China – The Past Is Present

Traversing Chinese philosophies, spiritual beliefs, associations with nature, art practices, use of materials and social and political movements, China – The Past Is Present emphasises the legacy of Chinese cultural and artistic traditions and their ongoing resonance in contemporary Chinese culture. Presented thematically, historical works of art are positioned in dialogue alongside works by some of China’s most innovative contemporary art and design practitioners.

Yang Yongliang

Yang Yongliang, a former student of traditional Chinese painting, is a Shanghai-based new-media artist. His work Phantom landscape, a visually detailed and elaborate video, is a modern urban response to the historical idea that mountainous locations steeped in the natural elements are idealistic retreats for contemplation. Yang’s animated work is a collage of thousands of urban high-rise buildings, cranes, powerlines, roads and cars, in the style of a traditional Chinese landscape painting (sansui zu). Over the course of Phantom landscape, traditional music is played on a scholar’s lute (qin), creating an atmosphere of nostalgia that is gradually overpowered by city street and construction noise. This changing mood diverts our attention from the tranquil idealistic mountain and lake experience, to moving construction equipment, flashing billboards and traffic jams. The impending catastrophe of thundering waterfalls and a final intervention of a huge commercial passenger plane overwhelms the entire paradisiacal landscape, confirming human’s desire to dominate nature.

Hong Lei

Hong Lei’s photograph After Zhao Ji’s loquat and birds (Song dynasty), 1999, is a poignant criticism of the corruption, favouritism and value manipulation in today’s Chinese art world, which he feels too often provides clichéd imagery of established Chinese themes and compositions for the Western art market.

In this work, Hong has appropriated the composition of a famous Song-dynasty painting in the bird and flower genre – often associated with harmony and nature – and deliberately disrupts the traditional arrangement by depicting a dead bird with a trickle of blood from its beak. Hong’s dead bird paintings are a refusal to offer what the Western audience wants from a Chinese painting. The lifeless bird’s body under the classical composition of loquats, expresses the artist’s resentment towards the ‘selling out’ of Chinese contemporary art to the West and his personal struggles with ‘manufactured Chineseness’ as part of his identity.

Xiao Lu

Xiao Lu is widely considered to be China’s first feminist performance artist and a member of China’s avant-garde art movement of the late 1980s. Her graduation work Dialogue, 1989, was selected for the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, in 1989. She rose to international fame during this exhibition after firing a gun into her work, an action ubiquitously referred to in the context of Chinese art history as ‘the first gunshots of Tiananmen’,¹Philip Wen, ‘25 years on, artist remembers ‘first gunshots of Tiananmen’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/world/25-years-on-artist-remembers-first-gunshots-of-tiananmen-20140530-zrspf.html>, date accessed 9 Nov. 2022. and ultimately led to the closure of the exhibition and her temporary arrest. Upon release, Xiao fled to Sydney and was later naturalised as an Australian citizen with 27,000 other Chinese immigrants seeking asylum in Australia after the Tiananmen Square student protests.

Calligraphy (shufa), the art of handwriting, is regarded in China as the highest form of visual art. Its artistic and expressive qualities are often independent of the meanings of the written word. Using only ink and water to create a dynamic and spontaneous expression onto paper, the association between black and white, dynamic and static, reflects the balance of yin and yang advocated by Taoism.

Xiao’s work One, 2015, printed 2017, is a powerful expression in the tradition of calligraphy. One is part of a series of performance works, videos and photographs, in which the artist uses ink and water as dominant mediums. In this work, produced during her performance at the art festival Live Action 10 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Xiao Lu used the exterior of her body as a site to combine yin and yang. The artist said: ‘Ink is yin, water is yang. Yin and yang combine to become one. The way of the universe’.²Xiao Lu, artist statement, <collection.sina.cn/yejie/2016-08-09/detail-ifxutfpc4865606.d.html>, date accessed 9 Nov. 2022. According to Taoist philosophy, the colour black (ink) is yin, the female element, while white (water) represents yang, the male. The work revealed the inherent tensions between this binary.

Her work follows a documented period of personal struggle in coming to terms with the process of ageing. During this period, she immersed herself in Chinese philosophical traditions, seeking relief through traditional Chinese medicine and establishing a daily calligraphic practice of transcribing Tang-dynasty poetry, which this work also references.

Chang Xugong

Auspicious symbols and customs are an integral part of Chinese ceremonial and everyday life. Chang Xugong, born in Tangshan, Hebei province, initially achieved recognition as an oil painter and after taking up residence in Beijing became associated with the Gaudy Art movement centred in the artistic enclave of Yuanmingyuan, near Beijing’s Old Summer Palace. Here, he began to produce textiles referencing the bright colours of folk art, such as embroidery and woodcuts that resulted in embroidered portraits presenting the dreams and good fortune that China’s economic boom promised during the 1990s and 2000s.

The two works by Chang Xugong are brightly coloured machine embroideries filled with traditional and contemporary symbolism representing ‘the good life’. One work displays a happy man smoking a cigarette in a heart-shaped frame with two celestial maidens holding signs reading ‘happiness everyday’ and ‘wealthy everyday’, and two fish symbolising abundance. The second work displays a female singer who is wearing a sleeveless white dress and holding a microphone. A fluffy lapdog, a Nescafé instant coffee satchel, a golf player and a white statue of Venus de Milo positioned with the written character for ‘wealth’, alludes to the desires and ideal lifestyle of China’s recently financially empowered urban dwellers.

Hai Bo

Investigating more recent post-communist revolution social stories, the contemporary photographer Hai Bo examines the mass social transition from the idealism of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to the pragmatism of everyday life of the 1990s. Expressing this period of sweeping social change that touched the lives of more than one billion Chinese people, Hai Bo uses studio portraits made during the Cultural Revolution and juxtaposes them with portraits of the same sitters photographed around the end of the twentieth century to chart the ageing process and the inexorable march of time.

They Series no 6, (They Recorded for The Future, 32), 1998, shows a black and white image of six boys wearing Mao suits taken in 1973. In counterpoint, the contemporary image is of the same group smiling and wearing clothing of their own choice, garments that would have been unthinkable and unattainable thirty years earlier.

They Series, (They Recorded for The Future, 31), 1999, shows a black and white image of sixteen teenage women wearing Mao suits and some with ponytail hairstyles, also taken in 1973. The contemporary image shows the same group smiling wearing all different clothes of their own choice, many with short hairstyles, twenty-six years later.

I am Chairman Mao’s Red Guard, 2000, shows a sepia black and white image of a young woman at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1968 proudly wearing her Red Guard uniform with a Chairman Mao badge and holding Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The Little Red Book). The photograph of the sitter as a Red Guard is contrasted with a contemporary image of the same sitter, now middle-aged, smiling and wearing a floral dress that reflects her individuality. These paired portraits serve to illustrate the cultural shifts that have occurred over this period as people who in their youth wore the uniform dress styles of the 1960s, became able to increasingly show their individual personalities.

Featuring the work of fourteen contemporary artists and designers, exhibited in dialogue with more than one hundred historical and mid-twentieth century works, China – The Past Is Present highlights the resonance of traditional and artistic practices in contemporary Chinese culture. Including works that span five millennia and an array of art forms, the exhibition creates an anachronistic discourse between the past and the present, allowing us to gain a greater knowledge of contemporary China through its traditions.

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