   :  ’       

 

After the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, and the unrest that continued into the early 1990s, some 25,000 Chinese students expatriated to Australia. Among these were a number of Chinese artists. Nearly fifteen years later, the works of these exiles have contributed a Chinese sensibility to Australian art, and their inclusion in national and international exhibitions has steadily increased over the years. According to Melissa Chiu, Museum Director of the Asia Society and the Society’s former Curator for Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, “the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia is problematic insofar as it conceives of Australia and Asia as discrete, separate and rigid identities.”1 Within this framework, “the significance of Asian-Australian artists lies in their knowledge and understanding of an Asian culture, yet their location within an Australian context provides an entirely unique denial of the fixed notions of Australia and Asia.”2 Investigating issues of identity and belonging, the work of these artists represents a shift in the Australian cultural landscape, confronting the audience with the mediation between cultures of origin3 and contact situations while stimulating reflection about cultural creolization.

Ah Xian was among the artists who migrated to Australia in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident. My first encounter with his work was in Berlin, in the fall of 2003, at Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, curated by Britta Schmitz, at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Ah Xian’s busts, exquisitely crafted in porcelain, , and cloisonné, conveyed a timeless atmosphere and a sense of impenetrable intimacy. Theirs was a hybrid nature infused with East and West, the result of a decade-long introspective journey in which the artist, physically dislocated and culturally displaced from his homeland, had sought to negotiate his cultural background with the prevailing and overriding values—philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural—of the West. One of my goals in writing this article is to investigate how, in the making of the China and Human Human portrait busts, Ah Xian has created a complex of semiotic relationships that tap directly into both Chinese and Western visual languages and cultures.

Ah Xian was born Liu Ji Xian in in 1960. Ah Xian is the he adopted in 1983. “Ah” is generally used as a prefix for a , and “Xian” means immortal. Used together, they become both an “art name” and nickname. Self-taught, Ah Xian started his career in art during the early 1980s. Between 1985 and 1990, his work was featured in several group exhibitions at Beijing University, the National Art Gallery of China in Beijing, the Beijing Central Drama Institute, and the Jin-An Culture Centre in Shanghai, as well as in Paris, New York, Boston, and Hobart. In 1986 his first solo exhibition was held at the Old Observatory in Beijing.

These exhibitions followed the years of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, launched by fac- tions in the Chinese Communist Party Leadership, who feared the spread of Western liberal ideas brought about by the Open Door policy,4 and the campaign against “bourgeois liberalism” that was begun in response to the 1986 student demonstrations and intended to weaken the activity of experimental artists. These years saw the emergence of unofficial artistic groups championing freedom of expression and a critical examination of the official academy prescriptions for art. Their manifestos and movement united references to both , such as traditional ink painting, Socialist Realism, and Western modern and postmodern styles, such as Dada, Surrealism, Pop, and Conceptual.

 During this time, despite continually practic- ing art, Ah Xian was never really a part of any formal artists’ group,5 mostly because of his natural solitude and quiet personality, although discussions with friends who were involved more closely in the movements were part of his daily life. The artist describes himself as interested in Modigliani, Magritte, and Delvaux. The works from these early Chinese years already reveal the figurative element as primary, whether in painted nudes or in wall rubbings on city surfaces (see fig. 1). “Part of my practice then was just intuitive, and part of it was just rebellion,” Figure 1. Ah Xian, The Wall Series #36, 1987, ink on rice paper, 110 x 110 cm. the artist has said.6 His work is permeated Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. by an implicit sense of intolerance towards the official academy and its intellectual constrictions, reflecting the controlled and controlling Chinese cultural context.

In early 1989, Ah Xian went to Australia as an artist in residence at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, returning to China a few weeks before the beginning of the stu- dents’ pro-democracy protests.7 In 1990, invited to participate in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Ah Xian then sought political asylum in Australia.

