Landmines in the Gardens of the Literati

I have been thinking about the ways in which contemporary artists in China continue to use and be informed by the traditional forms of ink painting such as the continuing references to Shan Shui (mountain / water) painting which seem to be everywhere right now, and by the scholarly traditions of calligraphy. Sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes subtle. Sometimes overt, sometimes nuanced. Sometimes in order to pay homage to the long history of the Chinese prior to the humiliations visited upon them by western powers in the 19th century and the chaos of the revolutionary period. Sometimes to combine that respect for tradition with a wry or downright satirical view of the contemporary world. But always there is this looking back - at times almost wistfully - to a time before the landscape was covered in advertising hoardings for mobile phones and fast food. This may be perverse - after all ordinary Chinese citizens enjoy a measure of moderate prosperity now that was unimaginable thirty years ago, let alone in the distant past when those who passed the imperial examinations became scholar officials, and developed their passion for painting and calligraphy. But nevertheless it is a consistent feature of so much contemporary art being made in China today that it clearly reveals something of significance about the 'zeitgeist' (whatever the Chinese term for that may be! Google Translate provides this: 時代精神 - someone might tell me if this is even remotely accurate.) And not just in the PRC, but in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. Past and present - always layered in rich and sometimes surprising ways.

Yang Yongliang, 'A Bowl of Taipei', source http://www.yangyongliang.com/index.htm

Lam Tung-pang in his studio with works in progress, photograph Luise Guest

Lam Tung-pang, Horse and Rider, charcoal, acrylic and ink on plywood, double-sided work on wheeled panel, photograph Luise Guest, image courtesy the artist

In Hong Kong artists such as Lam Tung-pang revere the traditions of the Chinese ink painting masters, and refer to them constantly. Lam spends long hours in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum working from their collection, however the historical images are transformed to become works in a new idiom in his own unique medium of charcoal and acrylic on plywood. Lam uses the themes of landscape to reflect on what is happening to his beloved homeland. Wong Chung-yu, likewise, admires the tradition of ink painting and some years ago he decided to reinvent it using his skills as a computer programmer. His works often involve the audience and use real-time video.

Lam Tung-pang installation view, image courtesy the artist

Lam Tung-pang, Travel and Leisure series, detail, image courtesy the artist

Lam Tung-pang, small detail of commissioned work, image courtesy the artist

Wong Chung-yu, When Time Flows Away 2011, water, digital projections and web cam operating in real time
image courtesy the artist

In Wong Chung-yu's ‘When Time Flows Away’, two screens are hung one above the other. On the top screen a traditional ink grinding stick is activated when an audience member takes a ladle of water and pours it into the vessel below the screen. A computer program designed to calculate the effect of ink infiltration then interacts with the water in real time. Virtual ink begins to flow downward into the second screen, ‘washing away’ images from the last 100 years of Chinese history, including the Japanese occupation, Mao Zedong, Cultural Revolution propaganda, Deng Xiaoping and images of the 1997 handover. The ink grinding represents China and the ebb and flow of its history, and the work involves the audience in its alteration. Wong believes that ink painting expresses the deepest beliefs and philosophies of the Chinese people: “What I am interested in is how to reinterpret Chinese traditional art in a new way,” he says.

In Shanghai, Yang Yongliang also works with video and digital media, creating works which initially appear to be tranquil Shan Shui paintings, until you realise that everything in the misty landscape is in motion - the mountains are made up of towering skyscrapers, cranes reach their arms into the air, cars travel on Jetsons-style freeways and planes criss-cross the sky. These works are very disconcerting - beauty juxtaposed with the uncertainty of modern life. In China the only certainty is change and these works certainly reflect that.

Yang Yongliang, Phantom Landscape, Blu-Ray HD, source http://www.yangyongliang.com/video.html

Yang Yongliang, Viridescence, Ultra Giclee Print on Epson Paper
source http://www.yangyongliang.com/Photography/35.html?a=5

It is in Shanghai, too, that Shi Zhiying experiments with the removal of colour from her vast canvases depicting oceans, expanses of grass, the raked spirals of Zen Gardens, as well as the humble objects of everyday life. In Shi's case, there is a specific reference to Buddhist belief.

