10,000 Things: Reflecting on a Year almost Gone

Cai Guo-Qiang's 10,000 suspended porcelain birds at the NGV. Photograph Luise Guest

On this final day of 2019, sitting at my desk with windows closed against bush fire smoke and horrifyingly hot winds, a fan blowing noisily at my feet, it seems this is the time to reflect on  a year of highs and lows. Lows there have certainly been; it has been a turbulent year of struggle and difficulty, of loss and grief, and of rising anxiety and even fear about the future that I know I share with so many. This is especially true now, when the orange disc in the sky seems almost apocalyptic and we are assailed by warnings about the air we breathe, which is equal in its polluted nastiness to any I have ever breathed in Beijing. But enough of that! One of my new year’s resolutions is to avoid the constant unsettling churn of media stories about Trump, Boris Johnson, Brexit, and our own deeply inadequate national leader: the unending reiteration of ‘news’ adds nothing to the quality of my life. Less social media too in 2020 – well, that’s the plan. But highs there have also been, not least the unconditional love of family and the absolute joy of being a grandparent. So, in this post there will be no wallowing. Instead, I’m going to celebrate some of 2019’s milestones, achievements, wonders and delights.

Poster design for the talk at Women's University, Beijing, in April 2019, featuring a work by Hong Kong artist Firenze Lai

Milestones -- there were a few big ones. They included the completion of a significant book project I’d been working on since 2015 (you can find details HERE); the publication of an article in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (HERE); an article in Art Monthly Australasia and a Quarterly Essay about Jingdezhen and porcelain for Garland (HERE); an essay for an NGV publication, ‘The Centre – On Art and Urbanism in China’; the presentation of a research paper at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference in Auckland; a lecture to students at China Women's University, Beijing, a talk delivered via a Wechat video link to students at Peking University’s global Yenching Academy, and two talks at the NGV about the exhibition 'A Fairy Tale in Red Times' – and I’m another year closer to completing my PhD. I’ve continued my now ten-year-long study of Chinese (but, oh God, will it EVER get any easier?) Probably it's not surprising that I'm just a bit tired.

Yan Ping, Still Life, 2011, image courtesy the artist

A work from 2001 reveals Yan Ping's recurring theme of mother and child, and her influences from European modernism. Image courtesy the artist.

In late October I interviewed Beijing-based figurative painter Yan Ping, preparing to write an essay for a forthcoming book about this artist, who is not known as well outside China as her work deserves. Conducting a conversation via a WeChat video link-up late into the evening, with the artist, her assistant and my translator passing around their mobile phones in her Beijing studio was not without its challenges, and I spent a good part of the more than two-hour conversation seeing tantalisingly fleeting glimpses of the artist while the camera focused on pot plants in the background. But the talk was fascinating and revealed the life and work of an artist who was a new discovery for me.

Yan Ping loves to paint theatre and opera troupes, acrobats and musician, often in behind-the-scenes moments.
Image courtesy the artist

Wonders and delights this year included interviews with extraordinary artists visiting Sydney, including Cheng Ran, Wang Guofeng, Cao Hui and Gao Xiawu (you can find those videos HERE) and in China. A meeting with Zhu Jinshi in Beijing in April was an absolute joy, as he spoke about his participation in the ‘Stars’ exhibition in 1979, his time living and working in Germany, and the thinking behind his extraordinary sculptural installation ‘The Ship of Time’. 

Zhu Jinshi 'The Ship of Time', installation view at Tang Contemporary, Beijing, 2018. Photograph Luise Guest

I relished the opportunity to record long, in-depth conversations with 17 artists in their studios in Beijing and Shanghai, from significant established figures such as Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen to rising stars Ma Qiusha and Lu Yang, and to talk with video pioneer Zhang Peili over delicate Longjing Tea and snacks in a teahouse on the shore of Hangzhou’s idyllically beautiful West Lake. An interview with Chen Hangfeng, who now lives and works between Shanghai and Amsterdam, was fascinating, and I wrote about his new work 'Excited with No Reason' in an article called 'Invasive Species and Global Trade Routes: A Conversation with Chen Hangfeng' for The Art Life HERE. 

