Sworn Sisters: 结拜姊妹

I've been a long time away from this blog, regretfully: writing full time about Chinese contemporary art, and (because, clearly, I'm insane) undertaking a PhD on top of that full-time job has taken all the time I have. There are not enough hours in the day. Sometimes lately I have to remind myself to breathe. But....

Luo Yang, 'Xie Yue' (from the series GIRLS) 2015 digital print on fine art paper 70x100cm (unique edition)
image courtesy Vermilion Art

An event last week in Sydney is not something that I can let pass without comment. Vermilion Art bravely showed the first exhibition of Chinese women artists in Australia, curated by former Australian Ambassador to China, Geoff Raby. I say 'bravely' because the history of all-women exhibitions inside and outside of China is contested and complicated. And I say that, too, as someone who has curated one: 'Half the Sky' at Beijing's Red Gate Gallery in 2016 was an exhibition I organised with Tony Scott to coincide with the launch of my book of the same name. I had decided that the only possible curatorial premise was a very simple one: a selection of interesting work by women who featured in my book. I did not apply any over-arching conceptual premise to connect them, although several possible themes and tendencies did emerge. Most of these were ignored by reporters, though, who only wanted to ask me about my views of the 'leftover women' phenomenon and what people in Australia thought of it.Sigh.

In the 1990s in China there were a number of all-women exhibitions that left artists a little bruised and critics a little bemused. The reasons are sufficient for a whole doctoral thesis, but suffice it to say that one artist said to me, 'They don't have exhibitions and call them "exhibitions of mens' work", they're just exhibitions! Why should women be any different?' I don't agree with this, because of course the point is that there are still far too few women artists represented in the big curated shows - including the dismal statistic of 9 women in more than 72 artists in the recent Guggenheim exhibition, 'Art And China After 1989: Theater of the World'. But the conundrum of 'nüxing yishu' (womens' art) and what the term might imply is at the heart of my own research. Like everything else in China, it's complicated.

At Vermilion Art, though, 'Sworn Sisters' navigates these potential pitfalls in interesting ways, presenting the work of 9 very diverse artists who yet strangely complement each other. Xiao Lu, whose reputation as a 'bad girl' was forever cemented by her notorious performance in 1989 at the China/Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing, when she fired a pistol into her own installation, is represented by photographs and video of a recent performance work. No less transgressive, this performance resulted in a serious injury to the artist's hand as she cut and hacked her way out of a block of ice which gradually became stained with her blood.

Xiao Lu, 'Polar' documentation of performance, 2016, C-print, image courtesy Vermilion Art

'Polar' is one of a series of recent performances that employ ink, water and ice - and sometimes all three at once. They follow some years of the artist's struggle to come to terms with childlessness, menopause and ageing. Xiao underwent 'Tui Na' massage and wrote Tang Dynasty poetry with medicinal herbs, practising calligraphy every day and immersing herself once more in Chinese aesthetics and philosophical traditions. Here, though, ink and water are used to quite different ends, in punishing durational performances which are often very beautiful, albeit sometimes  violent or self-destructive. The materiality of ink and water is particularly Chinese, and Xiao Lu is intentionally referring to the yin and yang binaries of Daoist philosophy. In the work below (not shown in  the exhibition), frozen blocks of Chinese ink and water slowly melted and dripped over the white-robed figure of the artist, with photographs of the earlier blood-stained performance in the background.

Xiao Lu, Hanging Ice (悬冰), 2017, performance and installation, image courtesy the artist

The title of the exhibition alludes to the semi-secret 'women's language' of Nüshu, a script form once taught by mothers to their daughters in remote villages of Jiangyong County in Hunan Province - and, incidentally, another key element of my PhD research. Nüshu was used to embroider poems onto fans, belts, and into 'Third Day Missives', books given to young brides by their 'Sworn Sisters' as they left their parents and their village for an uncertain future. Men could not read Nüshu, and, according to the scholar Fei-Wen Liu, were not tempted to try: it was scorned as a vernacular for mere women, confined to the home, their feet bound, and denied education. It is tempting to think that the work of these contemporary artists is another kind of female coded language, similarly designed to represent aspects of female experience.

