Explore the virtual tour above for I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, in partnership with the International Curators Forum (ICF) and Campbelltown Arts Centre, presents I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2 from 22 May – 10 October 2021. The exhibition considers the navigations, imaginings and lived experiences of six artists based in Australia, the UK and the Caribbean: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Lindy Lee, Leyla Stevens, Zadie Xa and Daniela Yohannes.
Curated by Adelaide Bannerman, Mikala Tai and Jessica Taylor, the exhibition is an ongoing project that explores the distinct and shared reality of living at a distance to ancestral homes. Belonging to a diaspora means that connection to these ancestral homes is often maintained through memories, myths and traditions. I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2 is as much an exhibition as it is a research project, underpinned by fieldwork and reviews of how artists, curators, theorists and institutions engage with diaspora as a topic.
Kashif Nadim Chaudry presents two sculptures, Hareem (2010) and Cabal (2020), which consider the cultural and social forces that inform his experiences as a gay man of Pakistani heritage in the UK. Lindy Lee explores the feelings of absence in the diaspora in the works Fire in the Immanence of Unfolding (2020), Fire and Dew (2020), and Quiescent Mind (2020), and the value of family photographs in Birth and Death (2002) and Twinning Through Jade Bamboo (2015). Daniela Yohannes also incorporates family photos into her collages a series of self-truths (2018), and offers a meditation on our relationships to ‘homelands’ in the film Atopias: I Have Left That Dark Cave Forever. My Body Has Blended With Hers (2019). Leyla Stevens’ photographic diptych Safe Passage (2013) and film Our Sea is Always Hungry (2018) interrogate what is seen and unseen in the Balinese landscape. Abdul-Rahman Abdullah exhibits two new sculptures, Buraq (2020) and Throne Room (2021), alongside Merantau (2016), all of which connect in different ways to his ancestry in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Zadie Xa’s large tapestry works Pilgrimage 2 Family Through the Portal of a Green Ghost (2019) and its counterpart Pilgrimage 2 Family Through the Portal of a Blue Ghost (2019) and film installation Child of Magohalmiand theEchoes of Creation (2019) imagine new worlds informed by Korean creation myths.
Access the Roomsheet for I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2
Front: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Merantau, 2016, carved and stained wood; commissioned by Art Gallery of South Australia; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art | Back: Robert Scott-Mitchell, Birth and Death, 2003, inkjet print and synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion books, variable dimensions | Photos: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; I am heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre; courtesy the artists.
Front: Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Hareem, 2010, papier mache, mod rock, recycled fabrics | Back: Leyla Stevens, Our Sea is Always Hungry, 2018, single channel video, stereo sound, 13:16 mins | Photos: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; I am heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre; courtesy the artists.
Lindy Lee, Quiescent Mind, 2020, Chinese ink, fire and rain, Fire in the Immanence of Unfolding, 2020, Chinese ink, fire and rain and Fire and Dew, 2020, Chinese ink, fire and rain; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2021; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.
Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo, A pilgrimage 2 family through the portal of a blue ghost, 2019, machine sewn and hand stitched bleached, dyed denim, iridescent fabric and oil on canvas; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; I am heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre; courtesy the artist.
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Throne Room, 2021, carved and painted wood; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and International Curators Forum; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; I am heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre; courtesy the artist [Moore Contemporary].
Daniela Yohannes, A Gathering of God’s Land, 2018, digital collage, I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2021; courtesy the artist.
Zadie Xa, Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation, live performance as part of Art Night London, 2019. Devised with and performed by Iris Chan, Jia-Yu Corti, Mary Feliciano, Jihye Kim and Yumino Seki, percussion: Jihye Kim, choreographed by Jia-Yu Corti and Yumino Seki. Image: Matt Row; I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2021; courtesy the artist.
Artist Biographies
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (b. Port Kembla, Australia 1977 lives and works in Perth, Australia) is a sculptor whose practice explores the different ways that memory can inhabit and emerge from familial spaces. Drawing on the narrative capacity of animal archetypes, crafted objects and the human presence, Abdullah aims to articulate physical dialogues between the natural world, politics and the agency of culture. Recent exhibitions include The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2019), Dark Horizons, Pataka Art + Museum, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand (2017) and Magic Object; Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Adelaide, Australia (2016).
Kashif Nadim Chaudry (b. Nottingham, United Kingdom 1976 lives and works in Nottingham, United Kingdom) is informed by his family heritage in tailoring which has influenced and focused his practice around the importance of materiality and craftsmanship. His work is characterised by the working, shaping and moulding of physical objects through the use of elaborate textile-based techniques to create monumental installations from fabric and found objects. Negotiating his identity as a British born gay man of Pakistani Muslim heritage much of Chaudry’s work questions how people choose to position themselves in the world. In relation, it is increasingly the sculptural and three-dimensional possibilities within his work that address the idea of positioning power, the sacred and the ceremonial. Recent exhibitions include What is Home at National Trust Croome Court, Worcester (2019),The Three Graces, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2016), and Swags & Tails as part of the Asia Triennial, Manchester, UK (2014).
Lindy Lee (b. Brisbane, Australia 1954 lives and works in Byron Bay, Australia) has an expansive practice that explores her Chinese ancestry through Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism – philosophies that see humanity and nature as inextricably linked. Symbolic gestures and processes that call on the element of chance are often used to produce a galaxy of images that embody the intimate connections between human existence and the cosmos. Rather than singular visual statements, they are thoughtful objects where meaning emerges from sustained meditation. Notable exhibitions include the major survey exhibition Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, Museum of Contemporary Art (2020-2021); the group exhibition Divided Worlds: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia (2018). Lindy Lee: The Dark of Absolute Freedom, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia (2014)
Leyla Stevens (b. Cooroy, Australia 1982, lives and works between Bali, Indonesia and Sydney, Australia) is an Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominantly within moving image and photography. Her practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters, transculturation and counter histories. Working within modes of representation that shift between the documentary and speculative fictions, her work deals with a notion of counter archives and alternative genealogies. In 2021, Leyla Stevens was awarded the 66th Blake Prize for her work Kidung/Lament. Recent exhibitions include her solo presentations Dua Dunia, curated by Rachel Ciesla, at PS Art Space, Perth Festival (2021), A Line in the Sea, West Space, Melbourne, PHOTO 21 Festival (2021), Their Sea is Always Hungry, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2019). Recent group exhibitions include The National 2021, Art Gallery of News South Wales (2021), Breathing Room (collaboration with Woven Kolektif), Cement Fondue, Sydney, Australia (2019), BEAUT 19, Brisbane & Elsewhere Art UnTriennial, Brisbane, Australia (2018) and the John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia (2018).
Zadie Xa (b. Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory 1983, lives and works in London, UK.) produces work informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest. Forces of distance and relation—familial, cultural, spiritual—shape her constantly evolving notions of self. Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for performance, protection or ceremony. Xa’s practice is highly collaborative, and she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers, musicians and actors. Since 2006, Xa has worked closely with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. Recent solo projects include, “Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers”, Remai Modern, Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of Métis, Saskatoon Canada (2020-21), “Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation”, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK (2020), Art Night London 2019 and “Meetings on Art” performance program for the 58th Venice Biennale 2019. Xa was one of the recipients of the Sobey Art Award in 2020, which for the first time was awarded to all 25 nominees.
Daniela Yohannes (b. 1982, lives and works in Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean) uses her own Ethiopian-Eritrean heritage as a lens in her work to reflect upon the racialised movement and conditional belonging of African diaspora. Through abstract portraiture and storytelling across multiple media, Yohannes explores the overlap of individual and collective subconscious and desire, and the destruction caused by displacement. Her work dwells on alternative Black realities, considering the bonds between herself, her family and other communities through magical symbolism. By embracing forms of hybridity and considering the artefacts of diaspora as a means of travel in themselves, she has built a dedicated interdimensional machine from emotionally charged objects.
CURATORS BIOS
Adelaide Bannerman (she/her) is a freelance curator from London. She works for International Curators Forum, arts and science commissioning agency, Invisible Dust and commercial gallery Tiwani Contemporary who exhibit and represent practitioners and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Covering curation, project management, mentoring and consultation, Bannerman has been practising for 22 years, producing commissions, exhibitions, events and learning. Institutions that she’s worked for include: Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art), Autograph ABP, Arts Council England, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Tate, Live Art Development Agency, South London Gallery, Platform London, and the 198 Gallery. She initiated the research residency programme, Never Done in 2018, and is a trustee of Idle Women, Lancashire, UK and PUBLICS, Helsinki, Finland.
Mikala Tai is a curator, researcher and academic specialising in Australian and Asian art and is currently the Head of Visual Arts at the Australia Council for the Arts. Most recently she was the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art where she collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Recent curatorial projects include ‘Nusra Latif Qureshi: Strategies of Intent’ (2019), ‘Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue’ (2019) co-curated with Claire Roberts and Xu Hong and ‘Justine Youssef: All Blessings, All Curses’ (2018).
She has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at Monash University, Melbourne University and Royal Melbourne Institute for Technology and regularly contributes to publications and catalogues such as ‘Abdul-Rahman Abdullah: Everything is True’ (John Curtin Gallery, 2021), ‘She Persists’ (NGV, 2020), Ocula, Art Collector, Art Monthly, Vault and Photofile. In 2015 she received her PhD from UNSW Art & Design examining the influence of the Global City on China’s local art infrastructure.
Jessica Taylor is a Barbadian curator and producer based in London. As the Head of Programmes of ICF, Jessica managed the ‘Beyond the Frame’ and ‘Diaspora Pavilion’ professional development programmes, and co-curated the ‘Diaspora Pavilion’ exhibitions in Venice and Wolverhampton. She has co-curated film and performance programmes such as ‘Migrating Cities’ as part of the Spark Festival in Hong Kong, ‘Sensational Bodies’ as part of the Jerwood Staging Series, and ‘Monster and Island’ with artist Sheena Rose at the Royal Academy London. Jessica also produced the exhibition ‘Arrivants: Art and Migration in the Anglophone Caribbean World’ at the Barbados Museum and the multi-site programme ‘Curating the International Diaspora’ in Sharjah, Barbados and Martinique. Jessica’s curatorial practice stems from an interest in testing and developing contemporary exhibition models for exploring matters of cultural contact and exchange, migration and movement, and transnationalism. She received a BA in Art History and Philosophy from McGill University in Montreal and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London, the dissertation for which is part of an ongoing research project on the development of national art institutions in the English-speaking Caribbean. Her research at the RCA was linked to her work around collections and archives at the Barbados Museum, which aims to underscore both the continued relevance and renewed tasks of national art institutions, as well as the importance of constantly re-developing infrastructures to support and complicate local, regional and global narratives around national identity.
I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2 is presented in partnership with International Curators Forum and with support from Outset. This project has been supported by The British Council.
Panel discussion with Marcus Whale, Jane Fan and Marco Rinaldi, moderated by Con Gerakaris.
As 4A Digital logs off for another year, join artists Marcus Whale and Jane Fan for a panel discussion with co-curators Marco Rinaldi (Curatorial Assistant, supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation) and Con Gerakaris (4A, Curatorial Program Manager), hosted by Prof. Paul Gladston, Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales.
This panel discussion will look back upon the ten newly-commissioned artworks created for 4A Digital 2021, exploring the methodologies of creating work for digital engagement, curating online spaces and expand upon themes of online communities and new approaches to media. Extrapolating on Marcus Whale’s inaugural piece, each 4a Digital project acted as a gateway into a virtual realm of artistic discovery into self-identity, investigations of social media and online experiences, often reflecting back upon our physical world.
