Shelter from the Storm: Before the Rain at 4A

Reproduced items and images from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, 2014; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive.

Sydney's 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art continues to do interesting and often provocative work that expands our ideas about what's contemporary, what's Asian and even, occasionally, challenges preconceptions about the boundaries between 'art' and 'not art'. They work with artists from across the Asia region, often in socially engaged, long-term projects. Most recently the exhibition 'Before the Rain' explores Hong Kong after the Umbrella Revolution of 2014. Although much of the work, and the curatorial imperative for the show, emerged from the way that contemporary art in Hong Kong has really been given a shot in the arm by events in that city, and the continuing discontent, and even despair at heavy handed control from across the border, the issues are not specific to that locus. I kept thinking about the resurgence of political satire in the US in recent weeks, and the activism of artists. Will it continue? Can it ever be effective? Big questions without simple answers.

Left: Yuan Goang-Ming. The 561st Hour of Occupation, 2014; single-channel video. Courtesy of the Artist.
Right: Reproduced items and image from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, 2014; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive

Here is my review of the show, published last week in Daily Serving.

Partly an archive of ephemera, mementos of a time already vanished into history, and partly an investigation of the role of the artist at historical flash points of social and political crisis, Before the Rain at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is also an exploration of present-day shifts in geopolitical currents and tensions in Asia. The exhibition gathers an intergenerational group of artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China to explore moments of change and reaction. Why “Before the Rain”? Curator and 4A director Mikala Tai says that in the humid air of Hong Kong, there is a particular moment when you know the skies are about to open and the deluge will arrive. As with barometric pressure, so too with human systems and political tipping points.

Luke Ching. 150 Lost Items, 2014; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian A

If pink “pussy hats” are the artifacts by which the 2017 Women’s March on Washington will be remembered, what are the objects that signify Hong Kong’s brief moment of revolutionary fervor, the Umbrella Revolution of 2014?[1] The yellow umbrellas used by the protesters to shield themselves from tear gas, and the yellow Post-it notes used in impromptu art installations around the city, come to mind immediately. Not included in Before the Rain, but significant as a comparison, is the work of Hong Kong artist Samson Young. Young’s Stanley (2015) is a large, neon-pink text work that reads, “NOTHING WE DID COULD HAVE SAVED HONG KONG IT WAS ALL WASTED.” This work proclaims the despair felt by many around the globe right now: an unnerving and destabilizing sense that taken-for-granted democratic foundations may be less secure than we assumed. The work of the nine artists in Before the Rain, however, represents a rather different view. They reflect on possibilities of resistance and a sense of exhilaration, albeit at times mixed with sadness.

To read the rest of the review, click HERE

Mapping Time: Zhang Peili and Yuan Goang-Ming in Canberra

Entry to Zhang Peili: Painting to Video, at Australia Centre on China in the World, Canberra

I've just returned from a weekend in Canberra, which always feels to me as if I have somehow just missed the Zombie Apocalypse - wide, silent, startlingly empty streets devoid of people and cars. It's eerie. At least, it felt like that until I got out of the lift in my hotel on the wrong floor last night and found myself in a dense crowd of broad men in dinner suits and thin, fake-tanned young women in very tight evening frocks. They looked at me as if I was an intruder from another planet. I was so disconcerted, and so inappropriately attired, wearing jeans and a padded jacket bought in a Beijing street market, that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that I was not in fact in the lobby, and push my way through the perfumed crowd back to the elevators.

Later, in my room, I had cause to reflect on what a sheltered life I have obviously led thus far - never before has the mini bar in my hotel room included, next to the over-priced Kit-Kat bar and expensive water, both a bow tie in a box (for emergencies of the cocktail party kind) and 2 condoms in a tin (for a different kind of emergency.) Suffering from an excess of self-conscious postmodernism, the hotel design featured every possible visual trope relating to politics and politicians, from portraits of Obama to Margaret Thatcher and everyone in between, and giant mirrored murals of paparazzi in the elevators. My room card featured the famous image of Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament House after the dismissal of his government. Mysteriously, overlaying the image were the words of quite another Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, after Australia won the America's Cup. Deliberate pastiche or millennial ignorance on the part of the marketing team? I was relieved not to be issued a room card featuring Tony Abbott, which might possibly have come with a Paul Keating quote about Australia being the ''arse-end of the world".

