• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

: ’ 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, lacquer, 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 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 Beijing in 1960. Ah Xian is the name he adopted in 1983. “Ah” is generally used as a prefix for a nickname, 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 names united references to both Chinese art, 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 style 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 titles 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 Han dynasty (206-220 B.C.).8 The production of porcelain objects and vessels for the imperial courts and ware for domestic use flourished during the Ming dynasty (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 title.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 family 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.

Load more

  11

Copy Link