半 边 天 : Half the Beijing Sky Part 2

Ming City Wall Park, Beijing

 Blue sky continues, the air is fresh(ish), and trees are in green leaf everywhere you look. Three reasons to be cheerful in Beijing. Only the apocalyptic traffic today could put a dampener on my mood, the day after the big book launch and "Half the Sky" exhibition opening at Red Gate Gallery. The exhibition is causing a bit of a buzz around town, I hear, and I am hoping there will be at least a few people turn up for my talk tomorrow evening at the Beijing Bookworm. It seems that "Half the Sky" has hit some kind of zeitgeist - people are definitely interested, and warmly enthusiastic.

Half the Sky opens at Red Gate Gallery

How interesting that shows of women artists are in the news again, with Hauser and Wirth in LA re-writing the history of abstract sculpture in America in ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016. Despite the apparent success of individual women - in that case Louise Bourgeois, or Lee Bontecou; in the Chinese context Cao Fei or Lin Tianmiao - they are still an absence in the larger narrative. The debate about the rightness or wrongness of all-women shows continues, and I must admit I had secret worries about whether it was a good strategy. But in the end, writing the book was a curatorial process, and an exhibition was a logical move.

Dong Yuan, Grandmother's Cabinet, installation view

When I began writing "Half the Sky" there were many anxious moments when I thought I must be mad. I continued to succumb to moments of doubt and despair throughout the process: was it a kind of hubris that made me think that I could - or should - write a book about artists in another culture, another language? But I really was determined to tell the story of this particular group of artists, representative in so many ways of the extraordinary phenomenon that is contemporary Chinese art.

Installing Gao Rong's "Sitting in a Chair and Thinking About My Future" - an armchair covered in embroidered mould, and lamp with knitted light rays

Installing Li Tingting works

Tao Aimin and Ma Yanling with Tao's "In an Instant" installation

In conversation with Lin Jingjing before the opening begins

  Visitors examining Dong Yuan's "Grandmother's Cabinet"

Tao Aimin, "In an Instant"

Brian Wallace, Red Gate director, with Xiao Lu and Guo Chen

With Dong Yuan

Gao Rong signs a copy of the book

Looking at Cui Xiuwen's "Existential Emptiness"

With Lin Jingjing

Brian Wallace introduces the Australian Ambassador at the opening

Australian Ambassador Jan Adams and a line-up of Chinese artists: 

L to R Zhou Hongbin, Cui Xiuwen, Li Tingting, Xie Qi, Jan Adams, Ma Yanling, myself, Bu Hua, Tony Scott, Bingyi, Xiao Lu, Lin Jingjing, Han Yajuan, Gao Ping. Not pictured: Gao Rong, Tao Aimin, Dong Yuan and Huang Yajuan

Are You My Mother? Reflections on Mothers and Daughters

Zhang Xiaogang Big Family 1995 oil on canvas. source: Saatchi Gallery

I have been thinking a lot about mothers and daughters. Unsurprising - my own mother is in a state of advanced dementia, and while I adore her, and she sometimes recognises me and is still fabulously feisty (and funny) the relationship has always been, shall we say, "complicated". And my eldest daughter is about to be married, which feels both happy and strange. I have flashes in my dreams of my daughters as babies; the sheer pleasurable physicality of tiny children. I remember lying beside them as they slept; the exhaustion overlaid by that fierce love that is quite overwhelming. 

Ridiculously, I was almost reduced to tears the other day when I read somewhere an account of the Dr Seuss book 'Are You My Mother?' which I must have read a thousand times to my own small daughters. A baby bird falls out of the nest and goes exploring, asking every creature - and thing - it sees, "Are you my mother?" The reply is always, "No. I am not your mother. I am a horse/pig/cow/truck," etc etc. Of course there is a happy ending, anticipated with great satisfaction by the children who chanted along with me, "Yes! I am a bird and I am your mother!"

I recently saw again a charming Chinese animation for children, called 'Tadpoles Looking for their Mother' or ‘Where is Mama?’. Created in 1960 at Shanghai Film Studios under the guidance of the legendary animator Te Wei, it tells the story of a group of tadpoles searching for their mother. They plaintively question goldfish, shrimp, turtles and other creatures on their journey through a watery landscape, "Women de Mama, Zai Nali?" Each frame is rendered in deft, minimal brushstrokes with ink and wash, influenced by the watercolour paintings of Qi Baishi. In these digital days its artistry and simplicity are a revelation.

But why on earth have memories of my own childhood, and my children's, been haunting me? Why now? It began when I started to write an article about the artist Gao Rong for 'Artist Profile' magazine. As I listened once again to my taped interviews with Gao, I heard echoes of the stories told to me by so many of the female artists I have been meeting in China. There is a great closeness between Gao and her mother - although much untold bitterness, I am sure, in the story of her grandmother. Sent away into exile in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, far from her native Shaanxi Province, she and her seven children would have starved had she not been able to barter her exquisite embroidery for food. I began to think of all the tragic separations and the broken families resulting from ten years of utter madness. 