Ah Xian’s early work made in Australia con- stitutes a sort of psychological laboratory, a cathartic locus for attempting to metabolize Figure 2. Ah Xian, The Heavy Wounds Series #1, 1991, oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. and overcome the horror of the Tiananmen massacre. The Heavy Wounds series of 1991 (fig. 2)—oil paintings executed on canvas in a Socialist Realist that show how to bandage wounds—and the Pervasive Spirit series of 1992 (fig. 3)— installations made of plaster casts of body parts (mainly feet and hands) displayed in ammunition boxes on tables or pinned to the wall—are pervaded by a hovering sense of violence. The reveal the delicate passage of the artist's spirit, caught in the oscillation between the offenses of the body and the wounds of the soul.

Since early 1994, following the Mao Goes Pop exhibition in Sydney, Ah Xian has been investigating the idea of making porcelain figures. In 1995 he was put in contact with Zou Xiao Song, who later became Vice Director of the art college of Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, located in Jiangxi Province, southwest of Shanghai.

For a thousand years, Jingdezhen has been considered China’s most important center for porcelain production. Ceramics were produced there as far back as the (206-220 B.C.).8 The

 production of porcelain objects and vessels for the imperial courts and ware for domestic use flourished during the (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Today, Jingdezhen remains a national and international center for porcelain production. Workshops, often specialized in specific traditional porcelain designs, keep alive the tradition of producing hand-manufactured replicas of vases and other vessels for the demands of a global market. Ah Xian traveled to Jingdezhen to learn more about the possibilities of the porcelain medium and to establish relationships with the local workshops.

Figure 3. Ah Xian, Pervasive Spirit No. 2, 1992, plaster, lead, steel nails, Back in Australia, Ah Xian was the recipient of a wax, ink, cotton, bandages, and ammunition boxes, 72 x 56 x 59 cm. year-long residency at Sydney College of Arts, Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. where he had access to studio space, materials, and kilns. The China China series was started at that time. In a brilliant synthesis, the artist’s homeland and the material with which the country is closely identified are inseparably connected in the series .9

In 1998-99, Ah Xian made the first busts and other body parts, including legs and heads, which he molded, fired, and hand-painted by himself (fig. 4). The models for the castings were chosen from among friends and members, both Chinese and non-Chinese. During the process, vaseline is rubbed on the model's face, skin, ears, and hair. The models must keep their eyes and mouths firmly closed and breathe through straws placed in their noses while multiple layers of plas- ter-soaked cloth are applied over the head, neck and shoulder. “It is not easy to find an ideal model and [equally] not easy to find someone who can physically and psychologically endure it,”the artist claims,10 and because of this, the Figure 4. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 1, 1998, porcelain, underglaze same mold is often used for more than one bust. cobalt-blue with landscape design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist.

The decorative styles applied to the busts were carefully selected from traditional porcelain designs found in Chinese pattern books and catalogues of antique Chinese bowls, platters, and vases. It mainly consists of a cobalt blue underglaze, reduction-fired red copper glaze, iron red glaze, and clear glaze.

In China China—Bust No. 3 (fig. 5)—porcelain with hand-painted cobalt underglaze, reduction- fired red copper glaze, and clear glaze—a bamboo grove is painted across the right temple of a young woman, the myriad of small pointed leaves rendered in different shades of blue. From the temple, the leaves delineate the rounded arch of the eyebrow, and on the left side a tree branches out across the side of her face, blooming with blurry red dots. A few isolated dots mark the

 sensuality of her face as beauty spots, and delicate lines run across the cheek like blood capillaries. Her eyes are shut, the features of the face relaxed, her posture upright. This woman seems caught in a moment of inward reflection and presence of mind, as if weighing the emotions that are condensing and clouding on her skin.

