All Under Heaven: the painted world of Dong Yuan

Dong Yuan, Painted objects, acrylic on multiple canvases, image courtesy the artist

I've interviewed Dong Yuan twice in Beijing (with one attempt abruptly aborted when I was robbed on the subway whilst on my way to her studio, left without even the 2 yuan needed to get through the turnstiles at the other end - a disaster story for another time.) Each time we met, in two different small apartments in enormous complexes of high rises on Beijing's furthest outskirts, I was charmed by her total lack of pretension. She is entirely, unselfconsciously herself. The second time we met, on a cold winter afternoon, I was befuddled by the incomprehensible numbering system of tower blocks, wandering helplessly, leaving her  ever more plaintive voice mail messages. Suddenly she appeared on the road beside me with her dog, wearing pyjamas. With red cheeks and with her hair roughly pulled back, she looked like a heroic girl farmer from a propaganda poster. And, in fact, she told me on both occasions that if she wasn't an artist, she'd like to be a farmer or a gardener.

Just this week my profile of Dong was published on The Art Life website. It starts this way:

A Short History of Everything: the painted world of Dong Yuan

ART LIFE , STUFF Jul 03, 201

As a student in the Experimental Arts Department at Beijing’s renowned Central Academy of Fine Arts, Dong Yuan began to document the mundane objects of daily life. She decided to paint, literally, everything she owned. Home of Paintings and Sketch of Family Belongings (2008) record, on fifty-nine and one hundred and eighty-six canvases respectively, the two apartments in which she lived as a student.

Dong Yuan, Sketch of Family Belongings, 2008, acrylic on 186 separate canvases, dimensions variable, image courtesy of White Rabbit Collection

With obsessive attention to detail, she rendered mundane objects on flat surfaces. Our gaze travels across a pair of shoes, a box of tissues, empty coat hangers, a striped towel hanging on the back of the door, an electric kettle and tea thermos, umbrellas leaning in a corner, books piled haphazardly on wonky shelves, stacks of papers, and a teapot. Some are painted with a Cézanne-inspired aerial perspective, others with meticulous trompe l’oeil illusionism. The canvases are then arranged in real space, in three dimensions: to enter the installation is to have sense of intruding on a private, domestic space. These works provide a glimpse into the world of a stranger, the same voyeuristic frisson as witnessing alternate lives in the blue light of a television screen through an un-curtained window.

Dong Yuan, 2014, with ‘Grandmother’s Cabinet’ painting, photograph Luise Guest

Dong Yuan’s installations of multiple paintings challenge the boundaries and limitations of the medium as it’s conventionally understood. Some are steeped in nostalgia, others are wryly observed representations of the everyday, and some are purely fantastical imaginings. As a student, inspired by her discovery of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, she was fascinated by the historical genre of the still life. Later, she immersed herself in a study of Renaissance and Flemish painting: Hieronymous Bosch, Hendrick Avercamp and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with their sharply focused gaze on every detail of a scene, near and far, especially delighted her.

Dong Yuan, Daily Scenes, 2009, oil on canvas, image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

Dong found living in Beijing alienating and stressful. Her practice of painting the minutiae of daily life grounded her, and helped her to adjust. Daily Scenes (2009) consists of forty-two separate canvases arranged in a grid, recording the view from every stairwell window in her apartment block. Windows were an important element in traditional Chinese architecture, garden design and painting, always placed to reveal a beautiful vista for contemplation and meditation. Dong Yuan’s utilitarian windows, in contrast, reveal a bleak view of endlessly repeated apartment blocks, cars, trucks and bicycles – the sprawling suburban periphery of Beijing. There is beauty, however, in her careful variation of partly-opened windows, a rhythm evoking the comforting familiarity of everyday routines and repetitions. The sky is an unlikely blue, the trees are in leaf and not yet covered by Beijing’s yellow dust, and the typically orange and salmon pink colour of the buildings seems cheerful rather than austere. The bottom row of canvases depicts open doorways, vignettes revealing glimpses of the life of the neighbourhood: a stout man unselfconsciously scratches himself, women look after small children and hang washing amongst haphazardly parked cars. A vista that at first seems sterile is filled with the parallel lives of others.

Dong Yuan, Painted Kitchen, 2010, (detail) acrylic on canvas, image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

Painted Kitchen (2010) takes us back into the domestic interior world: a cluttered kitchen lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rows of canvases depict bottles of cooking oil and soy sauce, stacks of noodle and rice bowls, teacups, hanging spoons and spatulas, plates of food, the porcelain sink and the stove. It is as if the inhabitants of this tiny domestic space have stepped out for a moment, and we are peering into their lit apartment, envious observers of a family meal being prepared and consumed.

TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE

Lu Xinjian: Looking for Harmony in the City

Shanghai-based painter Lu Xinjian has invented his own visual language with which he represents his experiences of urban life. In several interviews for the White Rabbit Collection since 2015 in Shanghai and in Sydney (Judith Neilson was one of the first collectors to see his early 'City DNA' paintings in Beijing, in 2011), he talked with me about his early life as a boy in rural China, and his surprising metamorphosis into a highly successful contemporary artist on the global stage.

Lu Xinjian and a painting in his 'City Stream' series, image courtesy the artist

These interviews were compiled as a profile of the artist published this week in 'The Art Life', together with a video interview conducted at White Rabbit Collection late last year. It goes like this:

Lu Xinjian’s early life seemed an unlikely background from which a successful artist might emerge. Born in 1977 into a poor farming family in a rural village in Jiangsu Province, by his own account his childhood was spent running wild, looking after ducks and chickens. After school he studied computer graphics and graphic design, despite his love of painting, knowing that a poor boy making his way in the world needed a more secure income than that of an emerging artist. 

Lu Xinjian with his mother, image courtesy the artist

But a chance encounter changed everything: in 1998 the influential Dutch design company Studio Dumbar had an exhibition at the art museum in Nanjing, where Lu Xinjian was studying. He didn’t have the money to buy a ticket to enter the gallery, but stood entranced in front of the posters, absorbing their structures, colour, line and form, their use of the Modernist grid. Returning to the college library, he began to read everything he could find about European design, determined that one day he would go to study in the Netherlands. It took four years after graduation to save the money, but in 2005 he graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and in 2006 from the Interactive Media and Environments Department at the Frank Mohr Institute of Hanze University of Applied Studies.

Lu Xinjian in the studio, image courtesy the artist

In Eindhoven and Groningen Lu Xinjian found himself at the centre of a particular Modernist tradition. To that point he had loved the work of Keith Haring and other contemporary American painters, but now the work of artists of the European ‘Zero’ movement of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Heinz Mack, Gunther Uecker and Otto Piene inspired him. They believed that art should be a ‘zone of silence’ devoid of personal expression. Lu Xinjian saw in this philosophy a link to Buddhist traditions of restraint and simplicity, harmony and quietude. After early experiments with figurative expressionist painting, an influential teacher, Petri Leijdekkers, introduced him to de Stijl and the work of Mondrian. He had been at an impasse, lonely and depressed during a residency in Korea, when he began to draw views of the night sky, the edges of buildings as lines and the stars as dots. The dots and dashes found in the ink drawings of Van Gogh, the grid structures of Dutch and German early twentieth century design, and the cool abstraction of Mondrian coalesced to form a new way of thinking. This epiphany was the start of his important City DNA series.

Lu Xinjian, City DNA – Beijing, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 400 cm, image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

From this point Lu Xinjian began to paint in more abstract ways, using aerial perspectives of iconic metropolises: New York (irresistibly recalling Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie) Beijing, Shanghai, Rome, Paris, London, Los Angeles, and Venice. The first in the series, however, was the Dutch university town of Groningen, where he had taken photographs from the top of the tower in the centre of the town before returning to China. Sources for his imagery included maps and satellite views of each location, as well as photographs, but the artist sees his work as philosophically complex and multi-layered. He believes cities are built and defined by history, culture and language as much as by geography; each is distinct and unique, despite the homogenising impact of globalisation. Lu Xinjian tells the story of each city in a visual language of his own invention that merges western abstraction with simplified forms that recall the Bauhaus and Dutch graphic design, in combination with computer coding. The picture planes appear to pulsate with energy, despite their flat, brightly coloured grounds. Struggling to find a name for this body of work, Lu Xinjian suddenly saw the lines and dashes as akin to a diagram of a human genetic code. Cities, too, have a kind of DNA structure, a term borrowed from architectural practice, conveying something of the unique and complex social and architectural systems of the modern metropolis.

