Luise Guest | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Papers by Luise Guest
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2023
From its emergence in the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang) the performing body ... more From its emergence in the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang) the performing body in Chinese performance art (xingwei yishu) was most often assumed to be male. The representation of performance practices in exhibitions, festivals – and in the art historical literature – has too often been dominated by male artists. This article turns the gaze onto three women artists, examining their work through lenses of gender, feminism and “Chineseness”: Performance artists Xiao Lu (肖鲁b.1962), Li Xinmo (李心沫 b.1976), and Xie Rong (谢蓉 b.1983) explore aspects of embodied lived experience in often-encoded ways. Li Xinmo explores experiences of gendered violence through theatrical, immersive performances that have often used ink or pigmented fluids as metaphors for blood and trauma – and through a series of paintings made with actual menstrual blood. In The Death of the Xinkai River (2007) she first explicitly links an embodied feminism with her distress at the destruction of the natural environment. Xiao Lu’s post-menopausal performances move beyond her previously more literal explorations of gender. Works such as Ren (2016) and Suspension (2017) employ ink and water in poetic reference to calligraphy (shufa) and ink-wash painting (shuimo hua). Inserting herself into the visual language of literati scholar painters, an artistic lineage from which she would have been excluded by virtue of her gender, Xiao’s liquid materiality becomes a feminist embodiment. Xie Rong (also known until recently by her English name, Echo Morgan) ‘writes’ ink painting using her hair as her brush in I Am a Brush (2011), Painting Until it Becomes Marble (2019) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). She paints her naked body with images of bird and flower painting and blue-and-white porcelain motifs to perform lamentations of grief, loss and longing in works such as Be The Inside of the Vase (2012) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). Framed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ‘Ornamentalism’, Ella Shohat’s notion of a non-Western ‘subterranean’ feminism, and early twentieth century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of ‘nannü’, the artists’ embodied practices are understood as creating nannü spaces that reveal female subjectivities and reposition them within the discourses of Chinese performance practice. Emerging from encounters with the artists, in studio visits and (during the pandemic years) online conversations, analysis of their counter-patriarchal work reveals not merely the ghostly presences and absences of women in narratives of performance art in China that have tended to marginalise them, but also the significance of their contributions.
TAASA Review, 2024
An article discussing the material and conceptual significance of porcelain in the practice of co... more An article discussing the material and conceptual significance of porcelain in the practice of contemporary artist Geng Xue
Home and Away, 2023
A catalogue essay for the exhibition (curated by the author) 'Home and Away: Eight Asian Australi... more A catalogue essay for the exhibition (curated by the author) 'Home and Away: Eight Asian Australian Artists' at 16albermarle Project Space, Newtown, Sydney, in November - January 2023/2024
Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art, 2022
An essay for the exhibition "Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art", Lilleh... more An essay for the exhibition "Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art", Lillehammer Kunstmuseum (May 16–October 22, 2022),
Kunstforeningen GL STRAND, Copenhagen (December 1, 2022–March 12, 2023), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (April 4–July 2, 2023)
Randian, 2023
A discussion of Bingyi's land-art ink installations within the context of "Experimental Ink" (shi... more A discussion of Bingyi's land-art ink installations within the context of "Experimental Ink" (shiyan shuimohua) interpreted as the artist's self-insertion of a female subjectivity into historically masculinist literati culture.