These early China China sculptures, of which a selection was first featured in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, held in Brisbane (1999) and later acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery, already feature the peculiar elements that recur in successive works: a decisive engagement between the sculptural form and the painted motifs. This is an engagement I would call sensual for the way Figure 5. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 3, 1998, porcelain, the decoration entices and is enticed by the bust in a underglaze cobalt blue with reduction-fired red copper glaze and clear glaze. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. union that generates a new place for the viewer: a place of surprise, attraction, and semiotic associations. “The reason why people are so seduced ...is not the body itself, but that place where it joins traditional decorative arts, and it is exactly there where the work has its appeal and where it actually succeeds—you pull it apart and it means nothing.”11 The way the patterns interact with the symmetry of the face, following, accentuating, smothering, or obliterating the features, urges the viewer to interpret the mood of the model, since we all have the tendency to read and deduce information about a person from the face. A sense of calm, inward reflection, but also imprisonment and asphyxiation, are just some of the terms that have been used to describe the sensation the viewer is confronted with.

It has been said that the China China series of busts recall the “quietness of death,”12 the imagery of prematurely formed “death masks,”13 the stillness of “mortuary sculptures.”14 This is due to the fact that the eyes remain shut, the shoulders droop, and the facial features relax, delivering a sense of serenity and restfulness. Such countenances remain unchanged in later works: the stillness of the Human Human series, for example, is disturbing. The feature of closed eyes “confirms both the natural process of molding from life and my conscious decision, since it creates a much wider spiritual space to be living in....”15

In 1999, having been awarded a grant from the Australia Council of the Arts, Ah Xian was able to travel to Jingdezhen, where he started working collaboratively with local workshops and artisans. The artist describes his experience thus: Along the production process,

I was mainly in charge of molding, forming, and revamping, and left the decoration to the artisans. I selected the artisans and briefly advised them about which motif to decorate where, and trusted that they would perform to their best ability in porcelain making. There was some concern initially as to how the patterns, which were usually reserved for circular, functional ceramics, would relate to the shape of the human figure. The artisans are trained to be good in a specified narrow field such as throughing or turning, underglaze landscape decoration or overglaze, underglaze motives or overglaze, flower and bird decoration and figure, drawing or filling out colours. They are fixed in one particular position for the whole of their careers. There were around ten people in the workshop where I made my works.16

 Sometimes the process of completing a bust requires up to five firings, and polychrome enamels, pierced-through porcelain, low relief, ying qing or shadowy blue glaze, are only some of the techniques featured in the busts created in Jingdezhen. The spectrum of the designs broadened to include applied “antique objects”—urns, jars, and lanterns in relief (see fig. 6)—flowers of the four seasons (see fig. 7), lotus scrolls, and traditional Chinese erotica (see fig. 8).

China China—Bust No. 36 (fig. 9)—porcelain with overglaze, iron-red, and a cobalt-blue dragon- and-ocean design—presents the long body of a red dragon coiling around the head of a man. His head is leaning slightly forward, and the coils Figure 6. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 34, 1999, porcelain with follow the facial features, moving around the ears overglaze iron-red, “antique objects” design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. so as to avoid obstacles to their full embrace of the head. The supernatural creature extends its body over the mouth, clasps the nose with one of its claws, and stands out on the man’s forehead with spirited eyes. Below, the man’s chest and back are painted with a stylized motif of ocean waves. Because of his posture, he seems weary and resigned.

The collaboration with the Jingdezhen workshop ultimately produced its fruit: thirty-five vividly decorated busts were exhibited at the Teacher’s College in Beijing in April 2000 and at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 2001. Since then the artist has been traveling back and forth between China and Australia. This ongoing China China series now consists of eighty porcelain sculptures (see figs. 10-12). In 2003, China Refigured: The Art of Ah Xian,held at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City, showcased thirty-seven of the new busts, including, for the first time, works from the more recent Human Human series.

The body of work included in Human Human was conceived of between 1999 and 2000, while Ah Xian was in Beijing:

“When you are in Beijing you see cloisonné and carved lacquer all the time, and, on the other hand it is not so simple to think about how to use these materials.”17 Ah Xian felt he was exhausting his possibilities with porcelain and wanted to broaden his investigations into traditional Chinese crafts, appropriating and reinventing a use for materials such as cloisonné, lacquer, jade, ox bone, and bronze. Twelve Human Human busts have been created so far: five of carved , five of cloisonné, and two inlaid— one ox bone and one jade. More recently, the artist has been considering the use of wood carving.18

In the series Human Human,fiberglass resin casts are used as base. The human figure remains central in these works, as the title emphatically suggests. As the artist stated, the works “‘would not make sense’ if they were not based on a human cast.”19 The reiteration of the word “human” in the series title recalls and plays with the title of China China,with the difference that “human human” transcends the immediate logic intrinsic in China China-meaning porcelain of China for the historical, cultural, and geographical associations the word “china” carries. Rather, Human Human, with its playful excess—human is by definition “human”—evokes a poetic logic that escapes geo-political reference and brings the Human Human works to an expanded, more universal plane.

 Cloisonné was first introduced in China during the (1279-1368) and has become one of the traditional arts and crafts used in China to produce tables, screens, and vessels. It is actually called the “blue of Jingtai” (Jingtai lan), since blue is the dominant colour adopted for enameling. Cloisonné, which became prevalent during the reign of Jingtai (1450-1456) in the Ming dynasty, involves elaborate processes: base hammering, soldering, enamel filling, enamel firing, polishing, and gilding.

In the making of cloisonné busts, Ah Xian first Figure 7. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 60, 2002, porcelain pierced makes a negative plaster cast. This is sent to a through with four-season-flowers design. Photo: Liu Xiao Xian. Courtesy of the artist. workshop where it is transformed into a fiberglass positive, and, at this stage, the artist can still make changes on the fiberglass. The fiberglass model is then passed to a panel-beating workshop where a zinc mold is formed before the final copper positive can be created by beating copper sections into shape within the negative mold and then welding them together to form the copper body. In the next phase, cloisonné craftsmen adhere copper strips to the copper body. Small filigree copper strips (cloisons) are shaped according to the artist’s design and then applied and welded onto the copper to completely cover the body. During the enamel filling, ores are ground into fine powder and applied to little compartments separated by filigrees.20 The subsequent firing fuses the enamel pastes into Figure 8. Ah Xian, China China —Bust No. 25 (left view), 1999, porcelain glass. Refilling with enamel pastes and re-firing is with overglaze polychrome enamels. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. required, as the enamel in the little compartments will shrink a little from the heat. Once the compartments are completely filled, the busts are polished to make the surface level, re-fired and re-polished. and finally gilded.21

Human Human—Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1 (fig. 13) is Ah Xian’s first free-standing complete figure cast from life, and its completion took twelve months, including several failed attempts. Its craft excellence is stunning. Long stems climb sinuously from the legs, embracing the female nude with rounded leaves, blossoms, and flowers. From vibrating emerald to saturated yellow, green nuances speak of the bravura of enamel artisans, and the liquid fluctuations of colours and the naturalistic movements of the ornamental motif contrast with the awkward stillness of the pose. A lotus flower blooms on the left breast, the drum-shaped seedpod sensually—or provocatively?—positioned on the nipple. Another flower covers the right cheek, the magenta petals centrifugally spreading across the face. In Chinese iconography, the lotus symbolizes purity because of the way it emerged unblemished from the mud in which it grew.22 Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1 was made at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei province, east of Beijing, during 2000-01. The sculpture won the inaugural National Sculpture Prize held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

 Among the other ornamental techniques that Ah Xian has been revitalizing in the Human Human series is lacquer, not only one of the most ancient23 but also one of the most time-consum- ing processes. Made from the sap of the lacquer tree, lacquer can be used as a top layer for objects ranging from simple bowls to deeply carved chests and tables and ornately painted wardrobes. When colour is not added, the natural state of lacquer gives the object a transparent, rich brown hue. Once dried and polished, the lacquerware has heat-, acid-, and alkali-resistant properties while Figure 9. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 36, 1999, porcelain with imparting to the object it protects a sturdy and overglaze iron red and cobalt blue dragon, and ocean design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. glossy shine. Carved lacquer requires the applica- tion of hundreds of layers of varnish, depending on the depth of the desired design to be engraved.