TO read more in 'The Art Life' , click HERE

And here is the video interview with Lu Xinjian 


Lu Xinjian in Conversation with White Rabbit from White Rabbit Collection on Vimeo.
Shanghai-based painter Lu Xinjian discusses his 'City DNA' series, his interest in Mondrian and Dutch design, and how a boy from a poor rural farming family became a successful contemporary artist

The mystery of the missing Chinese artists: The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial

• Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (aka HAHAN)
• Letters to the Great Saatchi, 2011 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas

• Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

My second review of the Asia Pacific Triennial was published in Randian this week. It's an online art journal published in Chinese and English, with editors based in Shanghai and Beijing.They describe themselves this way: "We seek to promote independent cultural debate in China and to foster intellectual exchange between China and the rest of the world. This means independent commentary on art, artists, exhibitions and galleries, as well as video, architecture and design. "

Having written two reviews of the APT for two different audiences, I really thought long and hard about why I remained relatively unenthused about this year's iteration of what has in the past been an incredibly exciting revelation of new artists from around Asia and Pacific nations. I would go so far as to say that the first time I went to Brisbane to see an APT, back in the early 2000s, it was quite an epiphany. It changed my teaching, because I realised how Euro- and Amero-centric I had been in the selection of artists and works I presented to my students, and it put me on my current path of a deepening fascination with China and contemporary Chinese art. And in this show, apart from the ever-fabulous Huang Yong Ping and a deeply uninteresting work by the over-hyped Zhou Tiehai entitled 'Le Juge'  (Why? Who knows?) apparently reflecting on "the intersection between art and gastronomy" (yeah, yeah) there is nothing from the PRC and little from Taiwan. This for me was the biggest disappointment - and quite inexplicable as there is so much that could have been selected within the curatorial narrative of ephemeral structures in a globalised world. A mystery. It's a bit of a curate's egg of a show, frankly - good in parts.

Huang Yong Ping 'Ressort', photograph Luise Guest, QAGOMA 2013

 It is not often that I find myself in agreement with critic John McDonald, but on this occasion I thought his doubts about the curatorial inclusions of so many apparently traditional works from New Guinea and the Pacific Islands were well founded.  I went back to the exhibition twice, and spent a lot of time looking for works to get excited about, works that I would want to write about. They were few and far between. However, with a longer, more careful look my initial lack of excitement gave way to a cautious feeling that there were other new artistic landscapes being revealed by the selection of interesting works from some surprising places. These included a  collaboration between Afghanistan's only female graffiti artist and an American 'street' artist through the auspices of a Vietnamese artist collective; photographic and video installations from Kazakhstan and some interesting painting and photomedia work by Samoan /New Zealand artist Greg Semu.

Greg Semu, 'Untitled, from The Battle of the Noble Savage Series', digital print on PVC canvas, lightbox, edition of 10
courtesy the artist and Galerie Metropolis, Paris

Gimhomsok, South Korea, Canine Construction, Resin 2009, collection Queensland Art Gallery

Here is the start of my piece for Randian, 'Casting Lines Across the Globe':

"What event makes a small tropical Australian city into an internationally significant art centre once every three years? It’s the Asia Pacific Triennial, the first project of its kind in the world to focus on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific — a barometer of artistic and social change in this region. The representation of 500 artists from 30 countries, some significant scholarship, the construction of international networks and continuing dialogues, an impressive and growing collection of contemporary works for Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art– this is the legacy of the APT, now in its seventh iteration and its twentieth year. The very first show in 1993 included major projects by Dadang Christanto and Montien Boonma, as well as featuring contemporary Chinese artists such as Ding Yi, Zhou Changjiang, Xu Jiang, and Sun Liang.

It is the APT that brought Ai Weiwei, Cai Quo-Giang, Lee Mingwei, Heri Dono, Barti Kher and Lee Bul to the attention of Australian audiences. Cai Quo-Giang’s project for APT2, “Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared” was a significant development of his early practice, featuring his emblematic use of explosives. Exploring the parallels he perceived between the Chinese dragon and the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent, the result was an 18 metre long piece made up of nine “gunpowder drawings.” APT 4 focused on substantial bodies of work by sixteen artists, including Song Dong and his “Stamping the Water” and “Writing Diary with Water.” It enhanced the APT’s reputation for serious scholarship and placed the triennial more firmly on the international art map, charting the changing geopolitical realities of our region. APT 6 in 2009 was of particular significance, with three ground-breaking projects: the first presentation in Australia of contemporary art from North Korea; “Pacific Reggae” which featured music and music video from Hawaii, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Vanuatu and Australia; and an interactive installation by husband and wife team Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan in which children were invited to participate. I found this iteration of the triennial the most exciting and engaging, in particular the inclusion of significant figures such as Gonkar Gyatso, Subodh Gupta, Chen Qiulin, Shirana Shahbazi. A segment devoted to contemporary artists working around the Mekong River, and its cartography of shifting dynamics and tensions between Buddhist tradition and Western values and modernity, introduced us to Cambodian Sopheap Pich and Vietnamese Bui Cong Khanh.