Speaker biographies
Marcus Whale lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. His work across music, performance and text focuses on the blurry intersection between desire and religion, often with reference to the poetics of memory and ghostliness. These works often stage encounters between camp performance styles and the heightened drama of traditional mythology, scripture and liturgy.
Recent performance works, including Praise! (with Eugene Choi) and the Lucifer series (with Athena Thebus & Chloe Corkran), have been presented by Sydney Opera House, Asia Topa, Next Wave, Performance Space, Sydney Contemporary, Sugar Mountain Festival, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Underbelly Arts Festival and Art Month Sydney.
Jane Fan is a software engineer and digital artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her works span a variety of mediums including illustration, 3D computer graphics, generative and interactive art. She employs web and game technologies to create her works, assisted by webcams, 3D cameras and microphones if they are interactive. Her artworks tend to have cyberpunk and algorithmic aesthetics, concerned with current and future implications of emerging technologies.
Marco Rinaldi is a creative director, installation artist and curator undertaking a Master’s in Art Curation at UNSW. Coming from an undergraduate degree in Interior Design, his creative practice is focused on areas of spatial immersion and human perception. As the director of Sydney based collaborative project osmosis, he is curating a series of immersive installations that explore the relationship between colour, sound, space and emotion.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is elated to launch a new-look format to celebrate our tenth milestone issue of 4A Papers.
Released in October 2021, 4A Papers: Issue 10 is edited by Mariam Arcilla and presents timely contributions from Matt Chun, Green Papaya Art Projects, Hugh Hudson, Leora Joy Jones, and Annette An-Jen Liu. In this edition, we consider the maxims of loanword languages, planetary care, cultural meritocracy, familial lineage, and archival custodianship.
4A Papers captures the currency of ideas and movements in Australia and the Asia region. From critical essays, reviews and dialogues, to hypertexts, travelogues and autotheory, 4A Papers chronicles the cultural transformers of our time.
This spring download is Kashif Nadim Chaudry’s 4A KIDS Kit ‘Colourful Patterns.’ As an artist living and working in Nottingham (UK) with family heritage in tailoring, Nadim’s sculptural work uses perspectives, patterns and colours.
In this edition of 4A KIDS, dive headfirst into DIY techniques of creating a symmetrical pattern and learn how to create a lively and beautiful design!
This 4A KIDS activity was developed by Kashif Nadim Chaudry. The artist was a part of the exhibition program I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the International Curators Forum in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre.
ASMR | ENDLESS BUTTERFLY KISSESis a generative ASMR experience in which 15 butterflies flutter in and out of audibility. Made as a companion piece to Akil’s recent online game Sonata in b minor for unity, the game reuses the programmed behaviour of the butterflies that self-generate new trajectories every time they reach their destination. While in the previous game the butterflies appear as silent evanescent sprites, this iteration renders them physically present; the flutter of their wings amplified into focus.
Following Akil’s interest in the therapeutic uses of online ASMR role-play videos, this work functions as an experiment that extrapolates a single aural motif into an endlessly evolving listening experience.
Game Programming by Ben Barnes.
Click to enable sound.
Akil Ahamat’s work across video, sound, performance, installation and games considers the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Driven particularly by their research into the use of ASMR in online spaces as a self-administered therapeutic tool, Akil translates its restorative effects into intimate audio experiences in the public space of the gallery. Translated further back into online experiences in recent work, these aesthetics are used to sensorially reproduce core questions about listening and relating.
Akil has most recently produced online works for Parramatta Artist Studios, Sydney Review of Books, Bleed: Biennial Live Event in the EverydayDigital, and PACT, Erskineville. They have most recently exhibited physically at Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Monash University Museum of Art, Artspace, Verge Gallery and UTS ART. Akil was shortlisted for the NSW Visual Arts Emerging Emerging Fellowship (2020) and the winner of the John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2018).
ASMR | ENDLESS BUTTERFLY KISSES is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
Panel discussion with Dr Wen-Hsi Harman, Ruth Ju-Shih Li, Jody Rallah, Bridie Moran, Professor Yu-Chieh Li, moderated by Professor Paul Gladston (UNSW)
A transcript will be available soon
Join artists exhibiting in 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s touring project Drawn by stones – Dr Wen-Hsi Harman, Ruth Ju-Shih Li, Jody Rallah – along with exhibition curator Bridie Moran, Professor Yu-chieh Li of the Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and moderator UNSW Art & Design’s Professor Paul Gladston, to discuss how clay can be a means of connecting to culture, land and identity – and challenging these concepts.
From July – September 2021, Drawn by stones is being staged at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick on sovereign Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land. The exhibition brings together artists who utilise the ceramic medium to interrogate contested histories, stolen land, Indigenous sovereignty, and concepts of national identity. Exhibiting artists from Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan investigate the creation of a sense of ‘nationhood’ and ownership through ceramics and demonstrate how the ceramic form can both memorialise and tell alternative histories. Using the works within the Drawn by stones exhibition as an entry point into this dialogue, speakers will explore a range of ideas and relate their own experiences in the practice and consideration of ceramic tradition, materials and objects.
4A’s talks series invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts, academia, journalism and related fields. Presented in partnership with UNSW Art & Design and Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, this special edition of 4A Talks allows 4A partner with UNSW to include the voices of researchers in our artistic dialogue; and with exhibition partner Counihan Gallery, we are pleased to digitally connect with Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands including an introduction from Gallery Curator Victor Griss for this special event.
Speaker biographies
Ruth Ju-Shih Li is a ceramic artist generally working between Australia, China and Taiwan. She explores different ways of narrating both traditional and multicultural concepts of beauty, transcendence and the sublime. Li draws from her diverse philosophical and cultural heritage, and from the language of dreams, myths and utopias. A recurring motif is her meditation on the fragile nature of self in relation to the paradoxes of time, life, death and spirituality, extending onwards to consider the transitory nature of the human condition. Li has exhibited internationally in Taiwan, South Korea, China, Thailand, Turkey and Australia.
Jody Rallah is a descendant of the Biri Gubba, Yuggera and Warangu peoples. Rallah is an emerging contemporary Indigenous Australian Artist based in the unceded lands of Yuggera language nation, Brisbane. She employs a concept-led interdisciplinary practice which investigates how celebrating cultural wealth by creating ‘knowledge vessels’ as embodiments of living histories ranging from sculptural installations, to painting and performance, can generate ancestral healing. Her practice addresses living histories as vessels embedded in materiality, investigating how haptic processes of making can be used to create conversations spanning between generations; connecting community throughout the generations and opening dialogues of cultural exchange for hopefully futures.
Wen-Hsi 文曦 Harman was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and is a ceramic artist currently living and working in Bristol, United Kingdom. She also is a member of the UNESCO-International Academy of Ceramics IAC and NCECA National Council on Education for the ceramic arts. Wen-Hsi studied her BA in Chinese Literature at the Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan (2006). After this she studied her first MA in Chinese History of art in the National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan (2008). After this she studied her second MA in Contemporary Crafts (Ceramics) at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK (2010). She has been awarded the degree of the Doctor of Philosophy in ceramics at Bath Spa University, UK (2018). Wen-Hsi has exhibited her work internationally in Taiwan, South Korea, Britain, Germany, France, China, Denmark and Australia.
Bridie Moran is an arts manager, editor and curator, working across unceded Awabakal and Gadigal lands. Bridie has worked for over a decade with contemporary art and cultural organisations, and is a current PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design, researching the history of craft policy and ceramics practice. Bridie is Project Curator and Stakeholder Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, delivering the major touring exhibition project Drawn by stones in 2021 and 2022; and is the Assistant Editor of The Journal of Australian Ceramics. Bridie has delivered a range of exhibitions, programs, public art projects and publications across Australia and the Asia region, and was from 2017-2018 Board Director at Sydney artist-run initiative Firstdraft.
Yu-Chieh Li is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. She has held research positions at UNSW Art and Design, Tate Research Centre: Asia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Li’s research engages with aesthetics of performance art in Asia and postcolonial discourses. Her publications appear in Third Text, World Art, and the MoMA’s art platform “post: notes on art in a global context,” with an edited volume Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles recently published by Routledge (co-edited with Midori Yamamura). Currently she is working on a book project examining affect and the artistic autonomy of post-socialist China.
Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham (2015-2018) and, prior to that, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham (2010-2015) and inaugural Head of the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China (2005-2010). Paul has written extensively on contemporary art and culture with respect to the concerns of critical/cultural theory. His numerous book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), awarded ‘best publication’ at the Awards of Art China (2015), and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an academic adviser to the internationally-acclaimed exhibition ‘Art of Change: New Directions from China’, Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre, London (2012), and co-curator—with Dr Lynne Howarth-Gladston—of the exhibitions, ‘Dis/Continuing Traditions; Contemporary Video Art from China’, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania (2021) and ‘New China/New Art: Contemporary Video from Shanghai and Hangzhou’, Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham (2015).
This event will feature a Welcome to Country to Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands, and an introduction to Counihan Gallery, Brunswick from Curator Victor Griss
Victor Griss is the Gallery Curator at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick. Leading a small, committed team for over 7 years, Victor has overseen the expansion and upgrade of the gallery, delivered an engaged annual exhibition program, led a new five-year gallery strategic plan, fostered relationships with the local arts community and public gallery sector, and developed the Moreland Art Collection. He previously held collections, curatorial and managerial roles at Deakin University Art Gallery. Victor holds a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts (Museums and Collections) from the Australian National University and an Honours degree in Visual Art from Northern Territory University. He was awarded a Post Graduate Scholarship from the National Museum of Australia and has previously been a board member of The City of Whitehorse Visual Arts Committee, the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and The School of Art Advisory Committee, RMIT.
This event is presented in partnership with: UNSW Art & Design, Counihan Gallery in Brunswick, Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office Sydney
Panel discussion with Yuko Hasegawa, Yuki Okumura and Jesse Hogan, moderated by Prof. Paul Gladston
Join artist and academic Jesse Hogan, Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and professor in Curatorial Studies, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts Yuko Hasegawa and artist Yuki Okumura for a discussion moderated by Prof. Paul Gladston, Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales.
Yuko Hasegawa | 長谷川 祐子 is a curator, academic, writer, arts and cultural worker and current Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and professor in Curatorial Studies, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Hasegawa’s previous roles include Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016–2021), Curator of the 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), 11th Sharjah Biennale (2013), Co-Curator of 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), and Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial (2001). From 1999 to 2006, as Chief Curator and then Artistic Director, Hasegawa contributed significantly to the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa as a model for a new kind of “open 21st-century art museum” via her involvement in development of the museum’s concept, design of the museum building in collaboration with architectural unit SANAA, and building of the collection.
Inspired by the peculiar subjectivity of the translator, Yuki Okumura | 奥村 雄樹 explores the essential parallelity of worlds and the primary interconnectedness between individuals through overlaps and gaps amongst different artists, often including himself, in terms of work and/or life. As of September 2021, Okumura is appointed as a PhD researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp to perform a quadrennial project titled Any Body, My Self: Conceptual Art and Personhood, which rediscovers the methodology of conceptual artists of the ’60s and ’70s to reduce their personality to the limit as a program with potential double effects: simultaneously towards revealing one’s ‘corporeal self’ and regaining the state of ‘self-other unity’.
Jesse Hogan | ホーガン・ジェシー is a writer and contemporary artist originating from Sydney. Hogan works across multiple mediums with a particular interest in art spaces as critical sites of spatial, cultural, aesthetic, and socio-political development. Understanding the exhibition conditions as non-neutral, Hogan plays with a host of artistic practices that engage with installation as a complex topography of art language and connection. He has completed a Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts (2020), a Masters of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts (2017), A Masters of Art Education at the University of Western Sydney (2009), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Sydney College of the Arts (2005).
