The List: Ten Moments that Mattered

Cruising lazily out of the choppy seas of 2015 and into the uncharted waters of 2016 I have been reviewing experiences of Chinese art, and China, and doing that very cliched thing: making a list. I've read so many of these in the last few days. Lists of the best and worst of the year are metastastizing everywhere, from movies and music to food fads (kale is gone, you'll be glad to know) to the most over-used words of 2015 (''bae'', apparently, and I am sadly so out of touch with popular culture that I could not tell you what it even means) The list mania appears to be contagious. I decided to launch into my own "best of" compilation of art highlights - and a few lowlights. It's entirely personal; my retrospective musings over a year filled with art, mostly Chinese.

1 January saw Sydney audiences enthralled by the ever-so-slowly crumbling face of a giant Buddha made of ash from the burned prayers of temple worshippers in China and Taiwan. Zhang Huan, having reinvented himself entirely from his earlier persona as the bad boy of '90s violently masochistic performance art, presented this latest iteration at Carriageworks. And it was rather wonderful. I wrote about meeting the artist and encountering the silent presence of 'Sydney Buddha' for The Art Life. Click HERE for the story.

Zhang Huan, 'Sydney Buddha'' installed at Carriageworks, image courtesy the artist and Carriageworks

2 January also saw some younger Chinese bad boys hit town - the Yangjiang Group arrived with their unique brand of artistic anarchy for a crowd-funded project, 'Áctions for Tomorrow',  at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Along with a bunch of other bemused scribes I had tea with the artists. So. Much. Tea. It was an artwork, and we were part of the art. Previously their performances of 'Fan Hou Shu Fa' (After Dinner Calligraphy) had involved prodigious feats of alcohol consumption, but they now stick mainly to tea, which they had brought with them from their home in Guangdong Province. What did we see in the gallery? Wax dripped over a shop full of mass produced clothing to create a frozen monument to retail therapy? Check. An installation of the remains of 7,000 sheets of paper covered with text from Marx’s Das Kapital in Chinese calligraphy, over which simultaneous games of soccer had been played? Check. A 24-metre mural juxtaposing expressive Chinese characters with scrawled English text reading “God is Dead! Long Live the RMB!”? Check. When I presumptuously asked if this last had a connection with their views about a materialistic new China, Zheng Guogu shook his head sadly at my outdated desire to find meaning. That's entirely beside the point, he said. Anti-art? To misquote the Chinese Communist Party’s description of socialism in the global marketplace, perhaps this was “dada with Chinese characteristics.” I wrote about my interview in Daily Serving. Click HERE for the story.

The Yangjiang Group at 4 A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Zheng Guogu in centre) photo: Luise Guest

3 In February I was a little bit preoccupied with arranging a wedding, and I have zero recollection of March to April. May brought the Sherman Foundation exhibition of Yang Zhichao's 'Chinese Bible'. Yang is another Chinese performance artist becoming a little less inclined in middle age to punish his own body with the surgical insertion of various objects - reputedly at the insistence of his daughter. Chinese Bible is a beautiful and important installation - part art, part anthropology, part social action. Not unlike his good friend Ai Weiwei, Yang Zhichao made a formalist, minimalist arrangement of found objects, some dating from the Cultural Revolution. 

“Historical experience is written in iron and blood,” said Mao Zedong. In Chinese Bible, historical experience is written in thousands of humble, mass-produced notebooks once owned by ordinary Chinese people, their worn covers testament to the weathering of time and the vicissitudes of social change. Ai Weiwei says, “Everything is art. Everything is politics,” and Chinese Bible reveals a similar approach to art as a form of social engagement. I interviewed Yang Zhichao at SCAF with the translation assistance of Claire Roberts, who curated the show and had written a most wonderful catalogue essay. They told me that after the installation, on their way to a celebratory lunch in Chinatown, they asked their Chinese taxi driver if he would like to see the exhibition. He said he could not possibly, his memories are so painful it would make him weep. Later, in October, I met sculptor Shi Jindian at his home and studio in the mountains outside Chengdu. Disarmingly humble, polite and hospitable, as the day wore on he was becoming monosyllabic and I was worrying about why my interview with this artist was proving to be such hard going. He suddenly said, "I have lived through every period of recent Chinese history, and it was all terrible. I don't want to talk about the past." Like the Sydney taxi driver, and for so many others of his generation, there are just too many bitter memories. You can read the article and my interview with Yang Zhichao  HERE.

