycles (panda costumes, OK, no animal cruelty!) in the Lunar New Year Parade, you should definitely make the time to walk round the side of the Town Hall and see what a very diverse range of Asian artists who now "call Australia home" - and Australian artists with links to Asian cultures - are doing. And on Australia Day, when increasingly there is way too much flag waving and scarily mindless jingoism, it's a salutary reminder that this nation is all the richer and more interesting due to the contributions of people who have arrived here from all corners of the globe.

The Rescuer of Lost Images

I enjoyed meeting the delightful Thomas Sauvin, curator and "collector of lost images" for an interview at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art last week, and finding out about the genesis of his project 'Beijing Silvermine' which is exhibited there in its current iteration.

Here is my review of the show and interview with Sauvin, published this week in The Art Life:

Thomas Sauvin is a rescuer of lost images. From more than 650,000 abandoned photographic negatives he has assembled an archive which tells a previously untold story - the story of China in the years from 1985, when photography first became accessible to ordinary people, to about 2005 when analogue photography was superseded by digital technologies. Badly shot, poorly lit photographs, often printed from damaged negatives, these are in many ways mundane images of ordinary people doing ordinary things. They joyfully show off their new consumer goods; go to theme parks, or to the beach; travel; enjoy time with their families and go to MacDonald’s. Yet these apparently banal images represent perhaps the most dramatic social change of the 20th century. Showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in an event associated with Sydney’s Chinese New Year celebrations, these still images, installations and video provide the viewer with a compelling narrative and a most unusual art gallery experience.

Sauvin does not describe himself as an artist. Rather, he says, he is a collector and curator who presents his collection in the manner of an artist. Like an archaeologist exploring a midden of Kodak moments, he has ‘mined’ discarded rolls of film destined for the silver recovery process in order to reveal a China that may surprise western audiences. Beijing Silvermine emerged from Sauvin’s experience of working with the UK-based ‘Archive of Modern Conflict’, a privately funded collection of vernacular photographs and perhaps the largest collection of images in the world that shows history through the eyes of ordinary people. Over time, however, he became more interested in seeking out negatives and starting his own collection of Chinese photographs. Just a small part of this extraordinary accumulation – an alternative history – is here in the gallery. The time these images represent is the period of opening up and reform; the first moments of Deng Xiaoping’s oft-quoted “To get rich is glorious” cultural shift; the starting point of the entrepreneurial and fast-changing China that we know today. Large numbers of people were beginning to accumulate a little more wealth. They had enough to buy household appliances such as refrigerators (which feature in a surprising number of photographs), to take holidays, and even to travel abroad. China moved from an emphasis on the collective towards a new determination by ordinary people to pursue individual happiness. And with increasing access to affordable photography they now had the means to document their lives.

If you expect Mao suits and bicycles, or apocalyptic pollution, you will be surprised - these images bear little relation to what western audiences might expect from Chinese photographs. Sauvin, who has lived in Beijing for many years, is irritated by what he sees as the “extreme” reactions of foreigners to China. He says, “Either they love China and see it in a ‘Tai Chi in the park, mystical mountains’ Orientalist manner, or they hate it and all they can see is ‘pollution, corruption, destruction, Ai Weiwei, Tibet.’ And that’s it.” In contrast the collection from which the twenty-eight images showing in ‘Beijing Silvermine’ are drawn reveal ordinary people living their lives during an extraordinary time of transformation. The photographs range from the banal, to the beautiful, to the bizarre. Sauvin finds recurring themes as he sifts through thousands of negatives, which he buys by weight from a recycling centre. He was immediately struck by the universality of experience, and he hopes that audiences here, as they have elsewhere, will recognise something of their own personal histories in the images he has selected for the exhibition. Some of the badly shot, luridly coloured snaps of people wearing truly hideous 1980s fashions could well have emerged from my own embarrassing family photograph albums. The time and place may be unique, but the themes are universal, Sauvin says – birth, family, leisure, travel, pride, joy, and consumerism. I remembered my snapshot of myself with my first car, shot in a suburban Sydney street, and agreed. 