Raqib Shaw, India / UK, Paradise Lost (detail), image courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London

The exhibitions have always been exciting, sometimes provocative — even disturbing. The seventh APT is no exception; however some of the decisions made by the curators are curious, resulting in a show that is not quite as richly rewarding as it should have been. The curatorial team led by Acting Director Suhanya Raffel began the process with a stated intention to consider location, and the significance of the structures and built environments in which we live and through which we construct our identity. “A project such as the APT is bound to deliberate on change as it casts its lines across the globe,” Raffel says in her catalogue essay. The metaphor of “casting lines” is particularly apt for an exhibition that has challenged many, including this writer, by its inclusion of a large number of mostly traditional works from Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, including masks and structures from the Sepik River Region in New Guinea, which dominate the lower space of GOMA. The decision to emphasise the Pacific and de-emphasise China, Japan, Korea and other Asian nations which have formed the backbone of past APT exhibitions has proved controversial. The traditional Oceanic works are hugely powerful, without a doubt, but they sit a little uneasily in the museum space, removed from their original function and purpose. A number of catalogue essays insist that these works reflect change in their societies and therefore connect with other works in the exhibition, but to an eye untrained in the subtleties of the particular context and the history of Papua New Guinea they appear dissonant — uneasily reminiscent of past museum collections from an anthropological paradigm. The task for the curators this year was by no means easy — navigating the highly political terrain of diasporic cultures, the rise of new cultures and the perceived decline of others, however, their inclusion of so many works that represent traditional cultural practices is problematic."

You can  read on HERE to see what else I had to say about this!

Nguyen Manh Hung, Living Together in Paradise, mixed media installation,
courtesy the artist and Art Vietnam Gallery Hanoi

I did think this work by Nguyen Manh Hung was completely charming. With all the idiosyncratic and low-fi qualities of an old style museum diorama, the sculpture of a ramshackle high-rise apartment block, complete with lots of laundry hanging out windows and home-made stripy plastic awnings of the kind seen everywhere in Asian cities, speaks of how people make 'home' and define their own space.

My review of the APT published in Dailyserving can be read HERE.

China and the Zeitgeist

I have been immersing myself in Chinese art to an even greater extent than usual: books and articles about Chinese art, web sites dealing with Chinese cultural issues, and exhibitions of Chinese art, to the point where I am dreaming about Chinese art....strange that suddenly there seems to be so much to look at and write about here in Australia. China is THE hot flavour of the month right now it seems, and all things Chinese, from food to fashion, art to literature, music and film, are suddenly highly desirable.

Song Yi, 'Girl', oil on canvas, image courtesy of Red Gate Gallery, Beijing

During the Sydney Chinese New Year celebrations, which culminated in the rather daggily charming parade that I described in a previous post, the Sydney Town Hall was the unusual site for 'Two Generations: 20 Years of Red Gate Gallery', an exhibition of work by artists from the Red Gate Gallery stable. Brian Wallace, the Australian director of this highly respected Beijing commercial gallery, asked a number of his senior artists to each nominate a young emerging artist for inclusion in the show, and the results were fascinatingly diverse and very impressive. There were  many wonderful works, including the luscious red calligraphic surface of 'Work 1112', a painting by Jiang Weitao revealing the continuing interest in painterly abstraction in Shanghai in particular.

Jiang Weitao, ‘Work 1112’, 2011, oil on canvas, 112 x 82 cm, image courtesy of Red Gate Gallery

From this substantial show in the centre of Sydney to the National Museum in Canberra (which has since the end of 2011 been showing a large exhibition of works from the collection of the National Art Museum of China, 'New Horizon) felt like a longer journey than just the tedious drive down the Hume Highway. This exhibition was uneven in its quality, with fabulous works by significant artists juxtaposed with more pedestrian works by (presumably) artists with impeccable political connections. The catalogue was particularly appalling - as if written by someone from a government office with little knowledge of art or the art world. While it was good to see the patterns of change in China as represented in artworks over the years since 1949, the exhibition as a whole was really quite bizarre, despite the inclusion of Xu Bing and Shen Jiawei.