Other works in 'Sworn Sisters' include a print of one of Chen Qingqing's ethereal robes made of dried grasses, and a Joseph Cornell-style weathered timber drawer containing a little naked plastic doll, her blonde head weighed down as if by the intolerable weight of memory. Called The Long March (2014), it recalls Qingqing's own dramatic life story: sent away from her family to cadre school during the Cultural Revolution she drove tractors, worked as assistant to a barefoot doctor, and much later became a corporate executive working in Germany, before returning to China to join the burgeoning contemporary art movement centred on the 798 art district. You can see my story about Qingqing here:Between Memory and Metaphor

It is wonderful to see more work from rising star Geng Xue, following the popular triumph of her installation and animation Mr Sea at White Rabbit Gallery in 'Ritual Spirit', an exhibition of her works on paper in the last show at Vermilion Art, and her selection for the Biennale of Sydney, where The Poetry of Michelangelo has been showing at Artspace. The conceptual artist is represented here by two earlier porcelain works; they are delicate and ethereal and I was immensely relieved that somebody in the enormous crowd on the opening night did not somehow back into their vitrines and destroy them!

Geng Xue, 'Untitled 2' porcelain 2016 25x25x25cm, image courtesy Vermilion Art

Geng Xue, Untitled 1, porcelain 2015 45x35x35cm image courtesy Vermilion Art

My current obsession is focused on contemporary adaptations and reinventions of Chinese ink, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Cindy Ng's works here. Surprisingly, it was in the British Museum's Chinese rooms that this Macau-born, Beijing based artist first explored the traditions of Chinese ink painting, while she was studying in London. In 1996, Ng moved to Taipei to continue her studies in contemporary ink painting and held a solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum, before later moving to the mainland to live and work in Beijing. Her work is rooted in her knowledge of Song Dynasty ink painting, but in her paintings, videos and photographs ink is freed from its history as a vehicle for imagery - she experiments with digital forms, and new media as well as painting. Having  seen Cindy Ng's work in a Shanghai gallery in 2011, when I was first beginning to study and write about Chinese contemporary art, I was delighted to see these beautiful works once again.

Cindy Ng 'Ink 1711' 2015, ink acrylic on paper, 30cm, image courtesy Vermilion Art

In his speech at the opening, which was attended by an astonishing 300 people, and included a performance by an opera singer and by artist Rose Wong, Geoff Raby said that his aim was to 'shatter stereotypes of Chinese women'. In a number of ways the works in 'Sworn Sisters' reveal women from different generations and  backgrounds who subvert gendered expectations of what 'womens' art' - and, indeed, 'Chinese art' - might look like. And that can only be a good thing.

Between Memory and Metaphor: Qing Qing

One of my most treasured recent encounters in my journeying through the Chinese artworld was with the somewhat reclusive (but completely delightful) Qing Qing. From the moment she appeared at her gate with her dogs to welcome me, then insisting on making various different herbal teas to cure my persistent (and no doubt very annoying) Beijing cough, she could not have been more engaging and straightforward. Her work is fascinating, and her house is a treasure trove of artifacts, of sculptural tableaux owing something to Cornell, something to Rauschenberg and dada, and something (disturbingly) to Hans Bellmer; but also retaining something absolutely Chinese and Buddhist shrine-like. Her life story is frankly astonishing. My interview with her was published today on The Culture Trip.

With Qing Qing in Songzhuang, April 2014

Here it is:

Chen Qing Qing (usually known simply as Qing Qing) layers past and present in her surreal sculptural installations. Best known for her beautiful, ethereal imperial robes made of grass and hemp, she also creates diorama-like works inspired by her early love for Joseph Cornell’s magical box sculptures, and more recently she has branched out into fibreglass figurative sculpture. Luise Guest talks to Qing Qing in her Songzhuang studio near Beijing.