To read the rest of the article and the interview, click HERE

Falling Back to Earth: Cai Guo-Qiang in Brisbane

                                          Cai Guo-Qiang China b.1957

                    Head On 2006, 99 life-sized replicas of wolves and glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and hide                               Dimensions variable

                    Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG 

                    Photo by Yuyu Chen, courtesy Cai Studio.

Too late it occurred to me that, given Cai Guo-qiang's previous disastrous attempts at large-scale ephemeral installations based on and around the Brisbane River I should have called my review of this exhibition, at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, "Third Time Lucky." I was very excited to see this show, having loved the whole idea of making art with gunpowder - so Chinese! The photographs I had seen of 'Head On', Cai's installation of 99 wolves hurling themselves at a wall of glass, had reminded me of my response to seeing the huge and spectacular installations of Huang Yong Ping. I hoped that the GOMA show would be similarly extraordinary. And it's altogether appropriate that while I was typing away writing the article the following morning there was a fire in my hotel, which resulted in me rushing headlong down 25 floors of firestairs to emerge into a lobby filled with black smoke. Cai would have been right in his element.

Here's the review I wrote for The Art Life, 'Our Place in the Universe':

Luise Guest visits the Gallery of Modern Art for Falling Back to Earth where beyond the spectacle lies meaning, wit and subtlety...

As I stood on the down escalator in Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art two teenage girls wearing cardboard wolf masks slid silently past me, going up. The surreal nature of this encounter encapsulated my experience of Cai Guo-Qiang’s ambitious project for GOMA, Falling Back to Earth.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Heritage, 2013. 99 life-sized replicas of animals, water, sand, drip mechanism; installed dimensions variable
 commissioned for the exhibition ‘Falling Back to Earth’, 2013; proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery collection with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

“And what is it about Chinese artists and taxidermy?” I wondered, as I stood with a crowd of Queensland families (the exhibition has been enormously popular, attracting an average of 1150 visitors each day) around the waterhole that forms the central element of his enormous installation, ‘Heritage’. From Huang Yong Ping’s bats, wolves and taxidermied animal heads to Cai’s earlier celebrated installation ‘Head On’, seen once again in Brisbane, the common factors apart from the use of real or replica animals are the scale of their allegorical ambition, and of course the literal physical scale of the works themselves. In ‘Heritage’, 99 animals, predators and prey alike, stand with bent heads in a peaceful coexistence, an allegory of utopian harmony. Sculpture as spectacle.

Cai’s works are never mere spectacle, however, despite his controversial fireworks for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.  His work is based on investigations of philosophy, history, and Chinese tradition. These layered and complex meanings, as well as his wit, are revealed in the work he created for the 1995 Venice Biennale, ‘Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot’. In a wry reference to the theory that Marco Polo never in fact reached China (he failed to mention tea in his account of his travels) and a reflection on the different histories and cultures of east and west, a Chinese junk moored at the historic Palazzo Giustinian-Lolin contained a vending machine dispensing Chinese medicinal tonics to visitors. Sydney audiences would be familiar with Cai’s exploding cars, in ‘Inopportune: Stage One’ in its Cockatoo Island version at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

Born in Fujian Province in 1957, Cai is best known for his use of gunpowder as art medium. Gunpowder, ink and paper – those significant Chinese inventions – all come into play in his practice. His first fire works date back to 1984, when he began exploding gunpowder onto canvas and paper as a way of ‘drawing’ which owes something to the calligraphic mark of the ink painter in Chinese tradition, and something to the ‘Laws of Chance’ of Dada. They also reference his childhood memories of witnessing skirmishes along the ‘Fujian Front’ between China and Taiwan. The artist describes his work as “like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working.” There is something of the alchemist in his ephemeral site-specific installations. The first open air pyrotechnic project took place on the River Tama, near Tokyo, in 1989. Cai loves the binary notions of destruction and rebirth, and connections with Taoist philosophies. Critic Fabio Cavalucci describes Cai as “working on the thin line that separates the possible from the impossible” and, indeed, his two previous works for Brisbane have shown all too clearly the precarious and unpredictable nature of his chosen medium.

Cai Guo-Qiang in front of installation Eucalyptus at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2013. Photo by Yuyu Chen, courtesy Cai Studio.