NGV Magazine, 2022
A short discussion of Xiao Lu's 2015 performance, One, for the National Gallery of VIctoria (NGV)... more A short discussion of Xiao Lu's 2015 performance, One, for the National Gallery of VIctoria (NGV) Magazine
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2021
In the post-Cultural Revolution reinvention of ink traditions in avant-garde (qianwei) Chinese ar... more In the post-Cultural Revolution reinvention of ink traditions in avant-garde (qianwei) Chinese art, women artists were almost entirely absent from the discourse. Specifically, this article argues that the genres of ‘unreadable’ calligraphy and performative applications of ink reveal the essentially unquestioned masculinist nature of literati wenren culture. Therefore, the work of female artists Tao Aimin (陶艾民 b.1974, Hunan) and Xiao Lu (肖鲁 b. 1962, Hangzhou, Zhejiang), examined through lenses of intersectional and situated Chinese feminism, may be interpreted as intervening in a culture of ink and calligraphy from which they would once have been excluded by virtue of their gender. Tao Aimin used the Nüshu script invented by unschooled rural women juxtaposed with obsolete quotidian objects – the weathered washboards once used for laundry. Xiao Lu’s performance works using ink and water are rituals of endurance that reference Daoist cosmology. Framed by Qing Dynasty anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s 1907 gender-making category of Nannü – with which she powerfully critiqued Daoist/neo-Confucian orthodoxies – the work of the two artists reveals the absence of women from narratives that create and reinforce national identities. Restoring hidden histories and revealing female subjectivities, their work is positioned as a reclamation of silenced voices past and present.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2020
Analysing the work of artists Pixy Liao and Cao Yu through a lens of gender
WAGIC, 2018
An article exploring the complexities of a feminist self-identification in contemporary Chinese a... more An article exploring the complexities of a feminist self-identification in contemporary Chinese art, focusing on the work of Dong Yuan, Gao Rong and Tao Aimin
4A Papers, 2020
An essay for 4A Papers exploring representations of motherhood in the work of Cao Yu, Ma Qiusha a... more An essay for 4A Papers exploring representations of motherhood in the work of Cao Yu, Ma Qiusha and Liu Xi
Sullivan & Strumpf magazine, 2021
A catalogue essay for Sullivan & Strumpf Sydney, ahead of Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition in Jun... more A catalogue essay for Sullivan & Strumpf Sydney, ahead of Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition in June 2021
Ran Dian, 2020
Liu Xi is unusual among Chinese contemporary women artists in her frank exploration of gender and... more Liu Xi is unusual among Chinese contemporary women artists in her frank exploration of gender and sexuality, including explicit representations of female genitalia, yet her work also examines hidden female histories, and the sometimes fraught and complex relationship between the individual and society. She challenges conventions of porcelain and ceramics production with unorthodox combinations of materials and methods of display, revealing both technical virtuosity and her willingness to engage with difficult ideas. The material of clay in its very physicality is paradoxical – soft and malleable, it becomes hard and brittle once fired. Porcelain is imbued with associations of Chinese history, its imperial prestige and status, yet clay is dug from the earth. Liu Xi’s work encompasses these binaries, just as she explores paradoxes of female strength and vulnerability.
Yishu, 2020
An account of the work of Shanghai born, New York based multi-disciplinary artist and photograph... more An account of the work of Shanghai born, New York based multi-disciplinary artist and photographer Pixy Yijun Liao, whose transgressive double portraits of the artist with her boyfriend and muse, Moro, challenge hetero-normative gender binaries. Complex issues of gender roles, cultural difference, and negotiating an intimate relationship are at the core of her photographic practice
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2019
In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as... more In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, a partner organization in Sydney, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua (刘建华) and Geng Xue (耿雪) approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2018
In recent years much contemporary art from China has been characterised by a re-investigation – e... more In recent years much contemporary art from China has been
characterised by a re-investigation – even a re-invention – of
Chinese artforms and aesthetics, and an immersion in Chinese
philosophical and spiritual traditions. Rather than an intentional
branding for the international art market, or a nostalgic orientalism,
in many cases the current revival of pre-Mao literati traditions
of ink and calligraphy, Buddhist and Daoist philosophies,
and folk art reflects artists’ desires to blur artificial binaries of
East and West, local and global, contemporary and traditional.
