The China Project

103 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection AH Xian The human body is central to Ah Xian’s practice — from the works on paper, painting, conceptual Xerox works and plaster sculpture of the early 1990s, to the porcelain, cloisonné and jade busts that became a hallmark of his practice in the latter part of the decade. Born in China in 1960 and active as an artist in the 1980s, Ah Xian sought political asylum in Australia following the events leading up to 4 June 1989 in Tiananmen Square. This incident deeply affected the young artist, and two early paintings in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Collection directly reflect this. Heavy wounds series no.10 1991 belongs to Ah Xian’s series of the same name. First exhibited in Irving (subsequently Sherman) Galleries, Sydney, in 1991, this group of paintings drew on the iconography of the social realist Chinese Red Cross propaganda posters issued during the Cultural Revolution, which demonstrated how to bandage wounds and deal with trauma. In Heavy wounds series no.10 , medical items are depicted as scattered elements on the surface of the canvas, mingling with decorative motifs and patterns from pre-Cultural Revolution China. The focus on the human figure apparent in the ‘Heavy wounds’ series continued to inform Ah Xian’s works throughout the 1990s, first as a reflection on the historical events through which he had lived, and then as an exploration of his own feelings of disjunction, poised between two different cultures. In (Disembodied hand, bandaged in lower register) 1993, a painting from the same series, a severed white hand recalls the themes of ruin in the work of surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Writer Nicholas Jose comments that works such as this reveal ‘a step into alienation, pain and puzzlement, expressed in cross-overs of medium and form, in multiple layers and broken ill-fitting elements’. 1 Bandages and the wounded body reappeared in a series of plaster cast body sculptures featuring disembodied limbs in the early 1990s. These works directly heralded Ah Xian’s works with porcelain, such as the ‘China China’ series. By the mid 1990s, in a conscious attempt to investigate his heritage, Ah Xian began to work with porcelain, painting his surfaces with flowers and animal motifs reminiscent of the fragments of decorative elements that punctured the flat surfaces of his early paintings. The Gallery’s group of four blue-and-white porcelain busts are among the first in the ongoing ‘China China’ series. Each is made from a porcelain ‘body copy’ cast from life models and painted by the artist with traditional Chinese porcelain designs in underglaze blue ( Qing Hua ), underglaze red, and some in overglaze enamels ( Dou Cai ). Dragons, lotus flowers, clouds, pine trees, bamboo and plum blossoms cover the brilliant white heads and torsos. While the iconography of traumatised bodies is less apparent in these works, the death-like stillness of the sitters’ poses combined with the claustrophobic surface of their decorated ‘skin’ is at once disturbing and compellingly beautiful. endnote 1 Nicholas Jose, ‘Notes from the underground, Beijing art, 1985–89’, Orientations , vol.23, no.7, July 1992, p.54. opposite Heavy wounds series no.10 1991 Oil on canvas / 110 x 90cm / Gift of Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2008 above (Disembodied hand, bandaged in lower register) (from ‘Heavy wounds’ series) 1993 Synthetic polymer paint, ink, oil on wooden board / 50 x 40.5 x 2cm / Gift of Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2008