Prof. Paul Gladston | ポール・グラッドストン教授 is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales and was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. Paul has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with regard to the concerns of critical theory and, in doing so, has been formative on the development of a critically informed contemporary Chinese art studies both internationally and inside China. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), which received ‘publication of the year’ at the Awards of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2014 to 2017 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.
Presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney and UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
A thousand blades slice through the air, their cacophony reverberating around the room, bouncing off walls and colliding with themselves. The room, thick with heat, vibrates as messages gleam back and forth through a colossal undersea of cables, ricocheting off satellites that float in a vacuum. A glacial shelf collapses into the sea. $DogeCoin is trending. The world’s largest bonfire – an incomprehensibly large inferno; billions of people circling around it endlessly; NASCAR at the Kaaba, each one going a different direction.
The call to prayer plays while children learn a new dance. The border conflict between China and India intensifies. You have been committing microaggressions your whole life without knowing. You drag your finger across the glass.
The exploration of virtual space is not unlike walking through an infinite hallway. A procession through endless messages that confirm, contradict, and confound each other. Any stop offers only temporary respite you’re gestured towards the portal further down the rabbit hole – ‘If you liked that, then you’ll love this’. Digital pilgrimage is laden with intensity, absurdity, and banality.
This is Electric Dirge. A reverie mourning itself as it celebrates its own rebirth. All occurring simultaneously.
Forever twirling towards freedom.
Rel Pham is an designer, animator, illustrator and painter originally from Sydney, Australia but now residing in Melbourne. Known for a strong use of electric, vibrant colours and a penchant for surrealism. His work combines and contrasts old and new mythology. Whether through surreal portraits or paintings of monoliths, computers and objects that look like alien still lifes. Each piece explores culture and tradition, juxtaposing old world fables and rituals with new stories and ideas.
Electronic Dirge is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
Join us for a free online artist talk series to coincide with the exhibition I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2. Facilitated by co-curator Mikala Tai, these creative conversations invite audiences to watch or listen in over lunchtime breaks.
Program
25 August, 12:30-1:00 pm AEST – Abdul-Rahman Abdullah
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, in partnership with the International Curators Forum (ICF) and Campbelltown Arts Centre, presents I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2 from 22 May – 10 October 2021, with the virtual tour closing on 18 October. The virtual exhibition considers the navigations, imaginings and lived experiences of six artists based in Australia, the UK and the Caribbean: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Lindy Lee, Leyla Stevens, Zadie Xa and Daniela Yohannes.
Curated by Adelaide Bannerman, Mikala Tai and Jessica Taylor, the exhibition is an ongoing project that explores the distinct and shared reality of living at a distance to ancestral homes. Belonging to a diaspora means that connection to these ancestral homes is often maintained through memories, myths and traditions. I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2 is as much an exhibition as it is a research project, underpinned by fieldwork and reviews of how artists, curators, theorists and institutions engage with diaspora as a topic.
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (b. Port Kembla, Australia 1977 lives and works in Perth, Australia) is a sculptor whose practice explores the different ways that memory can inhabit and emerge from familial spaces. Drawing on the narrative capacity of animal archetypes, crafted objects and the human presence, Abdullah aims to articulate physical dialogues between the natural world, politics and the agency of culture. Recent exhibitions include The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2019), Dark Horizons, Pataka Art + Museum, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand (2017) and Magic Object; Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Adelaide, Australia (2016).
Leyla Stevens (b. Cooroy, Australia 1982, lives and works between Bali, Indonesia and Sydney, Australia) is an Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominantly within moving image and photography. Her practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters, transculturation and counter histories. Working within modes of representation that shift between the documentary and speculative fictions, her work deals with a notion of counter archives and alternative genealogies. In 2021, Leyla Stevens was awarded the 66th Blake Prize for her work Kidung/Lament. Recent exhibitions include her solo presentations Dua Dunia, curated by Rachel Ciesla, at PS Art Space, Perth Festival (2021), A Line in the Sea, West Space, Melbourne, PHOTO 21 Festival (2021), Their Sea is Always Hungry, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2019). Recent group exhibitions include The National 2021, Art Gallery of News South Wales (2021), Breathing Room (collaboration with Woven Kolektif), Cement Fondue, Sydney, Australia (2019), BEAUT 19, Brisbane & Elsewhere Art UnTriennial, Brisbane, Australia (2018) and the John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia (2018).
Mikala Tai is a curator, researcher and academic specialising in Australian and Asian art and is currently the Head of Visual Arts at the Australia Council for the Arts. Most recently she was the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art where she collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Recent curatorial projects include ‘Nusra Latif Qureshi: Strategies of Intent’ (2019), ‘Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue’ (2019) co-curated with Claire Roberts and Xu Hong and ‘Justine Youssef: All Blessings, All Curses’ (2018). She has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at Monash University, Melbourne University and Royal Melbourne Institute for Technology and regularly contributes to publications and catalogues such as ‘Abdul-Rahman Abdullah: Everything is True’ (John Curtin Gallery, 2021), ‘She Persists’ (NGV, 2020), Ocula, Art Collector, Art Monthly, Vault and Photofile. In 2015 she received her PhD from UNSW Art & Design examining the influence of the Global City on China’s local art infrastructure.
TextaQueen is the inaugural recipient of the CAP $80,000 commission presented by Copyright Agency and A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Copyright Agency are elated to announce TextaQueen as the recipient of the inaugural CAP (Copyright Agency Partnerships) commission.
In April 2021, the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund announced the launch of the CAP three-year commission series in partnership with leading Australian arts institutions 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne), and the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), to support mid-career and established visual artists with an $80,000 artistic commission and solo exhibition opportunity. As the inaugural partner organisation in the CAP series, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will champion the development of TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’t project, culminating in a significant solo show across two floors of 4A’s Haymarket gallery.
Copyright Agency CEO Adam Suckling says, “We are incredibly excited about CAP and the establishment of this competitive commission that will offer vital mentoring and financial support to artists such as TextaQueen. The commission will afford them the time and space to create, as well as supporting them with appropriate resources to ensure their work is curated and, importantly, exhibited and promoted to Australian audiences.”
“Through this commission, my work will be able to reflect on and celebrate queer South Asian diaspora on a literally huge scale,” says TextaQueen. This project has decolonial motivations and being awarded this opportunity with 4A reflects global shifts started by grassroots Black and Indigenous led movements. I’m honoured to have this support to creatively contribute to important conversations happening beyond the arts, and within.”
In discussing their work, TextaQueen says, “Bollywouldn’t is a catchphrase decolonised; it is an imagining of utopia and reclamation of power. This work is an energetic offering that will inspire us South Asians to think about our relationship with the white gaze, how each of us can anchor in our subtext or prejudice and what we can do to dissolve it.”
TextaQueen’s commission will be created as small works on paper of queer and trans South Asians reclaiming the Bollywood movie poster format, based on portrait sessions whilst on residency at ACME, London. These portraits will be projection-mapped onto photographs, to create the illusion that they exist as actual murals that intervene with colonial structures and sites. It will be presented at 4A’s Haymarket, Sydney gallery on an epic scale.
“This idea is influenced by the experience of the pandemic, living life through the simulation of the digital screen as well as anticolonial, abolitionist, and Black Lives Matter movements, and the dethroning of colonial statues and reclaiming of colonial sites. The use of projection mapping and documenting in the gallery expands my practice into murals and contemplates the impact of images outside of institutions,” says TextaQueen.
To create Bollywouldn’tperformances, TextaQueen will engage four trans and queer South Asians to interact with the works and projections in the exhibition. The performances will interpret the Bollywood genre in queer and decolonial ways, reclaiming colonial space and asserting identities usually marginalised.
4A’s Artistic Director/CEO Amrit Gill is elated to present TextaQueen’s work. “TextaQueen’s work is influenced through their lived experience as a person of South Asian heritage, and we’re privileged to be able to support them in the creation of their visionary work through this notable commission,” says Ms Gill. “Our organisation has been a leader in Asian contemporary art in Australia since 1996, and this opportunity with TextaQueen is significant, as their work makes invaluable cultural contributions with comments on broader structural contexts and representations of marginalised identities.”
“The CAP commission echoes my constant intentions of connecting with community and using texta as a mechanism to bring people together,” says TextaQueen.
TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’texhibition will be shown at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in late 2022.
For more information or media images, please access this folder or contact Mariam Arcilla, 4A Engagement & Development Manager via mariam.arcilla@4A.com.au.
About the artist:
For over twenty years, TextaQueen has been known for using the humble fibre-tip marker to draw out complex politics of gender, race, sexuality and identity in detailed portraiture. They create in collaborative processes with other diasporic people whilst examining their own existence living on others’ ancestral lands to unweave the impact of cultural and colonial legacies, and the influences of visual and popular culture on personal identity. Beyond works on paper, their practice expands to photography, painting, curating, video, printmaking, performance, self-publishing, writing and murals.
They are a queer, disabled, non-binary Goan Indian, living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, in so-called Melbourne, Australia. TextaQueen’s work is held in collections at Artbank Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Patrick Corrigan Collection, Monash University Museum Art, National Gallery of Victoria, University of Queensland, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, and National Portrait Gallery of Australia.
Wishis an interactive audiovisual website which emulates the experiences of yearning for honesty, earnestness and intimacy on the internet. This artwork acts a response to Marcus Whale’s and Craig Stubb-Race’s Optic; where their work explores the ideas of identity and self discovery through screens as a slick, highly sensual experience, Wish is a hopeful dissection of the internet as a tool for expressing one’s self through vulnerability and tenderness. Drawing influences from early 2000’s tech aesthetics, Asian UI design, Super Mario Galaxy, Animal Crossing, Virtual Self, and the work of Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi, this work is an attempt to reframe the internet as a method of tracking human desires and hopes.
When users land on the website, they will be introduced to a starry night sky. Occasionally, glowing neon stars will tumble through the screen. Users will be prompted by a text box to enter their wish. As users type in their wish, sparse and cascading piano plays in the background, grounding them in the contemplative nature of the experience. When the wish has been submitted, stars will begin shooting through the sky, signalling their wish has been sent into the aether. In a section called the Wishing Tree, users can see wishes of others, displayed anonymously on rectangular tags, drawing reference to the custom of tying wishes to trees during the Tanabata festival.
Alvin Ruiyuan Zhong is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist working across illustration, projection art and CGI. His work often invokes feelings of nostalgia, wonder and child-like joy. He brings aboard a sense of schoolyard antics into his art-making, often blending the aesthetics of hyper-masculine rave culture and the saccharine cuteness in kawaii culture to investigate his surroundings.
Wish is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
This winter holidays download Sweet and Sour Group’s 4A KIDS Kit ‘Sharing Stories with Sweet and Sour.’ A collective focused on providing a voice for Asian-Australians, the members love creating, collecting and sharing stories to let readers know about different experiences and ways of living. In this 4A KIDS edition, dive headfirst into DIY techniques of folding, binding, and learn how to tell stories through zines!
This 4A KIDS activity was developed by Yvonne Yong and Chin-Jie Melodie Liu from Sweet and Sour Group. The collective were a part of the exhibition program ‘Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus,’ an initiative by Diversity Arts Australia supported by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Sail, Sail, for a Shared Myth is a generative text work that plays with the pirate as the bastard agent of the seas and the web. As figures with a rich inventory of language and materiality, their mythos becomes a means to reimagine our digital terrain.
Taking seed text written and generated with reference to the language of pirate and web speak, the interaction steals and scrambles to generate an infinite counterfeit myth.