Three artists from Judith Neilson’s White Rabbit Collection
of twenty-first-century Chinese contemporary art – Geng Xue
(耿雪), Qiu Anxiong (邱黯雄) and Sun Xun (孙逊) – are no exception. Examined for this first 'White Rabbit Collection Essay' in Issue 307 of Art Monthly Australasia, their work is positioned as a reinvention and subversion of traditional Chinese forms and materiality. They work with specific Chinese genres and forms, but they also subvert and challenge them. They are Chinese artists, to be sure, working within a very particular social, historical and political context, but they are also global artists who understand and apply other references and techniques when it is appropriate to do so. Resisting easy categorisation, their work is filled with an eclectic, encyclopedic archive of references ranging from
European art cinema to the Shanghai film studios of the 1960s;
from Foucault and Derrida to Laozi and Confucius; from Song and Ming dynasty porcelain to Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin, and from German expressionist woodblock prints to the propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution. Audiences encountering their works are swept into an immersive experience that draws on Chinese and western history, philosophy and aesthetics; popular culture; eastern mythology and contemporary reality. In each case, the result is a startlingly original dystopian allegory.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2019
For those whose concept of contemporary Chinese art is the pop-inspired Cultural Revolution image... more For those whose concept of contemporary Chinese art is the pop-inspired Cultural Revolution imagery of the first generation of post-Mao artists to make an impact on Western art audiences the work of younger artists can be perplexing. Their concerns are not those of their parents or grandparents, and the China they inhabit is an entirely different place. Artists born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up in a society transformed by Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up economic policies. As young adults they entered a world awash with the consumer goods of global brands, with access to American music, European cinema, Japanese pop culture and the world outside China via social media in an all-too-brief period of liberalisation. They take for granted a world of digital image saturation and screen-based experiences; the internet constitutes their primary source of information and their means of communication; it is their interface with the world. But the Chinese online environment has grown so fast that it is not just an ‘internet with Chinese characteristics’, but a very different world with its own visual language and unique aesthetics. For many young artists, it has become a rich source of data, imagery and ideas, and a platform on which their work can be shared. This article, published in Art Monthly Australasia Issue 315 April 2019, examines the work of young Chinese new media artists Lu Yang and Miao Ying, who are positioned as global practitioners using the internet as platform, subject and medium.
Garland Magazine, 2019
A term used by local artisans of Jingdezhen pottery workshops and kilns—the insiders— describes t... more A term used by local artisans of Jingdezhen pottery workshops and kilns—the insiders— describes the outsiders, the throngs of visiting artists, curators, researchers and writers: they are jingpiao, or “Jingdezhen drifters’. The expression derives from an earlier idiom. Beipiao, meaning “northern drifters’, was common parlance in the 1990s and described
young artists, musicians and other creatives who drifted into Beijing to make a precarious living there. Today, the term jingpiao describes all the waidiren or outsiders— Chinese or foreign—who find themselves in Jingdezhen. Why does this small, prefecture level city in one of China’s poorest provinces draw so many people from across the globe? To find out more, I’ve spoken with four artists who make work there, or whose
work is in some way inspired by their time there. Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue, whose work is held in the White Rabbit Collection, are discussed in detail, while the Australians Merran Esson and Juz Kitson provide a different point of view. I asked each artist to tell me why Jingdezhen exerts such a gravitational pull on Chinese artists immersed in their
own thousand-year-long porcelain history and on foreign visitors.