Qing Qing in her studio, image courtesy the artist and Red Gate Gallery

Memory and metaphor are everywhere in Qing Qing’s work – some of her own earliest recollections are of hearing the shouts of the Red Guards outside her parents’ courtyard home in Beijing, trembling with fear of what was to come. Today, she lives and works in a beautiful, tranquil house and studio (designed by an architect friend to her own specifications in a spiralling shape behind high walls) in the artistic enclave of Songzhuang, on Beijing’s outskirts. It is a treasure trove of her remarkable tableaux sculptures, and all the work she has completed since becoming a practising artist at the relatively late age of forty.

Qing Qing “9 mansion” 34.5x80x58cm device 2010 image courtesy the artist

Qing Qing’s earlier life is like a capsule containing all the miseries and dramas of 20th century Chinese history. She remembers being in middle school at the start of the Cultural Revolution, when at the centre of every classroom a big collage of coloured paper with a red sun at the centre took pride of place, often with a portrait of Chairman Mao or one of Mao’s poems as its focal point. If you were late to school you had to stand in front of it by yourself and sing patriotic songs, with the entire class watching you. ‘Very shameful,’ says the artist. Later, Qing Qing and her mother were exiled to the countryside and her father was imprisoned. In one of her sculptures I spy an old black and white photograph of a pigtailed teenaged Qing Qing, driving a tractor. She became a barefoot doctor, studied traditional Chinese medicine, survived the traumatic deaths of her parents, and somehow ended up on the other side of the world, in Vienna, working as an executive for a global corporation. With the opening up of China she returned to her home city of Beijing, opened a hutong café as an intellectual, artistic salon, and then found her passion and metier as an artist. Qing Qing was one of the first artists to have a studio in 798, at a time when it was still a shabby rundown site of bankrupt factories and parking lots.

I asked her, ‘When you look back at the dramatic events and transformations that you have experienced, does it feel as if it all happened to someone else? Does it seem like another world?’ She replies, simply, ‘No. It is my life.’

Her empty, transparent hemp robes, incorporating dried flowers and grasses, are exquisite creations suspended in Perspex box frames, evoking the Imperial past and all the generations of Chinese women imprisoned in various ways – from concubines and Imperial wives to rural peasant women - by the conventions and dictates of the times. Qing Qing uses hemp because it appears delicate and fragile but in fact is immensely tough and strong – ‘Like women,’ she says. ‘I choose this material because it can stretch, it is flexible, like the character of a woman. Women are not supposed to have power or express strength but they have more tenacity and more character than men.’ Referencing imperial robes worn by women in the Han, Ming and Qing Dynasties, she is also using hemp because it was used in ropes and in the floor coverings of traditional Chinese houses, and is a natural material redolent with history.

Qing Qing 拷贝出土文物— “Artificial Artifact-Han” 250x200x8cm image courtesy the artist and Red Gate Gallery

The significance of the robe is also a reflection on political symbolism. ‘Women in China, even today, but especially in the past, were placed in second position. Robes for women were not just a decoration but also expressed their place in the hierarchy and their social status. The importance of robes for women is very significant,’ she says. Women can express themselves through their clothes, but sometimes the beautiful bride in the richly embroidered robes becomes merely an accessory to her powerful husband. Yes, even today, and not just in China, the artist laughs, acknowledging the contemporary image of the trophy wife. She worries that young women in China today are too prepared to swap their hard-won independence for marriage to a man with a ‘fat wallet.’ Essentially, however, these works represent what Qing Qing sees as the essence of femininity: beauty and malleability, but also tensile strength and endurance.

Qing Qing, Ant Kingdom, Image courtesy the artist

An ongoing element in her practice is the creation of tiny, mysterious worlds enclosed in box-like forms. Sometimes they are like altars or Buddhist shrines, sometimes like a museum diorama or a Surrealist tableau. Sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes horrifying. They stem from the very first one she made, whilst still living in Vienna and reflecting on her Chinese past and identity from a position of exile. Of necessity it was simple and restrained, as she did not have access to many materials. This first body of work is entitled The Black Memory Series. An antique wooden box is lined by old book pages, with faded Chinese characters. A gilded pair of ears is pinned in place by multiple surgical clamps, a reflection, explains the artist, on her operation under acupuncture ‘anaesthesia’ carried out on a table during the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution. She has said, ‘Whenever I look at that scar…I cannot help but think of the rows of red flags waving along Sunflower Lake, revolutionary slogans pouring from high frequency loudspeakers. That is what I recall of my ‘radiant’ girlhood.’