Human Human—Carved Lacquer Bust 1: Dragon (fig. 14) is one of the five finished busts. It features the motif of the dragon carved into red lacquer: the scales, the sinuous whiskers of the mythological creatures in the foreground, and the undulating, evenly striped carving in the background cover the entire surface and convey a sense of sumptuous preciousness.

***

In the China China and Human Human series, the decorations seem indelibly to mark the busts like tattoos. Such re-marking of a cultural heritage is an element that recurs in the work of other Chinese artists either transplanted abroad or living in China. In the series of photographs Self- Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History,Ni Haifeng, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1990, addresses his Chineseness—and the history of the mercantile relationships between the Low Countries and China—by showing parts of his own body painted with traditional Chinese porcelain blue motifs. Similarly, Huang Yan, who works and lives in Jilin, China, recovers tradition by painting calligraphy and ornamental motifs over porcelain busts of Mao, pork cuts, bones, and his own body. In the making of the Family Tree series of photographs, Zhang Huan, who lives and works in New York, invited three calligraphers to write texts on his face beginning in the early morning and continuing into the night.24 As the Chinese characters cover more and more of the artist’s face, they evoke the artist’s Chineseness, while the black ink progressively obliterates his features and physical identity.

However, it seems to me that looking at Ah Xian’s works in the context of the literal metaphor of the tattoo means reducing the reading of it to his cultural heritage and failing to see the artist’s broader proposition to engage the Western audience with a visual language derived from traditional Chinese materials, craftsmanship, and decorative designs, which are signifiers of Chinese cultural identity.

In the article “Self Exile of the Soul,”Ah Xian raises this question in respect to the body of works China China:

The dilemma can in part be expressed as a question: how can artists brought up in a Chinese cultural context retain their values and traditions, while at the same time entering into a contemporary world dominated by the language and values of the West? But this is just the beginning of the question

 because there is a deeper issue to grapple with and that is, in my view, how to negotiate the , which in a sense is being devalued from within?25

The China China and Human Human busts are visually faithful records of the sitters. They are portraits and yet they escape the mimetic and iconic classification of portraiture and extend the significance of the word “portrait.”If the portrait is the representation of a subject’s interiority Figure 10. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 11, 1999, porcelain, brought to a manifest exteriority—what has been overglaze iron red with lion playing silk-strips-ball design. Photo: Liu Xiao Xian. Courtesy of the artist. described as the likeness of the soul, or of the interior truth of the subject—then the portrait shows a person rather than just the physical fea- tures of a model. Indeed the portrait “looks,”its look staring back at the gaze thrown at it, looking for the possibility of attention, for the chance of an encounter.26 Through the look, a subjectivity imposes its presence on us. In Ah Xian’s busts the eyes are shut, the look absent, the possibility of an encounter postponed to an indefinite time.

The efflorescence of designs on the “skin” of the busts has the colours and forms of peonies and dragons, phoenixes, plum-blossom and lotus Figure 11. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 45 (right view), 1999, scrolls, ocean waves, and idealized landscapes. porcelain low relief with low-temperature yellow glaze. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. Despite the fact that sometimes the same mold is used as base for several sculptures, we hardly notice it, our attention being diverted from the human features to the skin, from the form to the mere surface. From the abyss of inward serenity in which the men and women of the busts seem to be submerged, there is a different, striking likeness surfacing here between portrait and original: a likeness that transcends the mimesis of the single subject. Through the decoration— through its intrinsic reference to China— Chineseness is the “presence” that our eyes actually meet, the “soul” that reveals itself to us.