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2018
The 'yaji' (雅集) in Imperial China was an 'elegant gathering' of scholars who met to play chess, l... more The 'yaji' (雅集) in Imperial China was an 'elegant gathering' of scholars who met to play chess, listen to music, and appreciate ink painting and calligraphy. They were generally all-male affairs, often taking place in a walled garden. Recently it has been argued that such forms of semi-private contemplation are appropriate models for exhibiting Chinese contemporary art. This article has two connected parts: the first examines how two women artists, Tao Aimin (陶艾民) and Bingyi (冰逸), 'outsiders' to the yaji garden gathering as it was traditionally constructed, subvert (yet also honour) important Chinese traditions. They challenge a gendered historical narrative by means of a reinvigorated and performative ink language, negotiating literal and figurative 'inside' and 'outside' spaces. Positioned as reconfiguring space in a way that challenges binaries of inside/outside, they interrogate the literati tradition that functioned as an expression of class and gender. Two works in particular exemplify their practice: Bingyi's Époché, a 2014 performance in which she dropped 500 kilograms of ink/oil 'missiles' from a helicopter over the airfield at Shenzhen Bao'an Airport, and Tao Aimin's 2008 The Secret Language of Women, an installation of bound books printed from rural women's washboards employing the ancient Nüshu script invented by rural women. The second part of the article critically examines contemporary iterations of the yaji as a model for the exhibition of contemporary art. The term yaji is thus used in two ways in this article: as a metaphor to reflect on the absence of women artists in the reinvented literati ink tradition, and in a critical examination of its real-world manifestations in several recent exhibitions. In this context, the works of Tao Aimin and Bingyi occupy a complicated liminal space: they position themselves at times inside feminist discourse and at other times disavow a connection; they occupy a marginal space within dominant contemporary art world discourses and historically masculine discourses around calligraphy and the yaji, yet 'inside' the ink tradition.
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2023
From its emergence in the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang) the performing body ... more From its emergence in the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang) the performing body in Chinese performance art (xingwei yishu) was most often assumed to be male. The representation of performance practices in exhibitions, festivals – and in the art historical literature – has too often been dominated by male artists. This article turns the gaze onto three women artists, examining their work through lenses of gender, feminism and “Chineseness”: Performance artists Xiao Lu (肖鲁b.1962), Li Xinmo (李心沫 b.1976), and Xie Rong (谢蓉 b.1983) explore aspects of embodied lived experience in often-encoded ways. Li Xinmo explores experiences of gendered violence through theatrical, immersive performances that have often used ink or pigmented fluids as metaphors for blood and trauma – and through a series of paintings made with actual menstrual blood. In The Death of the Xinkai River (2007) she first explicitly links an embodied feminism with her distress at the destruction of the natural environment. Xiao Lu’s post-menopausal performances move beyond her previously more literal explorations of gender. Works such as Ren (2016) and Suspension (2017) employ ink and water in poetic reference to calligraphy (shufa) and ink-wash painting (shuimo hua). Inserting herself into the visual language of literati scholar painters, an artistic lineage from which she would have been excluded by virtue of her gender, Xiao’s liquid materiality becomes a feminist embodiment. Xie Rong (also known until recently by her English name, Echo Morgan) ‘writes’ ink painting using her hair as her brush in I Am a Brush (2011), Painting Until it Becomes Marble (2019) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). She paints her naked body with images of bird and flower painting and blue-and-white porcelain motifs to perform lamentations of grief, loss and longing in works such as Be The Inside of the Vase (2012) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). Framed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ‘Ornamentalism’, Ella Shohat’s notion of a non-Western ‘subterranean’ feminism, and early twentieth century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of ‘nannü’, the artists’ embodied practices are understood as creating nannü spaces that reveal female subjectivities and reposition them within the discourses of Chinese performance practice. Emerging from encounters with the artists, in studio visits and (during the pandemic years) online conversations, analysis of their counter-patriarchal work reveals not merely the ghostly presences and absences of women in narratives of performance art in China that have tended to marginalise them, but also the significance of their contributions.
TAASA Review, 2024
An article discussing the material and conceptual significance of porcelain in the practice of co... more An article discussing the material and conceptual significance of porcelain in the practice of contemporary artist Geng Xue
Home and Away, 2023
A catalogue essay for the exhibition (curated by the author) 'Home and Away: Eight Asian Australi... more A catalogue essay for the exhibition (curated by the author) 'Home and Away: Eight Asian Australian Artists' at 16albermarle Project Space, Newtown, Sydney, in November - January 2023/2024
Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art, 2022
An essay for the exhibition "Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art", Lilleh... more An essay for the exhibition "Stepping Out! Female Identities in Chinese Contemporary Art", Lillehammer Kunstmuseum (May 16–October 22, 2022),
Kunstforeningen GL STRAND, Copenhagen (December 1, 2022–March 12, 2023), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (April 4–July 2, 2023)
Randian, 2023
A discussion of Bingyi's land-art ink installations within the context of "Experimental Ink" (shi... more A discussion of Bingyi's land-art ink installations within the context of "Experimental Ink" (shiyan shuimohua) interpreted as the artist's self-insertion of a female subjectivity into historically masculinist literati culture.