Sail forth, in collaboration with the browser!
Sail, Sail, for a Shared Myth is best experienced on a desktop.
Janey Li is a designer and creative coder interested in the margins of possibility. Her work plays with collaborative technologies to strategise for new myths of body and space. You can see more of her work at janeyli.com.
I pay my respects to the traditional owners of the Land, Skies and Waters on which this work was created, the Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation, and all those it may reach.
Sail, Sail, for a Shared Myth is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
Azadeh Hamzeii presents new work commissioned by Metro Arts in association with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
With a focus on the dialogues between the individual and the universal, Azadeh Hamzeii mines her personal history and cultural background as an Iranian based in Meanjin (Brisbane).
Hamzeii draws from a range of subjects and materials including votive offerings, beeswax, fishing hooks, her father’s old film negatives, and Keffiyeh, to investigate the localised significance of objects and the potential to elevate their meaning, creating a broader human narrative.
This exhibition is presented in 2021 at Metro Arts, in collaboration with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Supported by City of Sydney and Create NSW
Azadeh Hamzeii: A Tool is a Tool was commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in collaboration with Metro Arts in 2020 for 4A Digital.
Artist Biography:
With a focus on the dialogues between the individual and the universal, Azadeh Hamzeii mines her personal history and cultural background as an Iranian based in Meanjin (Brisbane). Drawing from a range of subjects and materials including votive offerings, beeswax, fishing hooks, her father’s old film negatives and Keffiyeh, Hamzeii investigates the localised significance of objects and the potential to elevate their meaning, creating a broader human narrative. She is alumni of Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, held a Bachelor of Fine Arts majored in Interdisciplinary Sculpture Making and a Diploma of Photography from Tehran University, Fine Arts Department.
OFF THE PAGE: DESIGN, ILLUSTRATION AND AUTHORSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY COMICS
SATURDAY 3 JULY | 12PM – 1PM
ONLINE
Panel discussion with Jin Hien Lau, Meg O’Shea and W. Chew Chan, moderated by curator Con Gerakaris. Held as part of Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus (Part 2).
Join exhibiting artist Jin Hien Lau, independent comics author Meg O’Shea and professional comic book and storyboard artist W. Chew Chan for a Zoom panel discussion moderated by 4A Curatorial Program Manager Con Gerakaris.
Using Jin Hien Lau’s comic Train of Thought as a launching point, Chewie Chan, Jin Hien Lau and Meg O’Shea discuss the language and techniques of visual storytelling in comics. This dialogue examines autobiographical writing and monologue-style narratives with attention paid to compositional methods to manage the pace and readability of story and drama. The speakers highlight differences between the professional commercial practice of Chewie and the independent, solo work of Jin and Meg and how this affects the contemporary culture and industry of comics.
Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not a Virus (Part 2) is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Diversity Arts Australia and is part of the I Am Not A Virus project. Supported by Australia Council, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Inner West Council.
Speaker Biographies
A proponent of the values of narrative across all forms of media and practices, Jin Hien Lau believes that in order to tell a good story, you must listen to a thousand better ones from everyone and everywhere first. Based in Sydney but a frequent collaborator on projects across Asia, Jin has applied his craft to fields ranging from prints, comics, illustrations and animation.
Meg O’Shea is an Ignatz Award-nominated, Korean adoptee maker of comics and pictures based in Sydney, Australia (Gadigal and Wangal land). She makes largely autobiographical work that has featured on websites such as The Nib, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s 2020 4A Digital, and in a number of print publications including the Eisner Award-winning anthology Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment and Survival, edited by Diane Noomin.
She has spent the past two years in Korea undertaking research for a longform comic project, before returning to Australia this year.
By day, mild mannered W. Chew “Chewie” Chan provides storyboards and concept art for such movies like the Academy Award winning Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road and Superman Returns and drawing such comic books and characters like Iron Man, The Phantom and Cthulhu Tales.
But in times of need, he dons his alter ego to become the Comics Consultant! His clients include major movie studios like Warner Bros. (Justice League: Mortal), See Pictures (The Little Death), SBS (The Boat), Kinokuniya Bookstores and is a much sought after lecturer/analyst (UTS Masters of Animation, Sydney Writer’s Festival, Books+Publishing).
Update: 17 July, 2021
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is committed to protecting the health and safety of our community and staff by helping to minimise the spread of COVID.
In line with NSW Health’s recent announcement with Sydney lockdown regulations, we have made the difficult decision to postpone Honey Point X CLUB 4A on Saturday 14 August.
We will update the public and ticket-holders once we’re able to publicly announce a new date for Honey Point X CLUB 4A later this year. Current ticket-holders will be notified, with refunds available within 7 days of reply. For any enquiries, please contact 4A on hello[@]4A.com.au
– From the 4A Team
Curated by 4A in collaboration with Honey Point, CLUB 4A in 2021 will see some of the city’s most magnetic Asian Australian talent in the dance music and performance community. This collaboration is a manifestation of what many of us have been deprived of: intimacy and celebration of bodies in motion.
Blending global club sounds that are urgent and forward thinking, Naarm-based C.Frim will grace audiences with her fearless and boundary pushing drum-driven cuts. Co-headlining the event is up-and-coming Korean hip-hop act 1300, known for their energetic, infectious and hard-hitting performances.
Honey Point x CLUB 4Awill also showcase music from Kenyan-Australian artist and co-founder of ANTE, Kiminza, whose warm and considered stylings explore QTIPOC past, present and future in their multiple and interwoven forms. Club chameleon Jhassic will be serving Regal Realness weaving his fine layering of Southeast Asian sounds, RnB, house and hip hop. Gamilaraay woman crescendoll, a graduate of FBi’s 2020 Dance Class program, flirts with juke, jersey, bounce and club in her sets.
Gluing the music together are Honey Point residents Dame and Deepa – collectively known as Sydney’s jazzy sweethearts. As the host of Saturday Sunsets, Deepa is known for her weaponising oddball selections that are often leftfield, but always hot and dangerous. Dame doesn’t know how to follow rules; constantly pushing boundaries and throwing audiences off with her unique layering of styles; watch for the flick of her wrists. Together their DJing is totally infectious.
Honey Point x CLUB 4A will also feature memorable performances from artists Radha, Ramashon and RED REY, moving in tandem with DJ sets throughout the evening.
Honey Point x CLUB 4A will amplify your senses by bringing visual art into the club featuring luminous works by Kalanjay Dhir and Athena Thebus, and live visuals courtesy of Alvin Ruiyuan Zhong.
Poster design and event art created by Bobby Vibe Positive.
This event is supported by Create NSW. In the event of a Covid-19 lockdown, all ticket sales will be refunded.
Artist Biographies
SOUND ARTISTS:
1300 subverts expectations of what it means to be a Korean rap crew. Founded in a garage in Sydney’s west, 1300 are a five-member crew formed by multi-talented friends Nerdie, Rako, PokariSweat, Goyo and Dali Hart. Their latest single ‘No Caller iD’ received praise from both the Aussie and Korean scene for it’s refreshing take on hip-hop. The group’s style is honest, exciting and eclectic, representative of a deep connection with their upbringing as Korean-Australians with varying tastes in music. 1300 thrives as a self-sustaining creative entity with an exhilarating live energy. Above all, the goal is to connect with a community of like-minded individuals and champion creative freedom.
C.Frim bellows a massive sound, spinning drum-driven cuts that step, bounce, sway and shuffle. As a DJ, she draws from her own singular blueprint – with taste shaped by her perspective as a member of the Ghanaian-Filipina diaspora, growing up on a healthy diet of hybridized musical styles, ripping tracks of youtube as a teenager, and watching jerk and dougie videos. C.Frim blends global club sounds that are urgent and forward-thinking, while evoking deep feelings of nostalgia. Her eclecticism reflects an artist and DJ with a confidence in vision and a desire to keep pushing boundaries, collapsing walls between cultural silos and championing her own refreshingly distinct style.
Gamilaraay woman and Danny L Harle enthusiast, crescendoll loves big beats and bigger sax solos. A grad of FBi’s 2020 Dance Class program, she flirts with juke, jersey, bounce and club. She’s a lawyer by day and plays way too much netball by night. You’ve probably seen her at gigs before – come say hi, she doesn’t bite.
Producer/DJ/artist and club kameleon – Jhassic finds the common ground between chunky Chicago house and rap, all while weaving traditional South Asian instrumentation throughout. What comes from his careful curation is an eclectic sound infused with familiar beats, historical documents and loads of energy.
Kiminza is a Kenyan-Australian artist and co-founder of ANTE, based on unceded Gadigal land. They focus their energy towards community, basing their creative practice on the exploration of QTIPOC past, present and future in their multiple and interwoven forms. Using rhythm to explore bodies and space, Kiminza finds their flow in both audible and written realms
PERFORMANCE ARTISTS:
Radha aka Shahmen Suku is a performance artist based in Sydney who explores ideas of racial, religious and cultural identity, gender roles, the home and the kitchen, food and storytelling. Growing up in a modern matriarchal Indian family in Singapore, Shahmen processes his sense of displacement from home as Radha, the Diva from India. Moving to Australia has given Shahmen multiple perspectives on migration, culture, race, colonisation and gender identity. Shahmen discusses these issues openly through his alter ego, Radha, sharing stories the way she learnt them from his mother’s kitchen. Radha’s multifaceted practice has also seen them perform/host numerous music festivals and events, presented in Art Exhibitions, shows and workshops for kids and also a chef on the ABC’s The Set. He currently lives and works in Australia.
Model, designer, performer – Brown & Gold, Twirling & Whirling, Soft & Femme – Ramashon is an all-round creative being that exudes style, grace and beauty. Gliding like silk as they move through space, Ramashon enchants their audience with their sultry style and sensual energy.
RED REY is a DJ, performance artist and event producer. They are a founder of ANTE, a QTIPOC (queer, trans, intersex & people of colour) arts collective which curates’ events that focus on de-colonising the nightlife scene. Alongside Dyan Tai, they are also a producer of Worship Queer Cabaret, an event that showcases the performers unique identities and cultural backgrounds, through live art, dance, and music. They identify as genderqueer and of Flipinx background. Their gender identity is expressed through androgynous, binary transcending costumes. This extends to music and dance style, which is influenced largely by the ballroom/vogue communities pioneered by trans women of colour. As a DJ, they are best known for mixing techno, acid and industrial music with queer, club and world sounds. Red Rey has recently performed locally and interstate for the likes of Club Mince, BARBA, Leak Your Own Nudes and Heaps Gay.
VISUAL ARTISTS:
Alvin Ruiyuan Zhong is a Sydney-based artist working across creative coding, video, illustration and 3D and pixel animation in both physical and digital media. Zhong’s work explores contemporary rave culture within Australia, reinterpreting production, stage design VJ-ing and event and club theory.
Athena Thebus is an artist who uses sculpture, drawing and writing to explore notions of Desire.
Kalanjay Dhir is an artist and failed (try-hard) viral content creator based on unceded Darug Land (Sydney aka the 2K). Dhir’s work draws on narratives in popular culture, sci-fi and spiritual texts, exploring mythological and speculative technologies through sculpture, video and internet objects. He thinks about what the world would look like if we built things with a secular devotion. Dhir is a current resident of Parramatta Artists Studios. In 2019 he set up Pari, an artist-run space in Western Sydney. Alongside Kilimi he hosts ‘Sunset with 2K’ on FBi Radio.
CURATORS:
Honey Point (Dame + Deepa) have safely solidified their place in the Sydney underground dance scene as ‘Sydney’s Sweethearts’. Placing an emphasis on all things jazz and house, these two are cleaving a path for a vibe almost undiscovered and a community yet to flourish.
