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.

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.

Images from the Umbrella Movement’s 79 extraordinary days of civil disobedience are unforgettable: the viral smartphone videos of Hong Kong’s streets, the crowds, the barricades, the pepper spray—and perhaps unique to the movement, the spontaneous agit-prop artworks made on Post-it notes, pages torn from school exercise books, sheets of cardboard, and on improvised banners. The ground floor of 4A’s gallery space has been transformed by artist Sampson Wong into Capturing a Hyperevent: Artistic Records of the Umbrella Movement, a visual archive created together with Mikala Tai and other collaborators. The gallery walls are covered by Swing Lam’s maps, Post-it notes, and sketches of the temporary structures established by the protesters, and James Kong’s bird’s-eye time-lapse videos of the protests, made using clandestine cameras hidden around the main locus of the drama. Under a makeshift canopy, visitors can sit and immerse themselves in CCTV and news footage, newspapers, images, blogs, and tweets from the movement.

Sarah Lai. Demarcated Area, 2017 (installation view); performance with installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Two artists in the exhibition present and subvert tools of bureaucratic control. Upstairs, Sarah Lai’s performance and installation, Demarcated Area (2017), is a collection of black barriers that were moved into different formations at regular intervals by stony-faced security guards at the exhibition opening, causing trepidation for visitors who found themselves unsure of how to navigate their way through the space, or or how to respond to the unnerving presence of the guards. These artifacts of crowd control are reminders of the generally compliant nature of citizens, often accepted as completely normal until they are installed in the unfamiliar context of the gallery. Conceptual artist Luke Ching, no stranger to social issues of bureaucratic and political control (he once became a security guard at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and lobbied for chairs for his fellow guards), presents 150 Lost Items (2014), a series of miniature identity cards that feature him with an open mouth, in a deliberate disruption of the serious poses mandatory for passport and identity photographs. In this work, Ching evokes the indignities of border controls and the apparent randomness of fate that determines who is permitted to cross; the piece bears even greater prescience now than when the exhibition was planned and installed, prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration and the subsequent travel ban.

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

Yuan Goang-Ming’s video The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014) documents the occupation of Taiwan’s legislative chamber by the Sunflower Student Movement. The camera pans across jumbles of bags, posters, drink bottles, and food containers left behind by the departing students. The students themselves have been edited out of the video, and their occupation thus becomes an unsettling absence. Seeing it first in 2015 at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, I found the piece somber, an elegy rather than a celebration. It seemed to suggest that populist uprisings inevitably fail, or, like the Arab Spring, would lead to darker outcomes and the rise of demagogues. Juxtaposed with the other works by the artists here, however, we see that there are important moments when ordinary people refuse to submit to authority.

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.

Before the Rain, with its remnants and traces of a populist uprising, is a message of hope and validation. But for me, at least, there is a shadow presence, seen very obliquely, of Beijing in June 4, 1989. Ellen Pau’s 1990 video work The Diversion is the key to this reading of the show: She presented 1960s archival footage of a mass of swimmers jumping into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor for a swimming race. Lemmings? Or brave souls challenging their very reasonable fear in an impressive display of courage?  On the outside of the gallery, a hand-painted banner hangs from the second-story windows. It reads: “You may say I’m a Dreamer, But I’m Not the Only One.”

Before the Rain will be on view through March 19, 2017.

[1] A series of street protests often called the Umbrella Revolution (雨傘革命), and sometimes also known as “Occupy Central,” took place in Hong Kong from September 26 to December 15, 2014, in response to proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. Protesters saw these reforms as an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to screen candidates. The protests were in large part led by young student activists, and exposed deep rifts in Hong Kong’s society during a time of great tension. Protest art was an integral part of the activism, and has been followed by works by Hong Kong artists that emphasize Hong Kong’s unique history, language, and culture.

Tsubaki Noburu. Daisy Bell, 2014; polyester cloth; 700 x 600 x 800 cm. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Tsubaki Noboru’s 2014 Daisy Bell (curator Kenichiro Mogi) dominates the entrance to the gallery. An artist who has continually reinvented himself since his involvement in the Japanese “mono-ha” painting movement, Noboru’s work references popular culture, myth, and Japanese tradition. Daisy Bell is a giant inflatable creature that looms over the spectator, at once cute and monstrous. This ambiguous, almost entirely featureless hybrid love-child of Jeff Koons’ Puppy and a creature from the imaginary world of a medieval bestiary insists, as soon as the visitor enters the exhibition, that monsters are already among us.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Pewter Dickhead 3, 2016; earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, porcelain, twine, and human hair; 127 x 47 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran worked with curator Glenn Barkley to develop his characteristic totemic sculptures (currently showing in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra) into works on a monumental scale for the biennale, drawing on Hindu and Christian devotional iconography mashed up with pop culture references to superheroes and pornography. Nithiyendran’s “deities” exude raw sexual power, leavened by ironic humor and a playfully irreverent sensibility. Pewter Dickhead 3 (2016) is made of unfired earthenware—the artist wants these works to return to the earth after the exhibition closes, presumably leaving behind the remains of their adornments of gold and platinum lustre, porcelain, twine, and human hair. Like a voodoo doll or shamanic fetish, this creature with its gold claws and sharp pointy teeth is both charismatic and alarming.

Zhang-Xu Zhan. Inferiority Bat (Hsin Hsin Joss Paper Store Series–Room 003), 2014-2015; 6-channel video animation installation; 5 min. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Taiwan’s thousands of temples are filled with the statues of innumerable gods. A drive through the verdant landscapes of southern Taiwan is punctuated by brilliantly painted tiny shrines and temples containing the figures of numerous gods, many of whom once walked the earth in human form. On the corners of the back streets in old towns, brightly colored puppet theaters perform, not for human children, but for an audience of the gods residing in the temple. Zhang-Xu Zhan (curator Gong Jow-Jiun) presents an innovative work steeped in this Taiwanese folk culture: Inferiority Bat (Hsin Hsin Joss Paper store series–Room 003) (2014-2015) is a 6-channel video installation that begins with the humble vernacular material of papier mâché. Generations of Zhan’s family specialized in the craft of making paper offerings and effigies for religious rituals and funerals, and he marries this tradition with video and new media, creating entirely contemporary works. With paper puppets brought to life by stop-motion animation techniques Zhan creates a fecund universe: plant forms hang on separate screens like creepers in a jungle, swaying gently, rising and falling, and seemingly moving in response to the hypnotic sound track. His tiny puppet theater teems with frantic activity, like battles between gods and demons. Beneath the eccentric charm of his work there is a palpable sense of loss; like so many other ancient traditions, Taiwanese paper crafts are in danger of becoming obsolete in a modern culture of mass production and the seduction of global brands.

Zhang Pei-Li. A standard, uplifting, and distinctive circle along with its sound system, 2015; electric motor and metal rotating device, 25 Watt cylindrical horn speaker, old style “Made-in-China” transistor radios; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Chinese new media pioneer Zhang Pei-Li (curator Lu Ming-Jun) is represented here by A standard, uplifting, and distinctive circle along with its sound system (2015). A circle of old-school Chinese transistor radios suggests a gathering, or a conversation round a table. A microphone on a long arm sweeps around the inside of the circle and picks up the individual sound of each transistor in turn. The suggestion of the long arm of the state apparatus of censorship and control is inescapable, representing a much more sinister kind of monster than the pixilated three-eyed creature in the biennale’s publicity material: this cute pop monster references the unsophisticated video games of the 1980s and 1990s rather than a dark creature of the fearful imagination. However, each artist in this biennale has recognized something elemental in the human spirit. Beneath the playfulness of many works, and beneath the everyday, lies a fear of the encompassing darkness, the monster lurking behind the curtains of the conscious mind. The pressing question posed by the Kuandu Biennale is whether art has a role to play in slaying the “monsters” of the modern world, whatever shape they may take.

Slaying Monsters, the Kuandu Biennale 2016, will be on view through December 11, 2016 at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.

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.

