The China Project

57 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection Nicholas Jose Ah Xian / China/Australia b.1960 (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 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery My China project began in July 1983 when I visited China with a group from the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE), where I was studying Mandarin in my spare time. My interest in China already went back some way, but this was the first time I would be physically in the place that was real to my inspirational teachers but not yet to me. What I experienced in that month (and I’m still in touch with one or two of the people I met then) was a quality that I described to myself at the time as like a flower slowly opening. My classical Chinese teacher in Beijing, for example, was an accomplished calligrapher who delighted in sharing his art with us outside class time. Things were getting better in China in 1983, after so many years of bitterness and distortion. The tentative hope was palpable, especially to a young Australian who was enthralled by what was offered. When I mentioned this to Tai-fang Rigby, whose husband, Richard, was first secretary in the Australian Embassy, she warned me with a smile to go back before it was too late. China very quickly takes over. Its new openness was directed towards the outside world, but also meant the internal reworking of relationships with the past and tradition, as well as promising fresh possibilities for individuals in their personal and professional lives. Bronwyn Thomas was a senior member of our CCAE group. She had visited China before, with Marianne Baillieu (Director of Realities Gallery, Melbourne) in 1980, and mentored us, as we wandered through gardens and other tourist sites, on the long vistas of Chinese art and culture. The Chinese painting that had made the deepest impression on me at that time was Northern Song-dynasty artist Fan Kuan’s Travellers Among Mountains and Streams , by which I had been overwhelmed in the National Museum in Taipei in 1981. But when I got back to Australia in 1983, I began reading about the new contemporary China I had found, starting with the ‘Democracy Wall’ period of 1979 and the poets, thinkers and artists who emerged then. I was plotting my return. My sense of what I had found is epitomised in a famous passage from Lu Xun’s 1921 story My Old Home : ‘I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made’. Somehow I knew that China’s future and mine, and Australia’s, and maybe even the world’s, would be together on the road that was just then showing the first footsteps. I was back in Beijing by early 1986, to teach and to write the novel that was published as Avenue of Eternal Peace in 1989 (revised edition, 2008). I brought with me the first edition of Seeds of Fire (1986), edited by Geremie Barmé and John Minford, a seminal collection of writings and images from the vanguard of post-Mao culture. Produced by filmmakers, cartoonists, poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists and dissident essayists, the work was darkly witty, viscerally inflamed, tough and exuberant in its cry for freedom. A painting by Ah Xian ironically called Sense of security graced the back cover. Geremie also provided me with an introduction to his friend Linda Jaivin, who was working for news magazine Asiaweek in Beijing. Linda and I met for lunch at a revolving restaurant in a hotel that overlooked the zoo. Through her kindness I met the poet Mang Ke, one of the early ‘misty’ poets, friend to artists from the Stars Group such as Ma Desheng, and others, like poet Bei Dao, who had been associated with the Democracy Wall. He acted as hospitable godfather to an informal network of creative types who took themselves seriously but also liked to walk on the wild side. With Mang Ke I met other poets, including Duo Duo and Yang Lian, writers, editors and artists such as Lin Chunyan My China Project