Zhang Peili 張 培力, 30X30 (Set of 3 Screenshots), 1988, Single channel video installation

I was in the nation's capital (sorry, Canberra, but it's hard not to laugh a bit when you say that - beautiful clear air and a bit of Brutalist architecture notwithstanding) for a conference at the Australian National University, 'Moving Image Cultures in Asian Art', and the opening of an exhibition of works by Zhang Peili at the Australia Centre on China in the World. The big attraction was that both Zhang Peili (often called, perhaps to his annoyance, the father of Chinese video art) and Yuan Goang-Ming, the very significant video artist from Taiwan, were both speaking, and the conference featured interesting papers from scholars and artists including eminent Australians Claire Roberts and John Clarke, Omuku Toshiharu from the University of Tsukuba, and Kathrine Grube from New York University. .

In the end, apart from the anticipated themes of fluidity, hybridity and transnational discourse, the unexpected narratives that emerged were of friendship (between artists both within and across national borders, between artists and curators/critics, between scholars, between teachers and their students) and of education - dear to my heart but so often disregarded. Both Zhang Peili and Yuan Goang-Ming stressed their role as teachers. More of that in a moment.

Zhang Peili 張 培力, 30X30 (Set of 3 Screenshots), 1988, Single channel video installation
Image source: Asia Art Archive

Zhang Peili spoke about his work since the mid 1980s, his humorous and thoughtful delivery beautifully translated by Linda Jaivin. He emerged as a whimsical figure with a finely honed sense of the absurd. '30x30', usually described as the first Chinese video work, was three hours long, he revealed, because 180 minutes was at that time the longest VHS tape you could purchase. Zhang repeatedly dropped a mirror onto the terrazzo floor of an empty office, glued the shards together, then dropped it again, often interrupted by passing office workers wanting to know what on earth he was doing.

He knew it would be excruciatingly boring to watch, and this was intentional - after a long series of fruitless meetings throughout 1987 planning a retrospective of the '85 New Wave Movement, Zhang wanted to make a video that would be as boring and pointless as the meetings. The retrospective never happened. One may ask - and indeed, some at the conference did - why he chose a mirror, and whether there is a deeper, perhaps Freudian or Lacanian significance there, but I suspect this would be to miss the point. After years of Socialist Realism, followed by the Sichuan school (rather sentimental) and Scar Art, Zhang Peili wanted an art that denied narrative.

Zhang Peili 張 培力, WATER — Standard Version from the Dictionary Ci Hai (Screenshot), 1993, Video installation with single channel on TV screen. Image Source: Asia Art Archive

A work from 1993 features a famous news reader from CCTV, the official state television channel, reading all the words relating to water from the dictionary, in the manner and style of the official news broadcast - for 9 minutes and 35 seconds. It's both funny and (deliberately) tedious, and quite hypnotic. Deadpan, refusing narrative and deliberately avoiding any political commentary, works such as this become nevertheless a sardonic commentary on the absurdity of the artist's world. When it was shown at Huangshan, curator Gao Minglu insisted that it be run on fast forward.

The exhibition, in the very beautiful surroundings of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), features seven carefully chosen works. Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video is a collaboration between CIW and MAAP (Media Art Asia Pacific, in Brisbane.) The project is built around the generous gift to CIW, in 2014, of one of Zhang’s final paintings from the 1990s - perhaps even the last painting - before he shifted his focus to video and media installation art. Newly restored, never before exhibited, Flying Machine (1994) is a gift from Zhang’s friend and fellow artist, Lois Conner. The presentation of the painting provided an opportunity to explore this significant transition from painting to video, to reflect on the development of media art in China. 

I will write further about other works in the exhibition in a future post - including an extraordinary work, new to me, in which Zhang recorded interviews between police officers and two petty thieves. Real and unscripted, these interrogations are both alarming and absurd as the dishevelled, hapless pair admit trying to rob their victims armed with fruit knives.