Shi Zhiying's brushes, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Shi Zhiying in her Shanghai studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Work in progress photographed in Shi Zhiying's studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Some might attribute the continued focus on ink painting and Confucian or scholarly tradition as an aspect of Chinese nationalism, with all the implications and complications that suggests. Others see it as a welcome reversal after 30 years of Maoist policies of 'Smashing the Four Olds' and breaking with tradition (literally, in so many instances of the destruction of artworks, artifacts and buildings.)  Some, like artist Jin Sha, a painter of 'contemporary gongbi' works, see ink painting as a later version of Chinese culture which is not truly Chinese at all! Like everything else in China, it is complicated, contested and open to multiple interpretation.

So thinking all these thoughts about the enduring nature of - and in fact the increasing interest in - Chinese traditions, I wrote an article for a new web site peek365.com/ about how this plays out in the work of Monika Lin, a painter and performance artist based in Shanghai, whom I met first in April 2011 and again in December 2012; and the photographer/painter/sculptor Huang Xu and his very interesting and somewhat enigmatic wife, Dai Dandan, whom I interviewed in their Beijing studio.

Here is an extract:

Monika Lin is an American-born artist of Swiss and Chinese heritage, living and working in Shanghai, who focuses on socio-political and historical issues in her paintings and performance works. Lin is simultaneously part of the Chinese world and also, by virtue of her ‘foreign-ness’, separated from it. She views contemporary China with a clear and critical eye and in the performance ‘Ten Thousand’, presented last year at the Performance Art Institute in San Francisco, she reflected on Chinese history. In Imperial China, scholars who passed the Imperial Examinations were appointed to administrative positions overseeing populations ranging from small villages to entire provinces. Many of these scholarly civil servants – the literati – devoted themselves thereafter to the practices of the fine arts. An uncomfortable truth often overlooked, Lin says, is that their privileged life of contemplation depended on the work of innumerable peasants.

Monika Lin performance, 'Ten Thousand', image courtesy the artist

For the performance, Lin decided she would write the character for ‘rice’ – 米 – 10,000 times. Ten thousand as a numerical denomination (‘yi wan’) is unique to the Chinese language and signifies ideas about eternity and infinity. Lin chose the character for rice in part for its beauty and simplicity but also for its ironic resonance: rice was produced by peasant farmers who were taxed on it, but could not afford to eat it. Lin wanted to work in a physical way to connect herself to the labours of the peasantry rather than the literati. Influenced by endurance-based performances by artists such as Marina Abramovic and Kiki Smith, the result was 833 sheets of paper. The act of placing each sheet down on the gallery floor was so physically challenging that it appeared to some observers akin to the act of planting rice.

Monika Lin, Ten Thousand, image courtesy the artist

The American audience perceived Lin’s silent enactment of the act of calligraphy, an act that she describes as unspeakably arduous and emotionally powerful, as ‘beautiful and tranquil’. Lin told me that she saw this as an orientalist interpretation of her work, a misreading of her intentions. It was the backbreaking physical labour of the peasants, which made possible the countless hours (represented by the symbolic number 10,000, or万) that the literati were able to spend contemplating nature in their gardens, perfecting their calligraphy and painting. Is there a resonance here with the position of artists as privileged elite? Lin suggests, perhaps, that the contemporary artist, like the scholar in his garden, is seeing a convenient constructed version of the ‘natural’ world. She is wary of romanticising Chinese history, of falling into the kind of Chinoiserie that westerners living in China can fall prey to. Lin’s other works have dealt with the oppression of women in Imperial China, the ‘lotus feet’ resulting from foot-binding, and the ‘flower houses’ or brothels in Shanghai.

Monika Lin 'On the Way to the Imperial Examinations' - sculptures created from the 'mi' covered paper after the performance. These were shown in a curated exhibition at OV Gallery in Shanghai, 'Learning from the Literati'

In Beijing, photographer Huang Xu often represents ‘scholar rocks’, traditional subjects for Chinese painting for their natural perfect forms that echo Taoist philosophy. However Huang’s rocks are photographs of decaying plastic bags. They evoke the sublime, but also suggest the destruction inherent in China’s social and political transformation – the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, the emptying out of rural villages in the largest mass migration in history of workers to the factory towns of southern China, and the growing fears about air quality, pollution, food safety and environmental degradation. Floating plastic bags are ubiquitous in Chinese towns and cities. Luminous and beautiful, Huang’s works are dramatically lit like the billowing drapery of Baroque paintings, while they also recall the silk cloth of imperial China. Huang studied traditional painting from the age of twelve and he continues to emulate its ethereal qualities and its mastery of space and form in his photographic practice.

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag #1, C-print, image courtesy China Art Projects

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag #20, image courtesy China Art Projects

Huang’s most recent work is an installation in collaboration with his artist wife, Dai Dandan, who has recently turned to art practice following a career in television. In her own Duchampian act of transgression, she purchases rocks, probably intended for fish tanks, from the markets, decorating them with rhinestones and fake jewels in order, she says, ‘to perfect them’. A reference to the beauty of imperial gardens, and a nod to the rich traditions of Chinese art, but also, perhaps, a satire of the imposition of global branding onto Chinese culture, and the nouveau preference for ‘luxe’ consumer goods over the values and beliefs of the past. It is appropriate then, that her work with its ironic edgy glamour also featured in a curated show at Shanghai gallery Studio Rouge’s new branch in Hong Kong, on Hollywood Road, where art meets commerce and many of the Chinese antiquities in the shops are of dubious provenance.

Dai Dan Dan, Crystal Rock, image courtesy China Art Projects

The recent collaborative work between Dai Dandan and Huang Xu (the artist couple is an intriguing feature of the contemporary Chinese art scene) is titled ‘Mr and Mrs Huang in the Humble Administrator’s Garden’. It features Huang’s plastic bag scholar rock images together with his subtly erotic flower photographs and new button pavilion sculptures, juxtaposed with Dai’s ‘assisted ready-mades’. ‘Mr and Mrs Huang’ take traditional Chinese philosophy and aesthetics as their starting point and lay subversive landmines of the kitsch and the banal in the garden of the literati.

To read the whole article, click this link: artists-subverting-scholarly-traditions-in-contemporary-china-2#

'Mr and Mrs Huang' (Huang Xu and Dai Dandan) in thei Beijing studio,
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artists

Chinese Women Speaking

Last week I had a long conversation with Sydney-based, Chinese-born and trained artist Tianli Zu, just prior to the opening of the exhibition 'In Possible Worlds' at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Our discussion ranged far and wide, from the intricacies of her practice of paper-cutting and how she learned it from the peasants in Shanxi Province as a student, to her sadness at knowing that she was always the unwanted second daughter, and not the longed-for son. We spoke about the ways in which women must constantly juggle different roles - being mother, wife and artist is not an easy path.

Throughout our conversation about her interesting art practice this theme of the status of women in Chinese history, both in the distant Imperial past and the closer Revolutionary past, kept on re-emerging. Dark folk-tales, unhappy family memories and reactions to all the girl children aborted or abandoned due to the One Child Policy are a recurring theme in her work. 

Tianli Zu photographed at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art,
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with the permission of the artist

