Magic Carpet Ride: Lin Tianmiao's Protruding Patterns at Galerie Lelong, New York

Lin Tianmiao, Protruding Patterns, 2014, wool thread, yarn, acrylic, dimensions variable, installation view at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, Image courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York

Imagine my disappointment to be invited to the solo New York show of Lin Tianmiao - and to know that there is no way in the world that I can be there. However, I was lucky enough to be in New York when her major retrospective at Asia Society was showing, and I count myself VERY lucky indeed to have been able to interview Lin Tianmiao twice at her Beijing studio, and see for myself the spaces in which her extraordinary textile installations are produced.

It seems that this show continues her fascination, last seen in her embroidered 'Badges',  with language and how it delimits - and limits - women. The Galerie Lelong Press Release states:
"Over the past six years, Lin has collected around 2,000 words and expressions about women in various languages. Pulling from popular novels, newspapers, the internet, and colloquial dialogues, she has gathered phrases such as “divinité,” “Mori girl,” and “leftover women.” Some are predictably derogatory to women, demonstrating the continued ubiquity of sexist attitudes reinforced by language, while others are directly recovered from obsolescence, representing the nuanced mix of confusion, humor, self-deprecation, and empowerment that accompanies the shifting consciousness of women. This lexicon is woven into thickly raised wool forms so that viewers can feel the visceral and literal protruding patterns while touching and walking on the carpets."

As with the 'Badges' works which include familiar English terms including the entirely predictable tramp, whore and slut along with terms very specific to the Chinese context such as 'phoenix lady' and 'xiao san er' (a 'little third' is a mistress) these works too combine terms such as 'ghetto bird'  and 'Beauty Queen' with, as seen below, 'Zhongguo Da Ma'. Literally "Chinese Aunties" the term refers to middle-aged Chinese women who rushed to invest in gold in 2013 when gold prices plunged,

Lin Tianmiao, F + You No. 1, 2017, Black velvet, woolen yarn, silk thread, cotton thread, 100 x 100 cm, image courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York

In my first interview with Lin Tianmiao, in the bitterly cold Beijing winter of 2012, she was extremely definite discussing her views on feminism and feminist art.
 “How do you feel about being called a feminist artist?” I am emboldened to ask. Lin thinks for a moment, then says, “I don’t think there is any feminism in China. Mao said that women hold up half the sky but we have not reached that level.” She denies making her own works in any kind of a conscious response to her reading of feminist theory. “In fact I think feminism is from the west,” she says."

Click HERE for a link to the interview, published on The Culture Trip

This fall, Lin will also be featured in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lin will present a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, which will simultaneously feature her work in the group exhibition Annealing. In Spring 2018, Lin will also present a solo exhibition at the Bund Art Museum, Shanghai. Her work is in many prestigious institutions worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hong Kong Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Seattle Art Museum; Shanghai Museum of Glass; Sherman Foundation, Sydney; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. 
And to this list must also be added Sydney's own White Rabbit Gallery, where two works from her early 'Focus' series have just been showing in the recently concluded exhibition 'The Dark Matters'.

The New York show at Galerie Lelong New York September 9 through October 21. If you're in Manhattan, check it out.

 

Lin Tianmiao, Bound and Unbound, image courtesy the artist

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. 

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.

Zhong guo "Zai Jian" - for now

A large wall text at the entrance to the "Andy Warhol - 15 minutes eternal" exhibition currently showing at the Hong Kong Art Museum reads, " Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art". This is curiously appropriate in Hong Kong, a city where, artist Celia Ko told me tonight, "money is the only language that everybody speaks."

Hmmm. Money and art. Who knew? Always a hugely problematic nexus, and ideas about the relationship of one to the other are contested bitterly. In Beijing there is no denying that a number of artists became seriously wealthy in the art boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. And cynical views are expressed by some in the artworld that everything and everyone have been corrupted by that.

However while everybody needs to earn a living and artists are not exempt from the normal kinds of greed and desire for comfort and ease that we are all heir to, I am prepared to go out on a limb and say that each of the seventeen artists I have interviewed on this trip are absolutely and seriously dedicated to making art that expresses deeply felt ideas and beliefs, and work incredibly hard to develop their practice and pursue a goal of excellence, whatever the art market might be doing.

Gao Ping, oil on canvas, image reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

Gao Ping told me, "Every year I want to find something new in my work" and added, "The drawing is my heart". Lin Tianmiao said, "Being an artist is a very personal thing. We are the people who raise the questions - the critical thinking is the most important thing". You can read a more detailed account of my interview with this iconic figure, currently showing at Lelong in New York, here: http://dailyserving.com/2012/12/holding-up-half-the-sky-an-interview-with-lin-tianmiao/

Lin Tianmiao, thread winding work viewed in the artist's studio,
 photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with the permission of the artist

Liang Yuanwei, who spent three months in Berlin after a less than happy experience representing China at the Venice Biennale, said. "My work is like a tunnel between myself and the world. It must be true."