Qing Qing ”勿“和”吭“No and Keng” 80X50X25Cm2011 image courtesy the artist and Red Gate Gallery

The rigidity and conformity of the Chinese education system is remembered in another work in this series, ‘The Great Epoch’. Wooden clothes pegs (to hold you rigid) and chicken bones are juxtaposed with a Mao medal symbolising the cult-like reverence afforded ‘The Great Helmsman’ during her girlhood. ‘I used chicken bones (because) education instils ideas into your mind, whatever they give you, you have to take it. When I went to Europe I saw parents asking children, ‘What do you want to eat?’ I was very surprised! In China the parents put the food in your bowl. In Europe people are much more independent. The painting in the background is an ancient Chinese painting of herding the cows. The passage is about how to herd the cows and make them bend to your will.’

Another, ‘Story of Women’, recalls an operation at which the young barefoot doctor assisted. An old woman with bound feet had her necrotised toes amputated, a memory which fills the artist with horror even today. A hinged box like an antique ‘shadow box’ for the display of treasures contains a tiny pair of red shoes, for bound ‘lotus feet.’ The artist says, ‘To me, they represent such a horrific aspect of Chinese culture: absurd and distorted.’ Qing Qing uses found objects – tiny dolls, toys, shells, twigs, flowers and bones – to express her thoughts about past and present in China and about her own life. She is interested in yin and yang, and Chinese classical stories about life and death and the traditions of Buddhism. Tiny allegories, they are at once personal and universal.

Qing Qing Copy relics series – “Qing 4” 150X140CM image courtesy the artist and Red Gate Gallery

Her most recent sculptures, fibreglass figures of faceless child-like figures in baby pink, blue and pastel colours, are an interesting departure. The artist began to make these after a period of illness, and a time of regaining her strength and energy. She says they do not represent her, but asks me if I have perhaps noticed that each female figure has only one breast. They are not self-portraits, nor autobiographies, she stresses, but are a reflection on how Tai Ji is used to re-position bodily energy flow and ‘deal with things.’ Qing Qing muses about what she feels now about being female in China. ‘Young women today are much stronger in their character, they have more power and strength. It is very different than from the past, this power we have. No means no. We have learned to refuse, not to accept. And sometimes you have to push.’ She points to the figures entitled ‘No’ and ‘Pushing Hard’. Her figurative sculptures, like her diaphanous grass robes, possess a strength which is disguised by their aesthetic appeal.

See the article on The Culture Trip site HERE

Are You My Mother? Reflections on Mothers and Daughters

Zhang Xiaogang Big Family 1995 oil on canvas. source: Saatchi Gallery

I have been thinking a lot about mothers and daughters. Unsurprising - my own mother is in a state of advanced dementia, and while I adore her, and she sometimes recognises me and is still fabulously feisty (and funny) the relationship has always been, shall we say, "complicated". And my eldest daughter is about to be married, which feels both happy and strange. I have flashes in my dreams of my daughters as babies; the sheer pleasurable physicality of tiny children. I remember lying beside them as they slept; the exhaustion overlaid by that fierce love that is quite overwhelming. 

Ridiculously, I was almost reduced to tears the other day when I read somewhere an account of the Dr Seuss book 'Are You My Mother?' which I must have read a thousand times to my own small daughters. A baby bird falls out of the nest and goes exploring, asking every creature - and thing - it sees, "Are you my mother?" The reply is always, "No. I am not your mother. I am a horse/pig/cow/truck," etc etc. Of course there is a happy ending, anticipated with great satisfaction by the children who chanted along with me, "Yes! I am a bird and I am your mother!"