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Her childhood and teenage years were spent in Beijing, during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Tianli Zu grew up with her grandparents. Her parents were ‘sent down’ to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, but even before that time her childhood memories are filled with dark shadows. “The day I was born, my mother cried. I was born on the national day, which should have been a happy time. But she said to my father, ‘Another girl’, and then from the first day I came back from the hospital I lived with my grandparents.” She had a sense, always, of being unwanted. “They always said they intend to exchange me with my boy cousins,” she says sadly. “But I always wanted to be loved. This love thing is to me so important, and I wanted to be loved, and I always wanted to make them happy and satisfied. But each time … I am always in the wrong.” When her parents made their infrequent visits, she would lay out all her schoolwork and the calligraphy that her grandfather taught her, desperate for their approval and praise, receiving instead only criticism. “This kind of traumatic memory becomes a shadow – it’s always there.” She points out elements in her work that symbolise this deep sense of abandonment. Slowly falling drops of water become flames, or in another sequence, merge together to become piles of excrement. “You think it’s a beautiful drop of water, something that will get to somewhere… (that will) bring you something good. But then – it’s a pile of poo!” Zu laughs then, as she does many times throughout our conversation, even when the subject matter seems especially dark.

Despite the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, not all her memories of this time are sad. Her grandparents were the foundation of much of her work today. “My grandmother taught me sewing and paper cuts. My granddad taught me calligraphy and every afternoon he read me the traditional stories – the ‘San Guo Yan Yi’, which is all about revenge, royalty, war and strategy.” This story, ‘The Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ is about the three power blocs that emerged from the collapse of the Han Dynasty. It is filled with battles, intrigues and struggles for dominance. The famous opening lines explain why the story has continued to haunt Zu’s memory and influence the imagery in her work: “It is a general truism of this world that anything long divided will surely unite, and anything long united will surely divide.” She is haunted by feelings that as a child she could not understand, and by the divisions and separations which prevented a sense of belonging and acceptance. In her work, she is facing her deepest fears, and confronting the past. Zu is the product of a culture in which what is hidden is sometimes more important than what is revealed. “I came with a shadow,” she says, “and with my parents’ shadows. I was my parents’ shadow. I was living to their wish … That’s one thing I cannot run away from, I have to embrace this shadow.” Her work is deeply, intensely personal in a manner similar to some of the artists that she most admires: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Kara Walker and Yayoi Kusama also ‘embrace the shadow’ in their work.

To read the whole article on 'The Art Life', click HERE

Tianli Zu 'White Shadows' (2013) (detail), acrylic on acetate film, hand cut, and light projection and animation, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist.

Something that has interested me for a long time is 'Nu Shu' ( 女书) or 'women's writing, a secret form of character writing that was used exclusively among women in Jianyong County, Hunan Province. According to that most authoritative of sources, Wikipedia, "A large number of the Nüshu works were "third day missives" (三朝書, pinyin: sānzhāoshū). They were cloth bound booklets created by "sworn sisters" (結拜姊妹, pinyin: jiébàizǐmèi) and mothers and given to their counterpart "sworn sisters" or daughters upon their marriage. They wrote down songs in Nüshu, which were delivered on the third day after the young woman's marriage. This way, they expressed their hopes for the happiness of the young woman who had left the village to be married and their sorrow for being parted from her. Other works, including poems and lyrics, were handwoven into belts and straps, or embroidered onto everyday items and clothing."

So women who had no access to education or literacy were able to communicate with each other in the form of embroidered gifts.

Australian artist Marion Borgelt made a series of works, 'The Cryptologist's Memoir' based on this secret language - see more information HERE

Marion Borgelt, 'Cryptologist's Memoir', 2006, book, beeswax, pins,
source: http://www.ccpr.murdoch.edu.au/art/acquisitions/marion_borgelt.html 

And this reminds me of Tao Amin, whose work I discovered by chance in 2010.

" Using installation combined with oil painting and video, Tao Aimin bears witness to the lives of the rural poor. Focusing on women in particular, she creates art with an anthropological side to compliment and enlarge the aesthetic. In River of Women and Book of Women, she uses wooden washboards to create moving and thought-provoking installations—monuments to the daily lives and grinding labor of rural women. 
    "I went to villages all around the countryside outside Beijing collecting washboards. I explained to the women there that I wanted to incorporate their labor into my work as a way of acknowledging and respecting it. I listened to them tell me about their lives." The artist’s playful expression disappears as she narrates the intense process of creating her latest works.    Both pieces employ over 60 such washboards as a tribute to the way in which repetitive manual labor marks the passage of life for the rural poor. In River of Women, Tao Aimin hangs boards under lights, fashioning a metaphorical river.         Onto each washboard, she has painted the faces of each board’s owner, whose lined, sun-weathered expressions iconically resemble the age-worn ruts of the washboards themselves. In the background, the sound of a washing machine cycles repeatedly, as if to ask what the status of such women will be in the age of modernization. Book of Women uses such labor-worn washboards to form an ironic book constructed in the ancient style of calligraphy scrolls made from bamboo tiles in order to underscore the ways in which ordinary women’s cultural contributions have historically been circumvented by a lifetime of labor. " (Source: http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=3892)

