Beyond the Ordinary: Guan Wei at Vermilion Art

Guan Wei, Apparition, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 10 panels, 180x254 cm. Image courtesy Vermilion Art

Out of the Ordinary is the title of Guan Wei’s solo exhibition at Sydney’s Vermilion Art, a description that also fits the man himself. From his early years in Beijing’s post-Cultural Revolution contemporary art scene, to his arrival in Hobart in 1989 and emergence as the most prominent of the so-called ‘post-Tiananmen’ generation of Chinese artists in Australia, Guan Wei developed an art practice that merges two worlds. His visual language as painter, ceramicist and sculptor juxtaposes Chinese traditional motifs with Australian colonial imagery, and with continuing references to the indigenous history that intrigued him from his earliest days in Tasmania. The result is a surreal parallel universe, a place of imagined, alternative histories.

Covering twelve years of the artist’s work, Out of the Ordinary is a collaboration between Guan Wei’s long-time gallery, Martin Browne Fine Art, and Vermilion Art, Sydney’s only commercial gallery specialising in contemporary Chinese art. It reveals distinct phases in his practice over that time, and a variety of influences ranging from his fascination with Australian beach culture to appropriations of the Chinoiserie that was so fashionable in Britain and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prevented from returning to his Beijing studio for three years due to Covid-19 border closures, Guan Wei’s recent work examines the global pandemic as a kind of spiritual malaise. We humans may need an extra-terrestrial intervention, he suggests, whether that be from angels or aliens.

Guan Wei once said that he likes to work in ‘the space between imagination and reality’: he is a storyteller, a myth-maker – an artist with a strong sense of social justice and moral conviction. His blend of real and imaginary histories creates a world in which his characteristically faceless, pale figures interact with silhouettes of animals and people that resemble paper-cuts. His paintings are populated by Indigenous Australian, European and Chinese characters who wander in exotic landscapes or sail across painted oceans. Described poetically by Alex Burchmore as ‘adrift in dense spaces of iconographic collision’[i], Guan Wei’s eclectic imagery suggests stories of empire, invasion, exploration, and migration  – and often evokes a contemporary political paranoia over ‘sovereign borders’. Together with his distinctive iconography of Chinese clouds, swirling waves, map coordinates, navigational charts, and astrological diagrams they create a floating world of ambiguous transnational narratives.

Guan Wei, Play on the Beach No.2, 2010, acrylic on canvas, diptych, 130x106 cm.
Image courtesy Vermilion Art

The earliest work in the exhibition, Play on the Beach 2, dates from 2010. Part of a series created on Guan Wei’s return from China in 2008, the diptych suggests the simple, hedonistic Australian pleasures of sun and surf, with curly Chinese clouds floating above a blue ocean. Yet there is a hint of something darker. In the foreground, an emu buries its head in the sand while a fleshy pink figure runs towards the ocean, arms outstretched and mouth agape. In the background, tiny figures appear at first glance to be frolicking happily in the ocean. On closer inspection, however, we wonder whether perhaps they are not waving, but drowning.

Notions of navigation – the crossing of oceans, the art of the cartographer, the study of constellations – are significant in Guan Wei’s work. The exhibition features paintings from two important series, Reflections and Time Tunnel, that were inspired by a residency in England. Guan visited stately homes and historical museums and became fascinated by the exploits of the British navy in the eighteenth century. He studied maps and historical engravings and was inspired by collections of textiles and porcelain with the Chinoiserie motifs so beloved of the period. Contrasting a Rousseau-esque ideal of a Utopia in the Pacific with the horrors of a brutal penal colony and the violence of the Frontier Wars, Guan Wei developed new imagery to re-imagine these histories. He reflects on the universal theme of the journey, on specific historical voyages, and on his own journeys of migration and return.