Having played alongside artists such as Carista, CC:DISCO, Harvey Sutherland, Jitwam, Horatio Luna and Allysha Joy (to name a few), the Honey Point pair have earned themselves a reputation for creating high energy, love-filled and groovy sets. With selections tangential to jazz and house, you can expect to hear sounds spanning from liquid to dub, Chicago through to acid house and perhaps a drop of pop.
Through a collective goal for wider community engagement, this femme-fronted initiative seeks to create a platform for those less represented in the underground Sydney music scene. With a finger in more than one [honey] pot, Honey Point have thrown club nights, DIY warehouse parties and brunches, with aims to expand and evolve their repertoire in increasingly creative ways.
Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus is an artist-led exhibition series that seeks to unpack the hidden injuries of racism through the lived experience of Asian Australian artists and Asian artists living in Australia. By utilising experimental material and physical practices, the eight artists in Acute Actions part 1 illustrate poetically how the diverse futures for Australia might look. Through performative actions, material assemblage and sharing cultural food, their practices act as both archives of past traumas and sites of collective diasporic consciousness.
Sophia Cai is a curator and arts writer based in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. She currently teaches as a sessional lecturer in the department of Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne, while also maintaining an independent curating and writing practice. Sophia is particularly interested in Asian art history, the intersection between contemporary art and craft, as well as feminist methodologies and community-based practices.
Sai-Wai Foo is a Malaysian-born Chinese, Naarm/Melbourne-based emerging/early-career artist. Her training in fashion design influences and informs her practice through technique, finish and materials. Foo is a bricoleur who collects discarded and redundant items and gives them a new life through her sculptural practice. Working primarily in paper and textiles, Foo’s materiality prompts viewers to consider discarded materials and to reconsider how things are used in our over-curated and insatiable consumer society. Her pieces invite a more intimate engagement, due to their scale and delicacy.
Joe Paradise Lui is a founding member of Renegade Productions. Within its aegis he creates, writes, directs, designs and composes theatre and performance works. His most recent work was Cephalopod, presented at the Blue Room Theatre in 2019. Joe Paradise Lui is the Spirit of the Fringe World. He is also a part of the professional and independent theatre industry in Perth as a director, writer, and a sound and lighting designer. He has worked with most Perth based companies including BSSTC, Perth Theatre Company, Yirra Yaakin theatre company and the vast majority of independent companies.
Originally from Singapore, Deborah Ong is proudly of Hainanese and Peranakan Chinese heritage. She came to Australia in 2004 to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, fell in love with the city of Melbourne, and officially made it her home in 2013. She’s spent the past 10 years working as a qualified chef, and more recently has also been involved in teaching in local community centres, and pursuing postgraduate studies in Nutrition and Public Health. Deborah is passionate about food and its role in cultural identity. She finds joy in tearing down the walls of difference and bringing people together around the table with dinner and stories.
Using photography to capture her personal and cultural everyday experiences, Andrea Srisurapon explores concepts surrounding cross-culture, identity and Australia’s social and cultural landscape. Reflecting on her cultural experiences of East and West and celebrating her family’s heritage, Srisurapon challenges the stereotypes of racism, bigotry and cultural misconception and attempts to discover what is means to be a Thai Australian. Andrea graduated from Sydney College of the Arts and now works and resides in the city of Sydney.
Jayanto Tan is a visual artist who was born and raised in a small village in North Sumatra to a Sumatran Christian mother and Guandong Taoist father. As an immigrant artist living in Sydney, who fled poverty and political repression in search of a better life, his practice blends Eastern and Western mythologies with the reality of current events. His works have been selected for the 66th Blake Prize and a solo show at the Verge Gallery. He won the 11th Greenway Art Prize in a small sculpture category. Jayanto holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts from National Art School.
Amy Zhang is a movement artist that specialises in performance and movement direction. Using dance as her storytelling vehicle, she combines her unique eye for aesthetics to bring a new life to movement in all forms of media and live performance. Amy has most recently shared her work in this year’s Vitalstatistix Adhocracy and Brisbane Festival.
MaggZ is a Melbourne-based movement and multidisciplinary artist, specialised in waacking – a dance style originated in 1970s LA from the LGBTQ community, predominantly involving arm movements. Traversing amongst dance battles, live performances, installations and interdisciplinary collaborations with other artists, MaggZ aspires to explore the possibilities of art and creativity whilst to honour the unique being of self and others.
Exhibition Documentation
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus(installation view), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Right: Andrea Srisurapon, Covid Clean, 2021, photographic print. Left: Sophia Cai, Safety Yellow Woman, 2020-2021, handknitted wool garment – adult size, yarn support provided by Fancy Tiger Crafts. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus(installation view), 2021,4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Sophia Cai, Safety Yellow Woman, 2020-2021, handknitted wool garment – adult size, yarn support provided by Fancy Tiger Crafts. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not a Virus (installation view), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Right: Joe Paradise Lui & Deborah Ong, Laksa, video, 21:02, 2021. Left: Amy Zhang & MaggZ, 气 (qi), video, 3:34, 2021. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (detail), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Jayanto Tan, No Friends But The Ghosts (Ceng Beng), 2020 – ongoing, ceramics, embroidery on found fabrics. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist..
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus(detail), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Right: Sai-Wai Foo, Eat Your Words, 2020, textile installation, 12 individual textile dumplings, hand embroidered racial slur. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist..
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not a Virus (installation view), 2021,4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Right: Andrea Srisurapon, Covid Clean, 2021, photographic print. Left: Jayanto Tan, No Friends But The Ghosts (Ceng Beng), 2020 – ongoing, ceramics, embroidery on found fabrics. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
This exhibition is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Diversity Arts Australia, as part of the I Am Not A Virus project. Supported by Australia Council, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Inner West Council.
Building upon the previous Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus exhibition, the works of Jin Hien Lau, Nathan Liow, Zachary Lopez and Sweet and Sour Collective delve into distinct experiences informed by disconnection and isolation. Working across a variety of practices and artistic methods, this exhibition further demonstrates the wide impact of racism and displacement on the POC population. The presented works poetically illustrate possible outlooks featuring cultural diversity in Australia’s future experience.
Artist Biographies:
A proponent of the values of narrative across all forms of media and practices, Jin Hien Lau believes that in order to tell a good story, you must listen to a thousand better ones from everyone and everywhere first. Based in Sydney but a frequent collaborator on projects across Asia, Jin has applied his craft to fields ranging from prints, comics, illustrations and animation.
Melbourne pianist and composer, Nathan Liow, recently exhibited his collaborative work, “Music For Eyes” at Incinerator Gallery, which was also featured in the “New Movement Exhibition” at Cost Annex, Boston MA. His digital work, “Artifacts”, exhibited at West Space Gallery for Next Wave Festival. Liow’s compositions have appeared on a diverse range of mediums including for MIFF Official Selection film “Creswick” by filmmaker Natalie James, and other film and music festivals globally. He has performed alongside multiple ARIA recipient Andrea Keller at Melbourne’s Jazzlab, and during lockdown, he was commissioned by City Of Melbourne to broadcast a series of concerts from Tempo Rubato in Brunswick.
Zachary Lopez is a performer and choreographer. He explores the duality between his identities to understand cultural lineage and nationality within his practice. He has been commissioned for the Keir Choreographic Awards 2020 and by Sydney Dance Company, premiering works in Carriageworks (NSW) and Dancehouse (VIC). Zachary has been awarded a Young Creative Leaders Fellowship (Create NSW), an Australia Council Artstart Grant and creative development grants. He is currently working with Marrugeku and Legs on the wall and has worked with Punchdrunk’s co-artistic director Maxine Doyle (UK), Sydney Dance Company as an associate artist, Co3 (WA), The Farm (QLD), Opera Australia and with artists Amrita Hepi, Cass Mortimer-Eipper and Charmene Yap among others.
Sweet and Sour is a collective focusing on providing a voice for Asian-Australians. Being Asian today in Australia is not easy. When more than one culture demands your allegiance, there is a bizarre sense of existing between multiple worlds, yet not fully belonging to either. We are international students, mixed-race individuals and second-generation immigrants; many of us belong to multiple cultural identities, and face issues relating to belonging, racism and identity. Sweet and Sour was conceived with the notion of creating a space for individuals and communities with Asian heritage in Australia to share our thoughts, experiences and creativity. Members in Sweet and Sour: Chetan Kharbanda, Eleanor Hsu, James Yang, Joanne Leong, Malcolm Fortaleza, Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Sydney Farey, Viv Wang and Yvonne Yong.
Exhibition Documentation
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (installation view), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Zachary Lopez, Roil Horizon, 2021, bamboo, nylon, single channel HD video, various materials and objects. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (installation view), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Left: Jin Hien Lau, Train of Thought, 2021, digital illustration, inkjet print. Right: Zachary Lopez, Roil Horizon, 2021, bamboo, nylon, single channel HD video, various materials and objects.Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
Zachary Lopez, Roil Horizon, 2021, bamboo, nylon, single channel HD video, various materials and objects. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Jin Hien Lau, Train of Thought, 2021, digital illustration, inkjet print. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Jin Hien Lau, Train of Thought (detail), 2021, digital illustration, inkjet print. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (installation view), 2021, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney. Left: Sweet and Sour Group, Sweet and Sour Postcard Collaborative, 2020-21, mixed media installation. Right: Nathan Liow, Air(borne), 2021, two channel HD video, 2min 37sec. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
Nathan Liow, Air(borne), 2021, two channel HD video, 2min 37sec. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Sweet and Sour Group, Sweet and Sour Postcard Collaborative, 2020-21, mixed media installation. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artists.
Sweet and Sour Group, Sweet and Sour Postcard Collaborative, 2020-21, mixed media installation. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
This exhibition is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Diversity Arts Australia, as part of the I Am Not A Virus project. Supported by Australia Council, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Inner West Council.
Reformat your nature practices cultural wellness through virtual oases: Inspired by the transformative history of the Vietnamese dragon, the 3D series reimagines its traditional identity, projecting its orbital presence over an awakening garden.
Responding to global isolation and racial climate inflected on Asian consciousness, the animation transports viewers to a tranquil micro-world, considering the screen as a mode of re-belonging. The spatial departure from urban structures reifies Buddhist ideologies on mindfulness, immersing in the environment’s open ambiance.
Nature’s interconnectivity with rebirth and spirituality is formatted into the virtual oasis, neutral violet plants and geology materialising under pink skies. With soft calm sounds harmonising in the backdrop, the landscape offers meditative introspection by the glass pagoda.
In providing cultural agency towards Asian communities through digital constructs meld by past and present, the garden invites momentary comfort and growth. The garden is open to access, and made for wellness.
Jesse Vega is a contemporary visual artist based in Sydney. Working across photography, video, sound and 3D animation, his visual practice treads between commercial culture, hybrid identities, and digital ecosystems. Exploring post-internet worlds through 3D technologies, Vega taps into transformative fantasies and its agency towards cultural histories. His debut 3D series “Mourning the burned house” speculates the underbelly of post-natural landscapes, creating conscious hybrid formations implicated by material de- sire. Undertaking a Bachelor of Design in Photography from UTS, Vega has locally exhibited at Goodspace Gallery, Airspace Projects and Babekuhl Gallery.
Reformat your nature is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
COVID-Safe | Information for visitors to 4A @ Darlinghurst (updated 26 June 2021)
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is committed to protecting the health and safety of our visitors and staff by minimising the spread of COVID-19.