Figure 12. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 76, 2004, porcelain with overglaze polychrome enamel ten-thousand-flowers design. Photo: In the China China works, through the graphic Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. rite,Ah Xian invents therefore a place, which attenuates or annuls the face of the specific model as the place of his or her own personal subjec- tivity, to evoke—and at the same time preserve while remembering—another face, both private and collective, the face of Chineseness. If one of the functions of the portrait is to represent the image in the absence of the person, whether that person is distant or dead, Ah Xian’s works are many figurations of one absence. Painting, enameling, carving, and piercing the porcelain or

 lacquer of the busts assume the significance of a rite that—for that singular sense of solemn communion with the Chinese tradition—brings to surface the absence that ten years of physical displacement and cultural relocation have generated in the artist’s spiritual landscape.

These busts radiate the artist’s soul; they bear the imprint of his Chineseness, blurred with the individuality of the sitters—no matter whether they are Chinese or not. Each bust negotiates the space between the singular individuality of the models and a collective Chinese cultural identity. The consistency of the closed eyes seems to prevent the multiplication of singular subjectivities in to facilitate the emergence of a super-identity.

Ah Xian’s fascination with the human body can be said to be crucial in interpreting his work. “There are many things one can do as an artist—look at the environment, look at society, at politics—there’s quite a lot of room to play in all of those fields, but the human body is absolutely inexhaustible as a subject. I have never lost interest in the figure....”27 Whether or not the starting point is the conscious embrace of Western mimesis—the logic of an iconic figuration haunted by the dichotomy of absence/presence that spans the centuries from the classical Greece to today—China China and Human Figure 13. Ah Xian, Human Human—Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1, Human go beyond such interpretation to introduce a 2000-01, hand-beaten copper, finely enameled in the cloisonné technique. Courtesy of the artist and the National new figuration of absence/presence. Gallery of Australia.

Ah Xian effects a semiotic shift from iconic to symbolic in the status of the busts as portraits-from an iconic similarity to the model to the symbolic mode of being Chinese as it is coded and epitomized by the tradition of China’s decorative motifs. By superimposing a system of signs on the sculpture’s features (what one can consider the original system of signs, since we tend to “read” a person through his/her facial expression), the symbolic status of the mask is achieved. While hiding the individual face, masks construct the “actor” as a “face” that exists only within the cultural context. As in Chinese opera masks, where the main colour in the facial makeup symbolizes the disposition of the character,28 in Ah Xian's busts traditional ornamental motifs are not meant to literally disguise the face. Rather, they introduce a coded system of signs and symbols which, like mask colours, are immediately intelligible to the audience for their intrinsic associations with a specific cultural context.

Ah Xian is undoubtedly fascinated with the symbolism of traditional Chinese motifs. Peonies, symbols of wealth, spring, and female beauty, are used by the artist to decorate female busts. The recurrent association of the dragon with busts of men evokes the tradition of associating the supernatural creature with the emperor of China (the son of heaven). The dragon is also a symbol of male characteristics such as vigor, fertility, vigilance, and safety. By analogy, the or phoenix, the mythical bird most often associated with the empress of China, is utilized by Ah Xian for female busts.

And yet in Ah Xian’s work, the traditional motifs are not meant literally and didactically to dis- close to the Western public the meanings of symbols in Chinese mythology. For the viewer, being seduced by such a blend of ornamental design and human form, Chinese symbolism and Western mimesis, is being enticed into a semiotic interface between East and West, a place which is both

 and neither of the two. It is this place where traditional Chinese decorative patterns are invested with the role of signifying Chineseness—for, after five hundred years of mercantilism and import/export of porce- lains, and textiles,29 they create in a Western audience immediate associations with China, in the same way the colours in the Chinese opera masks are immediately intelligible for a Chinese audience. As semiotic interface, the busts carry symbolic meaning directly, communicating to a Western audience the sense of a quintessen- tially Chinese culture through a quintessen- tially Chinese visual language, without fully disclosing its syntax of metaphors and Figure 14. Ah Xian, Human Human—Carved Lacquer Bust 1: Dragon, 2000-01, lacquer-carved relief on resin fiberglass with dragon design. iconography, i.e., the symbolic meanings. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist.