His first planned work, For the Asia Pacific Triennial, in 1996, ‘Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared - Project for Extraterrestrials no.26’ was unceremoniously cancelled due to an accidental explosion in the warehouse storing his fireworks and gunpowder. Three hydrogen balloons were intended to explode in the sky above the river, lighting a fuse that would writhe like a snake along the surface of the water. In a piece about this incident on the artist’s website, entitled “Be Careful of Fire’, he says, “Later, I retrieved the Queensland Art Gallery curator’s burned suit jacket and the remains of videographer Araki Takahisa’s camera and displayed them as the installation Be Careful with Fire, part of Origins and Myths of Fire: New Art from Japan, China, and Korea,  an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan.

For Cai’s second proposed work in Queensland three years later, he planned to sail 99 small metal boats in a curving line of blue flame down the river. The last boat in the line flipped over and the artist and the gathered crowd watched as one after one the boats sank beneath the blue flames to the bottom of the Brisbane River.  After these two unrealised – indeed disastrous – projects, he may have felt that he had unfinished business in Queensland. ‘Falling Back to Earth’ (at GOMA until 11 May) consists of three monumental installations. Two new projects were inspired by his immersion in the Australian landscape and in his themes of humanity’s connection to the natural world. The third has a different resonance in an Australian context. ‘Head On’ was originally created for an exhibition in Germany, inspired by the dramatic, divided history of Berlin. ‘Heritage’, with its 99 replica creatures (polystyrene casts covered in hyper-real fur made from goatskin) gathered around a waterhole was inspired by Cai’s visit to the pristine environment of Stradbroke Island, and the fact that he considers Australia to be a kind of paradise. The title of the exhibition – his first solo show in Australia – evokes the traditional Chinese literati scholars’ yearning for nature and was inspired by a fourth century poem by Tao Yuanming. Why 99 animals? In Chinese numerology and in Taoist philosophy the number 9 is highly significant, representing completion, perfection and regeneration. 99 to Cai represents something that is yet to be completed.

This is the first time that the entire 3000 square metres of GOMA ground floor space has been given over to the work of a single living artist, and due to Cai Guo-Qiang’s global reputation international media – in particular Chinese language media – were targeted by the gallery, so expectations were high. ‘Heritage’ is the big drawcard and it is as spectacular as the gallery’s publicists would have us believe. There is a stillness that somehow transcends the crowds with their strollers and fidgety small children, and a feeling that you have entered a fairy-tale world where natural enemies can peaceably coexist. The enormous waterhole is surrounded by every conceivable kind of animal – zebras, giraffes, a horse, pandas, kangaroos, tigers, a lion, antelope - all creatures great and small. Their relative sizes and forms are exaggerated, enhancing the sense of unreality. They are rendered equal in their vulnerability as they drink, heads bent, from a huge pool of water. As you circumnavigate the pond, watching the animals and their reflections on the surface of the water, you slowly begin to think about the implications of this impossible scene. Cai has moved from the extra-terrestrial to the terrestrial, and invites us to think about our relationship with nature.

In ‘Head On’ 99 replica wolves appear as if in a freeze frame, arcing through the space in a graceful curve, only to hit the glass wall and slide to the floor, slinking back to begin the process all over again. In its original German setting this work had very particular connotations. Shown here, in conjunction with ‘Heritage’ it could be seen as an allegory of heroism, or as terrible misguided foolishness – a warning that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, perhaps. I thought about climate change deniers and the disastrous consequences of human decisions made in the interests of political expediency or short term greed. ‘Eucalyptus’ relocates a vast native gum, earmarked for clearing, to the gallery. Placed on its side it fills the architectural space and forces us to contemplate at close quarters its ancient, gnarled surface. Roots and branches stretch out like capillaries, touching the walls and inviting the visitor to walk underneath and look more closely at what we often take for granted. Cai visited Lamington National Park and was inspired by the giant Antarctic beeches and the primeval power of the landscape. Like the Chinese literati painters who found solace and a sense of the sublime in nature, Cai suggests there is both a moral and a spiritual dimension in our relationship to the land. We need to consider our place in the universe, our interconnectedness, and “fall back to earth.”