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| Bu Hua, AD 302, image courtesy the artist |
So here's a shameless plug for my website 'Teaching Chinese Art', designed to be a portal connecting teachers and students (and anyone else interested) with the world of contemporary Chinese art - reviews, interviews, articles, links to interesting websites etc.
Click HERE to find my website!
Coming up soon - interviews with Xiao Lu (yes, she who shot that gun in the National Art Museum of China in 1989!) and Bingyi, and a review of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation exhibition 'Home' which features the disturbing photographs of Chien-Chi Chang.
Meanwhile, because too much China is never enough, I have been working on my book, writing a paper about Ma Yanling and her use of the "secret women's script" of Nushu, reading Louisa Lim's excellent "The People's Republic of Amnesia", booking tickets for all the Chinese language films at the Sydney Film Festival, and feeling miserably aware that my gains in speaking more fluently after my intensive two weeks at the language school in Beijing are fading fast now I am back in Sydney. It's the necessity of communicating with taxi-drivers, shop assistants and just getting around that really forces you out of your lethargy. "Zenmeban?" What's to be done? I shall just have to book a ticket to return!
Meanwhile, I have been working with groups of teachers introducing them to contemporary Chinese art, and enjoying the reactions of my own students. They loved Liu Bolin and his disappearing act, and were able to discern the political intent, as well as the humour, behind his practice. His TED talk illuminates what he does and why he does it.
I've been exploring Xu Bing and, in particular, his most recent work, 'Phoenix', currently installed in the nave of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, with my Year 11 students. They are fascinated and enthralled by discovering a world and a history about which they (sadly) know little, asking eager questions about the Cultural Revolution and finding out about 1989 just in time for the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of those events. It's always a wonderful experience for a teacher to be in a room full of students who are actually discussing the topic of the lesson rather then their plans for the weekend, and I have been enjoying it immensely. I've just read 20 essays about Xu Bing and they're actually all pretty good - a testament to their interest in the artist and the multiple layers of meaning in his work.
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| Xu Bing, Phoenix, as installed outside the Today Art Museum in Beijing |