In Hygiene No. 3 (1990), another work inflected by a Dada-esque sense of anarchic humor, Zhang responds sardonically to a hygiene campaign imposed by the Shanghai government in which officials inspected people’s homes. In the video, Zhang washes a live chicken for two and a half hours, again wearing surgical gloves, which lends the video a disturbingly forensic ambience and recalls his early photorealist paintings of latex gloves.

Zhang Peili. Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video, 2016; single-channel video; 9:33; installation view, Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary, 1991. Courtesy of the Artist and Australian Centre on China in the World.

Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary (1991) presents national TV newsreader Xing Zhibin—famous for her broadcasts during the 1989 Tiananmen “incident,” as it is described in China—reading aloud every word and phrase that contains the character shuǐ (water) from a dictionary. Tedious, absurd, yet also poetic, this flood of meaningless words, freed of any context, parodies official news broadcasts and suggests the mutability of language in the hands of the state propaganda apparatus. Emerging from a society in which the preconditions for the production of video art, namely the possession of television sets and home video cameras, could not be taken for granted until the end of the 1980s, Zhang Peili satirizes the dominance of the state in the construction and communication of meaning. The domestic scale of the television screen on which the video plays symbolizes the sweeping changes that transformed Chinese society in the 1980s and 1990s, as collectivism was replaced by mass consumerism and aspirational individualism.

Q + A + Q (2012) records the real-life police interrogation of two thieves. A pair of disheveled boys have been caught attempting an armed robbery, wielding fruit knives; they are interviewed by police officers who question them in a bored manner, over and over again, to the point of absurdity. Though the questioning takes place in real time at the police station, the conversation assumes a heightened significance, as the actors in this drama are obviously aware of the camera. The temptation to create logical narratives and to imagine the larger context of the interrogation, denied by the structure of the work, is almost irresistible. Like Zhang’s earlier works, the rambling conversation is an exercise in the aesthetics of boredom—a deconstruction of the authority of language and power. Yet the video, presented on two screens set at diagonal angles, is compelling. Meanings emerge. The artist himself, in a conversation at this exhibition, said, “My work is in dialogue with the society I live in.”

Zhang Peili. Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video, 2016; 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.

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: From Painting to Video will be on view at the Australian Centre on China in the World, at Australian National University, Canberra, through November 15, 2016.

Christian Thompson. Bidjara People, Western Queensland Trinity I (from Polari series), 2014; C-type photograph; 100 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Showing the work of eighty-three artists from more than thirty countries, the triennial is a barometer of artistic and social change, responding to global forces and the shifting cultural, economic, and political environments of the region. The emphasis of APT 8 is on the performative body: in live actions, immersive installations, video, sculpture, and—a wonderful surprise—the dynamic resurgence of figurative painting. The exhibition reveals boundaries of geography, history, gender, religion, and art practice in constant, fluid motion. Curator Aaron Seeto says, “We understand that while Asia and the Pacific represent quite specific geographies, these terms are also convenient constructions. Within these territories we see great diversity, histories, and attitudes to current global issues.”

The work of indigenous Australian artists speaks of strength and survival in the face of historical oppression and dispossession, and Christian Thompson’s self-portraits are a powerful act of reclamation. Thompson reframes 19th-century ethnographic photographs as symbols of mourning, interwoven with influences from pop culture, cinema, and theater. Gunybi Ganambarr’s distorted burial poles, painted with the intricate cross-hatching of Arnhem Land, are juxtaposed with works in which he used an angle grinder to inscribe traditional patterns into sheets of metal from old water tanks and discarded conveyor belts from the bauxite mines.

Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, in collaboration with Jai Jai Ex Nilalang. Balud, 2015; single-channel 16:9 HD digital video, color, sound. Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.

Queer and transnational identities are taken into surprising new territory in Ming Wong’s appropriations of iconic Australian films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and in the beautiful and kitsch Filipino folk-tale-inspired performances of mermaids and spirits by Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra. Brook Andrews’s re-hang of colonial paintings onto walls covered with the dramatic chevron designs that once adorned the bodies of his Wiradjuri people underline the curatorial thesis of questioning accepted historical, geographic, and political discourses.

Transgender Samoan artist Shigeyuki (Yuki) Kihara is represented by a series of black-and-white photographs that satirically reference Gauguin’s fetishization of the Polynesian body as the Other. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (2013) depicts the artist with her back to the camera, dressed in 19th-century mourning clothes at sites of Samoa’s colonial history, such as the German Monument, Molinu’u. In the single-channel video Siva in Motion (2012) she performs a graceful taualuga dance, reenacting the tsunami that swept across Samoa in 2009. Her fluid hand gestures are intended to recall the early photographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Baatarzorig Batjargal. Nomads, 2014; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; 100 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Works by three Mongolian painters are a revelation. Mongol zurag painting, suppressed during years of compulsory Soviet socialist realism, reemerged with perestroika. These immensely detailed paintings emerge from a long tradition of figuration, a synthesis of Tibetan tangka, Chinese guohua, and Liao Dynasty equestrian art. Add a dash of political pop and contemporary satire, and the resulting works demonstrate extraordinary technical accomplishment, great beauty, and keen social observation. Nomin Bold’s Tomorrow (2014), painted on a surface of old scripture sheets, at first appears to be a traditional devotional Buddhist image, until you see that the background is a teeming city of grid-like streets, skyscrapers, and power lines. From the tradition of religious tangka, too, the paintings of Tibetan exile Tsherin Sherpa hang on dark scrolls that are suspended from poles featuring gold hands and feet in each corner; they are psychedelic in their swirling intensity of crimson, gold, viridian, and ultramarine.

From the Kyrgyz Republic, a five-channel video installation by Guknara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2006), embodies the spirit of many artists selected for this APT. The five screens show a lonely road winding through a bleak landscape. Along the trade route that once saw camel trains bearing silks and spices, now a convoy of battered trucks hauls scrap metal to China from the Soviet Union and Central Asia. In the opposite direction, shiny new Chinese road trains carry manufactured goods bound for European markets. A man sings a traditional Kyrgyz ballad, an ode to his homeland. A young boy on horseback races a truck along the road. The video focuses on the inhabitants of the farms and Kyrgyz towns en route, who reveal entrepreneurial agility and resilience in their dealings with the truck drivers. Eking out a precarious living in an unforgiving but beautiful place, they represent the contradictions and difficulties faced by all but the richest of the world’s population in a time of uncertainty.

At a time of unprecedented human movement across the globe, the focus on the body is timely. Curator Aaron Seeto says, “Artists are using the body through figuration and performance to express complex ideas and positions with respect to the environment, labor politics, migration, politics and history, sexual expression, and liberation to name just a few. […] These are responses to very specific politics and cultural trajectories, and so it is never a generic body that is being presented.” At a historic moment when human bodies are crammed into boats, trucks, and trains, making dangerous journeys, traversing oceans and crossing borders, seeking safety, this exhibition reveals the resilience of cultures, peoples, and individuals living in a time of doubt.

The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is on view at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art through April 10, 2016.

Chen Qiulin. A Hundred Surnames in Tofu, 2010; still from video installation. Courtesy of the Artist and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu.

One Hundred Names for Kwong Wah Chong continues Chen Qiulin’s use of tofu as an artistic medium. She examined the history of early Chinese migration to the Haymarket/Chinatown precinct of Sydney, where the gallery is situated in a historic building. Research revealed the names and stories of the earliest diasporic Chinese presence in the city—mostly Cantonese-speaking migrants who arrived in Australia between 1840 and 1920 from southern China, becoming market gardeners, restaurateurs, and business owners. The titular Kwong Wah Chong was, in fact, Sydney’s first Chinese-owned and operated business, a center of support and information for recent arrivals. The artist, together with curator Toby Chapman and the 4A team, found and interviewed current Sydney residents with those same surnames, whose stories revealed that how people remember “home,” often tinged with loss and nostalgia, is a common experience across diverse cultures and languages. Each of these surnames was carved from tofu and their consequent disintegration documented. Back in Chengdu, Chen Qiulin sought out families who shared those same surnames. She asked them for their favorite tofu recipes and videotaped the encounters, which took place in their kitchens while they cooked the recipes and recounted the stories behind them. Thus a connection was forged across continents and divergent histories. Chen Qiulin’s practice poetically captures the beauty of these unlikely connections, as well as the tragedy of displacement.