 Gao Rong The Static Eternity 2012 cloth wire sponge, cotton, steel, board, 516 x 460 x 270 cm detail
image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Perhaps because that time coincided with my own childhood and teenage years, as I look at photographs of my mother with her two children in 1966, I inevitably compare our lives with those of  Chinese artists of my own age. No doubt it's also because now, increasingly often, my mother has no idea who is in those photographs. Nevertheless, I think of Qing Qing, who was sent away with her mother to Xinjiang Province to drive a tractor in her early teens, the family's house seized, books burned and father imprisoned. I think of Lin Jingjing, whose mother was left behind "to take care of things" when the rest of the family escaped overseas. She was sixteen. The family's property was confiscated and she was sent to prison and then into rural exile.It was thirty years before she saw her mother again, by which time her father was dead. And there are so many others who allude obliquely to suffering, fragmentation, betrayal and disconnection as they tell me about their lives. 

Dong Yuan told me recently that she continues to make artworks about her grandma's house on the coast near Dalian because that was the place where she learned what family was, and where she felt safe. Her own parents, she didn't need to elaborate, were of the generation when "everything was for the country." Artists of a much younger generation find it hard to relate to their parents' and grandparents' experiences, and their parents in turn cannot understand the new pressures of a materialist and frighteningly dog-eat-dog (in Chinese, "ren chi ren" - man eat man) world. I think about Zhang Xiaogang's "Bloodline" series, and reflect on the tenacity - but also the tenuousness - of family ties. They can be destroyed by the fraying and crumbling of cognition and memory as much as by the ramifications of political ideology.

Dong Yuan Grandma's House, multiple canvases, oil and acrylic, 2013, image courtesy the artist

Yet it is interesting to me that so far every single Chinese female artist I have interviewed (about twenty five now) mentions their mother somewhere in their narrative. Sometimes memories are bitter and the stories oblique, sometimes they are enormously loving and positive. Some mothers are proud of their artist daughters, some mystified, and some are frankly disapproving. But those mother/daughter bonds, so complicated and so strong, are always a part of the daughter's story. Many women, I admit myself included, are still hoping for that motherly approval, that affirmation, and continue to long for it into middle age and beyond. My mother at eighty nine sees her own mother in the room, and sometimes cries for her, which breaks my heart.

So the story of Gao Rong learning to sew from her mother and grandmother, in turn teaching her Shaanxi stitching to rural women who can then earn money assisting her in her sculptural projects, struck a chord with me. It seemed a healing kind of story, in a country where the scars of the past are all too visible. And it spoke to me in a way about my own wounds too. Gao says, “Heritage is not just a technique, but a spirit of survival handed down from one Chinese woman to another.” Gao Rong is the same age as my daughter, and so I loved her telling me that she missed her mother terribly when she was alone studying in Beijing, and that she then took her mother with her to New York for her solo show last year. 

And now, when my own mother sometimes asks me,"Who are you? Are you my mother?" I have learned to say, "Yes I am, and you are safe."

The full interview with Gao Rong is in the current (August 2014) issue of Artist Profile.

Spring in the 'Jing

Classic Beijing wiring

How to describe Beijing in Spring? I have just walked home to the apartment where I am staying in Tuanjiehu in the late evening light, pondering just why it is that I love this city. It's filthy - and I mean really filthy. It's pretty ugly, let's be honest. The razing of the old courtyards and lanes has resulted in a city of enormous 8-lane highways lined by pink apartment blocks and the occasional "statement" building, which is often either unfinished or in a state of collapse. Everything is covered with dust. The air is foul, with many days of particulate pollution beyond actual measuring. People can be pretty rude and brusque in a way with which New Yorkers would be familiar. Some westerners find this hard to take, but I tend to like Chinese directness. There is no bullshit and no beating around the bush. There certainly are many things that are disconcerting, for example the constant public hawking and spitting, the piles and piles of rubbish around the roads of the villages where the artists have their studios - and the tendency for women of a certain age to see no necessity to close public toilet doors whilst squatting. This disconcerts me every time I come here. Public toilets in China are much improved even in the few years that I have been visiting, but the traditional style ones do take some getting used to - one moment of absent-mindedness and you forget that there is step down outside the door and fall embarrassingly into the arms of a startled cleaner. Beijing traffic jams are also legendary. The words for "traffic jam" and "air pollution" are now in all Chinese language textbooks. So, what's to like?