Tao Aimin, Book of Women

Tao Aimin with 'River of Women'

Tao Aimin, 'Book of Women'

Tao Aimin, 'Book of Women'

How interesting to see that she has recently exhibited in a show at Paterson University New Jersey with 3 other female artists, including Lin Tianmiao, who told me in December that she did not agree with 'women only' shows in Beijing, finding them 'regressive'. Perhaps it's different in America? The show is A Women's View: New Chinese Art, curated by Kristen Evangelista and Zhang-He.

Tao Aimin, 'Women's Writing: Rhetoric',ink on paper 16 x 20 in, source: Artslant

And from this a segue to .... past western representations of Chinese women:

This is a book that a friend found for me in a second-hand bookshop. 'Chinese Women Speak' by Australian writer Dymphna Cusack, was published in Sydney in 1958. The author of 'Come in Spinner' spent 18 months in China and travelled over 7000 miles through the countryside, visiting both cities and villages. 1958 was the start of the 'three bitter years' of Mao's ill-judged 'Great Leap Forward' and the beginning of the famine that historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates caused at least 45 million premature deaths between 1958 to 1962. During the time that she was there, for those with less starry eyes there must have been signs that all was not well. But In Cusack's account there is no sense of any privation or hardship observed anywhere. One wonders how she and other 'foreign friends' at this time could possibly have been so naiive, as they were ushered around 'Potemkin Villages' and showpiece factories and apartment buildings in Beijing, Harbin and other cities. Cusack's partner, journalist Norman Freehill, was a member of the Australian Communist Party so they were honoured guests of the Chinese government, feted and banqueted everywhere they went throughout China. 

Designer: Xin Liliang (忻礼良)
1953
New view in the rural village
Nongcun fengguang (农村风光)
Publisher: Sanyi Printers (三一印刷厂)
Size: 53.5x77.5 cm. Source: www.chineseposters.net

The artist of this poster designed glamorous movie posters in the 1930s, and the style is still evident in the works he produced after 1949. No woman in a rice field ever looked like this. But this is also the picture painted by Dymphna Cusack in her descriptions of rural life

She and her companions went to the opening of the People's Congress in the Forbidden City, and she describes the scene in great detail, including encounters with female delegates from ethnic minorities who tell her how happy they are that under Communism there will be no more discrimination or 'Sinization' by Han Chinese (!). She describes an encounter thus: "Then two women come towards me. We smile at each other. They stop and hold out their hands. Will I walk with them? I go, their arms linked in mine, the interpreter following....I  want to know something of Li Yu-hsin's life and she sums it up for me in a sentence. "Four years ago I was illiterate. Last year I was selected to go to a women's conference in Switzerland...now we all eat rice every day out of good china bowls." Their conversation is interrupted: "Premier Chou Enlai has come up to us. We are presented to him." When the women take their leave of her they say, "You must come and visit us, Come and see for yourself how Chinese women have stood up!"

Designer: Xin Liliang (忻礼良)
1954, March
Chairman Mao gives us a happy life
Mao zhuxi gei womende xingfu shenghuo (毛主席给我们的幸福生活)source: www.chineseposters.net

A new spacious home, a radio set, abundant and good food and three healthy children: the happy workers' family of the early 1950s - the view of the 'new China' presented in Cusack's book.