On the ground floor of 4A’s gallery space, banks of televisions and screens display the resulting videos. At the exhibition’s opening, the artist demonstrated tofu carving, working with a large block of firm tofu set out on a table covered by a cheerfully domestic floral tablecloth. For Chen, her chosen medium of tofu, one of the oldest and most commonly used ingredients in Chinese cooking, is both personal and universal. It speaks of domesticity and childhood memories of home, but it also references the inevitability of decay and disintegration, becoming a potent symbol of the traumatic change experienced by Chinese citizens in recent years. As recipes are handed down from generation to generation, often with family members spread across the globe, tofu also becomes a metaphor of migration. Chen identifies a kind of alchemical process operating here; one kind of raw material is transformed into another by intensive labor.

Chen Qiulin. The Garden No. 1, 2007; C-type print; 100 x 82 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu.

One Hundred Names is on view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, through February 27, 2016. It will be on view at  the Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria,  from June 4 to July 31, 2016.

New Directions: Tao Hui at UCCA Beijing; installation view. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Eric Powell.

The moving image was a Western import into China in the 19th century, and it was seized with enthusiasm and an entrepreneurial spirit. By the 1930s, Shanghai was the center of a thriving film industry, with glamorous movie stars rivaling those in Hollywood. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, film, like photography, became a vital instrument for Maoist propaganda. After Mao’s death, the reform and opening policies of Deng Xiaoping provided new influences, and in the mid-1980s, simultaneous with the rise of the ’85 “New Wave” artists, a group of idealistic filmmakers graduated from the Beijing Film Academy. Video in an art context was pioneered by artists such as Wang Jianwei, Hu Jieming, and Zhang Peili. An explosive mix of new technical knowledge, the discovery of Western artists (including Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Bruce Nauman), and the influx of popular culture from diverse sources provided an experimental laboratory for the Chinese avant-garde. Tao Hui is of a new generation for whom the language of video is entirely unremarkable, allowing him to explore the emotive possibilities of sound and create immersive experiences for audiences.

It seemed appropriate that I saw New Directions: Tao Hui at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art District on a long public-holiday weekend, its streets teeming with thousands of local citizens, including many teenagers wearing plastic vegetables, flowers, and bean shoots attached to their heads—the latest craze in China—and the carnivalesque atmosphere was strange enough to belong in one of the artist’s video works. I have been told that in the feudal past, grass put on a child’s head by parents was a sign that the child was to be sold to save the family from starvation. The contrast between this horror and the “cute” aesthetic of the young Beijingers wearing their plastic beansprouts is also found in Tao Hui’s oeuvre—a dark underbelly and a cutting humor characterizes his use of film language. As a small boy, Tao experienced the unnerving dislocation of modern China firsthand, moving from place to place with his family. A large part of his childhood was spent in a remote mountain village where the oral tradition of storytelling remained strong and vital; he was immersed in folklore and bizarre tales told by his neighbors. There is a significant strain of magical realism in traditional Chinese stories; Tao’s work reflects that tradition, as well as the uncertainty and growing awareness of moral decay felt by many in this “brave new world” of unequal wealth and rampant materialism.

Tao Hui. Excessive, 2015; single-channel video installation, HD video, color, sound, glass projector, silica gel, iron, wood; 112 x 59.8 x 30 cm; 19:32. Courtesy of the Artist.

His work presents the inner lives of people dealing with a maelstrom of changes resulting from urbanization, increasing wealth, the movement of millions to the factory towns of the south, and the disruptive demolition and renewal so characteristic of Chinese cities. Video is the vehicle through which Tao Hui explores the psychological impact of living in this time of transformation, presented in a manner both theatrical and cinematic, somewhat like a traveling cinema, or the raw performance and opera troupes still found in rural China. The Acting Tutorial presents amateur actors in an abandoned building, rehearsing extreme and brutal scenarios that culminate in them setting fire to a burning comrade. Suggestive of a violently cathartic psychoanalytical therapy, it also inevitably evokes the mass hysteria of the recent past, in the living memory of the artist’s parents, during the Cultural Revolution. It is a work about trauma—a subject that Chinese artists return to again and again, in different ways.

The video 1 Character and 7 Materials is a similarly absorbing and immersive experience. Headphones provide English and Chinese versions of a monologue in which a narrator tells her life story in an exhausted but strangely flat voice; the effect of this, juxtaposed with surreal images, is hypnotic. After she flees her small village beside the Yangtze for the squalor of the city, a doomed love affair with her music student results in a downward spiral, pushing her toward her inevitable suicide on the banks of the river. The repeated shots of a white-robed immortal steering a small boat across the immensity of the river is evocative and memorable, suggesting that imagination, dreams, history, and the present day all coexist in a jumble of images and memories.

New Directions: Tao Hui at UCCA Beijing; installation view. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Eric Powell.

I was less persuaded by Excessive, another surreal narrative of conflict: A young girl has an extra finger that causes grief to her family, so she cuts it off with a kitchen knife and burns it. It is reminiscent of Cao Fei’s video Haze and Fog, a similarly surreal expression of contemporary Chinese life, in which zombies roam the suburban supermarket and new apartment compounds; a bored housewife cuts off her finger and is then shown sprawled on her glamorous new furniture, having a manicure. In both Cao Fei’s and Tao Hui’s video installations, a sense of despair underlies the absurdity and black humor. Both artists are influenced by the broad acting style of low-budget Chinese TV melodramas, and by the excesses of contemporary popular culture. Tao Hui is interested in challenging the ways in which we traditionally experience video or movies, safely anonymous in the black box. In the gallery space, a vitrine contains the “ashes” of the incinerated finger, the burning projected on a back screen. It’s a trompe l’oeuil exaggeration that, truth be told, seemed to me as excessive as the work’s title. The overstatement renders the meaning less powerful, rather than more.

Despite this reservation, Tao Hui’s is a new and compelling voice in the crowded Chinese art world, with his own take on the strangeness of real life in a constantly changing society.

New Directions: Tao Hui is on view at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing through October 19, 2015.

Chen Zhen. Purification Room, 2000-2015; found objects, clay; approx. 850 x 1100 x 450 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Entering the Art Deco spaces of the Rockbund Museum, visitors encounter the rather spectacular Purification Room (2000–2015), a large space filled with everyday objects—sofas, TVs, chairs and tables, bicycles and shopping trolleys—all entirely coated with mud, as are the walls and floor. Traditionally, Chinese medicine used mud to cleanse and detoxify, and Chen Zhen thought of it as representing purity, simplicity, the natural world, and the peace of being laid to rest. The experience is one of stillness and silence, as if we have entered a mysterious unknown civilization revealed by an archaeological excavation. The quotidian artifacts of our modern daily lives seem to have a greater significance, becoming unfamiliar and strange.

The next level presents Le Bureau de Change (1996–2004), which is constructed from a traditional Shanghai communal public toilet, very common in the past when few people had their own bathrooms. Inside the darkened wooden structure, the pit toilet is full of money, gold and silver coins glinting in the dim light. The noise of constant flushing fills the space. This savagely witty work possesses even greater resonance today, when so many Chinese citizens are experiencing the shock of losing their money in an unprecedented economic downturn. The boom times may be over, and some fear their newfound prosperity could be simply flushed away.

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.

For me, the most important work in the exhibition is Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body. The major internal organs (heart, lung, spleen, liver, kidney, gall bladder, stomach, intestines, spinal column, and so forth) were created from blown glass, displayed on a glass medical-examination table, in a darkened space. There are twelve versions of this work, corresponding to signs of the Chinese Zodiac; this one is the Rooster. The crystal organs cast beautiful shadows on the floor below the table, representing the ephemerality and fragility of life, and the reflection of the inner reality in the physical manifestation of the body’s health. Both of the artist’s parents were doctors, and he himself began to study medicine, before being diagnosed with a rare, and ultimately fatal, form of anemia at the age of 25. His philosophical approach to life, and to his art practice, was profoundly influenced by the time that he spent in Tibet living with Buddhist monks. Chen Zhen’s landscape of the body is created by the reflections and refractions of the blown glass and the glass table, with a suggestion that all physical reality is illusory—and entirely temporary.