Well, here are a few things:
A girl just sailed past me on her bicycle, dressed entirely in gold lame including her Roman sandals, her waist-length black hair flying behind her as she effortlessly threaded her way through the cacophony of honking, swearing taxi drivers, BMWs and Mercs with tinted windows, three-wheeled carts laden with enormous piles of mattresses; recycled cardboard; stacks of timber; watermelons and, in one case an entire family and a refrigerator. Bicycles of every possible shape, size and degree of decrepitude ridden by people of every age, shape (and degree of decrepitude) followed random paths across the 8 lanes of the intersection, taking no apparent notice of the kamikaze taxis and trucks. I have never seen a helmet on anyone riding a bicycle or a motor bike. Most have several passengers riding side-saddle. Pedestrians dart into the middle of all of this chaos whenever there is the most minute gap in the traffic, holding up one hand like King Canute parting the waves. And it works! I take my life in my hands and stick close to old ladies and people carrying children, hoping that the magic talisman of holding up one hand against the streams of traffic will work for me too. So far so good, but I had better not try it in Sydney!

Towards me along Gongti Beilu come hordes of walkers in the late evening light. Hipsters in weird matching skin-tight suits with digital prints and geometric haircuts; a girl wearing a Union Jack poncho with a Louis Vuitton - maybe - bag dangling with Hello Kitty accessories; and tiny old ladies and men wearing cloth shoes. The sellers of "Tibetan" jewellery are out in force. A snack cart is selling pineapples scored into beautiful swirling shapes and weird sausages on sticks. A family group sits on stools around a brazier next to the subway entrance eating chuan'r (lamb - maybe - grilled on a skewer) and squid. A young woman in head-to-toe pink throws a massive hissy fit and storms away from her sullenly resigned boyfriend, throwing invective back over her shoulder. He trudges behind, carrying her shopping bags. In the park the older women - aunties and grandmas - are dancing in unison in the fading light and the water calligraphers are intent on their beautiful transient characters. There is pink blossom on the trees, musicians playing in all the pavilions - some beautiful and skilful, some not so very - and tiny children are everywhere.

Solitary Musician in Tuanjiehu Park

Evening in the Park

Really - what's NOT to like? It's endlessly fascinating, amusing and intriguing, despite all the very real issues and concerns, and despite the fact that it's a tough, tough city to live in. An old man in a blue suit followed the girl in gold lame across the intersection and rode his bike up along the sidewalk, singing loudly to himself. All humanity is here, in all its guises. Such a cliche, I know, to talk about contrasts and juxtapositions but this is what makes Beijing fascinating - it's a place in flux, reinventing itself constantly.On the one hand, Tuanjiehu Park and its "renao" frenetic activity, and on the other hand, the new suburbs on the outskirts where I met artist Dong Yuan today. In one block I saw a mock Tudor half timbered complex of houses and apartments, a grandiose and enormous building under construction - part ancient Rome and part Las Vegas - called the Hot Springs Resort, and an apartment complex called Hawaiian Hacienda. Talk about postmodern pastiche!

And - there's the art! I have seen an exhibition of Ma Yanling at 798 - an unexpected discovery. You can find my previous article about her work on Creative Asia here: http://www.creative-asia.net/content/secret-script-painting-and-performance-work-ma-yanling

Ma Yanling exhibition "Ethereal Conclusions"

So far I have spent time with artists Lin Jingjing, Hu Qinwu, Tony Scott, and Gao Ping and today I drove so far out of Beijing that we were actually in Hebei Province to see the extraordinary Dong Yuan. Her new work to be shown at Art Basel Hong Kong next month continues her elegiac memorialisation of her grandmother's house beside the sea near  Dalian. She told me she is too sad to return - the sea is polluted - even the groundwater in her home village is polluted and toxic and all the landscapes that she loved have gone. Her new paintings are constructed like cabinets of curiosity, with doors and drawers that open, revealing paintings within the painting. A world of secrets.

More about these artists later, but here are some links to my previous writings about their work.

Hu Qinwu in his Beijing studio, photo Luise Guest April 2014

Lin Jingjing in her studio, Photo Luise Guest April 2014

Hu Qinwu: http://theartlife.com.au/2012/the-whole-thing/
Gao Ping: http://theartlife.com.au/2012/still-life-girls/
Lin Jingjing: http://dailyserving.com/2014/01/material-practices-stitching-fabric-and-textiles-in-the-work-of-contemporary-chinese-artists/
Dong Yuan: http://www.randian-online.com/np_feature/in-grandmothers-house/

Dong Yuan with her work 'Grandmother's Cupboard', photo Luise Guest April 2014

The extraordinary trompe l'oeil of Dong Yuan's painting (detail)
photo Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

The work in progress on the easel in the artist's studio, reproduced with permission of Dong Yuan

Meanwhile, pink is the colour du jour: on the shoes of an extraordinarily dolled up middle-aged woman in the park, worn with electric blue tights - she was ballroom dancing with another woman wearing a saggy tracksuit - and on the handbags of numerous women seen in Sanlitun, and pretty much everywhere I look. Tomorrow, I meet Li Tingting, who does some surprising things with pink ink. Watch this space.

Snack window in Caochangdi