Yang Zhichao, Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail, 3,000 found books, Dimensions variable
Image courtesy: the Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Photo: Jenni Carter AGNSW

Lin Tianmiao, Badges 2009 White silk satin, coloured silk threads, gold embroidery frames made of stainless steel; sound component: 4 speakers with amplifier. Dimensions variable, diameters range from 25 cm - 120 cm, 266 badges total. Image courtesy: The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Photo: Jenny Carter

4 In the second part of this exhibition, 'Go East' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated from the Sherman collection by Suhanya Raffel, it was wonderful to finally see Lin Tianmiao's 'Badges' hanging in the imposing domed vestibule. Visiting her studio in 2013, I had watched her assistants stitching the texts, words describing women in Chinese and English, onto embroidery hoops. I had wondered what they were thinking as their nimble fingers stitched words like "Slut", "Whore" and "Fox Spirit" (a terrible name for a woman in Chinese.) I was amused in Sydney, where all the badges were Chinese,  to encounter shocked groups of Mandarin speaking tourists making their children look the other way. In this show, in addition to works by Zhang Huan and Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen's 'Suitcase Cities' were a highlight. A newly commissioned work by Ai Weiwei intrigued my students. ‘An Archive’ is a collection of the artist’s blog posts, banned since his efforts to name the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake attracted the attention of the authorities, presented in the form of traditional Chinese books in a beautiful timber box. A clever and more than usually subtle representation of Ai's resistance to the censorship and constraint that saw him confined to Beijing without possession of his passport, constantly under surveillance, until 22 July this year.

Kawayan De Guia. Bomba, 2011; installation comprising 18 mirror bombs, sputnik sound sculpture; dimensions variable. Collection of Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

5 In July, in Singapore, I saw 'After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art ' at the Singapore Art Museum, confirming my suspicion that after 'the sublime', 'Utopia' was THE buzzword of the 2015 artworld. It was an excellent and intriguing riff on the theme, featuring familiar works by Shen Shaomin and The Propellor Group with others that were new and wonderful discoveries. I loved 'Bomba': Eighteen sparkling 'bombs' hung in a darkened space. Terrifying disco balls promising destruction, they cast shards of light onto the Stations of the Cross that still adorn the walls of what was once the chapel of a Catholic school. Beautiful and menacing, Kawayan De Guia’s installation specifically references the bombing of Manila in World War II, but it also evokes the horrors of more recent conflicts, contrasting the glittery lure of hedonism with a dance of death. After that, Shen Shaomin's embalmed dictators lying in their glass coffins were an added bonus.

Shen Shaomin. Summit (detail – Ho Chi Minh), 2009; silica gel simulation, acrylic, and fabric; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

6 August was about planning and organising my own reinvention, from one kind of life to another, and in September I went to China for 5 weeks, to interview artists for a new project, which (of course) provided more highlights. Of these, perhaps the most remarkable was my visit to the studio/manufacturing hub of Xu Zhen and the MadeIn Company, in Shanghai. You would have to have been wearing a blindfold or lived in a cave to remain unaware of Xu Zhen, who appears to have taken on the mantle of Andy Warhol (although he told me that his favourite artists are Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney.) His enormous installations merge art and commerce, art and design, east and west, past and present, and any other form of post-internet hybridity you care to mention. He will feature in the 2016 Biennale of Sydney, and the work of the artist and his company of assistants and employees has been seen simultaneously in almost as many locations as the ubiquitous Ai Weiwei. (Although Xu Zhen himself does not fly, so everything is arranged and organised, and all research outside of China completed, by teams of MadeIn employees.) A focus artist at the 2014 New York Armory Show, and one of my top picks of last year for the spectacle of his retrospective exhibition at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Xu Zhen is given to gnomic Warhol-like utterances. "Chinese contemporary art nowadays is a farce filled with surprises," he told Ocula. 'Eternity' has been wowing audiences at the White Rabbit Gallery since early September. And watch out Sydney, there is a promise of more to come! 

Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company, Eternity, 2013-2014, glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, artificial stone, steel, mineral pigments, 15 m x 1 m x 3.4 m image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

7 And so to Shanghai in late September, and a major highlight of my year: the exhibition of an artist who should be a household name. Chen Zhen died (much too young) in Paris in 2000. Although after 1986 he essentially lived and worked in Paris, his personal history and deep cultural roots lay in China, and specifically in Shanghai. From the mid-1990s he returned over and over to a city on fast-forward. Shanghai was undergoing a massive, controversial transformation, in the process of becoming the global megalopolis it is today. The exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum presented works from this period. Sometimes witty, sometimes profoundly beautiful and melancholy, Chen Zhen’s works are steeped in his identity as a Chinese artist at a historical “tipping point.” As the artist said in his online project Shanghai Investigations, “without going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized.” To finally see 'Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body' was a revelation - both sad and beautiful. HERE is the whole story.

Chen Zhen. Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000; crystal, iron, glass; 95 x 70 x 190 cm. 
Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

With Wang Qingsong in his Studio, October 2015, Caochangdi, Beijing

8 is for Beijing, in October, and meetings over three action-packed weeks with a ridiculous number of interesting artists, all represented in the White Rabbit Collection. Old friends and new faces: Bu Hua, Bingyi, Li Hongbo, Zhu Jia, Wang Qingsong, Wang Guofeng, Liu Zhuoquan, Qiu Xiaofei, Lin Zhi, Huang Jingyuan, and Zhou Jinhua. Dinners with friends, long walks through the hutongs and the never-ending struggles of language learning. I journeyed through the smog to studios on Beijing's far outskirts, collecting stories and looking at extraordinary work, as I had done the previous week in Shanghai and Hangzhou. I left China with a kaleidoscope of impressions that are just starting to crystallise into the possibility of words. I saw Liu Xiaodong at the Faurschou Foundation and Ai Weiwei at Continua, but disappointingly missed Liu Shiyuan in Shanghai at the Yuz Museum. One of the youngest artists I interviewed in 2013 and 2014, her work will next show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, in an exhibition curated by Philip Tinari, among others, called 'Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation.'

9 is another repeat of one of my 2014 picks. The rather bizarre Red Brick Museum (practically empty on each occasion I have visited) on Beijing's northern outskirts was showing work by the artist who first inspired me to make Chinese art my focus of research, teaching and writing. Huang Yong Ping's fabulous thousand armed goddess of mercy was an unexpected delight when I visited in December of 2014. Again, in 2015, a new exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru (also the curator of the Chen Zhen show in Shanghai) presented a version of Baton - Serpent, seen in a previous Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. Not quite the 'words fail me' experience of seeing Leviathanation at Tang Gallery in 2011, or the 'Thousand Armed Guanyin' at the Shanghai Biennale in 2012, but nonetheless extraordinary. And all the more wonderful for being encountered in the deserted echoing spaces of one of China's newest museums.

10 And here we are, washed up on shore, arrived at the final, dog days of 2015. 

November to December, hmmm. What to pick? NOT 'Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol' at the NGV. If you have read my review (Click HERE if you want to) you know I had some issues with that exhibition - although I wish I had seen the London show at the Royal Academy. I admire Ai enormously for his genuine commitment - particularly his establishment of a studio on Lesbos to make art relating to the current refugee crisis. But boy oh boy did I hate those Lego portraits. And absolutely NOT the 'Rain Room' at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai - an empty spectacle. Nor anything at the major Sydney galleries - I cannot get excited about a few Renaissance works from Scotland, and Grayson Perry, whilst interesting, does not float my boat. 

YUAN GOANG-MING Dwelling - Moment III 2014. Digital Photography / Colour Photograph. 

120 x 180 cm Edition of 8. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery.