Dymphna Cusack before her trip to China

Her focus is on women - she meets Zhou Enlai's wife, and everywhere she goes, she writes about happy women with fat healthy babies, in picture perfect, clean, prosperous villages and city dwellings, liberated from centuries of feudal oppression. The mental picture as one reads her account is of the propaganda posters of the time, with happy smiling peasants and victorious heroines of industry. It is an interesting case of seeing what you want to see. It is so very much of its time, in a writing style filled with exclamation marks and a kind of jolly hockey sticks 'all girls together' style. It is incredibly poignant to read this now, with all the benefits of hindsight. How interesting it would be to read an alternative account of this highly organised and stage-managed travel, of the behind-the-scenes manipulation of show apartments and show villages, of scripted encounters with people and the removal of anything that might suggest an alternative reality.

Designers: Ha Qiongwen (哈琼文)
1965, March
Become a red seedling - Strike root, sprout flower and bear seed in the places the motherland needs it most!
Zuo yike hongsede zhongzi - Dao zuguo zui xuyaode difang shenggen faya, kaihua, jieguo!
Publisher: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe (上海人民美术出版社)

Chinese - Tai Nan Le! - 太难了!

Laurens Tan, 'Kuai Le Wan Ju', image courtesy the artist

I have been giving myself a number of self-imposed deadlines, writing in a fast and furious fashion about my interviews with Chinese artists; reviewing exhibitions; reading numerous books (often several at a time) in an attempt to make sense of my kaleidoscopic impressions of the fast-changing Chinese artworld on my last visits to Beijing and Shanghai. At times it seems like a form of insanity. But the topic continues to fascinate. I have been reading a new book of essays, 'My First Trip to China' in which scholars, diplomats and journalists reflect on their first encounters with China - it contains some wonderful insights and fabulous anecdotes from the 1950s to today. Jerome A. Cohen, who went on a US diplomatic and scientific delegation in 1972 and met Zhou Enlai, finished his account by observing that he agreed with the humourist Art Buchwald that, after a stomach-full of China watching, an hour later you're hungry for more. I can only concur!

I am  beginning to plan a trip for later this year, when I will be staying in Beijing for a couple of months to write, research and explore artists' studios, galleries and China in general. I am hoping to go beyond Beijing and Shanghai this time, and see more of China than the view visible from the windows of the high-speed train. Although this too was completely fascinating to me.

As I write this I should be at my Chinese class. But am not. Oh dear."Tai Nan Le! Too hard! - 太难了!" I am feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of trying to learn this difficult language and feel that I will never improve beyond the stumbling baby Chinese that I can manage right now. And as for character reading, forget it! My strategy today turns out to be one of avoidance. Probably not recommended. Next week, I WILL do the homework and go to class, I tell myself sternly. We'll see.... 

Laurens Tan, Beng Beng Prototype,Made in China.
 Fiberglass, Steel, Acrylic, Plastic, Wood, Baked Enamel, 62 x 30 x 11 cm, edition of 8, image courtesy of the artist.

Meanwhile, my interview with the wonderful Beijing/Las Vegas/Sydney based artist Laurens Tan has been published on The Artlife web site. I love the way that his work also deals with the traps and slippages of communication across language barriers. His is a practice that is absolutely unique. Tan went to China in 2006 speaking little Mandarin, and discovered a way to use Chinese characters as both the form and symbolic coding in his sculptural, digital and screen-based work. "There are different ways of operating as an artist but essentially I think art is always about embracing risk and letting go. And that’s the hardest part," he told me in a wide-ranging conversation in the (very noisy) cafe of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  For my account of the interview, 'Laurens Tan, Art as a Vehicle for Thinking" - click HERE 

Laurens Tan, Babalogic II, Installation View. Computer-cut ABS, Light, Custom Sanlunche, Dual-Channel Projection, Variable Dimensions, image courtesy of the artist

Another article (previously published in a longer, slightly different form on Artspace China) about the continuing influence of traditions of calligraphy and ink painting on Chinese contemporary painters has been republished on The Culture Trip as 'Constancy and Change in Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting' - featuring the work of three very interesting young women artists - Li Tingting and Gao Ping from Beijing, and Shi Zhiying from Shanghai. Click HERE to see the article.

