The China Project

58 and Ah Xian, who included me in their artistic journey into new dimensions of personal expression and social possibility. As rebels and bohemians who were also a young urban elite, many with their education disrupted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), they had the heady conviction of holding China’s future in their hands, even while they pushed defiantly at the boundaries. Politics was everywhere, and artistic energies became political in the act of claiming the right of expression. There were no gallery spaces for these ‘unofficial’ artists, for instance, so exhibitions were rare and fleeting, usually by invitation only. You could see artists’ work at home, but that could be problematic, not only because of the cramped conditions, but because the neighbours would be watching. Foreigners who were not subject to the same restrictions as Chinese citizens, especially diplomats with large apartments, offered a solution, and so the artistic salons began. All this added to the fermentation of a scene in which the art that was emerging had power, passion and a driving originality. I attended Lin Chunyan’s first exhibition at the Old Observatory in Beijing in 1986 and bought one of his darker paintings (Two figures climbing a tree) 1985, though there was no formal selling arrangement. I saw Ah Xian’s early work in his and his wife Ma Li’s crowded apartment at his parents’ work unit. I saw Guan Wei’s Wo yu (Kneeling fish) 1986 in his narrow corridor of a studio. I tracked down any exhibitions I could find. In trying to understand the Chinese world around me, in all its transformative contradiction, in listening for messages from the heart and soul of the people I was mixing with, in seeking my own way in, I turned to the art of these committed, independent practitioners who, with limited access to training and resources, were determined to speak to and for their world, now that the opportunity was there. Debate about the future directions of Chinese art was raging in the academies, research institutes and editorial offices as the state’s cultural dictates changed or weakened. Evidence of this could occasionally be seen in official exhibitions too, at the National Art Museum of China and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in the years from 1986 to 1989. I was struck, for example, by Wang Youshen’s bold, ambivalent rendering of the proverbial ‘Old Man Who Moved The Mountain’, which I saw in a student show at the Academy. I wrote him a letter and we met to discuss it. Later he let me acquire the work Yu Gong and his later generations (Yu Gong he tade zizi sunsun) 1986. Wang went on to become art editor for Beijing Youth News ; an important curatorial role that he maintained alongside his own evolving, photography-based practice. Sensing that things could be looser in the provinces, I visited remote Acheng in the snowed-under north-east to meet Shen Shaomin in his printmaking workshop, and returned with works from his ‘Sunflower’ series. After teaching at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Shanghai’s East China Normal University for a year and a half, I was appointed Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy at the end of 1987. Visual art became a key area of cultural exchange. During my briefings back in Australia that year, I met Claire Roberts at Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History. Claire had studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1979–81, where she was a contemporary of Xu Bing, Yuan Yunsheng and Chen Danqing, who were later the first generation to go to the United States after the Cultural Revolution. Claire and I became friends and were able to share a keen and growing interest in the then little-known area of contemporary Chinese art. Part of my work at the Embassy was to implement the official biennial cultural agreement between China and Australia, which in those days was how things happened. The Australian art world’s interest in China was more or less limited to the glories of traditional Chinese arts and crafts — which were in a pretty sorry state in the 1980s — and the varieties of collective and functionalist engineering of art’s links to industry. A golden opportunity to change this came when an arts education delegation exchange was agreed and Betty Churcher, Geoff Parr and David Williams signed up to visit China in 1988. I made sure that their itinerary was broadened to include some new art. When they returned to Australia they became staunch advocates for what they had discovered. Geoff Parr excitedly called Guan Wei ‘one in a billion’ and promptly initiated residencies for him, Ah Xian and Lin Chunyan at the Tasmanian School of Art (where Parr was director) early in 1989. Another welcome visitor to China was William Yang, who met contemporary Chinese photographers while exploring his own connections there. By that time I had talked to Bernice Murphy and Leon Paroissien at the embryonic Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, who were also eager to explore China’s new art. Back in Beijing, meanwhile, Australia had joined France (whose Cultural Centre in Beijing was the first place to show Guan Wei), Spain and Mexico among the diplomatic missions with a reputation for involvement with contemporary Chinese art. The forceful currents that would converge violently in June 1989 could already be felt in the preceding year or two, though they were moving with such swirling energies that it was difficult to find a position from which to be analytical or clairvoyant. My sardonic reports on the cultural scene to the Friday morning Embassy meetings were noted for sometimes being at odds with the optimism above Left to right: Xu Bing, Kong Yongqian, Li Xianting, Gu Wenda, Leon Paroissien, at ‘Mao Goes Pop’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1993 / Image courtesy: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Linda Jaivin and Geremie Barmé in Ah Xian and Ma Lihong’s apartment, Beijing 1989 / Photograph: Alex Kerr Artists’ salon, Jianguomenwai, Beijing, 1988. Left to right: Liu Pin, Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Masami Nakabayashi, Barbi Lock Lee, Guo Xiao Mei, Lin Chunyan, Ren Hua, Shen Shaomin opposite Painting class, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 1988 / Photograph: Geoff Parr