The NSW Government has recently announced measures in response to the new cases of COVID-19 in Sydney. As a result:
We’ll continue to monitor the advice of NSW Health and update our guidance as they evolve. We also ask the public to monitor the NSW Health list of affected case locations as they evolve.
Thanks for helping us keep our community safe!
–The 4A Team
Image: Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (Part 2),installation view, 2021,4A @ 101-111 William Street, Sydney; photo: Kai Wasikowski
LET’S PACK ACUTE ACTS: 4A PANEL X PERFORMANCE SATURDAY 15 MAY | 3PM – 5PM FIRSTDRAFT
Panel discussion at Firstdraft with Andrea Srisurapon, Jayanto Tan, and curator Reina Takeuchi, followed by a performance by Amy Zhang X MaggZ. Held as part of Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not a Virus (Part 1)
Listen to a Let’s unpack acute acts, a panel discussion between artists Andrea Srisurapon and Jayanto Tan, moderated by curator Reina Takeuchi. In this conversation, Srisurapon and Tan examine their lived experiences, artistic practices and explore the hidden injuries of racism in a post-pandemic era. Srisurapon, Tan and Takeuchi reflect on the stories and concepts behind the artists’ works, on view at 4A in the exhibition Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus (Part 1: 15 April – 15 May).
The interview took place on 15 May 2021 in Firstdraft’s courtyard in Woolloomooloo, where city life and basketball players can be heard intermittently in the background.
Join artists Andrea Srisurapon and Jayanto Tan, and curator Reina Takeuchi (from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) for an in-person panel discussion followed by a performance by Amy Zhang X MaggZ.
The Let’s unpack acute acts panel examines the artists’ lived experiences and practices, unpacking the hidden injuries of racism in a post-pandemic era, and how the collective smearing of cultural trauma bleeds into the Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not a Virus program.
The discussion will be followed by Amy Zhang and MaggZ’s live performance of 气 (qi), an energetic exploration of objects that inform the dance artists’ histories. Using contemporary movement, the performers seek to embody states of balance and equilibrium. Let’s unpack acute acts is presented as the finnisage event to celebrate the closing of Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not a Virus (Part 1) – an initiative by Diversity Arts Australia supported by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
4A would like to thank Firstdraft for generously providing the venue for this event. View Firstdraft’s COVID-19 visitor information here.
COVID-Safe | Information for visitors to 4A @ Darlinghurst (updated 6 May 2021)
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is committed to protecting the health and safety of our visitors and staff by minimising the spread of COVID-19.
The NSW Government has recently announced measures in response to the new cases of COVID-19 in Sydney.
Visitors to the current exhibition Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus (Part 1) at our Darlinghurst gallery will be required to wear a face mask when inside the gallery. Please bring your own mask, otherwise we can supply you with a mask upon entry.
We also ask all visitors to monitor theNSW Health list of affected case locations.
If you have been at one of these locations, please self-isolate and seek testing immediately as per health advice, and do not visit 4A.
We’ll continue to monitor the advice of NSW Health and update our guidance as appropriate. Thanks for helping us keep our community safe!
– The 4A Team
Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not a Virus (Part 1) is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Diversity Arts Australia and is part of the I Am Not A Virus project. Supported by Australia Council, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Inner West Council.
Biographies
Using photography to capture her personal and cultural everyday experiences, Andrea Srisurapon explores concepts surrounding cross-culture, identity and Australia’s social and cultural landscape. Reflecting on her cultural experiences of East and West and celebrating her family’s heritage, Srisurapon challenges the stereotypes of racism, bigotry and cultural misconception and attempts to discover what is means to be a Thai Australian. Andrea graduated from Sydney College of the Arts and now works and resides in the city of Sydney.
Jayanto Tan is a visual artist who was born and raised in a small village in North Sumatra to a Sumatran Christian mother and Guandong Taoist father. As an immigrant artist living in Sydney, who fled poverty and political repression in search of a better life, his practice blends Eastern and Western mythologies with the reality of current events. His works have been selected for the 66th Blake Prize and a solo show at the Verge Gallery. He won the 11th Greenway Art Prize in a small sculpture category. Jayanto holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts from National Art School.
Amy Zhang is a movement artist that specialises in performance and movement direction. Using dance as her storytelling vehicle, she combines her unique eye for aesthetics to bring a new life to movement in all forms of media and live performance. Amy has most recently shared her work in this year’s Vitalstatistix Adhocracy and Brisbane Festival
MaggZ is a Melbourne-based movement and multidisciplinary artist, specialised in waacking – a dance style originated in 1970s LA from the LGBTQ community, predominantly involving arm movements. Traversing amongst dance battles, live performances, installations and interdisciplinary collaborations with other artists, MaggZ aspires to explore the possibilities of art and creativity whilst to honour the unique being of self and others.
Bio captions: Andrea Srisurapon, headshot; courtesy the artist /Jayanto Tan, headshot; courtesy the artist / Amy Zhang, headshot; courtesy the artist; image: Ben Garcia / MaggZ, headshot; courtesy the artist.
Sophia Cai: Art, craft, collective solidarity and fandom culture
Curator, writer and knitter Sophia Cai speaks with producer Mariam Arcilla from 4A about the mobilising power of art, craft and fandom culture, and how embodied writing, teaching, hobbies, and K-pop have shaped Sophia’s practice. During the conversation, Cai discusses racism, self-care, mask politics, and using the colour ‘yellow’ as a reverse cultural signifier
through her hand-knitted work Safety Yellow Woman, which featured in the exhibition Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus.
Held in May 2021 as part of Acute Actions: Responses to I Am Not A Virus, presented by 4A and Diversity Arts, the talk was broadcasted via 4A IG Live from the unceded Lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
Sophia Cai is a curator and arts writer based in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. She currently teaches as a sessional lecturer in the department of Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne, while also maintaining an independent curating and writing practice. Sophia is particularly interested in Asian art history, the intersection between contemporary art and craft, as well as feminist methodologies and community-based practices.
Images (top-bottom):
Sophia Cai, Safety Yellow Woman, 2020-2021, hand-knitted wool garment – adult size, yarn support provided by Fancy Tiger Crafts. Courtesy the artist.
Scroll to continue is a response to Optic by Craig Stubbs-Race and Marcus Whale, but looks at the perversion of the internet in contemporary times. The work hypothesises that we are so attuned to motions such as swiping, scrolling, and tapping that even when these motions are abstracted from their context their origin may still be readily recognised. The interactive experience has the audience observing these motions from the other side of the glass, as if from within the device. More is progressively revealed as the audience further explores the space.
The interactions presented may defy what is expected from user interfaces and 3D spaces, and is designed to unsettle, reflect, and breach the surface for a self-aware moment of clarity amongst the sea of endless noise that is our habitual scrolling, swiping and tapping, zombie-like, dream-state. The artist admits he is an avid user of the internet and social media data harvesting platforms and insists he can quit at any time (he just doesn’t want to).
Callum Howard is an interactive media artist and software developer based in Sydney. His art practice includes tangible electronics and virtual generative experiences. His works touch on themes of interconnectedness, post-humanism and artificial life, and will often invite the user to uncover more by probing and exploring what is presented.
Prior to his current job Callum was a VFX Lighting TD on three feature films at Animal Logic, and prior to that a developer in the creative arts studio Code On Canvas. Callum is always on the lookout for new tools, technologies, skills and collaborators that can help bring new ideas to life.
Scroll to continue is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
Want to brush up on your arts copyright knowledge? 4A is partnering with Arts Law to host an online webinar on copyright 101.
Know where you stand with moral rights. Learn how you can own, create and use copyright when it comes to your practice and working with others.
This free session will use practical examples, case studies from artists’ experiences, and hypothetical scenarios to help make copyright accessible and—dare, we say—fun.
If you’re an emerging artist or art group working across all art forms, then this workshop is for you.
This webinar is presented by Arts Law in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and is supported by the City of Sydney.
101-111 WILLIAM STREET, DARLINGHURST, SYDNEY, NSW
15 April – 3 July 2021
Open Thursday to Saturdays, 10am – 4pm
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus is a two-part exhibition that presents the work of twelve artists commissioned through Diversity Arts Australia’s I Am Not A Virus initiative. This selection represents a range of artistic practices and conceptual reflections; these include acts of processing and healing from the trauma of racial prejudice experienced by Asian people. Through ceramics, photography, performance, music, craft, and storytelling, these artists have wrestled with racial prejudice and reframed multiculturalism to reflect this new lived experience.
Acute Actions: Responses To I Am Not A Virus Part 1: 15 April – 15 May 2021
This exhibition series is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Diversity Arts Australia, as part of the I Am Not A Virus project. Supported by Australia Council, Create NSW, Creative Victoria, City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Inner West Council.
Forming an ARI or currently managing one? This online session will take you through the various ways of setting up and running an ARI, and is hosted by Arts Law in partnership with 4A.
Learn how to run a sustainable ARI by familiarising yourself with the ins and outs of collaborating with other artists or groups. Get the lowdown on copyright and moral rights in joint works. We’ll present you with a checklist of things to consider and talk you through the sorts of agreements your ARI may need to deal with.
This free workshop is highly recommended for artists, creative groups, and artworkers who want to understand the legal frameworks and sustainable aspects behind collaborative processes or projects.
This webinar is presented by Arts Law in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and is supported by the City of Sydney. Time
SATURDAY 10 APRIL 2021 2PM – 3:30PM AEST (Sydney) / 11AM – 12:30PM GMT+7 (Saigon) Speakers: Adam Porter (Head of Curatorial, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia) and Mai Nguyễn-Long (Artist, Bulli, Australia), moderated by Amrit Gill (Artistic Director/CEO, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art)
Language: English
Watch the webinar:
Join us on Saturday 10 April (2pm AEST / 11am GMT+7) for the online panel ‘Dwelling on the outside: searching for folk wisdom to connect to earth’, featuring a conversation between Adam Porter (Head of Curatorial, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia) and Mai Nguyễn-Long (Artist, Bulli, Australia).
Sharing experiences of otherness, Mai Nguyễn-Long andAdam Porter will discuss how research and respect for ‘traditional’ expressive forms of cultural practices—particularly, folkloric practices—can offer instructive wisdom and help us recalibrate our understandings of contemporary art. This dialogue emphasises where translation and re-contextualisation occurs, and how this knowledge enriches our appreciation of our environment. Adam will explore how these ideas have shaped Mai’s practice, most recently sparked by ‘Vomit Girl’, a character who instructs Mai to re-build wood carvings into naked clay.
Reflecting on Adam’s participation in Re-Aligning the Cosmos, an on-ongoing project by The Factory Arts Centre (Ho Chi Minh City), this discussion will engage concepts of ‘earth’—this year’s chosen element of study—and seeks to examine the role, presence and meaning of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) in contemporary life. It will also examine how the elements are used in human superstition/spirituality, reflecting on their consumption (or neglect) that in turn, impact the human and non-human world.
This is the second talk in a four-part online talk series, as part of the Australia Council for the Arts ‘Curatorial Associates Program’. The talk is a partnership between The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and is supported by Campbelltown Arts Centre.
About the Speakers:
Adam Porter (Sydney, Australia)
Adam Porter is an Australian curator of diverse Asian heritage. Specialising in contemporary visual art, Porter lives and works on Tharawal Country in Sydney, Australia. Porter received a Bachelor of Arts (Double Major in Art History and Cinema Studies, and Social and Cultural Analysis) from the University of Western Sydney (2009). He also holds a Masters Degree in Art Curatorship from the University of Sydney (2010).