Guan Wei, Reflection 12, 2016, acrylic on canvas, triptych, 130x162 cm. Image courtesy Vermilion Art

When the series was first exhibited Guan Wei described them as ‘floating between true and false, dark and light’. Reflection 12 (2016), for example, depicts what at first seems a bucolic idyll. In the blue tones typical of export porcelain or toile textiles, enclosed in an ornate frame, the foreground shows the silhouette of a woman and child feeding chickens. Cows and sheep stand in a small stream that runs beneath a curved stone bridge. A silhouetted figure playing a pipe recalls Arcadian landscapes by Watteau. In the background, indigenous figures are strongly reminiscent of the paintings of early nineteenth-century Tasmanian artist John Glover, no doubt encountered during Guan Wei’s time in Hobart. Glover’s paintings of Aboriginal ceremonies ignored inconvenient truths, presenting instead  of dispossession and disease an imagined pastoral ideal of coexistence. In Reflection 12 the faint image of a sailing ship in the background, and the black silhouettes of an angel fighting a demon outside the framed landscape, allude to darker truths of our history. A four-panelled folding screen, Remarkable World 3 (2019) continues this interest in the intersections between colonial European, Chinese and indigenous histories, filtered through the artist’s imagination.

The most recent painting in Out of the Ordinary is The Apparition (2023), an ambitious ten-panelled contemporary version of a medieval altarpiece that distils Guan Wei’s response to the ruptures of the global pandemic. The lower five panels depict an ocean dotted with islands. The island peaks and swirling waves recall the mountain and water imagery of shan shui ink painting. Yet here, rather than lonely scholars or Immortals wandering in the mountains we see the biblical story of Noah’s Ark (with an abandoned panda looking on plaintively from the waves). Dinosaurs coexist with Chinese dragons and dolphins, and the sea is filled with capsizing boatloads of anguished human figures. Above, angels appropriated from Renaissance paintings appear to offer hope and salvation. Guan Wei says, ‘A terrifying flood submerged the world. People were struggling in the water. Noah's Ark appeared from afar and magical forces descended from the sky. Human beings who had been troubled by the pandemic for three years were, at long last, rescued. There is always hope.’ Yet, the tiny silhouettes of a submarine and hovering UFOs suggest that humanity is not out of the woods just yet. Guan Wei’s work always balances despair with hope, tragedy with humour, and the ordinary with the mystical.

Out of the Ordinary continues at Vermilion Art until 23 March 2023

 

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[i] Alex Burchmore, ‘Guan Wei’s “Australerie” ceramics and the binary bind of identity politics’. Index Journal issue no. 4 https://index-journal.org/issues/identity/guan-wei-australerie-ceramics-and-the-binary-bind-of-identity-politics-by-alex-burchmore

 

"Sweet Dreams Are Made of This": Dorveille at Vermilion Art

 

Qin Han, Dream your dreams, 2021, soft pastel, watercolor, mineral pigments on paper, 70x100cm, image courtesy the artist and Vermilion Art

In this time of "Know my Name" and the restoration of hidden women to the artistic canon (and to the art market) the current exhibition at Sydney's Vermilion Art hits the zeitgeist. Curators Man Luo and Tianyue Li, with curatorial assistant Jiawen Li, have created an interesting show in which works by 5 young women artists are not (at least primarily) linked by their gender. Instead, this exhibition centres around a common thread: that dreamy state between sleep and wakefulness once known as "dorveille". With apologies to Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics: "Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree?"

The exhibition catalogue references a medieval poem by Jean Froissart:

"First described in medieval France, Dorveille is ‘a psychic, physical and spiritual condition’                experienced by artists and poets. It is a dreamlike semi-conscious state in which there is no distinction    between the fantastic and the familiar, from which words, images and ideas emerge."

But it is not just artists and poets who experience this condition. Many of us are all too familiar with the phenomenon of hours of semi-wakefulness in the middle reaches of the night. But perhaps what we call "broken" sleep is actually not broken at all, but ... normal? Rather than tossing and turning, seeking elusive oblivion, could it be instead a productive time of thoughts and decisions, a time to reflect? Two years of a global pandemic and weeks of lockdowns put paid to so-called "normal" sleep for many. Working at home from the couch (or the bed), zooming into meetings in pyjamas, hours of Netflix bingeing, eating at odd times (I hope this is not just me...)  Has all this created new neural pathways and habits that mean we can't go back to how things were in the before times?

In fact, in the pre-industrial West, segmented sleep was completely normal. People slept in two blocks, with a time of wakeful sleepiness or sleepy wakefulness in the middle. As Jesse Baron wrote in the New York Times:

"Back when segmented sleep was common, this period between “first” and “second” sleep inspired reverence. The French called it dorveille, or wakesleep, a hypnotic state." Uses of this time differed. Some wrote poetry, or interpreted their dreams. Some had visions, or wrote in diaries. Some, more pragmatically perhaps, just had sex. As long as we don't use these unencumbered hours to answer emails or doomscroll through newsmedia, they can be a gift. 

