The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Insert Text. Since the opening of the Gallery’s Australian Cinémathèque facility in 2006 and the integration of cinema into the Asia Pacific Triennial at this time, a major animation retrospective has been curated for each APT: Japan Fantastic: Before and Beyond Anime for APT5, The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation for APT6 and, for APT7, Mountains and Waters: Chinese Animation Since the 1930s. Each program has profiled the continuation of longstanding aesthetic traditions in the medium of animation. Mountains and Waters features exquisite animated works inspired by ink-wash painting, shadow plays, papercuts, Chinese opera, puppetry, woodblock printing and other art forms and techniques. Animation began in China with the celebrated Wan brothers in the 1920s. The four siblings grew up making shadow puppet plays before they taught themselves how to make animated films, having seen cinema screenings in Shanghai of animations from France, Russia, Germany and the United States, and notably the cartoons created by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer. The earliest extant Chinese animation, Mouse and Frog 1934, is by the Wan brothers; it combines live action with sequences of animation. The brothers went on to make the first Chinese animated feature film, Princess Iron Fan 1941, one of many animated adaptations of Journey to the West , the literary account of a celebrated monk’s eventful travels to bring the Buddhist scriptures to China. Also in 1941, an association of Chinese cartoonists was established in Hong Kong, which, at different times, would be home to important figures in early Chinese animation, including the older Wan brothers. 1 A particular form of Hong Kong animation of the 1960s was the hand-painted effect — drawn or scratched directly onto the film negative — which developed as a feature of wuxia pian (films depicting traditional martial chivalry). New animation styles and techniques flourished in the ‘art films’ produced by the Shanghai Film Studio from 1950. Generally set in rural landscapes and presenting simple stories drawn from fables, folktales, proverbs and literature, these films were symbolically and philosophically resonant, often featuring anthropomorphic animal characters and exploring ideals of harmony with nature. At the beginning of the 1960s, Te Wei and his collaborators invented a new technique of animated ink-wash painting. One of the Wan brothers, Wan Guchan, developed exquisite papercut styles. Hu Jinqing, who trained with Wan Guchan, combined this technique with ink wash, creating painted paper characters with soft-torn edges, which allowed them to meld with the wash backgrounds. During the Cultural Revolution, very few animations were allowed to be screened in China and production ceased at the studios. A period of extraordinary creativity followed in the late 1970s and 1980s, when, after experiencing rural isolation and hard labour, studio staff enthusiastically returned to work. From the 1990s, new economic pressures, as well as the influence of animated television series, changed the nature of the animation produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. 2 From this time, it has been independent animators and artists who have continued to develop the links with the visual arts more broadly, including printmaking, painting and ceramics, and to explore the aesthetic potential of particular software platforms, notably Flash, as well as post-Flash animations created using programming script and code. Kathryn Weir 1 See Marie-Claire Quiquemelle, The Wan Brothers and 60 Years of Animated Film in China [brochure], Centre International du Cinéma d’Animation/Les Editions du Lac, Festival d’Annecy, 1985. 2 John A Lent and Ying Xu, ‘Chinese animation film: From experimentation to digitization’, in Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (eds.), Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema , Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2010, pp.111–25. MOUNTAINS AND WATERS Chinese Animation Since the 1930s 284