It is likely that Ah Xian’s sculptures reveal to a Chinese audience aspects of cultural alienness, which is intrinsic in the statues’ hybridity: “The artisans not only in Jingdezhen but wherever I went to, they were all surprised, not really interested but curious. Some of them even laughed at my idea and thought that I was crazy to do some useless thing. It was something too far from what they used to know and do.”30 Interestingly, the cultural hybridity of the busts is reflected in their blend of art and craft, tradition and contemporaneity. The opposition of art and craft, so strongly marked on a conceptual plane in the West, is less important—if not fictitious—when one comes in contact with the Oriental tradition. What from a Western perspective could be praised as mediation between art and craft indeed lacks persuasiveness, if not substance, when considered in the light of the Chinese “values” of craft perfection and timelessness.

In Ah Xian’s China China and Human Human series, meaning is not necessarily fully delivered and shared by the two cultures. However it seems to me that their beauty and power reside in the richness of associations the sculptures elicit and the cultural curiosity that their hybrid semiotic nature spawns. Such a curiosity—a natural intellectual movement towards something different, extraneous, or new—is the best result of the cultural mediation Ah Xian has been weaving, conscious, however, of the collective imagery and cultural fantasies reciprocally existing between East and West and of the fact that different audiences from different cultural contexts tend to read different significances.31

Ah Xian’s busts finally not only negotiate between individual and collective identities and articulate the binary relationship between China and West, but also express a broader contemporary global experience of hybridity, of a dialectic between “contact situations” and cultures of origin, of fusion and transformation in a postcolonial, post-communist, and rapidly interconnecting world.