But these hours can also be dark and disturbing, filled with half-remembered dreams, with regrets and sorrows, with presentiments of the uncanny. Mothers breastfeeding their babies in the hours towards dawn know this. So too, these are the hours when the old and sick are most likely to slide from life into death.

I was interested to see how artists Qin Han, Ruth Ju-Shih Li, Angie Pai, Rose Wong and xinxin responded to the hypnotic allure and dreamy reverie of "wakesleep".

Qin Han, Human pretzels, 2021, soft pastel, watercolor, mineral pigments on paper, 20x14cm, 41x32cm with frame, image courtesy the artist and Vermilion Art

Qin Han was trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her playful, Surrealist vocabulary of (very pink) naked women floating in strange landscapes owes a little to Matisse and Picasso, a little to Niki de Saint Phalle's joyfully voluptuous naked ladies, and something to Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", yet is in the end entirely, idiosyncratically her own. Dream your Dreams (2021), for example, depicts six pink nudes arranged around a large, floating mass, an amorphous shape filled with beautiful linear patterns and colour. Her figures recall the artfully arranged poses of art historical nudes or nudie pinups, yet they are smiling cheerfully, legs awkwardly placed and boobs akimbo. It is as if they have dreamed a gorgeously coloured world into being. In Everyone has an Island (2021) more pink ladies disport themselves in yoga or dance-like poses on brightly coloured shapes that resemble clouds. 

Other excursions into this theme take us to darker places.

Ruth Ju-Shih Li, Midnight, 2019, Jingdezhen porcelain, gold, 22 x 16 x 7 cm, image courtesy the artist and Vermilion Art

Ruth Ju-Shih Li, originally from Taiwan, trained in Ceramics at the National Art School in Sydney and now divides her time between Taipei, Sydney and the ancient Chinese porcelain city of Jingdezhen where she maintains a studio. Her work is gaining international attention - she has exhibited widely in Australia, Taiwan, Mainland China, Korea and Thailand, and was awarded the Special Prize at the Taiwan Ceramics Biennale International in 2020. Alluding to fairy-tales, myths and legends, juxtaposing Western and Eastern influences, her fragile porcelain installations evoke ideas about the ephemeral nature of existence. At first appearing simply beautiful and decorative, a closer examination reveals a darker exploration of death and decay signified through Vanitas-like drooping petals and birds' wings.

Rose Wong, The Bible of Female Saints - Lin Daiyu, mixed media, 2021, 42x30cm, Image courtesy the artist and Vermilion Art

Multidisciplinary artist Rose Wong was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She was trained firstly at the University of Hong Kong and received the Master of Artist Teaching & Contemporary Art Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. Now based in Beijing, her practice blurs boundaries between painting and sculpture, as well as digital media and performance art. She is drawn to subjects from classical Chinese literature, mythology and folk-tales, including concubines, goddesses and immortals. The Bible of Female Saints - Lin Daiyu, for example, depicts a central character from the classic Chinese novel ''Dream of the Red Chamber". A melancholy figure, Daiyu had been reincarnated from a previous existence as a flower, thus she represents the world of illusion, immortality and dreams. 

Angie Pai, Aha, 2021, acrylic and sand render on wood, 150 x 113 cm, Image courtesy the artist and Vermilion Art

Born in Taichung, Taiwan, currently based in Melbourne, Angie Pai graduated from RMIT and is now studying psychology at the University of Melbourne. Pai says she examines the compromises that come with living on the cusp of East and West. Influenced by Daoist and Buddhist teachings, and by aspects of Confucianism, Pai makes work that explores complex issues of identity in subtle, often ambiguous ways that suggest a meditative form of minimalism. Interviewed - most appropriately - for "Liminal", Pai told James Robinson that being Asian in Australia means "learning to harness the multifaceted aspects of my intercultural upbringing in a pragmatic manner."

xinxin, The Cure, 2021, oil on canvas, 70x50cm, Vermilion Art

Multidisciplinary artist xinxin trained at the art academy in Chongqing (which has a strong history of producing extraordinary expressionist and surrealist figurative painters) and at UNSW Art & Design. Like Qin Han, she too is influenced by northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, creating a Surrealist imaginary. Her works are mysterious, uncanny, suggesting the grotesque and nightmarish. Alice has definitely travelled through the looking glass in these works, entering a hallucinogenic and unsettling world where nothing is what it seems.