Chen Zhen. Daily Incantations, 1996; wood, metal, Chinese chamber pots, electric wires, parts of electronic objects, sound system; 230 x 700 x 350 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Daily Incantations is a monumental installation that appears at first sight to be a structure of traditional Buddhist temple bells. A closer inspection reveals it is created from 101 traditional Shanghainese barrel-shaped wooden chamber pots, some of which have been fitted with speakers broadcasting the sound of the chamber pots being washed, and other noises. At the center of the installation a sphere is filled with a jumble of TV sets, cassette players, video recorders, telephones, and tangled skeins of electrical wires. For Hou Hanru, these mundane, even ugly and unclean objects, fast disappearing as a result of modernization and Westernization, are “sacrificial objects in cultural conflict.” Like the artist’s painstaking documentation of the destruction and demolition that forever changed the face of his city, they represent change, and the loss of tradition. Like Nam June Paik’s iconic 1970s TV Buddha, Chen Zhen’s work of the 1990s explores postcolonialism through the use of  found objects: traditional Chinese wooden furniture and 20th-century electrical or electronic devices. The artist’s intended juxtaposition of past and present, East and West, today has a more elegiac quality of obsolescence, as his TV sets and tape recorders are themselves now artifacts of history.

Chen Zhen: Without Going to New York and Paris, Life Could Be Internationalised is on view at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai through October 7, 2015.

Ian Woo. We Have Crossed the Lake, 2009; acrylic on linen; 194 x 244 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Other Edens presents the garden as a site of desire in the colonial imagination. Singaporean painter Ian Woo’s lyrical, abstract representation of foliage and water represents the solace found in the natural world. A reference to mid-20th-century abstraction is evident, but Woo has invented a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language. Underlying the gestural, calligraphic mark making of We Have Crossed the Lake (2009) is a spare restraint emerging from his deep knowledge of Chinese ink-painting traditions.

Some works reflect the bitter aftermath of totalitarian ideologies. Asian nation-states today—even the behemoth of a post-Mao China—are hostage to the forces of the global market, and old certainties have vanished. Shen Shaomin’s hyper-real embalmed bodies of Communist leaders lie in crystal sepulchres, as if awaiting a call to arms that might reanimate them. Mao lies next to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, Kim Il-sung and Lenin. Summit (2009) is a G8 meeting of cadavers. The meta-narratives of the 20th century, like these old men, lie in the morgue of history.

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.

Vietnamese/American collective the Propeller Group collaborated with an advertising agency to rebrand Communism, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make it newly palatable. The mise-en-scène of Television Commercial for Communism (2011–2012) is all white—no red flags, no references to the glorious struggle of the proletarian masses, no cult-like imagery: a satirical “whitewashed” revolutionary ideology as empty and uninflected as a mouthwash commercial.

Anurendra Jegadeva. MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss, and Pre-Nuptials in The Time of the Big Debate, 2012-2014; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Anurendra Jegadeva’s MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss, and Pre-Nuptials in the Time of the Big Debate (2012–2014) presents the personal as unambiguously political. A seductively gaudy Hindu wedding altar is adorned with images of the artist’s parents, the religious iconography of four major religions, and a panoply of South Asian cultural references. Jegadeva comments on two definitions of marriage: the wedding of the artist’s parents, in 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence; and the marriage of convenience that created Malaysia as a modern state. Caucasian Krishnas are juxtaposed with the Virgin Mary, and portraits of political leaders jostle in a joyously vibrant eclecticism. In a time of increasing political and religious tension, this exuberant mash-up of culture and tradition seems utopian indeed.

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

Eighteen sparkling “bombs” hang in the darkened space of the chapel (the museum was once a Catholic school). Terrifying disco balls promising destruction, they cast shards of light onto the Stations of the Cross that still adorn the walls. At once beautiful and menacing, Kawayan De Guia’s Bomba (2011) references the bombing of Manila in World War II, but evokes the horrors of more recent conflicts, and others of the past, contrasting the glittery lure of hedonism with a dance of death.

Chris Chong Chan Fui. Block B, 2012-2014; single-channel video with sound; 20:00 looped. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Other works explore urban alienation. Chris Chong Chan Fui’s 2012–2014 video Block B was shot in a gritty neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur where life unfolds chaotically within a grid of brutalist high-rise apartments. Shannon Lee Castleman set up sixteen video cameras in facing apartments on Singapore’s  Jurong West Street 81. Residents simultaneously filmed and were filmed by their neighbors. The work reflects the new realities of surveillance, but also reveals the joys of the everyday within these closely packed buildings. In unscripted exchanges between neighbors who might otherwise never have spoken, we see the possibilities for human connection in unpromising environments. Through this examination of utopias lost and found, the exhibition reminds us that the universal desire for the perfect world remains a tantalisingly elusive aspiration.

After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art is on view at the Singapore Art Museum through October 18, 2015.

[1] After Utopia catalog, Singapore Art Museum, 2015.

Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW.

From 3,000 personal notebooks and diaries amassed by the artist over a period of three years, purchased in Beijing’s Panjiayuan “Dirt Market” (a place where you can buy just about anything, from fake antiquities to genuine Mao memorabilia), Yang Zhichao has created a work that reveals a hidden history. Spanning 1949–1999, these collected diaries, saved for their value as recycled scrap paper, reveal the dramatic transformations that have convulsed China from the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and later the impact of globalization under the Reform and Opening policies following Mao’s death in 1976.

Arranged in rows on a raised platform, the books’ first impression is a sea of revolutionary red. Early books covered in blue or green featuring pictures of traditional architecture, auspicious plum blossoms, or galloping horses give way to triumphant soldiers and peasants, factory chimneys billowing smoke, and Mao haloed by the rising sun. Books from the 1980s have plastic covers in bright pink or pea green with cute cartoon characters. We see only the covers, but pages have been photographed and displayed on iPads; with a slight frisson of voyeurism, we view the self-criticisms, dutifully copied out passages of “Mao Zedong thought,” and notes from meetings and political study sessions. Some contain more personal things—knitting patterns, song lyrics, and shopping lists. Others have keepsakes—photographs or pressed flowers—between their pages. One has a souvenir brochure for a 1979 exhibition of works by Kathe Kollwitz, one of the first international art exhibitions staged in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Part historiography, part sociology, and part anthropology, the work re-presents and reinterprets the quotidian.

Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.
Photo: Jenni Carter, AGNSW.

Chinese Bible was first shown in November 2009 at Ai Weiwei’s China Art Archives and Warehouse in Beijing, displayed in a massive rectangle “like a patchwork memory quilt.”[1]  The work was then shown at Hong Kong’s 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, where collector Gene Sherman saw it. Despite the decision she and her husband had made to “draw a line” under their collection, she decided it was too significant to overlook. Chinese Bible combines text and the found object, with a subtext of social justice—a narrative thread in the Shermans’ collection of contemporary art from Asia.[2]

Curator Claire Roberts explains the work’s significance: “There has been a trend for a while for Chinese artists to start looking at their own history, and Yang Zhichao’s work fits into that trend. It’s just so evocative of those amazing decades of the transformation of China. Even just by looking at the patina on the covers of the diaries you can see history unfolding before your eyes… These 3,000 diaries each represent a fragment of the lives of actual people. We can appreciate it as a contemporary artwork, but also as a work that opens up all sorts of insights into how individual lives have intersected with the big historical movements… Yang Zhichao is a performance artist, and this work is a performance installation.”[3]

Yang Zhichao. Chinese Bible, 2009 (detail – inside page); 3,000 found books; dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney.