Porter is currently the Head of Curatorial at Campbelltown Arts Centre and was previously, Curator of Contemporary Visual Art (2017-19). Prior to this, he was Head of Curatorial (2017) and Curator at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (2010-17). Porter was also co-curator of Laneway Art and City Spaces at the City of Sydney (2012-13), which led to the public artwork commission and permanent acquisition of Youngsters by artist Caroline Rothwell (2013).
Porter is an advocate for contemporary art and artists, delivering large-scale contemporary art exhibitions featuring multidisciplinary works, innovative curatorial models and community and cultural engagement practice. With demonstrated interest in South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Asia, Porter’s practice is reflective of the notion of ‘otherness’ inspired by his own diverse cultural background. His curatorial examinations have centred on the semiotics and aesthetic of ruins, seeing destruction and degradation as conveyance for cultural memory and renewal in an ever connected and complex world.
Notable projects include: Khaled Sabsabi: A Promise & A Hope (2020-2021, co-curated with Matt Cox, AGNSW), Vernon Ah Kee: The Island (2020); OK Democracy, We Need to Talk (2019); Suzanne Archer: Song of the Cicada (2019); Amala Groom: Does She Know the Revolution is Coming? (2017); Studios Switch (2016); Oceanic Arts Pacifica (2014); Subject to Ruin (2014); Nahrain: Two Rivers (2014); and Landlock (2013).
Mai Nguyễn-Long (Bulli, Australia)
Mai is Australian born of mixed heritage and lives and works on Tharawal Country. She received her Bachelor of Arts / Asian Studies from the Australian National University (1991) with a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies from the University of Sydney (1993). In 1994 she spent a year in Vietnam studying Vietnamese language at Vietnam National University and Vietnamese Art History and Life Drawing at Hanoi University of Fine Arts; and in 1997, completed her Master of Arts in Visual Art from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University . In 2017 she received an Australian Government RTP scholarship to undertake a Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong (current).
Mai’s first exhibitions were held in Manila, Philippines – Transit Lounge (Arrivals-Departures) (1996), and Hanoi, Vietnam – E Chong: A Bilingual Installation with Incorrect Translations. Working in oil on canvas for the next ten years, her imagery became consciously figurative within surreal settings that overlaid stereotypical Australian culture with Asian icons and waterscapes as their unifying element. Mai returned to installation for a 2006 commission by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, creating 3-dimensional mongrel dogs as a metaphor for cultural exploration and her identity, using papier mache to salute Southeast Asian folk crafts. The controversy generated by the “skins” of Mai’s Pho Dogs generated her performance/installation piece, The Burning of Godog at the opening of Nam Bang! curated by Dr Boitran Huynh-Beattie for CPAC (2009). While the mongrel dog has become a cultural trigger for Mai, and for those reading her work, equally it explores narratives that are extremely personal and self-reflective.
In 2014 Mai was commissioned by Wollongong Art Gallery to present a major solo show (curated by Gina Fairley). Bridging over 15 years of Mai’s practise, Beyogmos (“beyond the dog cosmos”) synthesized her intensely personal navigations through abstruse political landscapes questioning constructs of identity by drawing on a range of mediums. From 2014 a new character named Vomit Girl became dominant in her work, propelling Mai to reconnect with Vietnam. Late 2014 and 2015 she returned to Hanoi for residencies working with CICF Copyright Agency in the ceramic village of Bat Trang, and ACCA Viet independent curatorial group (working with Muong Studio Hoa Binh). Unpacking the context of Vomit Girl’s illness inspired her to undertake a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA), titled, Beyond Diasporic Trauma: opening up an intersection between Contemporary Art and Folkloric Practices in Vietnam. Mai Nguyễn-Long is represented by Art Atrium, a Vietnam Foundation Ambassador, and President Vietnam Centre – Australia Chapter.
Cybermancy 2 is an interactive webcam experience based on Chinese face reading, an ancient fortune telling practice that predicts a person’s personality and luck based on their facial features. This work is a continuation of Cybermancy, which is a palm reading experience which presents the user with targeted advertisements and content based on their estimated demographic.
Chinese face reading has had lasting impacts on the standards of beauty and gender roles in East Asian society. For example, small, full lips usually correspond to positive face readings, which women supposedly desire. In this case, large lips on women indicate that they are prone to gossip and spilling secrets, so the opposite is preferred
Underneath this non-scientific exterior, analysis is done by AI known as neural networks. The AI generates facial landmarks and predicts age and gender. With this data, the user is presented with generalised information that might fit this demographic, not unlike what advertising tries to do with analytics.
Cybermancy is a demonstration of the modern problem wrapped in the guise of an ancient practice. It is hard to say whether we are being successfully read by others or we are conforming to the predictions presented to us.
Jane Fan is a software engineer and digital artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her works span a variety of mediums including illustration, 3D computer graphics, generative and interactive art. She employs web and game technologies to create her works, assisted by webcams, 3D cameras and microphones if they are interactive. Her artworks tend to have cyberpunk and algorithmic aesthetics, concerned with current and future implications of emerging technologies.
Cybermancy 2 is commissioned by 4A and curated by the Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
To open our 2021 program, we would like to explore how much of our identity is found through digital validation through an audio-visual experience. Optic will be at the core of our 2021 digital program with the remaining artists responding to the work as the central theme.
Written and recorded by Marcus Whale and animated by Craig Stubbs-Race, Optic is a poem chronicling Whale’s experiences of finding oneself through the emerging technology of Web 2.0. The artistic thesis reflects upon the physical sensory experience of sitting at a desktop computer and the mental escapism the seemingly endless world the Internet provided for users in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Marcus Whale: I’m part of the last generation for whom communicating on the internet was a new, exciting and mysterious thing. For me, instant messaging applications were the arena for some of the most significant moments of my life. The popularity of MSN Messenger, for instance, fits exactly with the period of my adolescence. For better or for worse, my development as a person is deeply tied to the specific conditions of the internet before social media as we know it dominated how we communicate, in which presenting yourself as anonymous or as an avatar was commonplace, where everyone could be anyone. There are two sides to this condition – I’m someone who, like many people my age, were interacting with adults or catfishes in potentially dangerous ways. In this work, however, I’m more interested in pulling out the romance of the 2000s internet, in an effort to evoke the intense sensuality of my teenage experience. Drawing from my many, many experiences of longing after unknowable people and things, Optic considers desire as a generative force that pushes beyond the mundane and into the realm of the fantastical.
Craig Stubbs-Race: The piece is purely a visual response to the poem. The frame sits at the appropriate 5:3 ratio, the common monitor screen used during the time of the artists’ exposure to online chat forums and worlds. Within this box we witness a soul travel through cyberspace, taking on the form of what we can perceive as data flowing through the system. Fibre optic cables come to mind. These sparks travel a lonely dark highway seeking input and information. From here we discover what the soul wants. Sex as a raw image. Many other souls drool and slide over the bodies of the web, slowly drifting over every contour and line, taking in and absorbing the visual muscle. The ‘views’ and clicks are adding up, overwhelming the content to the point where it is hardly visible. Only soul. Upon our trip into cyberspace, we encounter another being, although there is no body to go with it, only their words and presence. Together they travel the internet highway together, seeking content. The introduction of a device, a new eye, takes the web by storm. No longer is content anonymous or needed. All our being and presence can perform for the webcam. The device is desire. Our souls celebrate.
Marcus Whale lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. His work across music, performance and text focuses on the blurry intersection between desire and religion, often with reference to the poetics of memory and ghostliness. These works often stage encounters between camp performance styles and the heightened drama of traditional mythology, scripture and liturgy.
Recent performance works, including Praise! (with Eugene Choi) and the Lucifer series (with Athena Thebus & Chloe Corkran), have been presented by Sydney Opera House, Asia Topa, Next Wave, Performance Space, Sydney Contemporary, Sugar Mountain Festival, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Underbelly Arts Festival and Art Month Sydney. He has performed in and composed for works by Agatha Gothe-Snape, Harriet Gillies, Ivan Cheng, Martin Del Amo and Jess Olivieri. His poetry has been published in book form by subbed in and Ruin Press.
As a musical artist under his own name and with groups Collarbones and BV, his recorded output primarily forms an electronic world around his singing. Ensemble Offspring, The Song Company, Zubin Kanga, Claire Edwardes, Synergy Percussion and others have performed his compositions across Australia and internationally.
Craig Stubbs-Race is a digital designer based in Sydney. With a background in filmmaking, he draws upon his passion and enthusiasm for cinema and the associated graphics that come with it to create elegant designs. This enthusiasm and interest extend into the associated typography, aspect ratios and many graphic elements of cinema. Occasionally he will draw inspiration from the creation of CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) letterforms and its usage in commercial contexts.
Optic is curated by 4A’s Curatorial Assistant for 2021, Marco Rinaldi, as part of 4A’s Digital Curatorship. The 4A Curatorial Assistant Program is supported by the Sally Breen Family Foundation.
Eat your way through Haymarket with Secret Snacks, a self-guided street and online campaign presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, in partnership with More of Something Good.
Launching on 8 February as part of the City of Sydney’s Lunar New Year Festival, Secret Snacks is a creative ode to Haymarket, a much loved precinct for locals and tourists alike—famous for its vibrant energy and copious mix of Asian restaurants and food joints.
For over 20 years, 4A has called Haymarket home, so our team has seen first-hand how the recent pandemic has affected local artists as well as the food community. As we safely edge out of lockdown, 4A invites the public to venture into Haymarket to discover hidden gems or revisit mainstay meals, all in one locale.
For Secret Snacks,4A has invited top Asian-Australian creatives Benjamin Law, Kylie Kwong, Luisa Brimble, and James Jirat Patradoonto hand-pick their favourite dishes and what makes them special. We’ve commissioned the designers behind More of Something Good to translate these food profiles into mouth-watering artworks distributed online and via street posters and decals in participating restaurants and public sites in Sydney.
From comfort slurps to big cravings, Secret Snacks helps connect food makers, artists and the public through tales that inspire memories, curiosity, and togetherness.
Keep an eye out for Secret Snacks posters and decals across Sydney streetscapes and public sites from 8 February-12 March 2021.
Secret Snacks is commissioned by 4A and co-presented with More of Something Good, featuring tried-and-tested dishes from Boon Cafe, Chat Thai, Gumshara, and Nakano Darling. Produced by Mariam Arcilla.
The project ispart of the City of Sydney’s Sydney Lunar Festival, and is supported by the City of Sydney.
About the contributors:
Benjamin Law is an author, TV screenwriter, playwright, columnist, journalist and ABC broadcaster.
Kylie Kwong is a chef, cookbook author and ambassador for food, culture and community at South Eveleigh.
Luisa Brimble is a James Beard nominated food photographer and a passionate advocate for the creative community.
James Jirat Patradoon is a visual artist whose mural, painting and animated gif works depict his vision of neon gothic paradise.
About the artists:
More of Something Good is an online illustrated food directory by Studio Mimu.
Secret Snacks documentation
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Secret Snacks artwork posters, 2021; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; designed by More of Something Good; Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A; courtesy the artist.
Secret Snacks artwork decals, 2021; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; designed by More of Something Good; Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A; courtesy the artist.
Secret Snacks artwork decals, 2021; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; designed by More of Something Good; Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A; courtesy the artist.
Secret Snacks artwork decals, 2021; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; designed by More of Something Good; Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A; courtesy the artist.
Secret Snacks artwork posters, 2021; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; designed by More of Something Good; Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A; courtesy the artist.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents hai con lân việt kiều (Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns), the first solo exhibition of emerging Vietnamese-Australian artist Truc Truong.
hai con lân việt kiều showcases a bespoke refashioning of traditional lion dance ensembles. By reinventing the costume, Truong delves into the tradition of lion dancing and how the cultural ritual has come to reflect the diasporic nature of multicultural Australian identities.