Zhang Peili, Q & A & Q & A, 2012

6 Channel with 6 images, video installation, Edition: Colour, sound, 20' 37", photo: Luise Guest

Here is a link to an interesting interview with Zhang Peili, who now, in addition to being director of OCAT Shanghai, still teaches in the influential New Media Art Department that he established in the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he himself studied oil painting in the early 1980s: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zhang-peili/

Yuan Goang-Ming  Fish On Dish, 1992 Video Projection Installation 
© Courtesy of the Artist & IT PARK 

In Taiwan, video emerged in the early '80s, kick-started after a show of French video art from the Pompidou Centre at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1984, and by artists returning to Taiwan from study in Japan: they introduced video art into the curriculum of tertiary art education. Yuan Goang-Ming made his first video work, 'About Millet's The Angelus' in 1985. Here it is:  https://vimeo.com/142410200

I first encountered work by Yuan Goang-Ming in an exhibition at Hanart TZ in Hong Kong last year. It's not an exaggeration to say that it blew me away. Later, I realised that I had in fact seen another of his works before, in the Asia Pacific Triennial, and had been deeply moved by it. In a review of the Hong Kong show, 'Dwelling', I wrote this: In the gallery space, an elegant table is laid as if for a dinner party, with crystal glasses and an ornate dinner service. Every now and then a loud clanking noise disrupts the silence, and the table shakes as if the building has been hit by an earthquake. The real sense of disquiet comes when you enter the next room, where three short videos are screened on a loop. You sit on a domestic sofa, lit dimly by a standard lamp, and reality begins to unravel entirely. In the title work, Dwelling, (2014) the focus is a blandly modern living room, the only oddity the rather slow riffling pages of a magazine on the chair, a book on the coffee table. A breeze wafts the curtains. Suddenly, and without warning, the entire room explodes. Slowly, languidly, the wreckage of the room drifts back until the room once again regains its ordinary appearance. Filmed underwater, although it takes one a while to realise this, the movement of every object seems dreamlike. Yuan suggests that what we accept as stable and fixed is in fact entirely unpredictable. In a split second, the apparently impossible can disrupt everything we take for granted. Of course, we know this is true, but it is profoundly disturbing to see.

The article from which this is excerpted, Exploding Realities: Three Video Artists in China, can be found HERE on The Art Life website.

YUAN GOANG-MING Dwelling - Moment III 2014. Digital Photography / Colour Photograph. 120 x 180 cm Edition of 8. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery.

Like Zhang Peili, Yuan Goang-Ming was trained as a painter, studying Chinese painting and calligraphy, then western painting. And like Zhang Peili, he too is an educator and influential teacher. Zhang Peili has mentored many young artists who have emerged from the school of New Media in Hangzhou, not least the often outrageously transgressive Lu Yang, whose recent work, Delusional Mandala, reveals the increasing influence of science and technology. Read about Lu Yang, Zhang Peili's enfant terrible pupil HERE. (And see her work in 'Vile Bodies', opening September 9 at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.)

The ANU conference made clear, among much else, the hugely important role of the teacher. In a room populated by scholars, artists and curators who are also teachers (and for whom, frequently, all these roles overlap) I reflected on why art education matters. Just as Zhang Peili reconstructed his 30 x 30 mirror over and over again, so too do teachers reconstruct, reflect and re-reflect in dialogue with their students, in a conversation that continues down the generations. They (we) make meaning - just as do artists, art historians and curators.

 I had plenty of time on the long drive back to Sydney, under huge sweeping skies, to consider the significance of time - even, in the words of John Clark, "epistemically broken time."

The List: Ten Moments that Mattered

Cruising lazily out of the choppy seas of 2015 and into the uncharted waters of 2016 I have been reviewing experiences of Chinese art, and China, and doing that very cliched thing: making a list. I've read so many of these in the last few days. Lists of the best and worst of the year are metastastizing everywhere, from movies and music to food fads (kale is gone, you'll be glad to know) to the most over-used words of 2015 (''bae'', apparently, and I am sadly so out of touch with popular culture that I could not tell you what it even means) The list mania appears to be contagious. I decided to launch into my own "best of" compilation of art highlights - and a few lowlights. It's entirely personal; my retrospective musings over a year filled with art, mostly Chinese.