I recently saw again a charming Chinese animation for children, called 'Tadpoles Looking for their Mother' or ‘Where is Mama?’. Created in 1960 at Shanghai Film Studios under the guidance of the legendary animator Te Wei, it tells the story of a group of tadpoles searching for their mother. They plaintively question goldfish, shrimp, turtles and other creatures on their journey through a watery landscape, "Women de Mama, Zai Nali?" Each frame is rendered in deft, minimal brushstrokes with ink and wash, influenced by the watercolour paintings of Qi Baishi. In these digital days its artistry and simplicity are a revelation.

But why on earth have memories of my own childhood, and my children's, been haunting me? Why now? It began when I started to write an article about the artist Gao Rong for 'Artist Profile' magazine. As I listened once again to my taped interviews with Gao, I heard echoes of the stories told to me by so many of the female artists I have been meeting in China. There is a great closeness between Gao and her mother - although much untold bitterness, I am sure, in the story of her grandmother. Sent away into exile in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, far from her native Shaanxi Province, she and her seven children would have starved had she not been able to barter her exquisite embroidery for food. I began to think of all the tragic separations and the broken families resulting from ten years of utter madness. 

 Gao Rong The Static Eternity 2012 cloth wire sponge, cotton, steel, board, 516 x 460 x 270 cm detail
image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Perhaps because that time coincided with my own childhood and teenage years, as I look at photographs of my mother with her two children in 1966, I inevitably compare our lives with those of  Chinese artists of my own age. No doubt it's also because now, increasingly often, my mother has no idea who is in those photographs. Nevertheless, I think of Qing Qing, who was sent away with her mother to Xinjiang Province to drive a tractor in her early teens, the family's house seized, books burned and father imprisoned. I think of Lin Jingjing, whose mother was left behind "to take care of things" when the rest of the family escaped overseas. She was sixteen. The family's property was confiscated and she was sent to prison and then into rural exile.It was thirty years before she saw her mother again, by which time her father was dead. And there are so many others who allude obliquely to suffering, fragmentation, betrayal and disconnection as they tell me about their lives. 

Dong Yuan told me recently that she continues to make artworks about her grandma's house on the coast near Dalian because that was the place where she learned what family was, and where she felt safe. Her own parents, she didn't need to elaborate, were of the generation when "everything was for the country." Artists of a much younger generation find it hard to relate to their parents' and grandparents' experiences, and their parents in turn cannot understand the new pressures of a materialist and frighteningly dog-eat-dog (in Chinese, "ren chi ren" - man eat man) world. I think about Zhang Xiaogang's "Bloodline" series, and reflect on the tenacity - but also the tenuousness - of family ties. They can be destroyed by the fraying and crumbling of cognition and memory as much as by the ramifications of political ideology.

Dong Yuan Grandma's House, multiple canvases, oil and acrylic, 2013, image courtesy the artist

Yet it is interesting to me that so far every single Chinese female artist I have interviewed (about twenty five now) mentions their mother somewhere in their narrative. Sometimes memories are bitter and the stories oblique, sometimes they are enormously loving and positive. Some mothers are proud of their artist daughters, some mystified, and some are frankly disapproving. But those mother/daughter bonds, so complicated and so strong, are always a part of the daughter's story. Many women, I admit myself included, are still hoping for that motherly approval, that affirmation, and continue to long for it into middle age and beyond. My mother at eighty nine sees her own mother in the room, and sometimes cries for her, which breaks my heart.

So the story of Gao Rong learning to sew from her mother and grandmother, in turn teaching her Shaanxi stitching to rural women who can then earn money assisting her in her sculptural projects, struck a chord with me. It seemed a healing kind of story, in a country where the scars of the past are all too visible. And it spoke to me in a way about my own wounds too. Gao says, “Heritage is not just a technique, but a spirit of survival handed down from one Chinese woman to another.” Gao Rong is the same age as my daughter, and so I loved her telling me that she missed her mother terribly when she was alone studying in Beijing, and that she then took her mother with her to New York for her solo show last year. 

And now, when my own mother sometimes asks me,"Who are you? Are you my mother?" I have learned to say, "Yes I am, and you are safe."

The full interview with Gao Rong is in the current (August 2014) issue of Artist Profile.