The China Project

15 the china project The China Project In the three-channel video installation Seven character quatrain 2007 by Zhang Song, the central screen shows a blind girl reciting, in Mandarin, a poem by Ming-dynasty scholar–official and poet Yang Rong (1371–1440). We see her using braille to feel each word that describes a landscape. The high and steep green mountain seems to rise into the midair The numerous hibiscus flowers overlapping each other are a bit wet from the purple mist. Last night a heavy spring rain fell on the mountain, and the stream running through the valley is torrential now 1 For a non Chinese-speaking audience, to hear these words in Mandarin is to experience the language as a sequence of sounds mediated by images. We know the girl is blind because of the way her fingers work the page as she speaks. On another screen we are shown details from a brush-and- ink scroll painting of a Chinese landscape: a waterfall, the craggy surface of a rock and trees through mist. On the third screen Zhang Song has filmed countryside with fir trees, grassy banks, patches of blue sky and cloud. Seven character quatrain is explicit only to a degree. We understand a small part of a more complex story. Perhaps in the manner in which the blind girl is able to sense the landscape she is describing, we too can see and understand some part of the elaborate picture that Zhang Song has constructed with this intricate, rich and dense iconography. Zhang Song trained at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, and belongs to the first crop of students to graduate in 2007 from the new media course at this prestigious art school. Under the guidance of senior artist Zhang Peili, the Academy developed this course to train artists eager to work in media now intrinsic to contemporary visual art. The establishment of this course at one of the three most highly regarded art schools in China speaks volumes about the immense changes that have taken place in contemporary Chinese art over the last three decades. Thirty years ago, artists such as Zhang Peili were at the forefront of an avant-garde movement that was spearheading change, working with mediums and styles that were experimental and in contrast to an Academy that was either sustaining the high art traditions of ink, calligraphy and printmaking or supporting the socialist realist styles promoted by Mao Zedong’s ideals of art production. The situation in regard to the avant-garde movement of the 1980s in China is only now becoming clearer through research, publications and exhibitions. In Australia, the interest in contemporary Chinese art began in the early 1990s. The violent events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, which led to a rise in the number of Chinese people seeking to migrate to Australia, coincided with Australia’s increasing interest in the broader cultural make-up of its own society and its relationship to the cultures in the region. One important example of this interest was the creation in 1993 of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) series at the Queensland Art Gallery. This long-term commitment by the Gallery is now consolidated in the ‘The China Project’. At the core of ‘The China Project’ is an exhibition titled ‘Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’, based on the Gallery’s holdings dating from the early 1980s to the present. Two further exhibitions show work by individuals: ‘Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul’ presents this avant-garde artist’s works dating from the early 1980s, paralleling the period of the Collection opposite Wang Qingsong / China b.1966 Competition (detail) 2004 Type C photograph / 170 x 300cm / Collection: The artist Suhanya Raffel above Zhang Song / China b.1985 Seven character quatrain (stills) 2007 Digital Betacam (PAL), 2:31 minutes, colour, stereo, ed. 1/3 / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery