The China Project

163 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection LIU Xiao Xian The art of Liu Xiao Xian engages with historical objects as sources of rich narrative possibilities. In The way we eat 2001, fine porcelain casts of eating utensils lie in cases like museum objects, removed from their past lives of everyday use. The meaning of these exquisite eating implements shifts as our recognition of the basic shapes and their function is overtaken by the fragile beauty of the porcelain. Both utility and decoration are integral to the work, creating narratives around these semingly mundane implements. After migrating from Beijing to Sydney in 1990, Liu originally trained as a photographer at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. During his postgraduate studies he began working with porcelain, drawing on his own heritage to express cultural and historical differences. In creating 31 pieces of ornate Victorian flatware and a single pair of chopsticks in fine porcelain, Liu recalls the historical significance of this medium both within Chinese tradition and as a coveted object in Europe. Large quantities of porcelain were exported to Europe from China from the sixteenth century onwards. Our understanding and visual appreciation of porcelain as a medium helps to inform our reading of the eating utensils. Dating from the seventeenth century in France and Britain, spoons, knives, forks and servers of varying sizes and functions were created for practical use, but they also signified wealth and status. The dinner table — central to eighteenth-century European social transactions — was symbolically laid with large sets of ornately decorated implements. Today, we can see examples of these in museum collections, and contemporary versions are still given as gifts to mark important rites of passage, such as weddings and christenings. In seeming contrast, a single pair of chopsticks represents 5000 years of culinary tradition in China. However, Liu’s flatware set is not a simple juxtaposition of excessive Western consumption and the ancient Chinese philosophy of ‘less is more’. The chopsticks in this work are also cast in fragile and beautiful porcelain, pointing to a long history of these implements created for wealthy Chinese from precious materials such as silver, gold, jade, ivory and bronze. Like porcelain, the use of chopsticks has spread from China, becoming the staple implement for eating in present day Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as well as being a familiar utensil in restaurants across the globe. Liu Xiao Xian’s The way we eat mobilises narratives of historical and cultural difference, and explores the movement of cultural objects and the wealth of human imagination. The way we eat 2001 Porcelain, slip-cast / 33 pieces ranging from 26.6 x 8 x 4.5cm to 10.8 x 1 x 1cm (installed size variable) / Purchased 2002 with funds from Tim Fairfax,  am , through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation