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[…..]
It sounds like the start of a fairy tale. Ten curators from nine different countries are given a task to perform: Each must choose one artist with whom to create a major show. The resulting Kuandu Biennale in Taipei, Slaying Monsters, is made up of separate “solo exhibitions” from Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan, an interesting spin on the usual[…..]
Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video is curated around a work gifted to the Australian Centre on China in the World at Australian National University. 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[…..]
Postcolonial narratives of dispossession, survival, and reclamation dominate the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, making the exhibition part melancholy lament and part anthem of triumph. Works by artists of different traditions speak of cultural practices transformed in response to external forces, yet they preserve important narratives of identity. From the revival of Mongolian zurag painting in Ulaanbaatar to[…..]
What’s in a name? In ancient China, surnames represented clans and ancestral lineage, a highly significant aspect of identity and filial obligation. In contemporary parlance, the Chinese phrase “Lao Bai Xing” (literally, “the old hundred names”) translates as “the ordinary people” or “the common folk.” It often refers to the voiceless, those who are most powerless in the face of social forces. For many years, Chen Qiulin[…..]
Young Chinese artist Tao Hui is a teller of absurd and disturbing tales; he is a fabulist and a social critic. Born in 1987, his childhood exposed him to the hardships of rural life and to Chinese folk traditions. After graduating from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a BFA in oil painting, he turned to new media to represent the bizarre realities of life[…..]
Chen Zhen, who died (much too young) in Paris in 2000, was a significant artist with a hybrid Chinese and European identity. 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,[…..]