With other avant-garde artists in Beijing’s “East Village” enclave in the 1990s, Yang Zhichao specialized in the transgressive body art that characterized that era. He had tufts of grass implanted into his back for an exhibition in Shanghai; was literally branded (by Ai Weiwei) with his identity number on his  shoulder; had an unidentified metal object surgically implanted in his leg and vials of earth and ash inserted in his stomach. I asked Yang Zhichao to tell me about the change in his practice, from what Craig Clunas describes as “extreme macho abjection”[4] to more reflective works. “From 1995 to 2005 it was kind of a ‘golden age’ of Chinese performance art,” he said. “It was an art form that put the artist in opposition to a variety of things: the artist’s way of exploring themselves in opposition to society in general, to living conditions, to governmental regulations, and of course to the art world itself. It was such a meaningful practice. In the period from 2005–2015 there has been significant change in China that has contributed to a change in art practice. Looking back over the last ten years, there does continue to be some quite challenging or provocative performance art, but in general it has changed into a less confrontational mode. But also, of course, the artists have aged! The relationship between the artist and society, living environments, and political systems, and the artworld itself—there have been significant shifts and changes in each of those realms which have also contributed to changes in practice.”

Explaining his motivation for collecting, washing, and installing Chinese Bible, Yang Zhichao says, “These diaries represented a forgotten history of ordinary people that is not reflected in the official histories.” He and Ai Weiwei pored over these evocative notebooks, finding connections with the events of their own lives and those of their parents. Ai Weiwei was instrumental in assisting Yang Zhichao with the first installation and presentation of the work in Beijing, when people could directly engage with the books, leafing through their pages. For a western audience who cannot read Chinese, the experience is more distant, with a risk that the objects become merely aestheticized. The title of the work, however, reminds us of the significance of the contents. The term “bible,” deliberately chosen despite its emergence from a secular history, denotes an authoritative text and “bestows on the diaries an air of authority that they would not otherwise have, elevating the collective writings of ordinary people to canonical status.”[5] Like other significant installation works from Chinese artists, the massed notebooks of Chinese Bible reference the tension between the aspirations and dreams of the individual, and the enforced conformity of the collectivist past. That was poignantly brought home when Claire Roberts and Yang Zhichao, en route to lunch in Chinatown, invited their Chinese taxi driver to see the work. He could not possibly do so, he said, as it would bring back such a flood of bad memories that it would make him weep.

Yang Zhichao: Chinese Bible is on view at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation through August 1, 2015. It is running concurrently with Go East, an exhibition of works from the Gene and Brian Sherman collection of contemporary Asian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

[1] Claire Roberts, “Yang Zhichao and Chinese Bible: Performing into the Present,” Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015.

[2] This work, and a major installation by Jitish Kallat, have been gifted to the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

[3] Claire Roberts and Yang Zhichao, interview with the author on May 16, 2015.

[4] Craig Clunas, Art in China, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[5] Claire Roberts, “Yang Zhichao and Chinese Bible: Performing into the Present,” Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015.

Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus D’Aspremont, 2012; digital C-type print mounted on diabond; 75 x 110 cm.
Courtesy the Artist and Ronchini Gallery, London.

Part of the Art+Climate=Change festival, the exhibition is intended to stimulate discussion about global warming and its devastating impact. Truthfully, I expected it to be worthy and sincere but deadly boring. Instead, I was moved and, in front of some works, enchanted. Bosse proposes a reinvestigation of the sublime—but not in its Romantic, 19th-century guise, which placed humankind at the thrilling center of things. Here, humans are rather on the periphery, facing the unintended consequences of what we have wrought, filled with regret. Delafield Cook’s Sperm Whale is cleverly juxtaposed with photographs of the American wilderness by Ansel Adams—a passionate environmentalist when it was distinctly unfashionable to be one. This is art for the Anthropocene, the epoch in which we confront humankind’s impact on the planet: mass extinctions, the pollution of the oceans, and the alteration of the atmosphere.

Jonathan Delafield Cook. Sperm Whale (Physeter Macrocephalus) (detail), 2013; graphite on canvas,
six panels; 245 x 1200 cm. overall. Courtesy of the Artist and Olsen/Irwin Gallery, Sydney.

Other works in the exhibition are equally compelling. Jamie North’s Slag Bowls are formed from concrete and steel slag, inhabited by moss collected from post-industrial sites. In 2014, North traveled to Pittsburgh to undertake a residency exploring new materials and technologies. Working with the Calgon Carbon Company and Pittsburgh Botanic Gardens, he wanted to investigate American “human-impacted landscapes” through sculpture and photography. Other works by the Australian artist stand like prehistoric stones in the darkened space of the gallery; fissured, weathered concrete columns appear to have formed naturally. Growing within their pitted gashes and broken surfaces are tiny ecosystems.

Jamie North. Slag Bowl I & II, 2013; concrete, coal ash, steel slag, Australian native plants and moss;
15 x 37 x 37 cm. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Gabriel Orozco’s video of hands relentlessly turning a smooth river stone in a compulsive fashion suggests the relentless weathering actions of wind and water. David Haines’s mesmerizing two-screen video projection, Day and Night (2005), juxtaposes a rocky cliff and waves dashing against rocks. Slowly you realize there is a tiny, formally suited figure, almost invisible against the enormity of the landscape, clinging to the cliff face and shifting from foot to foot. Like Magritte’s Castle of the Pyrenees, it is an image of the impossible, and in its enormity it echoes Delafield Cook’s leviathan in the next room. The wall text suggests it is about climate change—something of a forced “fit” that left me a little skeptical. It seemed a larger metaphor for our puny ambitions and relentless ego in the face of forces beyond our control.

Ansel Adams. Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1935; gelatin silver photograph; 56 x 71 cm. framed.

Issues of control—and lack of control—are paramount. Nature is the protagonist here, but the notable absence in these works is the controlling hand of humanity. Berndnaut Smilde creates clouds in his Nimbus series, like a magician conjuring up elemental forces. They are beautiful, mysterious images, but they cannot compete with Ansel Adams’ photographs of cloudy skies over Yosemite. The exhibition compels us to face the tragic consequences of the way we have interpreted Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Nature/Revelation is on view at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne through July 5, 2015.

“We are not conceptual artists,” Zheng told me very firmly when we spoke (yes, over many cups of fragrant tea) at the gallery. Named after their hometown of Yangjiang, the group formed in 2002 with an anti-authoritarian and inclusive approach to art. Like Joseph Beuys, they believe that anyone is an artist, aiming to challenge the elitism and privilege that attaches to calligraphy in China—and to contemporary art. I asked the artists about their unique approach to calligraphy. Zheng Guogu responded to my questions with the help of a translator, while his two collaborators concentrated on refilling our teacups.

Yangjiang Group. Actions for Tomorrow, 2015; exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Luise Guest: Traditional Chinese scholars liked to drink and gamble, as well as paint and write poetry. Are you following in the footsteps of the literati, or are you challenging those traditions?

Zheng Guogu: At first we wanted to try to experience that life, like the ancient artists. We found that when we were drunk, the calligraphy we made was very beautiful. We thought it had a special energy, so we adopted this kind of practice. Then we found out that when we were drunk we could forget lots of the rules of calligraphy. We discovered that the ancient scholars also had many rules, and by breaking them they could make their calligraphy more expressive. You need to follow traditions first and then break from those traditions.

LG: You have been described as iconoclastic calligraphers who throw thousands of years of Chinese tradition out the window—are you deliberately challenging China’s cultural heritage?

ZG: Yes, we challenge the old rules because each new generation has radicals who must break with tradition.

Yangjiang Group. Actions for Tomorrow, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

LG: Is your mural, which includes the words, “God is Dead, Long Live the RMB!” satirizing art as a commodity of international exchange or the loss of culture and tradition in China in a headlong rush toward ever greater wealth?

ZG: You are not meant to interpret any meaning. You should not use twentieth-century rules to view this exhibition; you should use a new way to see this. It’s not conceptual art; it has nothing to do with the symbols. Last century when you went to a gallery and saw an artwork, you would be guessing the meaning behind it. But now, with this work, it’s about how your body reacts—it’s an immediate response, an instinctive and emotional response.