Li Tingting, Chandelier, Ink on Chinese paper, image courtesy the artist

Recently, too, my interview with Hong Kong based artist Lam Tung-pang appeared on 'Daily Serving'. Lam is currently in new York on an Asia Council fellowship and residency, continuing a discourse about ink painting traditions and making new work in a number of US cities. For the interview, click this link: Things Happened on the Island: Lam Tung-pang's Floating World

Lam Tung-pang in his Hong Kong studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

And my conversations with two emerging women artists in Beijing, Dong Yuan and Gao Rong, were published by Randian Online - click 'In Grandmother's House' to see the article.

Dong Yuan, Daily Scenes, oil on 42 separate canvases, image courtesy of the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Dong Yuan, Hui Hua Chi Fan, oil on separate canvases, installation view, image courtesy the artist

My problem is not being able to type fast enough, nor go without sleep for long enough, to read, write and research as much as I want to. I should at least thank my mother for making me learn touch-typing when I was 16. She said, "Anyone who wants to work in the arts had better have something to fall back on", imagining, no doubt, a life of secretarial drudgery in an office, rather than adventures hiking around Beijing with a laptop.

Upcoming - an article about performance artist and painter Monika Lin and Beijing-based Huang Xu and Dai Dan Dan - 'Landmines in the Garden of the Literati' - watch this space!

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag No. 28, C-print, reproduced courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

Gao Rong (高蓉) and Dong Yuan (董媛) and the memory of things

Work in progress, Gao Rong's Beijing studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Two of the most interesting artists I met in my trip to Beijing last December were Gao Rong and Dong Yuan. I was especially interested to talk to these artists from a younger generation, to see how their work related to tradition and history, if at all. I found them to be thoughtful, reflective, very self-aware and sophisticated in their thinking about their practice. My article about the connections between these two artists was published today on Randian.

Gao Rong in her apartment with 'Private Phone and Public Phone'
photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permsision of the artist

Dong Yuan in her studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Here is the start of that piece:

“What is real?” one asks when encountering works by Gao Rong (高蓉) and Dong Yuan (董媛). The two emerging artists focus their practice on “things” — the objects with which we surround ourselves and through which we define our lives and personal histories. Baudrillard famously declared postmodernity as “the scene of the object’s preponderance.” From Rauschenberg and Oldenburg to Song Dong’s “Waste Not,” an installation of the thousands of objects collected by his mother over the course of her adult life, “things” have literally become art materials, and the private is made public. In the case of Gao and Dong, however, the things they represent are simulacra, in the sense that the objects themselves often no longer exist, swept away in the tide of demolition and reconstruction that has transformed contemporary China.

Gao Rong, Mailbox, Foam, Cloth and Embroidery, image courtesy the artist

Dong Yuan, Daily Scenes, oil on 42 separate canvases, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Gao Rong and Dong Yuan live and work in the outermost suburbs of Beijing. Both grew up far from the capital, Gao in Inner Mongolia and Dong near Dalian. They have never met. But each has created a work inspired by childhood memories of their grandparents’ house, and the accretion of relationships, objects and rituals contained therein. Unsurprisingly, artists now in their late 20s are reflecting on the enormous social transformation experienced in their lifetime. And in a society where change is the only certainty, artists tend to look inward to family and personal history — and to the “things” that represent them — in a search for meaning and identity.

