The China Project

16 opposite Zhang Xiaogang / China b.1958 Bloodline (Two comrades with red baby ) 1995 Oil on canvas / 150 x 180cm / Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra above Fang Lijun / China b.1963 Pencil drawing no.1 1988 Pencil / 53.5 x 77.9cm / Gift of Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2007 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Chen Yan Yin / China b.1958 Discrepancy between one idea 1996 Installation comprising glass bottles, intravenous drips, cut red roses, water, glucose, sound, nylon thread, table, cloth / Dimensions variable / Installed at ‘The Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, 1996 / Collection: The artist exhibition; while Australian–Chinese 2 photographer and performance artist William Yang uses self- portraiture, text, mementos and images of family and place, to depict a multifaceted personal story of Chinese migration and settlement in Australia in ‘William Yang: Life Lines’. In this way, ‘The China Project’ registers absorbing and compelling points of view, and presents exhibitions that examine the rich creative expressions of contemporary Chinese art. ‘Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’ reveals how the APT was an important catalyst for the ambitious acquisitions and commissions the Gallery pursued as it built the Collection. 3 From the APTs of the 1990s, major commissions entering the Collection included works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Zhang Peili and Chen Zhen. Augmenting these in the exhibitions were temporary commissions by artists such as Chen Yan Yin, Yin Xiuzhen, Xu Tan and Wang Jianwei, to name a few. In the following decade, works and commissions acquired included those by Ai Weiwei, Song Dong, and a group of works from the Long March Project — including an installation by Zhou Xiaohu; photographs and video by Mu Chen and Shao Yinong, Hong Hao, and Qin Ga; sculpture by Wang Wenhai; and papercuts by Liu Jieqiong. Indeed, the Gallery was the first Australian public art museum to commission and acquire works by a number of these artists in any substantial way. The acquisition of work for the Collection continues outside the APTs, and ‘Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’ testifies to this. A key early acquisition, made in 1994, is Xu Bing’s A book from the sky 1987–91, which came to Australia as part of the 1992–93 exhibition ‘New Art from China’. The expansion of holdings by Chinese–Australian artists who were in Australia before and after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests includes works by Ah Xian, Guan Wei, Guo Jian, Lin Chunyan, Liu Xiao Xian, Shen Shaomin and Wang Zhiyuan. In the case of Ah Xian and Guan Wei, the depth of the holdings spans the period from the early 1990s to the present, revealing artistic interests that have evolved over this time. For Ah Xian, a long-held interest in manifestations of the figure and its fragmentation can be traced across his works. The ‘Heavy wounds’ 1991 paintings, the earliest of his works in the Collection, are poignant images of displacement and dislocation, feelings that were constant for the artist even before he left China for Australia. Among the works he made in the late 1980s in his modest studio apartment in Beijing is an important series on paper in which elements of the body, such as an arm or a torso, are contained in rubbings of the brick walls of his apartment block, recalling the claustrophobia of being in a cell. Ah Xian finished this series during a residency in Tasmania in 1989 before he made a permanent move to Australia. Poignantly, images of walls recur in the work of several contemporary Chinese artists, including a superb early drawing by Fang Lijun; in the dark, poetic painting of 1985 by Lin Chunyan, which depicts figures hanging from trees, silhouetted against a high wall; and in Ding Fang’s paintings of a fortressed city, whose historic walls rise in hues of rich dark yellows. Continuing the wall motif is the spectacular site-specific commission by Wang Qingsong for the ‘The China Project’. Working with the compelling expanse of wall in the Long Gallery at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), he revisits his earlier work Competition 2004. In this version, titled China Red 2008–09, Wang Qingsong further develops his long-held fascination with, and reflection on, commodity culture as it has taken hold in China in the 1990s and 2000s — particularly in relation to the recent rapid commercialisation of art and the growth of the art market. The way this relationship has developed in the context of contemporary art in China is interesting, especially in regard to the Avant-garde as it unfolded over the 1980s and 1990s. The art that burst forth during the 1980s, and which has since garnered international interest, developed largely from within the sphere of an unofficial art practice. With little public institutional support, such practices were sustained in an environment where there was no formal framework in which to discuss, collect or exhibit avant-garde or experimental art. Instead, the art that was made was meant to be seen primarily by artist colleagues and critics, in a spirit of opposition and resistance to officially sanctioned state art. Although artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Xu Bing had trained and had careers as teachers in the Chinese art academy, they sustained practices that examined the canonical as well as the experimental. In 1979, the artists in the Beijing-based Stars Group staged their first makeshift exhibition, an unpretentious yet momentous event set up as a series of stalls in a park outside the National Art Museum of China (also known as the China Art Gallery). Ten years later, in February 1989, the groundbreaking ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition took place inside the China Art Gallery, but was soon closed down by the authorities. 4 After the relative openness of the 1980s, officialdom was struggling to accept or allow the controversial and often deliberately disruptive nature of the work being produced. This type of restriction continued in varying degrees over the following two decades, and artists often cited incidents of suppression by the authorities as markers of ‘success’. 5 Meanwhile, the market for unofficial art flourished: outside China there was the support