LG: By choosing to work with calligraphy, you are positioning yourselves in a continuing Chinese cultural tradition. By subverting it, you are critiquing Chinese culture. Are some of your works  political statements? Here you have written, “God is Dead, Long Live the RMB,” for example…

ZG: No. It’s not art of the head—it’s art of the body and the heart. When you enter into this social space you feel the energy and increase your spirit. It’s not about the meaning.

Yangjiang Group. Final Days, 2015; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, wax and modified clothing installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Photo: Zan Wimberley

LG: Okay, but in Fuck Off the Rules [1], you appeared to be challenging the very nature and value of art. What do you think is the importance of art in today’s world?

ZG: Lots of artists today are just fake. Real artists should break the traditional rules. Forget what the form is—then you can create real art. Previous generations of artists are not on the opposite side to us, we are one line of artists. We are all like the gods.

LG: There seem to be two things that are very important to you—language and what you call “the spirit.” How is spirituality important in your work? And are these two things connected?

ZG: To write you need spirit—or qi. [2] You use one breath to write one character, so the spirit is important. Some of the ancient calligraphers also practiced kung fu, so they needed to have great energy. This refers to the spirit and the breath. When you are writing, your brush strokes follow your breath. When you see calligraphy, you see the writer’s ‘qi‘. This has a relationship with the universe, the earth rotating and orbiting the sun—the same as the systems in your body. Writing calligraphy follows these rules.

Yangjiang Group. Final Days, 2015; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, wax and modified clothing installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Photo: Zan Wimberley

LG: How did you three meet, and how did the group start?

ZG: Before 2002, I was working in photography, and then I transferred to writing texts…. In ancient times words had some spirit or energy inside, related to their nature, as well as something to do with the symbol and the sounds. So I think that words are not 2-D they are 3-D. They are alive. I changed my own name to ‘Guogu’ so that it would be a unique creation. Then I created my persona, my identity. When somebody calls your name there is some vibration in the air, in the universe. If you have a negative name the vibration will be negative. Although I think that words have very strong vibrations, I am not trained in calligraphy, but Chen Zaiyan is a professionally trained calligrapher, trained in Hangzhou. Sun Qinglin is from Yangjiang. I invited him because I saw his drunk calligraphy and it had a special energy. So we formed this little group.

Yangjiang Group, Das Kapital Football (still), 2009, ink on Xuan paper calligraphy, action, documentation, installation (two-channel video: DV widescreen anamorphic, color, with sound, ink on Xuan paper carpet). Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space.

LG: When people think of Chinese contemporary art, they think of the major art centers of Beijing and Shanghai—perhaps not of Yangjiang! What makes you stay?

ZG: Lots of people ask this! A previous generation needed to go to the art centers like Beijing, escaping from small towns, but the real inspiration for an artist is equally from small places. There is no reason to think there is less inspiration from a small town, or more inspiration from a big city…. In a small town people are living their normal lives, and our work is closer to ordinary people. I find that the most essential thing is to stay in one place and to pay attention. It’s like art meditation. In a big city there are too many distractions and you cannot concentrate. A real artist has to find real life.

LG: The Yangjiang Group has blurred the boundaries between art and life. In the past you have made works documenting gambling, drinking, football, gardening…. Some people might say, “Is that really art? Is that not just life?” What would you tell them?

ZG: The purpose of art is to make people live better. That explains everything we do.

The concluding event of Yangjiang’s Sydney sojourn is the Twilight Garden Party in the Chinese Garden of Friendship on February 14; Actions for Tomorrow is on view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney through March 7, 2015.

[1] Yangjiang’s 2014 exhibition at Shanghai’s Minsheng Museum, Fuck Off the Rules, was a not-so-subtle reference to Ai Weiwei’s notorious Fuck Off exhibition and an illustration of their anarchic anti-art approach to the veneration of calligraphy in Chinese culture.

[2] The literal translation is “air” or “breath.” It is the underlying principle in traditional Chinese medicine and the practice of martial art forms. It refers to the life force and the flow of energy through the body.

Zhang Xiaotao. Sakya, 2010-2011; still image; 80 x 144 cm. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

For the last few years, in regular visits to Beijing, I have been delighted to encounter work that seems to have escaped the dead hand of suffocating theory. Certainly Beijing has seen its share of the “art as spectacle” phenomenon, with artists tempted by the accessibility of large spaces, cheap labor, and cheaper fabrication costs to make works that are bigger and shinier than they need to be. But that’s the world we are living in now—a world of giant rubber ducks everywhere and butt-plug sculptures in the center of Paris. Art as entertainment. An evaluation of 2014 exhibitions in a Sydney newspaper pointed out that these days “you can’t just put stuff on the wall and expect that lots of people will come see.”[1] People expect something momentous, something extraordinary; they want their perceptions altered. In short, they want art to be magic.

And, sometimes, just sometimes, it is. My most enduring memories of the all-too-rare transcendent art experience include Cai Guo-Qiang in Brisbane, Xu Bing’s magnificent Phoenix in New York, and Huang Yong Ping at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum. Which is not to say that I haven’t also seen some wonderful painting, most particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. No “Zombie Formalism” there. To my list of the extraordinary I can now add Zhang Xiaotao’s digital 3D animations at Pékin Fine Arts, in his solo exhibition In the Realm of Microcosmic. Two works, Sakya (2010–2011) and The Adventures of Liang Liang (2012–2013), were exhibited in the 55th Venice Biennale, in the China National Pavilion’s Transfiguration curated by Wang Chunchen.

Zhang Xiaotao. Sakya No. 4, 2010-2011; still image; 80 x 144 cm. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

With references ranging from video-gaming software and science fiction to Tibetan thangka painting, sutras, and mandalas, Sakya reveals the struggle to retain spirituality in today’s modernizing, materialist China. It centers upon a significant Buddhist temple in Tibet partially destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Past and present overlap and the experience is hypnotizing, immersive, and very beautiful. Zhang Xiaotao says his utopia would be a “Buddhist Renaissance” in China, believing that people have lost their way in the chaos of urbanization and the frantic acquisition of material possessions. He incorporates a deep sense of history and reverence for tradition with a dizzying technical accomplishment using innovative approaches to technology.

In The Adventures of Liang Liang (2013), the artist animates his little son’s precociously wonderful and eccentric drawings, creating an engaging allegorical adventure in which cartoon characters, superheroes, deities, and traditional Chinese stories such as Journey to the West merge and overlap. His most recent work, Three Thousand Worlds (2014), creates an ambitious multilevel, multi-spatial representation of the Buddhist notion of the oneness of all things, the Three Realms, the intricate reciprocal relationship between the macrocosmic and microcosmic view of the universe. He is influenced by new theories in quantum physics and the way they challenge accepted notions of time and space as much as by the philosophies of his mentor, Xu Bing. Joseph Beuys’ philosophy of “social sculpture,” in which the artist breaks down barriers between artwork, artist, and audiences, is a significant influence. Zhang Xiaotao believes the artist should be “like an alchemist.” On the evidence of this show, Zhang is a magician.

Zhang Xiaotao. The Adventures of Liang Liang, 2013; video; 11:49. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

A major event on the Beijing calendar each year at Pace Beijing has been Beijing Voice, which showcases current discourses and directions in contemporary Chinese art. This iteration, the fifth, was curated by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu with independent curator Cui Cancan. For their project Unlived By What Is Seen, they had 2,000 square meters of exhibition space to play with in Pace Beijing alone, as well as two other major Beijing galleries—Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art. The curators selected twenty-eight artists and three artist collectives to participate in an exhibition intended to interrogate relationships between the artist, the art object, and the audience.