"Dorveille" takes us into the personal imaginaries of each artist. Individually they explore their dreams, desires and fears, and the exhibition as a whole, beautifully installed in the gallery space, suggests the exposure of otherwise elusive, hidden worlds. But perhaps there is also another kind of 'dorveille'. In some ways the experience of diaspora mirrors that liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness. Living on the cusp of East and West, often moving across borders and between cultures, exhibiting internationally, wondering where is home, the artists in 'Dorveille' have each developed a visual language of material, image and form that examine the connections and disconnections of the diasporic experience. 

"Dorveille" continues at Vermilion Art through 4 June 2022

Watching the Moon: The end of a terrible year

Pixy Liao, 'Things We Talk About', 2013, image courtesy the artist

In normal times at this tail end of the year I would write a kind of  'best of'' list of the art, the exhibitions and the most memorable artworld moments of 2020. I know, I know, it's kind of lame and a cliched media trope, but I have always enjoyed looking back over my calendar and sorting through all the many and varied experiences. Well, as we all know, these are not normal times, and this year there are vanishingly few things to talk about. The lasting experience of 2020 is of solitude mixed with uncertainty, boredom, and occasional lapses into existential despair. Life became very small as I encountered my students and colleagues mostly on Zoom, and seized precious socially distanced opportunities to see family and friends. I have tried to be more aware of the natural world, the turning of the leaves, the singing of birds in the garden, the sunsets and the moon - but frankly I'm often reading or watching Netflix and shamefully I see the moon and the sunsets in other people's Instagram photos more often than in reality. And as for art.....

The final exhibition I saw before the onset of Sydney's lockdown in March, somewhat nervously due to the increasingly serious pandemic, was 'Xu Zhen: Eternity Vs. Evolution' at the National Gallery. I felt that the visceral spectacle of the works, which had been so evident in the major survey exhibition at Beijing's UCCA and in various shows at White Rabbit Gallery, was somehow diminished inside the rather dark concrete spaces of that Brutalist Canberra building. 

XU ZHEN® "Hello", installation view, Photograph: Luise Guest

The best critical account of that exhibition is by Alex Burchmore, in Randian. Of the snake-like, moving Corinthian column activated by visitor movement he writes: ''the voluptuous coils of ‘“Hello”’ (2019) take pride of place in ‘Eternity Vs Evolution’, towering over the viewer and following their every move with a baleful gaze that threatens consumption by the emptiness of the void (and note the inclusion of quotation marks in the title). The caption for this work draws attention to the historic prestige of the Corinthian column that Xu has chosen for the body of his serpent, ‘first created in ancient Greece [as] a symbol of power, prestige and western civilization.’ Yet the flaccid immobility of this automated guardian, save for the hesitant and creaking sway of its pediment-head when activated by the approach of the viewer, inspires more pity than dread. Carved in soft and yielding Styrofoam, this is a column devoid of all function, a structural support incapable of supporting its own weight, spectacular in scale but hollow within. As such, ‘“Hello”’ offers a clue to the underlying message of the exhibition: that which seems invulnerable and eternal is often little more than an artfully contrived illusion, while the evidence of our own eyes is rarely as straightforward as it seems and inevitably colored by the assumptions that structure our view of the world.'' Read the full article here. 

Lindy Lee, 'Moonlight Deities', installation view, photo: Luise Guest

Lindy Lee, No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things, 1995/2020, installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2020, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint, ink on Stonehenge paper, dimensions variable, image courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and © the artist, photograph: Anna Kucera

I managed to briefly see a small part of Brook Andrew's Biennale of Sydney before it closed and then, once museums re-opened, enjoyed a visit to an almost empty Museum of Contemporary Art to see 'Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dewdrop' (about which, more later). Apart from those experiences, months apart, the wonderful 'Indonesia Calling' at 16 Albermarle Project Space turned out to be one of those increasingly rare experiences - an exhibition that was curatorially coherent and visually and conceptually exciting. John McDonald's curation of an exhibition of work by extraordinary (and eccentric) ink painter Li Jin for Vermilion Art, 'To Live [It Up]', was also interesting, providing a different view of the artist's work than the big survey show of his career that I had seen at Ink Studio in Beijing in 2019. It's great to know that a number of works were acquired from this exhibition for the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 

Works by Li Jin shown at Vermilion Art in November

So, in this globally calamitous and personally very challenging year, how to make some sense out of the chaos and confusion? Is it even possible in this year when the president of the United States is advocating a literal military coup to contest an election he lost, and when so many of us have lost faith in our governments' responses to the pandemic that has devastated the globe. We are increasingly divided, angry, sad and cynical.

Among the many losses of the year, a bright spot for me was the realisation that it was still possible to continue my conversations with Chinese artists, albeit (sadly, and who knows for how long) not face to face in their studios. I've spoken with Pixy Liao, Cao Yu, Liu Xi and Shoufay Derz via email, Facebook and Wechat and have had articles published in a range of print and online journals that I've referenced in previous blog posts, including most recently an article in Art Monthly Australasia.

Pixy Liao, 'Ít's Never Been Easy to Carry You', 2013, image courtesy the artist

These conversations were interesting and thought-provoking, challenging some of my assumptions about art, feminism and China, which is always a good thing. I take these ideas now into the chapter for a book that I am working on, so watch this space! Here is the opening section of the Art Monthly piece.  In the extract below I've left out the footnotes and references, just to make it more readable in this blog format:

 'Public Bodies, Private Lives: the work of Cao Yu and Pixy Liao'

In the cold Beijing winter of 2012, I interviewed Lin Tianmiao – often described as one of very few feminist artists in China. She told me bluntly, ‘There is no feminism in China. It’s a Western thing.’She meant, I think, that Euro-American feminism/s were not especially relevant to the experiences of Chinese women – and also that she resisted being silo-ed in a still-patriarchal Chinese artworld as a ‘woman artist’. It is generally acknowledged, as Shuqin Cui recently argued, that ‘few Chinese women artists would welcome the label of feminist art or categorize their work as feminist art even if the feminist dimensions of their work were clearly evident.’ Nonetheless, many artists grapple with issues of gender and challenge heteronormative stereotypes. A feminist self-identification is not especially significant, as art historian Joan Kee noted: ‘The question is not whether women artists from Asian countries identify themselves as feminists, or whether their work imparts feminist messages. Instead, the issue concerns the logic of interpretation’. Feminism is embodied in nuanced and culturally specific ways in the practice of many contemporary Chinese artists – even if they disavow the label.  When I spoke with multi-disciplinary artists Cao Yu and Pixy Liao, they expressed reservations about being pigeonholed, yet their work powerfully challenges essentialist notions of the ‘feminine’.

Cao Yu, 'Mother' series, installation view, image courtesy Cao Yu and Urs Meile Beijing/Lucerne

Cao Yu, 'Everything Will Be Left Behind', installation view (above) and detail (below), image courtesy the artist and Urs Meile Beijing/Lucerne

You will find the whole article in the Summer 2020/2021 issue of Art Monthly Australasia.

Perhaps, at the end of a year that has been so terrible for so many across the globe, at the mercy of a virus (and I don't mean the one in the White House) we come back to the knowledge of our tiny insignificance in the vastness of the universe. Lately I am finding that comforting rather than frightening. The title of Lindy Lee's exhibition 'Moon in a Dewdrop' is a reference to the writings of Dōgen, the 13th century Zen monk who brought Buddhism from China to Japan. Lee is a practising Buddhist and the philosophy informs her life and art. I think of the artists I know in China whose study of Daoism similarly inflects their work, and their reactions to the world and its suffering. We too are the 'ten thousand things' - everything under heaven - in a constantly fluxing relationship with the world and everything in it - light and dark, health and illness, solitude and companionship. Well, I'm working on that level of acceptance. Mostly failing. It's a process.

Lindy Lee, Buddhas and Matriarchs, 2020, installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2020, flung bronze, image courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney with the assistance of UAP and © the artist, photograph: Anna Kucera

As Dōgen said of himself watching the moon:

‘Sky above, sky beneath, cloud self, water origin’

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.