1 January saw Sydney audiences enthralled by the ever-so-slowly crumbling face of a giant Buddha made of ash from the burned prayers of temple worshippers in China and Taiwan. Zhang Huan, having reinvented himself entirely from his earlier persona as the bad boy of '90s violently masochistic performance art, presented this latest iteration at Carriageworks. And it was rather wonderful. I wrote about meeting the artist and encountering the silent presence of 'Sydney Buddha' for The Art Life. Click HERE for the story.

Zhang Huan, 'Sydney Buddha'' installed at Carriageworks, image courtesy the artist and Carriageworks

2 January also saw some younger Chinese bad boys hit town - the Yangjiang Group arrived with their unique brand of artistic anarchy for a crowd-funded project, 'Áctions for Tomorrow',  at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Along with a bunch of other bemused scribes I had tea with the artists. So. Much. Tea. It was an artwork, and we were part of the art. Previously their performances of 'Fan Hou Shu Fa' (After Dinner Calligraphy) had involved prodigious feats of alcohol consumption, but they now stick mainly to tea, which they had brought with them from their home in Guangdong Province. What did we see in the gallery? Wax dripped over a shop full of mass produced clothing to create a frozen monument to retail therapy? Check. An installation of the remains of 7,000 sheets of paper covered with text from Marx’s Das Kapital in Chinese calligraphy, over which simultaneous games of soccer had been played? Check. A 24-metre mural juxtaposing expressive Chinese characters with scrawled English text reading “God is Dead! Long Live the RMB!”? Check. When I presumptuously asked if this last had a connection with their views about a materialistic new China, Zheng Guogu shook his head sadly at my outdated desire to find meaning. That's entirely beside the point, he said. Anti-art? To misquote the Chinese Communist Party’s description of socialism in the global marketplace, perhaps this was “dada with Chinese characteristics.” I wrote about my interview in Daily Serving. Click HERE for the story.

The Yangjiang Group at 4 A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Zheng Guogu in centre) photo: Luise Guest

3 In February I was a little bit preoccupied with arranging a wedding, and I have zero recollection of March to April. May brought the Sherman Foundation exhibition of Yang Zhichao's 'Chinese Bible'. Yang is another Chinese performance artist becoming a little less inclined in middle age to punish his own body with the surgical insertion of various objects - reputedly at the insistence of his daughter. Chinese Bible is a beautiful and important installation - part art, part anthropology, part social action. Not unlike his good friend Ai Weiwei, Yang Zhichao made a formalist, minimalist arrangement of found objects, some dating from the Cultural Revolution. 

“Historical experience is written in iron and blood,” said Mao Zedong. In Chinese Bible, historical experience is written in thousands of humble, mass-produced notebooks once owned by ordinary Chinese people, their worn covers testament to the weathering of time and the vicissitudes of social change. Ai Weiwei says, “Everything is art. Everything is politics,” and Chinese Bible reveals a similar approach to art as a form of social engagement. I interviewed Yang Zhichao at SCAF with the translation assistance of Claire Roberts, who curated the show and had written a most wonderful catalogue essay. They told me that after the installation, on their way to a celebratory lunch in Chinatown, they asked their Chinese taxi driver if he would like to see the exhibition. He said he could not possibly, his memories are so painful it would make him weep. Later, in October, I met sculptor Shi Jindian at his home and studio in the mountains outside Chengdu. Disarmingly humble, polite and hospitable, as the day wore on he was becoming monosyllabic and I was worrying about why my interview with this artist was proving to be such hard going. He suddenly said, "I have lived through every period of recent Chinese history, and it was all terrible. I don't want to talk about the past." Like the Sydney taxi driver, and for so many others of his generation, there are just too many bitter memories. You can read the article and my interview with Yang Zhichao  HERE.