NGV Magazine, 2022
A short discussion of Xiao Lu's 2015 performance, One, for the National Gallery of VIctoria (NGV)... more A short discussion of Xiao Lu's 2015 performance, One, for the National Gallery of VIctoria (NGV) Magazine
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2021
In the post-Cultural Revolution reinvention of ink traditions in avant-garde (qianwei) Chinese ar... more In the post-Cultural Revolution reinvention of ink traditions in avant-garde (qianwei) Chinese art, women artists were almost entirely absent from the discourse. Specifically, this article argues that the genres of ‘unreadable’ calligraphy and performative applications of ink reveal the essentially unquestioned masculinist nature of literati wenren culture. Therefore, the work of female artists Tao Aimin (陶艾民 b.1974, Hunan) and Xiao Lu (肖鲁 b. 1962, Hangzhou, Zhejiang), examined through lenses of intersectional and situated Chinese feminism, may be interpreted as intervening in a culture of ink and calligraphy from which they would once have been excluded by virtue of their gender. Tao Aimin used the Nüshu script invented by unschooled rural women juxtaposed with obsolete quotidian objects – the weathered washboards once used for laundry. Xiao Lu’s performance works using ink and water are rituals of endurance that reference Daoist cosmology. Framed by Qing Dynasty anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s 1907 gender-making category of Nannü – with which she powerfully critiqued Daoist/neo-Confucian orthodoxies – the work of the two artists reveals the absence of women from narratives that create and reinforce national identities. Restoring hidden histories and revealing female subjectivities, their work is positioned as a reclamation of silenced voices past and present.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2020
Analysing the work of artists Pixy Liao and Cao Yu through a lens of gender
WAGIC, 2018
An article exploring the complexities of a feminist self-identification in contemporary Chinese a... more An article exploring the complexities of a feminist self-identification in contemporary Chinese art, focusing on the work of Dong Yuan, Gao Rong and Tao Aimin
4A Papers, 2020
An essay for 4A Papers exploring representations of motherhood in the work of Cao Yu, Ma Qiusha a... more An essay for 4A Papers exploring representations of motherhood in the work of Cao Yu, Ma Qiusha and Liu Xi
Sullivan & Strumpf magazine, 2021
A catalogue essay for Sullivan & Strumpf Sydney, ahead of Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition in Jun... more A catalogue essay for Sullivan & Strumpf Sydney, ahead of Yang Yongliang's solo exhibition in June 2021
Ran Dian, 2020
Liu Xi is unusual among Chinese contemporary women artists in her frank exploration of gender and... more Liu Xi is unusual among Chinese contemporary women artists in her frank exploration of gender and sexuality, including explicit representations of female genitalia, yet her work also examines hidden female histories, and the sometimes fraught and complex relationship between the individual and society. She challenges conventions of porcelain and ceramics production with unorthodox combinations of materials and methods of display, revealing both technical virtuosity and her willingness to engage with difficult ideas. The material of clay in its very physicality is paradoxical – soft and malleable, it becomes hard and brittle once fired. Porcelain is imbued with associations of Chinese history, its imperial prestige and status, yet clay is dug from the earth. Liu Xi’s work encompasses these binaries, just as she explores paradoxes of female strength and vulnerability.