 I'm giving my Number 10 highlight spot to Yuan Goang-ming at Hanart TZ in Hong Kong. In this show, entitled Dwelling, we were presented with the uncomfortable intersection of the real and the apparently impossible. In the gallery space, an elegant table was laid as if for a dinner party, with crystal glasses and an ornate dinner service. Every now and then a loud clanking noise disrupted the silence, and the table shook as if the building had been hit by an earthquake. In the title work, Dwelling, (2014) the focus is a blandly modern living room, the only oddity the rather slow riffling pages of a magazine on the chair, a book on the coffee table. A breeze wafts the curtains. Suddenly, and without warning, the entire room explodes. Slowly, languidly, the wreckage of the room drifts back until the room once again regains its ordinary appearance. Filmed 

underwater, although it takes a while to realise this, the movement of every object seems dreamlike. Yuan suggests that what we accept as stable and fixed is in fact entirely unpredictable. In a split second, the apparently impossible can disrupt everything we take for granted. 

In my own 2015 version of the impossible becoming possible, I have changed careers, started new research and writing projects, and - in a total triumph of optimism over bitter experience, I enrolled in a new term of Chinese language classes.

Oh. And I have written a book. Out in February. 

Why art education matters: and what it's got to do with Ai Weiwei

Last week I took a group of 30 senior high school students to the exhibition of works from the Sherman Collection of Contemporary Asian Art, 'Go East' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. (I reviewed the show for 'The Art Life' - click here for my thoughts.)

Jitish Killat, Public Notice 2 (detail)  in Go East, image The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection and the Art Gallery of New South Wales

I was curious to see their responses to a show which is in many ways quiet and cerebral, opening with Jitish Kallat's (admittedly visually overwhelming) tribute to Mahatma Gandhi's famous Salt March speech, in which every word is represented with letters made out of replica bones, arranged on narrow ledges on a wall painted the colour of turmeric. The students were fascinated, responding thoughtfully - even tired, at the end of a long day, very close to final exams, and close to the looming deadline for the submission of their own bodies of work. Their willingness to look for the conceptual intentions and possible meanings behind each new artwork they encountered was heartening.

They have spent the last two years with me, immersed in contemporary art from around the globe. At first they had been frankly sceptical - we'd had a few of those "But how can that be art?" conversations that every teacher knows. So it delighted me to hear their earnest discussions of Song Dong's endurance performance, in which he lay prostrate on the winter-cold surface of Tiananmen Square, and then upon a frozen lake, discovering (rather to his surprise) that in that location his warm breath had no discernible effect on the ice. They talked about the subtle symbolism - and clever satirical intent - of any Chinese work produced after 1989 that uses the potent location of Tiananmen. Some saw a comment on the continuing elemental power of the natural world in comparison to the puny efforts of humanity. Others discerned a comment on the failure of artists and pro-democracy demonstrators to change the tragic course of events 26 years ago.

Zhang Huan
Family Tree, 200
C-type prints. Suite of 9 images
Edition 2/3
227 x 183 cm (Framed)
Image courtesy: The Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Photo: the artist

They looked with interest at Zhang Huan's 'Family Tree', reading it variously as the overwhelming power of written language and traditional culture over individual desires and freedoms, or alternatively as the sadness and loss of diaspora. Charwei Tsai's quietly meditative Buddhist sutra written on a mirror reflecting the ocean enthralled them, as did Tibetan artist Nortse's installation of the robes of Buddhist monks, arranged as if the seated monks have vanished into the blowing sand that covers the hem of each robe, overturned yak butter lamps indicating the overturning of tradition, religious practices and - again - the loss of language. Some knew about the practice of self-immolation, and others were completely horrified to learn of these acts of desperation.

Nortse, Zen Meditation, 6 monks' robes, butter lamps, Chinese money, scriptures, sand, metal frames,
image courtesy the Gene and Brian Sherman collection

The work that caused the most intense discussions, however, was by Ai Weiwei. Familiar with many of his works, from the iconoclastic smashed Han Dynasty urns to porcelain sunflower seeds, from 9,000 school backpacks representing young lives lost in the Sichuan earthquake to the recent (and I must confess, a little disappointing) installations on Alcatraz Island, my class were excited to see 'An Archive' - a work newly commissioned by Gene and Brian Sherman, and generously gifted to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Ai Weiwei, 'An Archive', huali wood, xuan paper, edition of 2 + 1 AP, image courtesy the Gene and Brian Sherman collection and Art Gallery of New South Wales

We had discussed its possible references and the artist's intentions before we went to the gallery, reading a little about the work, watching an informal video of Ai talking about it (and endearingly dropping the video camera, so the end footage is upside down). Nothing prepared them for the size of the beautifully constructed huali wood box, and its contents of 6000 large sheets of rice paper with every (banned) blog post and tweet made by the artist since around 2005. I had deliberately made no reference to it, wanting that first immediacy of seeing the actual, physical object to be a memorable and palpable experience: a salutary reminder of the power of an encounter with the original work of art rather than its reproduced 'shadow image'.

 I listened to their impassioned discussions in response to my question - why a wooden box? Why stacks of paper that cannot be read? Why transcribe something so essentially ephemeral as tweets? I cautioned them against identifying Ai Weiwei as a secular saint - the patron saint of free speech according to some western observers, or alternatively as a giant ego who "hoovers up all the oxygen" in the Beijing artworld, according to others. And with four (yes - four!) concurrent shows at four major Beijing galleries, nobody could say he's invisible, or unheard, even despite the continuing and constant surveillance to which he is subjected. Nevertheless, polarising though he might be, his practice provides rich and fascinating opportunities for my seventeen and eighteen-year-old students to hone their artwriting chops. I confess I would be a little happier if I didn't occasionally read responses that told me that Han Dynasty urns were important artefacts of the Cultural Revolution, but hey, you can't have everything!

At the end of the day, the bizarre rite of passage that is the Higher School Certificate examination aside, what I take with me from this afternoon is the genuine interest my students showed in looking carefully, slowly and with keen intelligence at contemporary art that is not easy or quick to decipher. Even more importantly, that critical ability to make connections, to "join the dots", to make informed inferences and logical deductions, as well as those all too rare intuitive, imaginative leaps that make the heart sing. “So if you set a model of what it means to look hard at something, think a while about it before you open your mouth, and then articulate it carefully—you will have done your job as a critic," said  Robert Storr, Dean of the School of Art at Yale. He was talking about art criticism, but what a principle for an intelligent, interesting and thoughtful life!  I believe that my students (maybe not all, but certainly most) will take this with them into their adult lives, and be the richer for it. And THAT is why an academically rigorous and challenging art education matters.

Ai Weiwei, 'Overcoat', military coat and 2 digital prints, image courtesy the Gene and Brian Sherman collection

Go East

Jitish Kallat, Public Notice 2, 2007,
image courtesy the Gene and Brian Sherman collection and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation,
Photo: Hangar Biocca, Milan

Important works from the private collection of Gene and Brian Sherman are revealed to the public in Sydney in an exhibition across two spaces: 'Go East', curated by Suhanya Raffel at the venerable and slightly staid Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Yang Zhichao's monumental performance installation, 'Chinese Bible' at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The Shermans have given this work, and another significant installation by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat, to the museum. In comparison with the wonderful collection of contemporary art from Asia in the permanent collection of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, the holdings of AGNSW are rather woeful: it is to be hoped that these two very significant and generous gifts may kickstart a more dynamic acquisitions program that acknowledges the significance of Asian art, and our place within Asia.

Yang Zhichao
Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail)
3,000 found books
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy: The Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW

My review of the exhibition, in which I was thrilled to encounter familiar works by Lin Tianmiao and Yin Xiuzhen, artists I have interviewed in China in the last two years, seeing them in a new light, was published today on The Art Life:

To title an exhibition of contemporary Asian art ‘Go East’ might seem deliberately provocative, given the geographical reality that Asia is not, in fact, to our east. It hints at Orientalism, at ‘Otherness’, at post-colonialism, as curator Suhanya Raffel acknowledges in her excellent catalogue essay. But it also acknowledges another reality: since the 1980s, despite many a political and diplomatic hiccup along the way, Australia has, in fact, turned to the metaphoric and cultural (if not the geographical) east.