Yang Zhichao, Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail, 3,000 found books, Dimensions variable
Image courtesy: the Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Photo: Jenni Carter AGNSW

Lin Tianmiao, Badges 2009 White silk satin, coloured silk threads, gold embroidery frames made of stainless steel; sound component: 4 speakers with amplifier. Dimensions variable, diameters range from 25 cm - 120 cm, 266 badges total. Image courtesy: The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Photo: Jenny Carter

4 In the second part of this exhibition, 'Go East' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated from the Sherman collection by Suhanya Raffel, it was wonderful to finally see Lin Tianmiao's 'Badges' hanging in the imposing domed vestibule. Visiting her studio in 2013, I had watched her assistants stitching the texts, words describing women in Chinese and English, onto embroidery hoops. I had wondered what they were thinking as their nimble fingers stitched words like "Slut", "Whore" and "Fox Spirit" (a terrible name for a woman in Chinese.) I was amused in Sydney, where all the badges were Chinese,  to encounter shocked groups of Mandarin speaking tourists making their children look the other way. In this show, in addition to works by Zhang Huan and Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen's 'Suitcase Cities' were a highlight. A newly commissioned work by Ai Weiwei intrigued my students. ‘An Archive’ is a collection of the artist’s blog posts, banned since his efforts to name the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake attracted the attention of the authorities, presented in the form of traditional Chinese books in a beautiful timber box. A clever and more than usually subtle representation of Ai's resistance to the censorship and constraint that saw him confined to Beijing without possession of his passport, constantly under surveillance, until 22 July this year.

Kawayan De Guia. Bomba, 2011; installation comprising 18 mirror bombs, sputnik sound sculpture; dimensions variable. Collection of Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

5 In July, in Singapore, I saw 'After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art ' at the Singapore Art Museum, confirming my suspicion that after 'the sublime', 'Utopia' was THE buzzword of the 2015 artworld. It was an excellent and intriguing riff on the theme, featuring familiar works by Shen Shaomin and The Propellor Group with others that were new and wonderful discoveries. I loved 'Bomba': Eighteen sparkling 'bombs' hung in a darkened space. Terrifying disco balls promising destruction, they cast shards of light onto the Stations of the Cross that still adorn the walls of what was once the chapel of a Catholic school. Beautiful and menacing, Kawayan De Guia’s installation specifically references the bombing of Manila in World War II, but it also evokes the horrors of more recent conflicts, contrasting the glittery lure of hedonism with a dance of death. After that, Shen Shaomin's embalmed dictators lying in their glass coffins were an added bonus.

Shen Shaomin. Summit (detail – Ho Chi Minh), 2009; silica gel simulation, acrylic, and fabric; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

6 August was about planning and organising my own reinvention, from one kind of life to another, and in September I went to China for 5 weeks, to interview artists for a new project, which (of course) provided more highlights. Of these, perhaps the most remarkable was my visit to the studio/manufacturing hub of Xu Zhen and the MadeIn Company, in Shanghai. You would have to have been wearing a blindfold or lived in a cave to remain unaware of Xu Zhen, who appears to have taken on the mantle of Andy Warhol (although he told me that his favourite artists are Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney.) His enormous installations merge art and commerce, art and design, east and west, past and present, and any other form of post-internet hybridity you care to mention. He will feature in the 2016 Biennale of Sydney, and the work of the artist and his company of assistants and employees has been seen simultaneously in almost as many locations as the ubiquitous Ai Weiwei. (Although Xu Zhen himself does not fly, so everything is arranged and organised, and all research outside of China completed, by teams of MadeIn employees.) A focus artist at the 2014 New York Armory Show, and one of my top picks of last year for the spectacle of his retrospective exhibition at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Xu Zhen is given to gnomic Warhol-like utterances. "Chinese contemporary art nowadays is a farce filled with surprises," he told Ocula. 'Eternity' has been wowing audiences at the White Rabbit Gallery since early September. And watch out Sydney, there is a promise of more to come! 

Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company, Eternity, 2013-2014, glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, artificial stone, steel, mineral pigments, 15 m x 1 m x 3.4 m image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

7 And so to Shanghai in late September, and a major highlight of my year: the exhibition of an artist who should be a household name. Chen Zhen died (much too young) in Paris in 2000. Although after 1986 he essentially lived and worked in Paris, his personal history and deep cultural roots lay in China, and specifically in Shanghai. From the mid-1990s he returned over and over to a city on fast-forward. Shanghai was undergoing a massive, controversial transformation, in the process of becoming the global megalopolis it is today. The exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum presented works from this period. Sometimes witty, sometimes profoundly beautiful and melancholy, Chen Zhen’s works are steeped in his identity as a Chinese artist at a historical “tipping point.” As the artist said in his online project Shanghai Investigations, “without going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized.” To finally see 'Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body' was a revelation - both sad and beautiful. HERE is the whole story.