 Notes 1. Melissa Chiu, “Asian-Australian Artists: Recent Cultural Shifts in Australia,” paper presented at the apexart conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2001; see http://www.apexart.org/conference/Chiu.htm (accessed January 30, 2005). 2 Ibid. 3 The Chinese community in Australia is in itself diverse in origin. Many of its members were originally from the People's Republic of China, but others have emigrated to Australia from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, , Laos, and Cambodia. Some have been in Australia for generations, others are new arrivals. 4 The campaign lasted from October 1983 to February 1984, attacking such social problems as crime, corruption, and pornography. See Christopher Hudson, The China Handbook: Regional Handbooks of Economic Development—Prospects onto the 21st Century (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997). 5 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, October 29, 2004. 6 Dana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys: An Interview with Ah Xian,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 22. 7 On April 16, 1989, people started gathering in Tiananmen Square after the death of Hu Yaobang the night before due to illness. Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Yaobang, was ousted in February 1987. Hu had been seen as a liberal and his ousting in response to student protests in 1987 was widely seen to be unfair. 8 The most famous types of porcelain from Jingdezhen are the blue-and-white porcelain, which has been produced since the Yuan dynasty (1280-1368), and the rice-patterned porcelain that was introduced in the (960-1279). 9 Our term “china” for porcelain or ceramic ware is a shortening of “chinaware” and, probably, “china dishes.” Although the word “china” is identical in spelling to the name of the country, there are 16th- and 17th-century spellings such as “chiney,” “cheny,” and “cheney” that reflect the borrowing into English of the Persian term for this porcelain, chn. The Persian word and the Sanskrit word cn, “Chinese people,” which gave us the for the country, go back to the Chinese word Qín, the name of the dynasty that ruled China from 221 to 206 B.C. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), entry “china.” 10 Dana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 18. 11 Ibid., 22. 12 Claire Roberts, “Fishes and Dragons: Ah Xian's China China series,” Art AsiaPacific, no. 26 (2000): 55. 13 Both Rhana Devenport and Irene Levin employ the reference to death masks. See Rhana Devenport, “Ah Xian’s China: An Artistic Journey through a Lost Art-Form,” Object (2000), 50, and Irene Levin, “‘China China: Recent Works in Porcelain by Ah Xian,’ Powerhouse Museum, 14 March-16 September 2001,” Artwrite (2002), http://www.artwrite.cofa.unsw.edu.au/0122/IssuesatLarge/Levin_AhXian/Levin_China.html (accessed January 30, 2005). 14 Suhanya Raffel and Lynne Seear, “Human Human,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 12. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 From an interview, November 2000, as reported at the VCEART Web site: http://www.vceart.com/artists/xian/page.2.html (accessed January 30, 2005). 17 Rhana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 18. 18 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, October 29, 2004: “The only predictable ‘problematic’ point would be that I will not be able to do ‘body cast’ in this way. However, the result will be great, I am sure. (Can you imagine a hollow-carved wooden figure full of decorative design? Incredible!! Whether [I] do it or not will only depend on my decision. There is no technique barrier.)” 19 Ben Divall, “Ah Xian: Circles in Time,” Craft Arts International no. 56 (2002-03). 20. Due to the different minerals added, cloisonné varies in colour. Usually one with much iron will turn gray; with uranium, yellow; with chromium, green; with bronze, blue; with zinc, white; with gold or iodine, red. 21 For a detailed description of the cloisonné process and a brief history of the technique, refer to Ian Were, “Revitalizing Tradition: Ah Xian’s Cloisonné, Jade, and Lacquer Figures,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 27-31. 22 John E. Vollmer, Five Colours of the Universe: Symbolism in Clothes and Fabrics of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911), (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1980). 23 A lacquer-coated bowl, 10.6 x 9.2 cm of opening diameter, 5.7 cm of height and 7.6-7.2 cm of bottom diameter, was dug out of Stratum III (dates back to 6,141 years ago on the average) in Hemudu, Yuyao, . Wood stuffed, it was ellipse shaped with a loop of support at the bottom. The external surface was coated with a layer of hues of red, adding luster to it as a whole. From www.ningbo.gov.cn (People’s Government of NingBo) (accessed January 5, 2005). 24 “I told them what they should write and to always keep a serious attitude when writing the texts even when my face turns to dark. My face followed the daylight till it slowly darkened. I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared.” From the official Zhang Huan web site, http://www.zhanghuan.com/ZiJia.htm. 25 Ah Xian, “Self Exile of the Soul,” TAASA Journal: The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia 8, no.1 (March 1999): 8-9. 26 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Il Ritratto,” in Il Volto, Il Ritratto, La Maschera, I Quaderni (Siena: Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea, 2000). 27 Rhana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 22. 28 For example, white suggests treacherousness, suspiciousness, and craftiness; red indicates devotion, courage, bravery, uprightness, and loyalty; and yellow signifies fierceness, ambition, and cool-headedness. Gold and silver colours are usually used for gods and spirits. 29 The beginning of modern Sino-European mercantile and political relationships can be dated back to the 1508 Diego Lopes de Siqueira's expedition, the first attempt by the Portuguese at trading with China, which was followed by the Portuguese settlement of Macao at the delta of Pearl River. The subtle thread that connects to China dates back much further; Pliny the Younger (62-114) apparently “complained that the fashion for silk clothing among Roman nobles caused a constant drain of gold and silver bullion eastward along the famed ,” according to John E. Vollmer, in “A Chinese Universe of Textiles”, Clothed to Rule the Universe: Ming and Qing Dynasty Textiles at The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies 26, no. 2 (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000). 30 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, January 3, 2005. 31 For some Australian reviewers, for example, the busts' decorations recall Maori facial tattooing and traditional scarification practiced by some aboriginal nations.

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