Shanghai's former French Concession in Spring - bicycles, washing lines, and  neighbours chatting in leafy streets. Photographs Luise Guest

Just being in China is always a joy, and Beijing and Shanghai in April, with blossoming trees and gorgeous gardens, are especially beautiful. Not to mention the dancing aunties, Peking Opera performers and mahjong players in the parks. And the food! 

My translator, Jane, and kind-hearted driver Mr Zhang, at dinner at Shengyongxing in Beijing

In the ‘wonders and delights’ category - and as lists appear to be essential at this time of year - I add my favourite exhibitions of 2019. (Apart from the wonderful 'Hot Blood' and 'Then' at White Rabbit Gallery of course):

Qiu Zhijie, 'Mappa Mundi' (detail), UCCA April 2019

1. In Beijing, at UCCA, 'Mappa Mundi', the significant exhibition of Qiu Zhijie’s satirical socio-historical cartography of the strange world we now inhabit.

A detail of Qiu Zhijie's obsessively detailed map of China's modern and contemporary art history

2. In Shanghai, at ShanghART Westbund, the installation work of Ouyang Chun in which every piece was constructed with objects retrieved from junk salvaged from the staff living quarters of Xi’an University of Technology, where the artist had once lived with his parents. The compound was about to be demolished, so Ouyang made three trips from Beijing to Xi’an and collected almost 12 tons of rubbish and household goods. From toilet seats to timber doors and windows, from thermos flasks and crockery to rusty bedsteads, battered suitcases and broken furniture, for Ouyang every object was imbued with traces of time and untold histories. I wrote a review of this exhibition, and an account of his work, in 'Reconstructing Memory: Ouyang Chun’s ‘The Mortals’ at ShanghART Gallery' for The Art Life. Find the article HERE

Ouyang Chun, 'King and Queen Number 2', 2018, assemblage of found objects - wooden cabinet, plastic bed pans, wood, concrete, White Rabbit Collection Sydney. Photograph Luise Guest

3. At Shanghai’s Long Museum,  I loved the major retrospective of the work of  extraordinary painter Yu Hong, 'The World of Saha', which she conceived as a 'visual opera' dividing her life into four acts. The exhibition included her 'Witness to Growth' series of self-portraits and her reflections on her life at the age of 50, 'Half Hundred Mirrors'. 

4. 'Remapping Reality' at OCAT Project Space Shanghai - the first comprehensive presentation of Wang Bing’s collection of Chinese video art from the post-Olympic era. OCAT said 'In this moment of historical rupture, the exhibition attempts to take the collection as a point of departure to develop a new narrative framework that, on the one hand, is able to account for the ironies and complexities of China in the age of globalization, while on the other hand addresses the possibilities of “continuity” that is emphasized in China’s public discourse as an integral part of the Chinese experience.' 

Pang Tao (detail), installation view at Pearl Lam, Shanghai

Portrait of a teenage Lin Yan preparing to enter CAFA when it re-opened after the Cultural Revolution, by Pang Tao

5. At Pearl Lam in Shanghai, 'Material Lineage', an exhibition of work by Lin Yan and her mother Pang Tao, who is now in her 90s and recently had a solo show devoted to her work at Beijing's Inside Out Art Museum. This was especially interesting, as on the way to the airport in Beijing I'd seen the exhibition of works by Lin Yan's father, Lin Gang, at the CAFA Art Museum. Her grandfather, Pang Xinqun, was one of the founders of the modernist 'Storm Society' in Shanghai when he returned from Paris in 1930. You can find my story about Lin Yan and her extraordinary artistic lineage, 'Lin Yan: A Tale of Three Cities' in The Art Life HERE.

Lin Yan, paper installation in 'Material Lineage' at Pearl Lam Shanghai.

6. Cai Guo-Qiang's 10,000 porcelain birds at the NGV, in an inspired juxtaposition with the Terracotta Warriors. (And, of course, 'A Fairy Tale in Red Times' curated by David Williams from Judith Neilson's White Rabbit Collection).

Cai Guo-Qiang's porcelain birds at the NGV.

And finally, in non-China related experiences – yes, I do occasionally have some of those! – I loved the Cindy Sherman show at London’s National Portrait Gallery in September, the William Blake show at Tate, a tour of the newly re-opened China rooms of the British Museum before the museum opened for the day (what a luxury to be in an empty museum!) and Berthe Morisot at Musée d’Orsay in Paris. I discovered the collection of treasures from across Asia in the Musée  Guimet, and must return there one day.