Beijing Voice: Unlived By What Is Seen; installation view. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

They present works in support of a theoretical position: that there is a shift in focus from making art to taking action; a move away from the production of images and objects. Instead, the artists are “developing modes of existence that interrogate life itself,” according to the somewhat opaque publicity material. In many instances the result of this is an artist-as-talking-head narrating personal stories or aspects of daily life to a video camera. Unsurprisingly, some of these are much more interesting than others. The documentation of performance works offered little that seems new. Sun Yuan volunteered to allow the artist Zhao Zhao to stab him once in the back with a knife. I think we may have seen this once or twice before.

Performance art is undeniably significant in the development of contemporary art in China, and is well documented. A consistent thread within this history focuses on a punishing, ritualized inscription of suffering upon the body. He Yunchang famously had his own rib surgically removed and made into a piece of jewelry with the addition of 400 grams of gold. Art historian Gao Minglu suggests that the overt violence that characterized performance art in the 1980s revealed, intentionally or not, the “sorrows and disturbances hidden in the artists’ souls as they found themselves straddling cultural epochs and influences while trying to forge a new way.”[2]  In the Bohemian East Village artists’ community outside Beijing, artists such as Zhang, He Yunchang, and Ma Liuming were responding to a society increasingly focused on private wealth and ownership of commodities. They felt they could “own” nothing but their own bodies. Performative practices thus focused on the idea that the artist’s own body was his or her primary material. Existential, ritualized, their work explored ideas about shamanism, martyrdom, political violence, and highly contested notions (in a collectivist society) of the individual.

Rather than establishing something radically new, Unlived By What Is Seen appears to look back with a degree of nostalgia to this era before Chinese artists were subjected to the hype and hustle of the art market. The artists and their works are all but invisible behind a wall of theory. Unfortunately, this makes the works—or, rather, the traces left behind following the actions of the artists—seem like historical artifacts. Huang Yan’s My Life recorded everything in his daily life for more than two years, and the exact time at which they occurred. More than a hundred thousand events have been recorded so far. More interesting was the documentation of Homeshop, a defunct artist initiative located in an old Hutong neighborhood in the city center that operated as a locus for the exchange of ideas between artists, designers, and thinkers—relays between the public and the private. But even here, the museological display of objects, documents, and photographs conveys little of what I am sure was genuinely exciting for the participants.

Beijing Voice: Unlived By What Is Seen; installation view. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Some works reveal an engaging Dadaist absurdity. Walk the Art Arena – No Survivors uses the local comedy genre of “Crosstalk” to cover thirty years of anecdotes about Chinese contemporary art, artists, exhibitions, business dealings, and events. Kang Jin’s Faster is subtitled I try to run in the flow of traffic on the highway—which, given Chinese highway traffic conditions, must surely come under the heading of self-sacrifice in the name of art. Wei Bingqiang collected hundreds of stones in a fruitless endeavor, asking the question, “Is it possible to find an entirely circular stone in the world?”

Young artists have always questioned the nature and purpose of art—where would the 20th century avant-garde have been without that? While there is no doubting the sincerity of the curators, or the artists, in their belief that they are challenging the hegemony of the art market and what they deem “ossified modes of making art,” by the time I left the last of the three galleries I was beginning to feel that Joseph Beuys has a lot to answer for. For me, at least, the base metals had not turned into gold.

[1] Robert Nelson, “Visual Arts Year in Review,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 31, 2014 http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/visual-arts-year-in-review-commercial-galleries-at-a-crossroads-as-institutions-prosper-20141226-12b2wt.html#ixzz3NiPPsVeK

[2] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge MIT Press, 2011), 216–217.

Xia Xing. 2010, 2010-2011; oil on canvas; 35 x 50 cm (x 60). Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

A series of paintings by Xia Xing embodies these paradoxes. The artist collects press photographs from the Beijing News, a mass daily with a circulation of 450,000. In 2007 he was working as a reporter at the paper and became fascinated with how it shaped public opinion and represented only selected aspects of daily life in a time of flux and change. Trained as an oil painter, Xia had found his subject. He began to paint the images he saw on the front page of the newspaper. For 2010, he reproduced one photograph for every day of the year, emulating the commercial printing process in a painstaking application of layers of cyan, magenta, and yellow. There is no caption, no headline; from the sixty closely cropped paintings shown here, we must guess what the images represent. Each alludes to a private joy, tragedy, or conflict that has been made—all too fleetingly—public. By preserving these ephemeral images, Xia Xing documents a particular time in China’s history, structured as a series of apparently unconnected fragments. We encounter the man whose hands were amputated by a criminal against whom he had given evidence, the parents of missing children, the forced demolitions and removal of people from their homes, the polluted rivers and lakes. We sense the artist’s horror at a never-ending catalog of disaster and anguish. The artist as witness—a continuing theme in China’s contemporary art.

Bai Yiluo. Spring and Autumn 1, 2007; wood, metal, farm tools. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Bai Yiluo’s Spring and Autumn 1 (2007)  is juxtaposed with these paintings. A life-size tree with branches fashioned from old farming implements, with outstretched rakes, shovels, and pitchforks poignantly evoking the dependence on the seasons, the rhythms of nature, the times of planting and harvesting that dictate the lives of those who farm the land. One is also reminded of the obsession with rural agriculture of Mao’s revolutionaries: the ill-fated campaigns to eradicate the sparrows during the Great Leap Forward that caused enormous hunger and hardship; the rustication programs that sent urban “educated youth” to toil on communal farms and “learn from the peasants.” The work is very beautiful, and in its restrained use of weathered, rusted found objects, it is reminiscent of Ai Weiwei’s continued use of the “things” that evoke China, from ancient urns to three-legged stools and Qing Dynasty tables. Ai himself is represented by a pile of his porcelain sunflower seeds, that street snack shared among friends in hungry times in the past. These sunflower seeds have multiple meanings. They may be read as a comment on the ancient traditions of porcelain manufacture and its significance in trade with the West, or as a critique of mass production in China, “the world’s factory.” The realization that each seed, apparently identical, is actually different, reminds us of the weight of China’s population. The seeds also allude to Maoist iconography, which represented Mao as the sun, the Chinese people as sunflowers turning toward him. This is a subtle and clever acknowledgement of the tensions even today between individualism and collectivism.

Ai Weiwei. Sunflower Seeds, 2010; porcelain, 500 kg. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Rural China is also represented by the youngest artists in the exhibition. Wang Cheng’s reconstructed pig sty, communal brick oven, and roadside shrine are built with Ming Dynasty bricks taken from the Great Wall. Salvaged by farmers over the years to build their own humble structures (especially during the Cultural Revolution’s “Smash the Four Olds” campaign, when everything considered “feudal” was fair game) they were purchased by the artist for his installation. He has installed them together with photographs of their original locations, a video, and a map. They represent the pillars of Chinese culture, says the artist, “community, animals, and God.” Gao Rong uses the traditions of Shaanxi embroidery taught to her by her mother and grandmother to make simulacra of the objects of her daily life in Beijing. She is represented here by The Static Eternity, a replica of her grandparent’s traditional home in Inner Mongolia. This simple house was the focus of Gao’s happy memories and longing for home when she left to study and work in the capital, part of “a generation adrift in Beijing.” Gao applies a painstaking traditional female domestic craft to create astonishing feats of trompe l’oeil. She replicates objects that have become or are about to become obsolete, in an effort to make us “look more closely at these things.” The work is an elegy to childhood, family, and a vanishing way of life.

The painter Chung Shun-Wen similarly pays homage to family with a series of gouache paintings of the patterned, faded fabrics of the clothes that her grandmother wore for decades. When this indomitable matriarch died at the age of ninety-seven, the artist began to paint remembered details of her clothing, including pockets, hems, and buttons. They are subtle, quiet works that require a willingness to look below the surface. Cleverly, like the Chinese painter Liang Yuanwei who has also painted fabric in closeup, they parody conventions of “all-over abstraction” and replace the field of the (mostly male) mid-century abstract painters with an entirely domestic surface, redolent of lived experience.

Wang Lei. Everything from Nothing, 2013; newspaper, dimensions variable. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Wang Lei knits words. He takes newspapers, in this case the Oriental Daily, cuts out all the people’s faces, and mounts them onto long scrolls, a cascade of anonymous humanity. He then turns the dampened, discarded paper into yarn, knitting it into large, empty sacks. They are a little alarming, like something from a Grimm’s fairy tale. Previously he has used toilet paper to knit elaborately beautiful imperial robes, turning humble materials and the everyday into something rare and extraordinary. This alchemical approach to materials is another characteristic feature of contemporary Chinese art.

Chen Mingqiang’s Pictorial Study of Marriage Certificates in the New China was his doctoral dissertation. The artist collected hundreds of marriage certificates dating from 1949 to the present day, searching through flea markets and recycling centers to produce sixteen bound volumes of gorgeously illustrated documents that reveal changing attitudes to gender, love, and family through their iconography. Depending on the social circumstances and policy directions in the year of your marriage, you might end up with pictures of happy peasants and factory workers, a bumper harvest, or perhaps a Soviet-made tractor on the official record of your wedding. Marriage in the past was not a private affair, and hence the certificate recording the event was also a propaganda vehicle. The presentation of these “found objects” in a museum vitrine—like artifacts of a lost world—serves to underline the disjunction between past and present in China. Two such very different worlds. But it also reveals the way in which the past is always there, just out of sight, bubbling up from under the surface gloss and consumerist hustle of today’s world.

Chen Mingqiang. A Pictorial Study of Marriage Certificates in the New China, 2013; dissertation documents, 16 volumes. Courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery.

Perhaps the most compelling work in the exhibition is the highly cinematic Waltz by Zhu Jia, a slow, dreamy, and evocative video work presented on a single large screen. A pigtailed young woman and a young man, dressed in the drab Zhongshan suits of the past, dance awkwardly and stiffly to the martial rhythms of a revolutionary song, their bodies held deliberately away from each other. The settings change—a slow fade reveals the same young man preening in front of a mirror, dressed in the sharp Western fashions of 1930s Shanghai and waltzing with an imaginary partner. Time flips to the present, then runs backward, challenging our comfortable sense of narrative. The couple represent the artist’s parents and their courtship in days that seem to belong to another world. Zhu questions whether we can make sense of the past, with blurred transitions and soft fades alluding to the unreliability of memory. Trained as a painter, he works solely in video, making works that deal with time and the loss of innocence, reflecting on the impact of dramatic social and political change.

In the end, it seems to me, COMMUNE is all about memory. Public memory; revealed through newspapers, the printed word, marriage certificates, and official photographs. Private memory; the random, selective, and often blurred fragments of past connections and relationships. Both are immensely poignant, everywhere, but especially in the torrent of destruction and reconstruction that is China today.

Chien-chi Chang. Stills from Chinatown Diptych, 1992-2011; digital film, b/w and color, sound; 19 to 23 mins. Images courtesy of the Artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, and Magnum Photos.

HOME is an exhibition of works by two Taiwanese artists, Chien-chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen, that explores this complex and nuanced territory. Entering Sydney’s Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, you encounter a darkened and almost silent space filled with minimalist wheeled “wagons,” cabin-like boxes made of recycled timbers from construction sites. The very materials are redolent of memory, the passage of time, the transformation of one kind of world to another. They are beautiful objects, and in their resemblance to caravans, they evoke journeying. Inside each is a video or audio work by Chen Chieh-jen. Four filmic works focus on the Losheng Sanitorium in Taipei, a decommissioned leprosy hospital built during the period of Japanese rule and controversially slated for demolition. In 2007, thousands of people demonstrated against the forced removal of the last forty-five patients, who had spent their entire lives at Losheng and for whom it was “home.” Chen is interested in bodily memories and elusive states of mind. He documents histories—and people—that would otherwise go unremarked.

Chen Chieh-jen. Realm of Reverberations, 2014; installation view from the exhibition HOME; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Photo: Brett Boardman.

Sitting enclosed in the wagons, watching slow, dreamlike black-and-white videos of a woman sweeping an abandoned industrial site or slowly stroking the mattress of a hospital bed in an abandoned ward, a sense of melancholy reverie is overwhelming. In addition to the four videos, Realm of Reverberations includes audio interviews with Australian women recorded at a center for the homeless, the marginalized, and the lonely. They attempt to explain what “home” means to them. It’s both moving and confronting, and the final wagon, which requires you to lie down in a space like an enclosed bunk in a dormitory or prison—or a coffin—is claustrophobically unsettling. The installation speaks of dispossession and loss, and the ways in which individual lives are hostage to the demands of the global economy.

The other half of the show is presented in the galleries of the National Art School, which was itself a prison in colonial days. SCAF Chairman and Executive Director Gene Sherman saw Chien-chi Chang’s extraordinary series of photographs The Chain at the 2001 Venice Biennale. They became “etched in her mind,” she says, prompting her desire to commission a new project from the artist and bring his work to Australia. Near life-sized, these portraits of the inmates of a Buddhist temple “sanctuary” for the mentally ill and intellectually disabled show people chained together in pairs, subject to eccentric theories about mental illness and the rejection of conventional psychiatric treatments; victims of family shame and secrecy. They are unforgettable. A young man stood next to me in silence, and after a while he turned and said, “I knew about this place when I was a child in Taipei. We made jokes about it at school. I am ashamed for my country.”

Chien-chi Chang. The Chain, 1993-99; installation view from the exhibition HOME; 45 works; silver gelatin photographs; each 157.8 x 107.3 cm. Photo: Brett Boardman.

A new work commissioned especially for SCAF, Side Chain explores more deeply Chang’s relationship with the Lung Fa Tang temple and its inhabitants. In video footage of the still photographs being unwrapped for exhibition, and then later—mysteriously—destroyed, is a suggestion that in viewing these images, audiences become complicit in the fate of the subjects. This is a very uncomfortable notion indeed in a world in which discourses about the responsibilities of those who have much for those who have little are increasingly shrill and self-righteous. If “home” is about safety and autonomy, and about the connectedness of human beings to each other, then each of these artists raises issues that we cannot ignore.

Chien-chi Chang. Still from Side Chain, 1993-2014; b/w and color, sound; 6:24. Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2014. Image courtesy of the Artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, and Magnum Photos.

Chang’s photographic essay and accompanying two-channel video, China Town, documents the lives of Chinese migrant workers in New York. As a Taiwanese immigrant himself, first in the United States and now in Austria, it is unsurprising that Chang makes work informed by notions of exile, and by his empathy for those far removed from their homeland. For the last twenty years he has been photographing these men. We see them sleeping in their underwear on fire escapes outside their shared bedrooms, and eating noodles high above the streets of Manhattan, which might as well be another world. Chang has also documented the lives of their wives and children back home in the villages of Fujian Province, villages in which so many children grow to adulthood without knowing their father, and in which almost every family has someone working far away in America. The men are shot in black-and-white, strangely cropped, with compressed space and shallow depth of field a metaphor for cramped and circumscribed lives crammed into tiny spaces. Their families in China are photographed in color, but the averted gaze of each of his subjects evokes the sadness of absence.

Chang works at the intersection of art, documentary film, and journalism, but what distinguishes his work is its unusual depth—he returns to visit his subjects over a period of years—and his empathy. Not so far removed himself from the fragile hopes and constant fears of discovery and deportation so evident in his moving photographs, Chang moved to America in 1988 but was awarded permanent residency only in 1992, as “an alien with extraordinary ability.” “Like a Martian or something,” says Chang. There is none of the compromising voyeurism so often present in sociological photographic narratives. His works are both a social document and a profoundly compassionate statement about human connection. Photographs of sons and daughters his immigrant subjects have never met are taped to the walls next to girlie pinups and scrawled phone numbers. One man has not been home for seventeen years. I came away with a great sense of sadness, and a huge admiration for all of the anonymous cooks, dishwashers, taxi drivers, domestic helpers, and childcare and aged-care workers in the first world, laboring to send money home to make a better future for their families. Sherman says, “HOME is not an easy exhibition. The issues are uncomfortable, the images are unsettling, the people represented share our humanity but not our good fortune.”

HOME is on view at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation through August 2, 2014.