Gao Rong, The Static Eternity, detail, foam, cloth and embroidery,
 image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Gao Rong has transformed the traditions of embroidery, described as “nu hong” — no doubt apocryphally, the phrase is said to have come from the name of an emperor’s daughter in the Zhao Dynasty who spent seven days and seven nights embroidering dragons onto his imperial robes. Using fabric and thread to create large-scale sculptural works, Gao Rong stitches onto fabric which is then wrapped around sponge stiffened by steel frames and wire. Exact representations of peeling paint, electricity fuse boxes and bus timetables take the place of traditional dragons and plum blossoms. “I am a sculptor who uses embroidery, not an embroiderer,” she says. Banal yet poignant, they represent the public and private realms she inhabits — a public telephone, a Beijing bus stop, the entryway to her basement apartment and the house where she spent time as a child. Her most ambitious work to date is a replica of her grandparents’ traditional home in Inner Mongolia, now demolished. Every detail — the rust-stained pipes, enamel mugs and thermos flasks, heavy furniture and ancestor portraits — was created with embroidered fabric. The work reveals itself slowly, initially seducing through sheer technical skill, and then by its evocation of an all-surrounding memory. “The Static Eternity” is a trompe l’oeil labor of love in which the minutiae of humble domestic spaces and the lives lived within their walls are a palpable presence. Gao’s work speaks of family history, memory and filial duty. She honours the traditions of her ancestors by memorializing their vanished home."

If you want to read more about these two interesting artists, click HERE

Dong Yuan, Hui Hua Chi Fan (detail) oil on mulitple separate canvases, image courtesy the artist

God of Small Things - the art of Gao Ping

One of my favourite artists is Beijing-based Gao Ping. She has shown her ink drawings of 'tiny things,' like the solitary fragile figure in the work below,  at Stella Downer Fine Art in Sydney where I first met her. She has also been included in a curated show at the Maitland Regional Gallery in 2012. Her works both ink on paper and oil on canvas have the same paradoxical combination of fragility and strength that the artist herself exhibits in person.

These works have a sadness about them - minute figures, objects, buildings and gardens seem to float on the surface of the Chinese paper. They appear spontaneous, but are in fact carefully planned and controlled by an artist in full command of her medium. Her subjects range from tiny figures, usually girls, to banal household objects such fans or furniture, to depictions of her Beijing courtyard studio or the slightly wonky potplants it contains. There is a series of toys - battered teddy bears and toy trucks, tin wind-up toys and well loved animals.

 Space is used so cleverly - the forms float slightly uneasily, and the white void around them is equally as important as the subjects she has chosen. When I reviewed the show at Stella Downer for The Art Life in 2012,following a long conversation with the artist in a Waterloo cafe,  I said this: " She stores up memories of the people and things she observes in her daily life, until she is safely in the solitude of the studio when they spring back to life under her brush – a weary figure leaning sideways on a park bench, a feisty girl in jeans talking on a mobile, a gathering of men in suits. Together with her characteristic subjects of sad, abandoned toys, and collections of chairs, lamps or electric fans, they suggest a whole population in a state of flux. The delicate restraint of her ink marks gives them a sense of impermanence, as if they could dissolve, shape-shift, or transform themselves into something else altogether. It is perhaps not surprising that the artist describes her experience of living in the constantly changing chaos of Beijing as one of loss and sadness. There is humour too, however, to be found in her wry observations of the unexpected details of city life."

We met once again in Beijing in December, and when Gao Ping brought a folder of drawings to show me over coffee in a 798 cafe, she told me that she is happiest when she is drawing: "The drawing is my heart." 

Gao Ping, ink on Chinese paper, all works above courtesy of the artist and China Art Projects

Her oil on canvas works are strong and subtle, working with a nuanced palette of greys and muted colours. My visit to her studio in Beijing was the first of several conversations where we talked about her life and her art practice. "The life of the artist in Beijing is a lonely one," she says. Her ambitions as an artist are  very pure - almost austere: "Work is the most important thing," she told me, wary of saying too much or of over-analysing. "All the ideas, all the talk is in the paintings."

The images of her studio and her work below communicate that sense of a rigorous practice, one which eliminates all that is unnecesary, even discarding colour altogether at times, and concentrates on what really matters.

Gao Ping studio view, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Gao Ping, studio view,  photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Gao Ping with her unfinished work, photograph Luise Guest
reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

Gao Ping, work in progress photographed in her studio, photograph Luise Guest
reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

Gao Ping Studio, Photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist