Driving the bleak stretches of highway to south-western Sydney to see “Pigeon Auction” at the Casula Powerhouse, an arts centre housed in a post-industrial relic between a polluted river and a railway line, I had time to reflect on the curatorial premise for the show. An examination of ‘suburban subcultures’ is fertile ground for contemporary art. I was intrigued to see how a coherent narrative could[…..]
In early 2011, when I visited a number of young Hong Kong artists’ in their studios, they spoke of their frustration at the focus of curators on art from mainland China, and of their sense of being a ‘poor relation’. Add to that the tensions simmering just below the surface as cashed–up mainlanders poured into Hong Kong, and it seemed a recipe for resentment. In[…..]
Twenty years ago in the Asia Pacific Triennial’s first catalogue Caroline Turner wrote, “Euro-Americentric perspectives are no longer valid as a formula for evaluating the art of this region”. Today this seems obvious – but to a significant degree this is due to the previous 6 exhibitions which introduced audiences to the richness of contemporary art practices in the region. It was through the APT[…..]
After seeing Bound Unbound, the major retrospective show of Lin Tianmiao’s work at the Asia Society Museum in New York I was so intrigued by how such work could emerge from the testosterone-fuelled Chinese artworld in the late 90s that I decided to seek her out in Beijing to ask her what it’s like to be pretty much the only female artist in China to[…..]
Things are not quite what they seem in ‘Double Take’ at the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. The exhibition presents some new works and others which have been seen before but deserve re-examination. A heap of porcelain sunflower seeds, a shiny Harley Davidson which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a bicycle, and the doorway of a Beijing apartment which reveals itself to be[…..]
In Kurosawa’s 1955 movie ‘I Live in Fear’ Toshiro Mifune plays an aging industrialist so frightened of a nuclear attack on Japan that he tries to move his entire family to Brazil, far away from radioactive fallout. If the birds knew what was coming, he says, they would fly away in terror. His children have him committed to a psychiatric institution. The alternative title for[…..]
Disembarking visitors to the 18th Biennale of Sydney at Cockatoo Island first encounter fog rising from a crevice between sandstone cliffs and the island’s abandoned buildings. A site-specific work by Fujiko Nakaya, it exemplifies the intentions of the artistic directors – to open our senses to water, wind, and earth. Jonathan Jones, of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations, created a midden of oyster shells and porcelain teacups, a poignant reference[…..]
