Cartography of the Artworld: the 18th Biennale of Sydney and other exhibitions

Nipan Oranniwesna  'City of Ghost', 2012,
 baby powder, wood, fabric, bulbs and stencil maps, dimensions variableInstallation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Art Gallery of New South Wales
Courtesy the artist
Photograph: Ben Symons

First post for some time - like most people I know, I am finding that work is eating my life, leaving too little time for the things I love to do, such as writing about art - Chinese contemporary art in particular. I know, I know, 'FWP - first world problem', but the fact remains that the work/life balance thing gets harder to manage as time goes on, not easier. However, in the last few weeks I have been able to lift my head, take a deep breath, and look around. Here is some of what I have seen:

Gao Ping, ‘Still Life – Fans’, 2011,
 Chinese ink on rice paper, 45 x 36 cm,
image reproduced courtesy of the artist, Stella Downer Fine Art and China Art Projects.

The wonderful Gao Ping has been shown in a curated exhibition, 'The Drawing Room' at Stella Downer Fine Art. I met with her over coffee at Danks Street to talk about her practice - luckily her English is much better than my Chinese - and wrote about our meeting, and about the exhibition, for The Art Life. Her work is also showing at the Maitland Regional Gallery, together with works on paper by William Kentridge, Trevor Weekes and Gary Shead, among others. Her work is so delicate yet so strong; so sad yet also so quirky and humorous. I love the way she places tiny objects into vast empty spaces, influenced by the traditions of Chinese ink painting masters of the Song and Ming Dynasties. She told me that she admires the work of Marlene Dumas and Antony Gormley, as well as the historical conventions of ink painting. She was not trained in that tradition at all - she is a graduate of the Department of Oil Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing - yet sees it as an essential element of working as an artist in China. She was intrigued to discover the work of Joy Hester, and had also been taken to see Ann Thomson's work at Tim Olsen, coincidentally one of my own favourite painters. Gao Ping described Thompson as 'serious' and 'strong' - a definite accolade. She spoke about dealing with sadness and loss as an inevitable aspect of carving out a life in Beijing. This sadness, as well as a still quietness, is very evident in her works.

Gao Ping, 'Still Life - Chairs',  2011,
 Chinese ink on rice paper, 45 x 36 cm, 
image reproduced courtesy of the artist, Stella Downer Fine Art and China Art Projects. 

I have been completely blown away by what I have seen of the Sydney Biennale thus far. The works of previously unfamilar artists (to me at least) from Thailand (Nipan Oranniwesna and Pinaree Sanpitak), Vietnam (Binh Danh) and the Middle East (Hassan Sharif) have been a revelation. It was also wonderful to see once again the beautiful work of Yuken Teruya, especially his shopping bags, discarded from both high and low emporia, from the sublime (Chanel, the Venice Biennale) to the ridiculous (Starbucks, McDonalds) with tiny, intricately cut trees apparently growing inside them. Shopping bag as vitrine. And the lovely irony of using products of the wastefulness of consumer desire to point to the fragility and beauty of the natural world!

                         Yuken Teruya, 'Notice - Forest (Fendi)' 2010 (detail)

                         paper shopping bag, glue, 16.8 x 43.6 x 41.8cm 

Courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica

 Photograph: Yuken Teruya

As usual though, it was the works of a number of Chinese artists which made the most impression on me. Liu Zhuoquan, of course, whom I met at his studio in Beijing last year - his impressive installation of bottles painted in the 'neihua' or 'inside' technique with sinuously coiled black snakes look both seductive and dangerous in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Liu Zhuoquan, Two Headed Snake, 2011, 

glass bottles, mineral pigments, dimensions variable

 image reproduced courtesy of the artist and China Art Projects 

Gao Rong's fabric and embroidery replica of the entrance door of her Beijing apartment was my absolute favourite work last year at the White Rabbit Gallery. For the Biennale she has created a full size replica of her grandparents' house in Inner Mongolia in which every single thing - the furniture, the ancestor portraits, the enamel mugs and basins, even the walls and doorways - are embroidered. It is so interesting to see this contemporary reinvention of a traditional handcraft practised by women. I am curious as to whether she is familiar with the work of feminist artists of the 70s such as Miriam Schapiro or Judy Chicago who were intentionally and deliberately bringing female 'craft' into the high art territory of the gallery space. Gao Rong's work speaks of family history and the domesticity of ordinary lives, of memory and filial duty. As a simulacrum it reminded me of Do Ho Suh's replicas of his Seoul, New York and LA houses. I was completely charmed by his gauzy transparent New York apartment where everything down to the radiators and light switches is sewn from transparent silk - in fact I was severely spoken to by guards in the MCA years ago because I unconsciously reached out to touch the fabric lightswitch as I passed it. 

   Gao Rong, The Static Eternity, 2012, cloth, wire, sponge, cotton, steel support and board, 500 x 400 x 300 cm

Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Art Gallery of New South Wales

Courtesy the artist

This project was made possible through the generous support of the Neilson Foundation

White Rabbit Gallery supported this project through its residency program

Photograph: Ben Symons

Her work made me think about other artists who work in a similar vein, from Song Dong with 'Waste Not', an installation containing every single item from his mother's hutong house in Beijing laid out on the floor of the gallery; to Chen Qiulin's  Xinsheng Town no. 275–277, a reconstructed traditional house that was demolished for urban development, drowned in the creation of the Three Gorges Dam. Back in 2009 I saw an exhibition at Osage Kwun Tong in Hong Kong, 'Dwelling', which dealt with all of these themes - the personal and the political elements of the spaces in which we live and move. The show included Hanison (Hok Shing) Lau, although at that point I had no idea that I would come to meet this artist on my study tour of China two years later. His work focuses very strongly on notions of space and place, including his very charming yet politically charged 'Century Old Shop' (below) in which he constructed a replica of a traditional tiny Hong Kong shop front from cardboard and discarded materials, just big enough for him to enter. He pulled it around the streets of Hong Kong, engaging passers-by in ‘trade’, by exchanging items from inside the shop (e.g. old newspapers which old people can sell for a little money, and cheap items of stationery such as pencils, stickers and erasers) for whatever people chose to give him in return. He recorded conversations with this ‘audience’ about their memories of fast disappearing aspects of traditional Hong Kong life such as these old shops. Other artists in Hong Kong such as Jaffa Lam also explore ideas about urban/domestic, private/public spaces. It is probably not in the least surprising that Chinese artists both in Hong Kong and on the mainland are interested in this political geography - overcrowding and expensive rents in Hong Kong make life increasingly difficult, whilst in cities like Beijing the constant transformation and modernisation of every facet of the city cause stress and anxiety to many.

Hanison (Hok Shing) Lau, A Century Old Shop, 

sculpture, and documented performance 2010

Image reproduced with the permission of the artist

And of course there are our own Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro whose collaborative works from as far back as 2003, with 'The Cordial Home Project' through to Deceased Estate and Flatpack (an entire flattened caravan) deal with the same territory - a practice which interrogates both institutional and domestic architecture.

Another extraordinarily beautiful work from the Biennale - Nipan Oranniwesna's 'City of Ghost', created with baby powder dusted through a stencil made of the street maps of ten different cities - evocative and ethereal.  The artist's choice of material is both unexpected and utterly right. The cartography of contemporary art - so many possible permutations, and a number of them right here at the Biennale.

Nipan Oranniwesna, 'City of Ghost' 2012, 

                              baby powder, wood, fabric, bulbs and stencil maps, dimensions variable

                 Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Art Gallery of New South Wales

                                                    Courtesy the artist, Photograph: Ben Symons

Day 3: 2 galleries, a critic, an artist and 2 bowls of soup

Today was a little slower and less intense than yesterday, which gave me a bit more time to soak up the ambience of this city, where (gulp!) I saw a fishmonger skinning live frogs around the corner from very swish art galleries and expensive handbag shops. Some impressions: tiny stooped old ladies pushing enormous barrows of goods up steep hills; glamorous and very well-groomed young girls with beautiful shoes, bags and overcoats walking in pairs; very young men in very sharp suits and rectangular designer glasses speaking in staccato tones into cell phones; groups of old men with gold teeth laughing together and playing mah jongg in the park; shopping malls of enormous glitz and glamour around the corner from street markets selling anything and everything including meat hanging from hooks under red lights. This is a city where everyone is busy and everyone seems to be selling something!



At the Osage Foundation Gallery in Chelsea I had a conversation with Joyce Lau, who trained in art criticism at St Martins in London before coming home to work in Hong Kong. Highly articulate and passionate about contemporary art, she told me that things are difficult for younger artists in Hong Kong as the commercial galleries are focused on art from the mainland and there are few artist-run spaces for them to exhibit their work. In this highly compressed city where space is at a premium and rents have continued to rise, artists who had rented cheap industrial spaces in Fo Tan are continuing to be pushed further and further away, and some have no studio space to work at all.With many people arriving from the mainland every day there is intense pressure on jobs and rental property. In the galleries arounnd Central today I saw a lot of very interesting work, both traditional and contemporary, all of which came from Mainland China, Korea or Japan.

Doorway on Hollywood Road

The main event today was the first of my artist interviews, with young Hong Kong artist Hanison (Hok Shing) Lau. We met in a cafe in Mong Kok, as Hanison was between classes - he teaches Sculpture and Art History at Hong Kong Art School. After studying in Hong Kong he completed his BA and MFA atSwinburne and RMIT in Melbourne, and confesses that although he loves Hong Kong he sometimes misses the quieter pace of life in Melbourne. I don't share with him the famous Ava Gardner quote, that Melbourne was a great place to make a film about the end of the world, as I am not sure that he will understand me.

Hanison (Hok Shing) Lau in Mong Kok

Hanison shows me images from the last eight or so years of his sculpture and installation works. They are very beautiful, meditative and quiet works which employ found objects and 'poor' materials (in the sense of art povera) in sensitive and unexpected ways: cardboard packing boxes are glued together and carved to form mountains reminiscent of classical Chinese paintings, or paper towels are designed to form lakes and waves. He references traditional Chinese culture and poetry from the Song Dynasty, as he believes that young Chinese need to reconnect with these traditions. He also wants people to take the time to really look at the world around them and the objects they are using - in a busy busy city where people buy a new cell phone then throw it away and buy a new one in order to have 'the newest, the latest' consumer goods, Hanison wants his audience to think more carefully about tradition and the meanings inherent in objects. Year 12 Loreto students: note the continuing connections with Marcel Duchamp and the ready-made! Told you it was still important!

Hanison Lau, 'Table Top Garden' 2007, Paper, wood, plant and water
80cm (L) x 60cm (W) x 130cm (H)
  image used with permission of the artist

Many of his works also have a sly humour - his 'Letter to Marco Polo', which includes a pair of boots made of teabags sewn together. They appear like the Chinese leather armour worn  by the entombed warriors (and he says were surprisingly difficult and frustrating to sew!) and of course are a reference to Marco Polo infamously neglecting to mention tea in his accounts of his travels, which have caused some to believe that his tales were all fabricated fantasy. I especially loved his 'Table Top Gardens' which are tiny traditional gardens like those of the Ming Dynasty, with tiny carved cardbaord mountains, real plants and fish, which he 'adopted' out to a dozen people (including his mother, a traditional landscape painter). The 'adopters' had to look after their gardens and take a photograph every day, which were then exhibited with the works as a large installation.

I also loved his 'walking shop', a cardboard person-sized replica of a traditional Hong Kong shop, in which he walked around the city engaging people in conversation and exchanging or trading items with them. He said that old people like newspaper, because they can sell it, so he collected lots of that and gave it away, and young people like stationery, so he exchanged that for whatever people offered to give him in return - the goods he received included used Starbucks coffee cups, but also some money. The performance piece was documented and photographed, and the items he received and the conversations he had with the audience participants all then became part of the artwork. Perhaps this development of his practice from more purely sculptural to performative comes in part from his experience as a performer in the Chinese opera, from the time he was a small child up until he left Hong Kong to study in Australia. I suspect that his expressive face and ability to tell a story and engage me in the narrative of his works may come from this part of his personal history as well.

I think students in Australia would love his work and find it accessible, interesting and engaging, as well as thought provoking. Some aspects reminded me of Hossein Valamenash, the Iranian born Australian artist, whilst some of his deliberate choices of 'poor', recycled non-art materials, which are transformed through the alchemy of his artmaking, reminded me of Sarah Sze, a New York Chinese artist whose work I saw last year.Hanison has already experienced one overseas artistic residency, in Portland Oregon, and later this year he has been commissioned to create some works in Paris and London. He will also be going to a residency in Korea. Whilst he, like many others I have spoken to, talked about how hard it is for Hong Kong artists beacuse no-one is interested, and all the focus of the artworld is on the mainland, I think he is definitely a young artist to watch.

And, oh yes, the 2 bowls of soup were eaten on the run in food courts where so many options have lungs, intestines, feet or things which are, frankly and perhaps fortunately, unidentifiable, in them that I have been eating vegetarian soup with noodles - when in doubt, pointing at things and using sign language!