Lin Tianmiao, 'Badges', 2009, white silk satin, coloured silk threads, gold embroidery frames made of stainless steel, sound component: 4 speakers with amplifier, dimensions variable, image courtesy the Gene and Brian Sherman Collection and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Photo: Galerie Lelong, New York

The history of our engagement with contemporary art from Asia is filled with significant exhibitions, strong private and public collection programs, and cultural exchanges, of which ‘Go East’ is an important example. Since the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation’s first commissioned project with Ai Weiwei in 2008, many of these discourses have been instigated by Gene Sherman. Through subsequent projects Australian audiences have been introduced to works by Chiharu Shiota, Charwei Tsai, Yang Fudong, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan andDinh Q. Le, to name just a few. ‘Go East’, an exhibition of works from the Gene and Brian Sherman collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, features these artists and others from China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet and Vietnam. It presents compelling evidence that an artistic ‘pivot to Asia’ will continue to enrich, provoke, and delight audiences.

Meanwhile, at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Paddington, Yang Zhichao’s ‘Chinese Bible’ fills the space recently vacated by Shaun Gladwell’s watery ‘Lacrima Chair.’ A sea of red, interspersed with flashes of blue, yellow and green, ‘Chinese Bible’ comprises three thousand personal notebooks and diaries collected by the artist in Beijing’s Panjiayuan ‘Dirt Market’, revealing a hidden history. Showing in tandem with ‘Go East’, the work represents the tsunami of change weathered by ordinary Chinese people over the fifty turbulent years from 1949 to 1999. Exhibitions, Gene Sherman told her audience at the opening of ‘Chinese Bible’, are “primary sites for the construction of art history. Exhibitions tell the story of art. They reveal untold or forgotten aspects of history - not just art history - and they shine the light on social injustices. Exhibitions are where artworks meet audiences.”

Yang Zhichao
Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail)
3,000 found books
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy: The Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW

These humble notebooks and diaries, rescued from oblivion, washed and presented as found objects, are filled with self-criticisms, transcribed passages of compulsory ‘Mao Zedong Thought’, mechanical diagrams, even (forbidden) personal reflections, poetry, knitting patterns and recipes. Laid out in symmetrical rows on a raised platform, the almost uniform red of their covers presents an allusion to the modernist grid – another kind of failed utopian vision. Their cover designs reflect periods of recent history, with pictures of animals, temples, traditionally costumed characters, and dancers disappearing in the years of collective madness between 1966 and 1976, when the Cultural Revolution made every element of an individual’s dreams, desires or memories suspect and taboo. Those covers are plain red, or adorned with images of Mao.

Better known for provocative performance works involving bodily mutilation and even surgery (most notably having tufts of grass from his home province surgically implanted in his back) Yang has found a new calm and quietness. Like other transgressive artists of the period such as Zhang Huan (whose ‘Sydney Buddha’ featured at Carriageworks over the summer) Yang Zhichao appears to be reflecting on his own and China’s history. I asked the artist about this change in his practice. “It relates to the introduction of performance art into China – in 1989 it was a very new thing, and was introduced into China from outside,” he said. “From 1995 to 2005 it was kind of a ‘golden age’ of Chinese performance art - it was an art form that put the artist in opposition to a variety of things: to society in general, to living conditions, to governmental regulations, and of course to the artworld itself. It was such a meaningful practice. In the period 2005 – 2015 there has been significant change in China that has also contributed to a change in art practice. Looking back over the last ten years… in general it has changed to a less confrontational mode.” And, he added, somewhat ruefully, “Also, artists have aged!”

To read more, click HERE.

Noun or Verb? "COMMUNE" at the White Rabbit Gallery

I must have really loved the new curated show of Judith Neilson's collection of contemporary Chinese art because I have managed to write two different reviews for two very different publications published within a week of each other.

