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’

Sugar and Spice Sichuan Style: 'China's Decade' at Ray Hughes Gallery

Wan Yang, Game No 2: Fortuitous Encounters in the Forest, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 150 cm, image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Ray Hughes, that somewhat Rabelaisian, larger than life fixture of the Sydney artworld, first travelled to China in 1998. Since then he has been a regular visitor to the studios and galleries of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and, most recently, Chongqing, that vast city of 38 million people on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. It is now well known that it was at an exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery that Judith Nielson, the founder with her husband Kerr of the White Rabbit Gallery http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org and its significant collection, first encountered contemporary Chinese art. While she has since developed her own networks of artists and advisors, it is due to her chance encounter with artist Wang Zhiyuan and the energy and excitement of Chinese art at Hughes’ Surry Hills Gallery that a new and vital force was unleashed onto the Sydney cultural scene.

Something of a maverick, Hughes’ determination to run his own race in the sometimes pretentiously self-conscious Sydney artworld is what makes him such an interesting character.  He is interested in “the next generation, the next ‘new thing’ “, he tells me when I visit the gallery to see the group show ‘China’s Decade’ together with a show of new work by the painter Li Jun. A curious title for the show, given that many works date from the late 90s, but there is no denying the accuracy of the statement in today’s global context. Hughes was expansive and animated, describing his visits to Sichuan (and the hot pots eaten in the mountains with the artists, teachers and art students, of course!) and the way that the artists he admires there are focused on moving art beyond the limited scope of the ‘Political Pop’ movement of the late ‘90s, re-examining their own pre-revolutionary Chinese history. They are developing a new visual syntax which incorporates Western influences with a confidently global, international outlook.  Their references to Chinese art and craft traditions are sometimes subtle and veiled, sometimes overt.

Luo Brothers, 'Welcome Welcome!', fibreglass and paint.
Image reproduced courtesy of Ray Hughes Gallery

This is not to say, however, that the brash wit of Political Pop is altogether absent. The work of the Luo Brothers, who have been shown in Sydney by Ray Hughes since his first forays into Chinese art, is typical of the style. As well as the highly recognisable icons of consumer desire – such as the gaudy fat ‘good fortune’ fibreglass babies reclining smugly on cans of Pepsi that we see in this show – there is also a series of pencil and charcoal drawings. The three works in ‘The 100 Family Names Primer’ series represent a baby, a young female in Red Army uniform, and an old worker, all with their jackets covered in Mao buttons and backed by revolutionary flags. The title is presumably a reference to the ‘Old Hundred Names’, the ordinary working people of China who propped up the revolution and are now propping up the country’s growing wealth and industrial might in the factories of the Pearl River Delta. Other works by Feng Zheng-jie and Qi Zhilong which date from the late 90s and early 2000s work the familiar seam of Red Army ballet dancers and Maoist imagery with engaging verve and confidence. There are those in China, such as the Canadian Martin Kemble of the respected Shanghai ‘Art Labor’ Gallery http://www.artlaborgallery.com/ who see the continuing popularity of this style in the west as a kind of ‘Chinoiserie’ or orientalism, which Chinese artists are pragmatic enough to happily profit from. There is no doubt some truth in this. However, despite the fact that younger artists (and many of the older generation as well) have moved away from this somewhat obsessive gnawing at the bone of the Cultural Revolution, these works still exert a fascination in their relentless exposure of the contradictions of this ‘new’ China as it moves towards global dominance.

Hang Bo’s series of photographs, ‘No. 6 They’, ‘Middle School’ and ‘No.  5 They’ exemplify a very different approach to the business of ‘being Chinese’ and making sense of history. His method is to take ‘found’ images, poignant group photos of young Pioneers, soldiers or work unit comrades from the time of the Cultural Revolution, and then re-photograph the same (living) subjects in the same arrangements. Quietly arresting and very moving, ‘No. 5 They’ contains a number of empty chairs, and one inevitably begins to speculate as to the reasons for the absences.

Of most interest to me were other more idiosyncratic works such as Wang Yuping’s oddly tentative ‘Untitled’, a mixed media work on paper.  A faceless figure, sketchily and loosely rendered, tenderly holds a small black bird on its hand. Reminiscent of ink drawings by Joy Hester such as ‘Girl with Hen’ or the ‘Lovers’ series, in which faces are partially or totally obliterated, the work can be read on many levels and suggests the vulnerability of both the natural world and of human connections. Ji Dachun’s large canvases, in which mundane objects such as electric light bulbs and shoes appear to float against a light coloured ground, are also strangely compelling, making subtle references to Western modernist conventions of abstraction, colour field painting and expressionism. There is a Zen sensibility though, of weightlessness and quiet meditation, which makes these works repay a second look, and then a third.

Wang Yuping, Untitled, 1998, mixed media on paper, 102 x 69 cm,
 image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The highly respected senior painter Liu Xiaodong, who will be remembered by Sydney audiences for his monumental  paintings of migrant workers building the Three Gorges Dam shown at a Sydney Biennale some years ago, is represented here with a work from 2002, ‘Unknown Pleasures’. A solitary figure, seen from the rear, smokes a cigarette, quietly observing a street scene. Large, ornate, brightly coloured floral wreaths are arranged along a bicycle lane in front of the kind of new commercial buildings which look ramshackle and decrepit in China before construction has even finished. There is a melancholy air about this figure observing the ‘new’ China.  Liu was apparently inspired to develop his particular expressive style after he was given a postcard of a work by Lucien Freud. When you look at the way he paints flesh, especially in those earlier paintings of migrant workers at the dam site eating lunch in their underpants, or young girls lying on seedy bare mattresses, this makes perfect sense. There is a sense of melancholy and a hint of menace lurking behind the seductive and luscious painterly surface.