Chen Zhen. Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000; crystal, iron, glass; 95 x 70 x 190 cm. 
Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

With Wang Qingsong in his Studio, October 2015, Caochangdi, Beijing

8 is for Beijing, in October, and meetings over three action-packed weeks with a ridiculous number of interesting artists, all represented in the White Rabbit Collection. Old friends and new faces: Bu Hua, Bingyi, Li Hongbo, Zhu Jia, Wang Qingsong, Wang Guofeng, Liu Zhuoquan, Qiu Xiaofei, Lin Zhi, Huang Jingyuan, and Zhou Jinhua. Dinners with friends, long walks through the hutongs and the never-ending struggles of language learning. I journeyed through the smog to studios on Beijing's far outskirts, collecting stories and looking at extraordinary work, as I had done the previous week in Shanghai and Hangzhou. I left China with a kaleidoscope of impressions that are just starting to crystallise into the possibility of words. I saw Liu Xiaodong at the Faurschou Foundation and Ai Weiwei at Continua, but disappointingly missed Liu Shiyuan in Shanghai at the Yuz Museum. One of the youngest artists I interviewed in 2013 and 2014, her work will next show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, in an exhibition curated by Philip Tinari, among others, called 'Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation.'

9 is another repeat of one of my 2014 picks. The rather bizarre Red Brick Museum (practically empty on each occasion I have visited) on Beijing's northern outskirts was showing work by the artist who first inspired me to make Chinese art my focus of research, teaching and writing. Huang Yong Ping's fabulous thousand armed goddess of mercy was an unexpected delight when I visited in December of 2014. Again, in 2015, a new exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru (also the curator of the Chen Zhen show in Shanghai) presented a version of Baton - Serpent, seen in a previous Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. Not quite the 'words fail me' experience of seeing Leviathanation at Tang Gallery in 2011, or the 'Thousand Armed Guanyin' at the Shanghai Biennale in 2012, but nonetheless extraordinary. And all the more wonderful for being encountered in the deserted echoing spaces of one of China's newest museums.

10 And here we are, washed up on shore, arrived at the final, dog days of 2015. 

November to December, hmmm. What to pick? NOT 'Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol' at the NGV. If you have read my review (Click HERE if you want to) you know I had some issues with that exhibition - although I wish I had seen the London show at the Royal Academy. I admire Ai enormously for his genuine commitment - particularly his establishment of a studio on Lesbos to make art relating to the current refugee crisis. But boy oh boy did I hate those Lego portraits. And absolutely NOT the 'Rain Room' at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai - an empty spectacle. Nor anything at the major Sydney galleries - I cannot get excited about a few Renaissance works from Scotland, and Grayson Perry, whilst interesting, does not float my boat. 

YUAN GOANG-MING Dwelling - Moment III 2014. Digital Photography / Colour Photograph. 

120 x 180 cm Edition of 8. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Hanart TZ Gallery.

 I'm giving my Number 10 highlight spot to Yuan Goang-ming at Hanart TZ in Hong Kong. In this show, entitled Dwelling, we were presented with the uncomfortable intersection of the real and the apparently impossible. In the gallery space, an elegant table was laid as if for a dinner party, with crystal glasses and an ornate dinner service. Every now and then a loud clanking noise disrupted the silence, and the table shook as if the building had been hit by an earthquake. In the title work, Dwelling, (2014) the focus is a blandly modern living room, the only oddity the rather slow riffling pages of a magazine on the chair, a book on the coffee table. A breeze wafts the curtains. Suddenly, and without warning, the entire room explodes. Slowly, languidly, the wreckage of the room drifts back until the room once again regains its ordinary appearance. Filmed 

underwater, although it takes a while to realise this, the movement of every object seems dreamlike. Yuan suggests that what we accept as stable and fixed is in fact entirely unpredictable. In a split second, the apparently impossible can disrupt everything we take for granted. 

In my own 2015 version of the impossible becoming possible, I have changed careers, started new research and writing projects, and - in a total triumph of optimism over bitter experience, I enrolled in a new term of Chinese language classes.

Oh. And I have written a book. Out in February.