Bai Yiluo. Spring and Autumn 1, 2007; wood, metal, farm tools. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Here is an extract from the article now up on the Daily Serving website:

COMMUNE at White Rabbit Gallery of Contemporary Chinese Art

The word commune, whether used as a noun or a verb, has complex connotations. From earnest Utopianism to grim, state-enforced collectivism; from familial relationships and networks to our connection with the natural world—all of these possible associations are present in the new show at Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery of Contemporary Chinese Art. From Judith Neilson’s impressive collection, curator Bonnie Hudson has selected works by twenty-three artists. They include representatives of the older generation that emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, characterized by transgressive experimentation and a merging of the local and global in their practice, through to young (in some cases, very young) artists whose work reflects their experiences growing up in the “new China.” Theirs is a world of chaotic energy, the newly globalised world into which Chinese people were catapulted by Deng Xiaoping’s socio-economic reforms, the transformative effects of which continue to convulse every aspect of Chinese life. As you might expect, an exhibition that explores this world has moments of both darkness and light. The artists examine the complex, shifting realities of contemporary China, including changing structures of family life, relationships between old and young, and the conflict between self-actualization and the collective past.

Xia Xing. 2010, 2010-2011; oil on canvas; 35 x 50 cm (x 60). Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

A series of paintings by Xia Xing embodies these paradoxes. The artist collects press photographs from the Beijing News, a mass daily with a circulation of 450,000. In 2007 he was working as a reporter at the paper and became fascinated with how it shaped public opinion and represented only selected aspects of daily life in a time of flux and change. Trained as an oil painter, Xia had found his subject. He began to paint the images he saw on the front page of the newspaper. For 2010, he reproduced one photograph for every day of the year, emulating the commercial printing process in a painstaking application of layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow. There is no caption, no headline; from the sixty closely cropped paintings shown here, we must guess what the images represent. Each alludes to a private joy, tragedy, or conflict that has been made—all too fleetingly—public. By preserving these ephemeral images, Xia Xing documents a particular time in China’s history, structured as a series of apparently unconnected fragments. We encounter the man whose hands were amputated by a criminal against whom he had given evidence, the parents of missing children, the forced demolitions and removal of people from their homes, the polluted rivers and lakes. We sense the artist’s horror at a never-ending catalog of disaster and anguish. The artist as witness—a continuing theme in China’s contemporary art.

Ai Weiwei. Sunflower Seeds, 2010; porcelain, 500 kg. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Bai Yiluo’s Spring and Autumn 1 (2007)  is juxtaposed with these paintings. A life-size tree with branches fashioned from old farming implements, with outstretched rakes, shovels, and pitchforks poignantly evoking the dependence on the seasons, the rhythms of nature, the times of planting and harvesting that dictate the lives of those who farm the land. One is also reminded of the obsession with rural agriculture of Mao’s revolutionaries: the ill-fated campaigns to eradicate the sparrows during the Great Leap Forward that caused enormous hunger and hardship; the rustication programs that sent urban “educated youth” to toil on communal farms and “learn from the peasants.” The work is very beautiful, and in its restrained use of weathered, rusted found objects, it is reminiscent of Ai Weiwei’s continued use of the “things” that evoke China, from ancient urns to three-legged stools and Qing Dynasty tables. Ai himself is represented by a pile of his porcelain sunflower seeds, that street snack shared among friends in hungry times in the past. These sunflower seeds have multiple meanings. They may be read as a comment on the ancient traditions of porcelain manufacture and its significance in trade with the West, or as a critique of mass production in China, “the world’s factory.” The realization that each seed, apparently identical, is actually different, reminds us of the weight of China’s population. The seeds also allude to Maoist iconography, which represented Mao as the sun, the Chinese people as sunflowers turning toward him. This is a subtle and clever acknowledgement of the tensions even today between individualism and collectivism.

