Group ponders creativity and context

FSYDNEY: Wang Zhiyuan, 43, first impressed me as a good driver.

Speeding at 110 kilometres per hour on the wavy Australian highways, the big van in which our team was riding felt smooth as an airplane on a silky journey.

Throughout the three-week-long press event entitled "Chinese Perspectives on the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games," Wang was merely our loyal chauffeur: careful, devoted, and patient.

But when I stood before his metal sculptures, featured in a group exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and when I glimpsed some of his earlier figure paintings in the collection of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Art Gallery, I understood that this ordinary looking man from North China's Tianjin was more than just a good driver.

Wang, a former printmaking graduate and teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is one of the most prominent Chinese contemporary artists now living in Australia.

He is part of a group of artists - including Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Xiao Xian, Shen Jiawei, Guo Jian and Zhang Dawo - who emigrated from China in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

They join Australia-born artists such as William Yang and Lindy Lee and Hong Kong-born artist John Young, who moved to Australia in 1967, to form the noteworthy community of Chinese-Australian artists.

Most of the artists are painters, sculptors, photographers and calligraphers who reside in metropolises like Sydney and Melbourne, where they can keep in closer touch with the mainstream Australian art world and major commercial galleries such as Sherman, Ray Hughes and Roslyn Oxley 9.

Although Chinese immigrants started to appear in Australia almost 150 years ago, the Chinese art community only began to flourish after the Australian Government ended its discriminatory White Australian Policy and advocated "multiculturalism" in the 1970s, according to John Clark, associate professor of art history and theory at the University of Sydney.

Once established, the community gained steam with the rise, since the 1980's, of China's status in the international arena. And, more recently, it has been bolstered by the brisk political, economic and cultural exchanges that have occurred between China and Australia, experts say.

"The current generation of Chinese-Australian artists make an important and vibrant contribution to Australian art, and to our multicultural cultural environment, along with immigrants from other Asian countries," said Susan Acret, editor of the Art AsiaPacific, an influential art magazine headquartered in Sydney.

"Their visibility has increased dramatically over the last 15 to 20 years, as Australia began to look to Asia in the early 1980s, instead of Europe, and as those who migrated here from around 1970 onwards began to contribute to and change the cultural landscape of Australia," Acret continued.

Through their impressive achievements in art, the Chinese artists bring in another perspective, which "offers Australians different views on life and art," as Sydney curator Melissa Chiu put it.

On the other hand, most of them have experienced years of hard struggle to establish themselves in a foreign and often challenging place.

Besides dealing with the always difficult prospect of making their livings as artists, most of this group have also had to overcome a large language barrier while trying to find new modes of artistic expression in a totally different cultural context.

After living in Sydney for 11 years, Wang Zhiyuan still feels awkward when he has to express himself verbally in English. "It was even worse when I first came without any background in English. Luckily, I can read smoothly now and there is not much chance to speak as a visual artist," said Wang, who is currently continuing his graduate study at the Sydney College of the Arts.

Beijing-born artist Guan Wei, 43, is possibly the most widely recognized Chinese artist living in Australia. He was the first Chinese individual accepted to hold a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, one of Australia's more important art venues.

Represented by the Sherman Galleries, Guan, whose striking oil and acrylic paintings present an interesting mixture of black humour and mysterious images, is one of the most successful Chinese artists in the local art market.

"But he started from nothing, no language and no money. For five years (since 1989), he sold nothing," said Gene Sherman, director of the Sherman Galleries in Sydney.
That sort of poverty is nearly unimaginable in a commercialized society like Australia's. As a result, many Chinese artists who were not able to make an immediate living from their art were forced to take other employment to generate an income, including painting portraits for tourists.

Another major problem facing Chinese artists, especially those who migrated to Australia in the early 1990s, is the fact that Australia has a different art scene and system from China, according to Chiu, curator of Gallery 4A.

4A is an initiative of the Asian Australian Artists Association Inc, a non-profit arts organization committed to promoting a broader awareness and dialogue between Australia and Asia - China in particular.

"I think it has taken a number of artists a long time to adjust to a new system that has different priorities and ways of measuring success," Chiu said.

Most artists from China, for instance, used to be trained in the realistic school of art, which stressed skillful techniques but often neglected the individuality of artists themselves.

Influenced by Western contemporary art, artists in Australia, however, focus more on the conceptual side of art, rather than figurative techniques.

Before they left China, most Chinese artists were used to working for State-run organizations where they depended more on the "iron rice bowl" than their creativity to survive.

After many years in Australia, the Chinese artists, most of them independent, care more about the art market and the importance of curators and critics - all decisive factors in their career.

"One of the most interesting aspects of Chinese artists in Australia at the moment is the way that they combine Australian and Chinese cultures in their work," Chiu noted.

Chiu's words were echoed by Jin Hua, a Beijing scholar now pursuing a Master's degree in arts administration at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in Sydney. Jin is a major organizer of the project "Chinese Perspective on the Sydney Olympic Games."

"These artists nurtured in China are in no way to separate themselves from their cultural root, considering that using oriental symbols has become a fashionable way of extending art space even for some local Australian artists," Jin said.

Jin cited Beijing-born artist Ah Xian, 40, as an example. The artist has been known for his porcelain busts series titled "China, China," which is physically related to China because it is made of Chinese materials but which is far from "Chinese" with its colours and patterning, according to Jin.

Sydney-based Lindy Lee is a first generation Australian, born in 1954 to Chinese parents who emigrated from Guangzhou to Brisbane in 1948.

A well-established woman painter, Lee has experienced the dilemma of "identity" in her work, which has led to the change of her artistic style in recent years.

"The issue of my being Chinese has only come up in the last few years and I would say that is because of the reconfiguration of Australian identity. Two aspects for me are being in a Eurocentric culture and coming from a Chinese racial background. Maybe at some stage the Chinese aspect of me will assert itself, but it will be a reclaiming," Lee said in an earlier interview.

Lee said her faith to reclaim her identity was strengthened by a four-month study and research programme in Beijing a few years ago. The influence of Chinese wash-ink techniques and calligraphy is apparent in her recent abstract works, which are quite different from her previous paintings, dominated with European images.

While most Chinese-Australian artists are enthusiastically stressing or reclaiming their identity as Chinese, Susan Acret argues that it seems more urgent for them to break into the mainstream of Australian art.

"Many Chinese artists continue to exhibit as a group, rather than being part of shows featuring artists from a range of ethnic backgrounds," Acret criticized. "However this situation is now changing," she added.

Date: 09/18/2000
Author: YANG YINGSHI, China Daily staff
Copyright? by China Dail

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