So, what will 2020 have in store? Perhaps ignorance is bliss. But hopefully, for Australia, RAIN and lots of it! For me, it's writing the PhD thesis, studying Chinese with more discipline and perseverance than before, continuing my research work and - how exciting - taking my daughters to Shanghai in April for their first trip to China. Signing out for now - 新年快乐! Xinnian Kuai Le! and a Happy New Year to all.

Tang Dynasty polo-playing lady from the collection of the Musée Guimet, Paris

Zhang Peili: China and the World

Preparing to write a piece for Daily Serving about the Zhang Peili exhibition at the Australian Centre on China in the World, at Canberra's Australian National University, I was thinking about the aspects of Chinese contemporary art that I find most compelling. In the end, I decided, it comes down to the sheer audacity of scale and ambition, the sense that nothing is impossible, even in a tightly controlled society. Chinese artists are adept at walking that tightrope, evading heavy-handed and clumsy attempts at censorship; they use metaphor in such clever and poetic ways. Even, as in the case of Zhang Peili, when they have been insistent on a desire to avoid narrative altogether. 

Here, for example, is Zhang Peili's 'Elegant Semicircles', in ‘HARMONIOUS SOCIETY 天下無事’, curated by Jiang Jiehong as part of Asia Triennial Manchester 2014 (with a work by He An in the foreground. Six large, single-colour flags on mechanised flagpoles sweep the floor as they move from side-to-side, gathering dust throughout the exhibition. 

One of the things I thought about was the hugely significant role of new media and time based work in an artworld still dominated by painting - the impact of one man on that development is very significant. Zhang Peili was the founder of the New Media Department at Hangzhou's China Academy of Art, and he still teaches there - his pupils are now making waves internationally.

Writing for Daily Serving, I said: 

''Sometimes—perhaps not often enough—viewing video art is a profoundly immersive experience of the kind that only a time-based medium can provide. Bill Viola describes this magic: “…it’s not an intellectual experience, it’s a physical experience. It’s coming at your body.” At other times, while peering at a small screen in a darkened gallery, the only possible response is an overwhelming ennui. Zhang Peili provides audiences with both these seemingly mutually exclusive states. In the 1980s and 1990s, he employed an aesthetic of deadpan banality, repeating nonsensical rituals that created intentional slippages of language and meaning. Although these and his recent video installations might frustrate a 21st-century audience grown overly reliant on spectacle, this glimpse of Zhang’s work over more than twenty-five years is satisfyingly thought-provoking and often surprisingly poetic. 

Zhang Peili. Q + A + Q, 2012. 2-channel video projection installation; 20:37; installation view, Q + A + Q, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist and Australian Centre on China in the World.

'Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video' is curated around a work gifted to the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU. In 2014, Zhang’s friend and fellow artist Lois Conner donated one of the artist’s final paintings, Flying Machine (1994). The exhibition of this newly restored work provided an opportunity to explore Zhang’s transition from painting to video, and to reflect on the development of new media art in China toward the end of the 20th century. The exhibition also presents eight of Zhang Peili’s pioneering video works dating from 1988 to 2012, starting with 30 x 30 (1988), generally considered to be the first video work in the history of contemporary Chinese art.

Zhang Peili. Uncertain Pleasures, 1996; six-channel video, twelve CRT monitors; 5:04. Courtesy of the Artist and Australian Centre on China in the World.

30 x 30 (1988) was later followed by Zhang’s experiments with performative, durational, and text-based installations. In the piece, Zhang films his own hands in surgical gloves, breaking a thirty-by-thirty-centimeter mirror, painstakingly gluing the shards together, and then breaking and gluing it again and again against the terrazzo-tiled floor of an empty office. The video was filmed over three hours (the longest VHS tape available at the time); Zhang’s intention was to lock viewers into the exhibition space for the entirety of the piece. This absurdist representation of a banal and incomprehensible action reflected the artist’s determination to avoid political imagery and easy narratives. He intended it to be excruciating to watch: After a series of fruitless meetings planning a retrospective of the avant-garde ’85 New Wave Movement that had surged across China in the mid-1980s, Zhang wanted to make a video that would be as boring and pointless as these meetings.

Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1988, single channel video, 32 min 9 secs

The first 5 minutes of 30 x 30

To read the rest of the article, click HERE

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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."