I have written more extensively about both these shows in an article posted on The Art Life:
Drifting Clouds: Two Views of Chinese Art

Spring Breeze and Willow, Zhou Shuqiao, 1974, image reproduced courtesy of the National Art Museum of China

Last weekend I spent some time in the current exhibition showing at Ray Hughes Gallery in Surry Hills, 'China's Decade', which provided an illuminating contrast with both the previous shows. Hughes is one of the first people in the Sydney art world to understand the significance of the art being made in China in the early 90s, and the first to begin to show Chinese art in Sydney. He told me that he is now particularly interested in what is happening in Chongqing, that huge city of 38 million people in Sichuan Province, as he believes it has become a central locus of innovation and interesting practice. The works range from explorations of popular culture ('Infection Bambi'by Zhou Siwei, for example) to Li Jin's lyrical ink paintings of a kind of 'floating world' of everyday life - eating noodles, lying about watching television, making love. I loved the  fabulous examples of the 'Gaudy Art' of the 90s, such as the machine embroidered silk works of Chang Xugong which feature maniacally grinning karaoke singers and self satisfied toothy 'entrepreneurs' in brightly coloured suits clutching mobile phones and other accoutrements of  'success'.  The exhibition demonstrates the diverse richness of contemporary art in China, charting the startlingly rapid change in society and all the tension, dislocation and fragmentation that results from that, as well as the unalloyed joy and satisfaction of sudden wealth and access to all the desirable products of global capitalism. This last is featured in a cynical and witty form in the fibreglass fat babies of the Luo Brothers, lolling about on Pepsi cans or wrapping themselves around Big Macs.

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm, 

image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Best of all, however, was the painting by Liu Xiaodong, Unknown Pleasures, a work dating from 2002. A wonderful painter, his work is never facile despite his mastery of the painterly surface and gestural mark. In this work, the solitary figure smoking a cigarette in a street lined with shoddily constructed commercial buildings seems to embody a weird mixture of existential despair and hopefulness - the zeitgeist, perhaps.

Liu Xiaodong, Unknown Pleasures, 2002, oil on canvas, size unspecified,

 image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

We Have Crossed the Lake

Ian Woo, 'We Have Crossed the Lake', image used with permission of the artist

Ian Woo, 'The Great Interior',  image used with permission of the artist

I loved the work by Abstract painter Ian Woo in his review show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Lasalle College of Fine Arts, SIngapore. I included a review of the show in a piece about contemporary art in Singapore I recently had posted on 'The Art Life'  http://theartlife.com.au/?p=5698. 

Here are my thoughts about the exhibition:

 Lyrical and beautiful, without ever descending into empty gesture, or becoming formulaic, Woo’s body of work reveals a practice of unremitting commitment and a single-minded examination of the possibilities of colour, mark and surface. Owing a debt to Philip Guston and Susan Rothenberg, as well as to canonical abstract painters of the mid-20th century such as Kline or Motherwell, the works represent nevertheless a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language all his own. In works such as ‘We Have Crossed the Lake’, 2009, the figure-ground relationships demonstrate a confident knowledge that what is left out is just as important as what is shown. An energetic calligraphy of white and black lines scrawls with apparent abandon across the surface of the work, yet underlying the gestural mark-making is a sure, spare restraint which derives from his evident knowledge of Chinese ink-painting traditions.

Playing with hard edge shapes versus lyrical, smoky drifts of grey and ochre, an earlier work such as Before I give an answer I see a flower indicates more obviously the artist’s influence from New York painters such as Guston. The ethereal drawn lines of The Clearest Symbol, dating from 1997, tantalise with hints of mysterious half-seen objects or landscapes. The subtlety of the grey washes and stains and the spare restraint of the floating forms evoke a dream-like state. Large ink drawings in this show reinforced this sense of meditation – a surprising calm as many of the individual works are so filled with energy and crammed with disparate shapes, colours and forms. Woo has said he is interested in complication, confusion and connection, and this sense that the artist is working out difficult problems on the surface of each painting is a thread running through this show.

Ian Woo, Before I Give an Answer I See a Flower, image used with permission of the artist

These works were showing in the wonderful new buildings of the Lasalle College of Fine Arts,  making me fantasise about being an art student once more. Why did I not fully appreciate the wonderful luxury of those 4 years spent at art college, all those many years ago? Why on earth did I not spend every precious moment learning as much as I possibly could? Too much time dancing to rockabilly bands (it WAS the '70s!) and drinking cheap beer, and not enough time painting! Especially way too much time spent on nonsensical student politics. What can I say? "That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead"....(to quote either Christopher Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta', or the crime novelist PD James, depending on which Wikipedia entry you want to go with.) I was seized by the same sense of nostalgia and a degree of longing when I spent a day in the painting studios of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in March this year. Such intent young people, so serious of purpose, so very unlike my memories of the early 70s! No good wishing for the past to return, I tell myself briskly as I vow to make the most of every minute and seize every opportunity that presents itself.


'We have crossed the lake', indeed. 

Lasalle College of Fine Arts Buildings, Singapore