The China Project

62 above Nicholas Jose looks at Chairman Mao, news photography exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 1988 / Photograph: William Yang 1989, directed me towards the modest Beijing Concert Hall Gallery run by Qian Cheng, a graduate of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, as one of the few places in Beijing where I might still view interesting art in that subdued period. I consulted with Li about works that might need safeguarding. With Qian Cheng’s help I was able to bring paintings by the ‘other’ Gu Wenda, formerly of the Tianjin Academy, to Australia for preservation. Li identified these works as key precursors of the political pop and cynical realism phases of the later 1980s and early 1990s that made contemporary Chinese art internationally desirable. Gu Wenda’s tragic circumstances prevented full recognition of his work in his lifetime, and these deteriorating paintings might well have disappeared. Ding Fang was another artist recommended by Li Xianting: his brooding metaphysical paintings of the Great Wall suited the sombre mood. The first exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to be seen in Australia post 1989 was ‘New Art from China: Post-Mao Product’, curated by Claire Roberts for the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Queensland Art Gallery in 1992. This groundbreaking show featured Xu Bing’s masterwork A book from the sky 1987–91, pencil drawings and monochrome paintings by Fang Lijun, installations by Lü Shengzhong and Ni Haifeng, woodblock prints by Chen Haiyan and paintings by Xu Hong, mostly on their first showing outside China. A third of the artists in the exhibition were women: probably a record, as well as a statement about the odds against which women continue to struggle in the Chinese art world. Claire had moved to the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney in 1988 and initiated a curatorial exchange with the Shanghai Museum in 1990. During that time she and I were able to work together, developing our involvement with contemporary Chinese art and artists. In the process we have had art works in our custody which reflect the major cultural and social shift that China has gone through — a transformation that artists have not only witnessed and documented but also which, in specific and powerful ways, their artistic creativity and intelligence have driven. Contemporary Chinese art has moved unimaginably since then, becoming professionalised and even opulent, with the fortunes of some artists matching the confidence with which they began; those grins say it all. Claire and I are pleased and proud that much of our collection has found a home in the Queensland Art Gallery alongside other key works of contemporary Chinese art. The Gallery has helped to create a road that visitors to ‘The China Project’ will go down, and that scholars and audiences from here, China and around the world, will travel into the future. opposite Nicholas Jose, Ah Xian, Wang Youshen and Liu Xiao Xian at the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes, Beijing, 1988 / Photograph courtesy: Liu Xiao Xian