Yishu, 2020
An account of the work of Shanghai born, New York based multi-disciplinary artist and photograph... more An account of the work of Shanghai born, New York based multi-disciplinary artist and photographer Pixy Yijun Liao, whose transgressive double portraits of the artist with her boyfriend and muse, Moro, challenge hetero-normative gender binaries. Complex issues of gender roles, cultural difference, and negotiating an intimate relationship are at the core of her photographic practice
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2019
In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as... more In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, a partner organization in Sydney, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua (刘建华) and Geng Xue (耿雪) approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2018
In recent years much contemporary art from China has been characterised by a re-investigation – e... more In recent years much contemporary art from China has been
characterised by a re-investigation – even a re-invention – of
Chinese artforms and aesthetics, and an immersion in Chinese
philosophical and spiritual traditions. Rather than an intentional
branding for the international art market, or a nostalgic orientalism,
in many cases the current revival of pre-Mao literati traditions
of ink and calligraphy, Buddhist and Daoist philosophies,
and folk art reflects artists’ desires to blur artificial binaries of
East and West, local and global, contemporary and traditional.
Three artists from Judith Neilson’s White Rabbit Collection
of twenty-first-century Chinese contemporary art – Geng Xue
(耿雪), Qiu Anxiong (邱黯雄) and Sun Xun (孙逊) – are no exception. Examined for this first 'White Rabbit Collection Essay' in Issue 307 of Art Monthly Australasia, their work is positioned as a reinvention and subversion of traditional Chinese forms and materiality. They work with specific Chinese genres and forms, but they also subvert and challenge them. They are Chinese artists, to be sure, working within a very particular social, historical and political context, but they are also global artists who understand and apply other references and techniques when it is appropriate to do so. Resisting easy categorisation, their work is filled with an eclectic, encyclopedic archive of references ranging from
European art cinema to the Shanghai film studios of the 1960s;
from Foucault and Derrida to Laozi and Confucius; from Song and Ming dynasty porcelain to Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin, and from German expressionist woodblock prints to the propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution. Audiences encountering their works are swept into an immersive experience that draws on Chinese and western history, philosophy and aesthetics; popular culture; eastern mythology and contemporary reality. In each case, the result is a startlingly original dystopian allegory.
Art Monthly Australasia, 2019
For those whose concept of contemporary Chinese art is the pop-inspired Cultural Revolution image... more For those whose concept of contemporary Chinese art is the pop-inspired Cultural Revolution imagery of the first generation of post-Mao artists to make an impact on Western art audiences the work of younger artists can be perplexing. Their concerns are not those of their parents or grandparents, and the China they inhabit is an entirely different place. Artists born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up in a society transformed by Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up economic policies. As young adults they entered a world awash with the consumer goods of global brands, with access to American music, European cinema, Japanese pop culture and the world outside China via social media in an all-too-brief period of liberalisation. They take for granted a world of digital image saturation and screen-based experiences; the internet constitutes their primary source of information and their means of communication; it is their interface with the world. But the Chinese online environment has grown so fast that it is not just an ‘internet with Chinese characteristics’, but a very different world with its own visual language and unique aesthetics. For many young artists, it has become a rich source of data, imagery and ideas, and a platform on which their work can be shared. This article, published in Art Monthly Australasia Issue 315 April 2019, examines the work of young Chinese new media artists Lu Yang and Miao Ying, who are positioned as global practitioners using the internet as platform, subject and medium.
Garland Magazine, 2019
A term used by local artisans of Jingdezhen pottery workshops and kilns—the insiders— describes t... more A term used by local artisans of Jingdezhen pottery workshops and kilns—the insiders— describes the outsiders, the throngs of visiting artists, curators, researchers and writers: they are jingpiao, or “Jingdezhen drifters’. The expression derives from an earlier idiom. Beipiao, meaning “northern drifters’, was common parlance in the 1990s and described
young artists, musicians and other creatives who drifted into Beijing to make a precarious living there. Today, the term jingpiao describes all the waidiren or outsiders— Chinese or foreign—who find themselves in Jingdezhen. Why does this small, prefecture level city in one of China’s poorest provinces draw so many people from across the globe? To find out more, I’ve spoken with four artists who make work there, or whose
work is in some way inspired by their time there. Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue, whose work is held in the White Rabbit Collection, are discussed in detail, while the Australians Merran Esson and Juz Kitson provide a different point of view. I asked each artist to tell me why Jingdezhen exerts such a gravitational pull on Chinese artists immersed in their
own thousand-year-long porcelain history and on foreign visitors.
Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2018
The 'yaji' (雅集) in Imperial China was an 'elegant gathering' of scholars who met to play chess, l... more The 'yaji' (雅集) in Imperial China was an 'elegant gathering' of scholars who met to play chess, listen to music, and appreciate ink painting and calligraphy. They were generally all-male affairs, often taking place in a walled garden. Recently it has been argued that such forms of semi-private contemplation are appropriate models for exhibiting Chinese contemporary art. This article has two connected parts: the first examines how two women artists, Tao Aimin (陶艾民) and Bingyi (冰逸), 'outsiders' to the yaji garden gathering as it was traditionally constructed, subvert (yet also honour) important Chinese traditions. They challenge a gendered historical narrative by means of a reinvigorated and performative ink language, negotiating literal and figurative 'inside' and 'outside' spaces. Positioned as reconfiguring space in a way that challenges binaries of inside/outside, they interrogate the literati tradition that functioned as an expression of class and gender. Two works in particular exemplify their practice: Bingyi's Époché, a 2014 performance in which she dropped 500 kilograms of ink/oil 'missiles' from a helicopter over the airfield at Shenzhen Bao'an Airport, and Tao Aimin's 2008 The Secret Language of Women, an installation of bound books printed from rural women's washboards employing the ancient Nüshu script invented by rural women. The second part of the article critically examines contemporary iterations of the yaji as a model for the exhibition of contemporary art. The term yaji is thus used in two ways in this article: as a metaphor to reflect on the absence of women artists in the reinvented literati ink tradition, and in a critical examination of its real-world manifestations in several recent exhibitions. In this context, the works of Tao Aimin and Bingyi occupy a complicated liminal space: they position themselves at times inside feminist discourse and at other times disavow a connection; they occupy a marginal space within dominant contemporary art world discourses and historically masculine discourses around calligraphy and the yaji, yet 'inside' the ink tradition.
"Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China", 2016
Chapter 7 of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China" , "Inscriptions on the Bod... more Chapter 7 of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China" , "Inscriptions on the Body" (PIper Press, 2016) examines an alternative to the prevailing masculinist histories of performance art in China. INSCRIPTIONS ON THE BODY: Endurance to Transcendence in Chinese Performance Art examines the work of He Chengyao, Yingmei Duan and Ma Qiusha, and introduces young artist Xu Shanshan
Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China, 2016
Chapter 9 of "Half the Sky" (Piper Press, 2016) focuses on the work of women photographers and ne... more Chapter 9 of "Half the Sky" (Piper Press, 2016) focuses on the work of women photographers and new media practitioners in China, including Chen Lingyang, Zhou Hongbin, Liu Shiyuan and Fang Lu.
"Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists In China" , 2016
Chapter 3 of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists In China" (Sydney: Piper Press, 2016... more Chapter 3 of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists In China" (Sydney: Piper Press, 2016) examines the work of women working as contemporary artists using traditional textile, embroidery or stitching practices
Half the Sky, 2016
The first chapter of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China" published by Piper... more The first chapter of "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China" published by Piper Press in 2016
This is an Unedited preprint of an unpublished catalogue essay - the proposed Hong Kong solo exhi... more This is an Unedited preprint of an unpublished catalogue essay - the proposed Hong Kong solo exhibition of the work of Yan Ping was derailed firstly by unrest in Hong Kong in 2019 and then by the global pandemic in 2020. To date, her work has not been shown outside Mainland China.