The China Project

264 Do you feel a sense of connection or solidarity with Australian–Chinese artists, or artists working in China? Has this opened up new ways of thinking about your own work? I probably don’t know enough Chinese artists to be able to answer that, but I do feel a sense of solidarity with Australian–Chinese artists, because I think we travel the same ground. There was a big symposium in Sydney in 1993 about Asian artists, and there seemed to be two schools. The Chinese who came from overseas knew who they were, and their problem was adapting to a different culture. The Chinese who were born in Australia all had the same concern, and that was ‘Who am I?’ We were struggling to work out who we were. Everyone’s been through it one way or another; it’s not an isolated story. John Young and Lindy Lee have been through that, they would know my experience. I feel a kind of solidarity among Australian–Chinese artists. It’s different with the artists from China living in Australia. I like them and they are an interesting photographic subject for me. I marvel at the way they stick together, and as a group have managed to be successful, but we come from different places. When you take photographs, do you consider them within a narrative, or that they may become part of a performance? Diane Arbus expressed that when she first started taking photographs of people, there were an awful lot of people in the world and it was going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them. It was her teacher Lisette Model 5 who told her that you can’t photograph everyone but, if you were specific, then somehow that is more universal. I had to realise that in my own way. I’ve limited my work to themes. I do family, anything that’s Australian–Chinese, or even Chinese. Celebrities, Australian celebrities especially, is another one of my themes. That also overlaps with my friends, the artistic community which I identify with; and then, of course, there’s the gay community. It’s easy to take documentary photographs but it’s hard to pull them together. There is a further refinement in the way I choose things — if there’s a story there, something I can talk or write about, I find that more alluring. They’re the criteria that I have mapped out for myself so I don’t have to photograph everything in the world. You have said that writing on your photographs ‘gives context to the picture’. 6 Did this process come out of the performances, which also place images within the context of words? Yes, the two go hand in hand. It started off by simply listening to artist talks. With the level of conception and abstraction within contemporary art, it’s very hard to actually enter the work, and so at least if a person gave an artist talk, then they gave you an entry into the work. What I think people long for is a kind of engagement; people want to empathise with what you have to say. If it had no meaning at all, then there’s probably no need for art — you’d just walk into the street and find meaning there. So when I started doing my monologues, I was very closely engaged with the audience. I didn’t have a director but I listened to them. I want engagement and I want interaction, I don’t want to be aloof or present something that’s too difficult or too theoretical for an audience to understand. right Shen Jiawei, Lin Li, Guo Jian, Guan Wei at Jiawei’s BBQ, Bundeena 1998 Digital print / 34 x 40cm / Collection: The artist opposite Self-portrait #3, c.1948. Photo: Charlie Young (from ‘GoMA self-portrait’ series) 2008 Digital print, ed. 1/20 / 60 x 42cm / Collection: The artist