Liang Yuanwei in her Beijing studio, December 2012
Photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist

Liang Yuanwei, Flower Study for the Golden Notes series, oil on canvas
Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

Liu Zhuoquan makes very beautiful works that contain within them some carefully coded meanings about issues in China today. Wu Meng makes works in the public space in Shanghai at considerable personal risk to herself and her family, raising issues of vital concern such as the suicides of workers in the factories of southern China, or the unfair treatment of migrant workers. And Lam Tung-pang in Hong Kong, whose work is currently showing at Saatchi in London, makes works which reflect his feelings of anxiety and distress about what is happening to his beloved city, and his search for quietness and repose in a re-examination of the traditions of ink painting.

Lam Tung-pang in his studio, Hong Kong December 2012,
photograph Luise Guest  reproduced with the permission of the artist

Lam Tung-pang, studio view

Lam Tung-pang, 2 sided work based on Tang Dynasty horse, photographed in the studio
Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

Lam Tung-pang, exhibition of work at Goethe Institut, Hong Kong, installation view
image reproduced with permission of the artist

I have interviewed painters and performance artists, photographers and sculptors, artists who work with found objects and found images, those who reinvent traditional Chinese forms such as ink painting or gong bi style painting and those who seek an entirely new visual language. I have met famous and revered artists, and artists newly graduated from art academies. I have met curators and gallery directors and critics.

Monika Lin, "On the Way to the Imperial Examination",
performance piece in which the artist wrote the character 'mi' (rice) 10,000 times
Image reproduced with permission of the artist

Shi Zhiying in her Shanghai studio,
Photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist

I have also met two wonderful and inspirational art teachers with whom I hope to collaborate on some projects with our respective art students - art that crosses national boundaries and limitations of culture and language, that sounds good!

I have learned enough to make my brain feel as if it is overflowing with new information, enough for a book! We'll see... I have loved the experience of travelling with this sense of purpose and in a spirit of enquiry, and have been warmly welcomed everywhere. I have sat in ice cold freezing studios in old 'Shikumen' houses in the French Concession in Shanghai, and in Caochangdi and Songzhuang artists' villages on the outskirts of Beijing. Today, after visiting Lam Tung-pang in his new studio in Fo Tan, I caught a local mini bus to Sha Tin Station, blaring Chinese opera all the way.

From the sublime to the truly ridiculous, Hong Kong has it. Yesterday I saw an eagle floating, suspended, high above the clustered apartment buildings as I rode down the hills from the Peak on the top deck of a bus. Today, in the shopping mall above the Sha Tin MTR station, I came across a brand of handbags and wallets called 'Shag Wear' - I swear this is true! Yesterday, in Canton Road, two young men in the jostling crowd carried sandwich boards advertising 'The Battery Operated Nasal Aspirator".

I have been observing - sometimes feeling like a voyeur - the people in each city as they go about their lives, Old men and women playing cards, mahjong, chess, doing Tai Chi, ballroom dancing, playing bowls. Such constant activity! And here in Hong Kong have been touched by the way tiny, wizened old ladies are led gently by daughters and grand-daughters down jostling Kowloon streets. And also by the general tenderness shown in every  city I have visited to babies and children. Not surprising in the land of the one child policy, changing though that may be. Often in Australia I observe parents respond to their small children with exasperation and impatience as their default position. Not so in China.

It is perhaps ironic that part of my purpose here has been to discover what the effect of international dialogues, residencies and exhibitions has been on the work of Chinese artists, and how they have been changed by these experiences. A lot more remains to discover on that topic, but in the meantime the person most changed by the dialogue is me.

Zhongguo - Zai Jian!

Zhe Shi Beijing: 4 artist studios and a private villa

4 Signs seen from a Beijing taxi:

• The Dongxinghua Bilingual Art Kindergarten (everything seems to have the word 'art' attached as a sales pitch, I have also seen an 'art' Polo Club)
• The Soluxe Winterless Hotel ( at a temperature of minus 3 degrees I was tempted)
• The Sparkle Glitter World Shopping Mall (build it and they will come)
• and, finally, the Beijing Stomatological Hospital (possibly what I needed after eating sea cucumber)

 3 Items from the China Daily:

• 14 dead in fire caused by gasleak in hotpot restaurant
• high speed trains forced to slow down as people insist on smoking in the carriages
• Men's groups welcome the election of an all-male Politbureau Standing Committee as a 'step in the right direction'

Beijing continues to fascinate, delight and appall in equal measures.

Intersection in what was until recently a small village

I spent this morning with the artist Lin Tianmiao, whose work I had seen recently in a big retrospective show at the Asia Society Museum in New York. We drove for over an hour through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cleared farmland, fields of grey rubble, construction sites and brand spanking new apartment blocks in row upon row as far as the eye can see. Finally, down a private tree lined street in Songzhuang Artist Village, to a fortress-like villa, the home of Lin Tianmiao and her husband the video artist Wang Gongxin. Five huge dogs in the garden of the villa across the street leapt at the fence, snarling and barking in a most disconcerting manner.

Living space in studio of Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin

Once inside, the private spaces and light filled studio are extraordinary and wonderful. As we sat and waited for Lin Tianmiao and her assistant, we listened to the finches in a huge birdcage and the splashing of goldfish in a pool. Two large dogs roamed the garden outside the windows, with trees covered for the winter. Finally I realised that the strange shuffling noise I was hearing was a large tortoise in the corner of the room, emerging briefly and moving towards us, then retreating into its shell. I had time to look at the contents of the floor to ceiling bookshelves. DVDs ranging from Dr Doolittle 3 to Zhang Yimou revealed a broad and eclectic taste. Books on the coffee table with beautiful tea cups and bowls included Susan Sontag, a Foto Folio collection of potraits of New York artists in the 1980s and 1990s, and a book on Georgia O' Keeffe's houses.

Living space in studio of Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin

So strange to sit for half an hour in someone else's space, a space which revealed so much of the life lived therein. Artworks were everywhere, from Wang Gongxin's new digital animations to works by Lin Tianmiao herself and many other artists both Chinese and Western. A shelf of photographs includes recent snapshots and family photographs from the Cultural Revolution period.

The studio is a revelation - a white calm space filled with works in progress, and a staff of maybe 20 studio assistants working silently - winding colourful silk thread around synthetic bones or stitching the 'badges' similar to those currently showing at Galerie Lelong New York. Other workers  assemble the sculptures of bones connected to tools, bound with thread. Lin Tianmiao walks quietly through and makes adjustments. I asked her if, in the years she worked as a graphic designer in New York before her return to China and emergence as an artist to be reckoned with, she could have imagined all this. She shakes her head. The New York years, were hard, she says, although she loved the energy of that city she herself was not left with the energy to think about becoming an artist. Returning to China was also hard, but she thinks China now has the creative energy that New York may have lost.

Works in progress, Lin Tianmiao

Assistant working on 'badges', Lin Tianmiao studio

Studio View, Lin Tianmiao studio

Studio View, Lin Tianmiao's studio

We talk over tiny, delicate cups of tea about the use of thread, hair, felt and other textiles in her work. She tells me that in her childhood, her mother was 'sent to the countryside' (read into that what you will) for three years, and it was there that she remembers her mother learning how to spin and sew. The basic, physical nature of the materials which connect us to the natural world and to bodily realities are what interests her. I am fascinated but not surprised that she nominates Louise Bourgeois as an artist she admires.

Lin Tianmiao in her studio, December 6 2013,
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

She rejects the feminist label with which she is often identified, believing that feminism is a western thing and that China is not yet at that point. So many other pressing problems, she says: food safety, pollution, corruption, politics....She also rejects the idea that she may be a role model or inspiration for younger female artists, stating bluntly that every artist must forge their own path. Art is a personal and spontaneous thing, she tells me. However, she does acknowledge that when women have children they change, become stronger and yet also more vulnerable. It is this paradox that her work most beautifully explores.

I think of some of the other women I have met in the last few days:

• Gao Ping whose work ranges from tiny, delicate fragile ink drawings of lonely toys, furniture and household appliances to the most wonderful, strong paintings in a palette of subtle grisaille.

Gao Ping in her studio, December 5 2012,
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

• Dai Dan Dan who I found applying sequins and sparkly beads to 'scholar rocks' sourced in the Beijing fish and bird market. With her husband, Huang Xu, she created an exhibition installation shown in Shanghai and Hong Kong with the enviably fabulous title of 'Mr and Mrs Huang in the Humble Administrator's Garden'.

Dai Dandan and Huang Xu (Mr and Mrs Huang) in their shared studio
December 5 2012,
Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artists

• Li Tingting who works quietly to reinvent the traditions of ink painting and develop her own visual language of line, mark and drip, reflecting on her immediate domestic and feminine world.

Li Tingting with her work at 798, December 2 2012,
Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

• Chu Haina who takes her camera on lonely walks around the streets and parks of northern Beijing, seeking images that echo her feelings.

Chu Haina at Egg Gallery Beijing, December 4,
Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Chu Haina, Hidden Landscape No 1, Digital Print

All these women are both strong and vulnerable. The thing I have most loved about talking to them is their absolute lack of self conscious 'cool' or the adopting of personae. They talk with evident sincerity, seriousness and thoughtfulness about their work. There is no posturing. That is something very refreshing!


See my review of the Lin Tianmiao show at the Asia Society Museum in New York here: The Art Life: masculinity and femininity in new york

See my review of Gao Ping's Australian show at Stella Downer Fine Art here: http://theartlife.com.au/2012/still-life-girls/