Click HERE to read more

COMMUNE-ing at the White Rabbit Gallery

人民 公社 (Renmin Gongshe) is what my Chinese dictionary suggests as the most appropriate translation for the word "Commune". A "People's Collective" of the kind introduced in China in the later 1950s as amalgamations of collective farms. This is the title of the new exhibition at Sydney's White Rabbit Gallery, although the curator is playing her cards close to her chest about whether her intention was to think of the term as a noun or a verb, or possibly both. As is usual with shows at this Sydney gallery, a museum privately funded by the Neilson Foundation and exhibiting works drawn from Judith Neilson's impressive (and growing) collection of contemporary Chinese art, the works and their juxtapositions have much to tell us about China.

Here is an excerpt of my review of the show, published in The Art Life yesterday:

The unveiling of a new exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery is always an eagerly anticipated event. After the sombre mood of ‘Serve the People’, curated last year by Edmund Capon, and this year’s thought-provoking ‘Reformation’ the new show provides quite a different experience. Curator Bonnie Hudson has selected works which create a complex narrative about collectivism versus individualism; about the joys and sorrows of family; and about the ways in which the past pervades the present.

In the Imperial past, the Confucian ideal of filial piety placed family at the centre of Chinese life. Duty to family was far more important than the desires or freedoms of an individual. Under Mao, collectivism defined each person as a member of their group, whether that was a rural communal farm or an industrial “danwei” or work unit. From the cradle to the grave, the well-being of the group took precedence – people were told who to marry, what university course they were permitted to study and where they could work. Today, very few of those strictures remain. Even the much-hated “hukou” - the household registration system which dictates where people can live and work - is being dismantled, and so is the one-child policy.

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, ceramic, dimensions variable, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Despite the greater freedom today it can sometimes appear as if the idealism of the revolutionary past has been replaced by a cynical belief in the inevitability of corruption; collectivism by a competitive culture of crass materialism. Young people have no experience of the hardships suffered by their parents and grandparents, and as a consequence there is more than the usual tension between generations. COMMUNE features twenty-three artists, from significant international figures now aged in their fifties, such as Ai Weiwei and Hu Jieming, to younger practitioners such as Gao Rong and Wang Cheng. Together, in clever curatorial juxtapositions, they explore some of the tensions and contradictions of contemporary China. Beyond that, though, the exhibition weaves a narrative about family, belonging, and connectedness. There is a bitter-sweet character to this show that I found immensely moving.

Bai Yiluo, Spring and Autumn 1, 2007, wood, metal, farm-tools, 400 x 350 x 350 cm, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

On the top floor of the gallery, new media pioneer Hu Jieming’s ‘Remnant of Images’ fills the gallery space with the sound of filing cabinet drawers and doors sliding open and closed again, symbolising the selective and transient nature of memory. Institutional metal cabinets are filled with flickering animated photographs from China’s past and present. Hu Jieming uses new technologies and media to reveal how we are all now inter-connected in a digital world. “It’s like a socialism of the future,” he told me when we met in his Shanghai studio. His work often reflects China’s past and its uncomfortable and dramatic trajectory into an entirely new society. By combining his own photographs of friends and family with iconic Mao-era imagery, and adding random photographs found on the internet, Hu evokes the presence of history in the now, the interrelatedness of past and present.

Hu Jieming, The Remnant of Images, 2013, cabinets, LED screens, photographs, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery.

What unites the diverse artists represented in this exhibition is an awareness that the past is not “another country” - although it often seems that way – in fact, it shapes our current reality and the ways in which we connect and re-connect with others. Whether you choose to interpret the title of the exhibition as a noun or a verb; as a reminder of the socialist past or as an exhortation, COMMUNE is profoundly moving. Don’t miss it!

To read the whole review, click HERE!

The show includes one of my current favourite artists, Gao Rong, and a beautifully elegiac video by Zhu Jia entitled 'Waltz', embodying in one clever, absorbing and beautifully cinematic work so many of the themes I find in contemporary art from China: a pervasive melancholy, a layering of  past and present, a mixture of nostalgia with an acknowledgement of the betrayal of idealism, a deep cynicism.  There is joy too of course, and it is present here in many works. But 'Waltz' is just beautiful and it haunted me long after I had left the gallery and was walking the currently bleakly rainswept Sydney streets.

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.