I was intrigued by Zhou Siwei’s mixture of ‘spice and sugar’ in works such as ‘Infection Bambi ‘ paintings, part of a larger series of ‘cartoon nostalgia’ which includes ‘Infection Mickey’ and ‘Infection Astro Boy’. Drops and splatters of paint create stylised images which are intended, the artist says, to return viewers to the state of their wide-eyed and optimistic youthful selves. Rather unnervingly though, Bambi appears to be decomposing, so the work rather suggests the impossibility of returning to that charmed childhood state, and instead suggests that popular culture is toxic to those who consume it. The artist has said that his work is there to be ‘infected’ with all the various interpretations and ideas that the viewer may bring to contemplating it. Zhou studied at the influential Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. This city is, Hughes believes, at the centre of innovative art in China. Zhou represents a generation who have little interest in, or direct experience of, the Cultural Revolution that provided so much of the imagery employed by the first wave of contemporary Chinese artists and avidly ‘consumed’ by Western audiences. In this he reminds me of Lu Yang, a young artist I met in Shanghai last year, who told me she has no interest whatsoever in being identified or defined as a Chinese artist. The limitations of national identity become  meaningless in the age of social media. These young artists are forging a new path, challenging the orthodoxies that have grown up in the last 20 years about what Chinese art ‘should’ look like. Sometimes they may seem to an (older) outside observer to be in denial, however there is no doubting their sincerity, or their determination.

As I chatted with Hughes in the gallery, though, my eye was continually drawn away from him (despite his characteristically brightly coloured shirt and tie) to the works by Chang Xugong hanging above him. Dating from the Late 90s, they represent the ‘Gaudy Art’ movement. Born in 1957 in Hebei Province, Chang uses the tradition of silk embroidery to make comment on the nouveau riche in China and their relentless acquisition of consumer goods and branded products. Like the dramatic imagery of heroic workers from Cultural Revolution Propaganda posters, these new aspirational heroes of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ appear happy to the point of lunacy, which allows just a little doubt to creep into the mind of the viewer. They  are charming rather than malicious, however -  there is affection in the mockery, rather as one might tiredly acknowledge the foibles of a relative one is really quite fond of. Many of his toothy grinning characters carry the latest accessory of urban China – a fluffy white Maltese terrier or Paris Hilton style pooch. Cars, mobile phones and television sets swirl around like the haloes surrounding Renaissance depictions of saints. These saints, though, are more likely to be performing Karaoke than miracles.

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The delicate and beautiful works of Li Jin, http://www.li-jin.com/  an artist from Tianjing, are reminiscent of nothing so much as the drawings of George Grosz or Max Beckmann, albeit with a lighter and more humorous touch. Loose, lyrical ink on paper works depicting rather unprepossessing looking men in front of messy  tables scattered with bottles of baijiu and cut sausage, or engaged in strangely unerotic encounters with plump naked girls, they celebrate the everyday lives of ordinary and unbeautiful people – that is, most of us. Affectionate and gentle, his works present a slightly flabby and imperfect cast of characters, drawn lovingly without attempts to idealise, to beautify, or to apply Vaseline to the lens recording daily existence. In a time when the only images of ordinary flawed human beings we see are the grotesque photographs of ‘Celebs without Make-up’, or the sad and desperate on ‘The Biggest Loser’, this is very refreshing.

The exhibition celebrates Chinese art in all its rich diversity. Yes, there is Mao imagery, and the memory of the Cultural Revolution lives on in the work of many artists – how could it not? Yet there are also artists working in new techniques and with imagery that represents the bizarre and the humdrum, the beautiful and the disturbing, the humorous and also the magical aspects of life in China (and everywhere) today.

Li Jin, Accompanying Object, 2007, ink on paper, 46 x 70 cm, 

image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

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

Liu Xiaodong and China's Decade

Liu Xiaodong, Unknown Pleasures, 2002, currently showing in 'China's Decade' at
Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney

Looking at this painting by Liu Xiaodong in the 'China's Decade' show at Ray Hughes Gallery, I suddenly remembered that my first inkling of the nature and significance of contemporary Chinese art, some years ago, came as I stood in front of Liu Xiaodong's enormous painting of migrant workers at the Three Gorges Dam, hung in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Not quite an epiphany, although in retrospect it should have been. It must have been a Sydney Biennale, although I cannot now remember the year.  It was that painting, in all its extraordinary technical mastery, which made me want to find out more about how Chinese artists came to paint in this way. Until that point my own art education had been almost entirely Eurocentric and American in its focus, with a few exceptions such as Nam June Paik or Yasumasa Morimura. Liu was apparently himself inspired to paint in this manner by being given a postcard of a work by Lucien Freud, and when you look at the way he paints flesh, in the migrant workers eating lunch in their underpants, or in his series of girls lying on seedy bare mattresses, this makes perfect sense.


The artist, now one of the most significant and respected painters in China, teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he himself studied. The day that I spent last year immersed in the First and Second Year painting classes at CAFA revealed the legacy of artists such as Liu, and the mastery of technique that is passed on to so many hopeful young art students in China. Like the best dancers or acrobats, they make what is incredibly difficult look easy. And, like dancers or acrobats, it takes years and years of constant and unremitting effort to acquire such a high level of technical mastery.

Painting Class at Central Academy of Fine Arts, observed March 2011

Liu Xiaodong, 'Eating', shown in the 'Mahjong' exhibition of works from the Sigge collection at Berkeley Art Museum in California in 2009