The costumes use panels of Truong’s own clothing, draping out from beneath traditional Vietnamese lion heads. By utilising material assemblage and fabric bleaching to alter the lion dance costume, Truong articulates the nuances and challenges of assimilation, its impacts on her own familial history and the ‘alterations’ faced by Asian-Australian migrants in an era post-colonisation. Typically, lion dancing symbolises the removal of unwanted spirits. Here, Truong depicts how the fighting lions can transform and become microcosms of Asian-Australian generational wisdom.
Accompanying the exhibition is a documentation video of the newly-commissioned contemporary lion dance performance, the love ethic, which was held and documented at Haymarket’s Chinese Garden of Friendship to herald the Lunar New Year. Breaking with tradition, the performance featured a bespoke refashioning of the traditional lion dance costumes hand-made by Truong, which were embodied and activated by Trung Han Qun Martial Arts and Lion Dancing Academy. The performance, which featured the lions awakening, dancing and revealing themselves as they flit between the Garden’s unique architecture, is intended as a celebratory act to rid the world of the misfortune of 2020 and welcome a year of prosperity and happiness. the love ethic marks the first iteration of hai con lân việt kiều in Sydney.
For many, hai con lân việt kiều enacts an unexpected encounter, helping to reignite the Sydney CBD’s vibrancy over the summer festival period. In the past, traditional lion dances have been a common occurrence during Lunar New Year throughout Haymarket. hai con lân việt kiều represents an artistic response to the Lunar New Year tradition and the unprecedented changes that have impacted this annual ritual. The project ensures contemporary performance art reaches new audiences in an accessible and captivating way, heralding a new year and celebrating the dynamism of the local, vibrant Haymarket community.
View the Truc Truong: hai con lân việt kiều (Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) roomsheet here.
Truc Truong (b. 1987, lives and works in Adelaide, Australia) is an artist living and working on Kaurna land (South Australia, Adelaide), exploring variances between Eastern and Western thinking. Working with sculpture and installation, her work points to colonialism, exploring aspects of racism, hybridity and displacement, often through experiences and stories retold by her family. Truong explores the innovative use of materials, processes, and thematic content that examine issues of identity and Whiteness, and the forces of assimilation and cultural adaptation, especially as they impact on the Vietnamese community in Australia.
This project has been supported by Create NSW’s Play the City grant program.
Exhibition documentation
Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (installation view), 2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (installation view), 2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Front: Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (installation view), 2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: Truc Truong, bench the french (installation view),2019, cotton drill, bleach, stockings, Installation view, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Truc Truong, bench the french (detail), 2019, cotton drill, bleach, stockings, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (detail), 2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Front: Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (installation view), 2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: Truc Truong, bench the french (installation view), 2019, cotton drill, bleach, stockings, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Truc Truong, hai con lân việt kiều(Two overseas Vietnamese unicorns) (installation view),2019, traditional lion heads, bleached clothing, aluminium steel frame, paper mache frame, acrylic paint, 4A @ 101-111 William Street, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Presented in partnership with World Square, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents for Lunar New Year 2021 the 14th solo exhibition of Thai-Australian multidisciplinary artist James Jirat Patradoon.
Commissioned as part of Sydney Lunar Festival 2021, ULTRA reinterprets traditional and contemporary Chinese Zodiac iconography into an immersive installation experience. Curated by 4A’s Con Gerakaris, and drawing upon Eastern and Western graphic concepts spanning manga, tattoo illustrations and product design, Patradoon’s encompassing murals and installation work reframe the 2021 Zodiac symbol of the Metal Ox.
Reflecting upon the cycle of rebirth each new year, the artist has composed hypercoloured scenes of life and death as acts in a fictionalised Chinese opera. Featuring compositions of Yama, Buddhism’s wrathful King of Hell, facing off against an anthropomorphised chrome-clad ox fan dancer, the scene also reveals an otherworldly beast and a bewitching leading lady in performance grandeur. These striking characters flank the centrepiece of ULTRA: a wicked, customised motorcycle assemblage adorned with an ox skull. Taking cues from his well-known illustrative practice, Patradoon’s first sculptural work rides his signature line between realism and fantasy heightened by mesmeric lighting to challenge the viewer’s experience of viewing art.
Patradoon says, “For the works in ULTRA, I imagined a cosmic Chinese opera with characters representing the Metal Ox and King Yama (Buddhist Deity of Death) in opposition: 2021 vs 2020. I see 2021 as a year of rebirth and recovery from the terror of 2020, a year of prosperity and success. I hope we can rise transformed, and dance once again.”
ULTRA will be on view from 29 January – 28 February 2021 at 4A’s offsite gallery at World Square. As part of the exhibition, 4A will host a panel talk with Patradoon on Saturday 13 February, followed by Patradoon’s digital illustration workshop on Saturday 27 February.
Listen to a recorded artist talk with James Jirat Patradoon in conversation with Con Gerakaris here:
James Jirat Patradoon (b. 1985, Thailand, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand and Sydney, Australia) is a primarily illustrative artist working across installation, painting and graphic design. Patradoon’s work is informed by a wealth of cultural references: from 80s aesthetics and 90s fashion, to comic books and tattoo design, he renders his ideas in flashes of neon and monochrome. Fusing Japanese anime with pop-horror and searing, luminous colours, his work is clean and graphic, exploring humanities depths and fractures and creating his own hyperreal infernal paradise.
Patradoon’s recent solo exhibitions include Inferno (2019), Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; Death Metal Hands (2018), Lamington Drive Gallery, Melbourne; Fever (2016) Superchief Gallery, New York City; and Bodyache (2016), Goodspace, Sydney. He has been included in several group exhibitions and festivals including Art Basel Miami (2019), Miami; Violent By Design (2017), Exhibit A Gallery, Los Angeles, MediaLive Festival (2017), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Pow Wow Hawaii (2016), Honolulu; and Hit The Bricks (2014), Look Hear, Newcastle. His standalone style has led to work with high profile international clientele, including collaborations with the likes of Coca Cola, Facebook, HBO and Microsoft.
Exhibition documentation
James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (exterior view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Floor: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, Hyosung Aquila GV700, ox skull, chrome paint, chains, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Floor: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, Hyosung Aquila GV700, ox skull, chrome paint, chains, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Floor: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, Hyosung Aquila GV700, ox skull, chrome paint, chains, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2020; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Floor: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, Hyosung Aquila GV700, ox skull, chrome paint, chains, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Wall: James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (installation view), 2021, mural, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA (detail), 2021, Hyosung Aquila GV700, ox skull, chrome paint, chains, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
James Jirat Patradoon, ULTRA, 4A @World Square, January 2021; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
This event is part of the City of Sydney’s Sydney Lunar Festival and is presented at World Square Sydney.
Watch Thai-Australian multidisciplinary artist James Jirat Patradoon in a series of live painting sessions for his 14th solo exhibition, ULTRA, at 4A @World Square.
Commissioned as part of Sydney Lunar Festival 2021, ULTRA reinterprets traditional and contemporary Chinese Zodiac iconography into an immersive installation experience. Curated by 4A’s Con Gerakaris, and drawing upon Eastern and Western graphic concepts spanning manga, tattoo illustrations and product design, Patradoon’s encompassing murals and installation work reframe the 2021 Zodiac symbol of the Metal Ox.
Reflecting upon the cycle of rebirth each new year, the artist has composed hypercoloured scenes of life and death as acts in a fictionalised Chinese opera. Featuring compositions of Yama, Buddhism’s wrathful King of Hell, facing off against an anthropomorphised chrome-clad ox fan dancer, the scene also reveals an otherworldly beast and a bewitching leading lady in performance grandeur. These striking characters flank the centrepiece of ULTRA: a wicked, customised motorcycle assemblage adorned with an ox skull. Taking cues from his well-known illustrative practice, Patradoon’s first sculptural work rides his signature line between realism and fantasy heightened by mesmeric lighting to challenge the viewer’s experience of viewing art.
James Jirat Patradoon (b. 1985, Thailand, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand and Sydney, Australia) is a primarily illustrative artist working across installation, painting and graphic design. Patradoon’s work is informed by a wealth of cultural references: from 80s aesthetics and 90s fashion, to comic books and tattoo design, he renders his ideas in flashes of neon and monochrome. Fusing Japanese anime with pop-horror and searing, luminous colours, his work is clean and graphic, exploring humanities depths and fractures and creating his own hyperreal infernal paradise.
Patradoon’s recent solo exhibitions include Inferno (2019), Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; Death Metal Hands (2018), Lamington Drive Gallery, Melbourne; Fever (2016) Superchief Gallery, New York City; and Bodyache (2016), Goodspace, Sydney. He has been included in several group exhibitions and festivals including Art Basel Miami (2019), Miami; Violent By Design (2017), Exhibit A Gallery, Los Angeles, MediaLive Festival (2017), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Pow Wow Hawaii (2016), Honolulu; and Hit The Bricks (2014), Look Hear, Newcastle. His standalone style has led to work with high profile international clientele, including collaborations with the likes of Coca Cola, Facebook, HBO and Microsoft.
Presented in partnership with World Square, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents a artist talk with Thai-Australian multidisciplinary artist James Jirat Patradoon for his 14th solo exhibition, ULTRA.
Commissioned as part of Sydney Lunar Festival 2021, ULTRA reinterprets traditional and contemporary Chinese Zodiac iconography into an immersive installation experience. Curated by 4A’s Con Gerakaris, and drawing upon Eastern and Western graphic concepts spanning manga, tattoo illustrations and product design, Patradoon’s encompassing murals and installation work reframe the 2021 Zodiac symbol of the Metal Ox.
Reflecting upon the cycle of rebirth each new year, the artist has composed hypercoloured scenes of life and death as acts in a fictionalised Chinese opera. Featuring compositions of Yama, Buddhism’s wrathful King of Hell, facing off against an anthropomorphised chrome-clad ox fan dancer, the scene also reveals an otherworldly beast and a bewitching leading lady in performance grandeur. These striking characters flank the centrepiece of ULTRA: a wicked, customised motorcycle assemblage adorned with an ox skull. Taking cues from his well-known illustrative practice, Patradoon’s first sculptural work rides his signature line between realism and fantasy heightened by mesmeric lighting to challenge the viewer’s experience of viewing art.
James Jirat Patradoon (b. 1985, Thailand, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand and Sydney, Australia) is a primarily illustrative artist working across installation, painting and graphic design. Patradoon’s work is informed by a wealth of cultural references: from 80s aesthetics and 90s fashion, to comic books and tattoo design, he renders his ideas in flashes of neon and monochrome. Fusing Japanese anime with pop-horror and searing, luminous colours, his work is clean and graphic, exploring humanities depths and fractures and creating his own hyperreal infernal paradise.
Patradoon’s recent solo exhibitions include Inferno (2019), Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; Death Metal Hands (2018), Lamington Drive Gallery, Melbourne; Fever (2016) Superchief Gallery, New York City; and Bodyache (2016), Goodspace, Sydney. He has been included in several group exhibitions and festivals including Art Basel Miami (2019), Miami; Violent By Design (2017), Exhibit A Gallery, Los Angeles, MediaLive Festival (2017), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Pow Wow Hawaii (2016), Honolulu; and Hit The Bricks (2014), Look Hear, Newcastle. His standalone style has led to work with high profile international clientele, including collaborations with the likes of Coca Cola, Facebook, HBO and Microsoft.
Learn how to turn your ideas and drawings into digital illustrations with ULTRA artist James Jirat Patradoon in this free one-hour illustration demonstration.
See James demonstrate how to draw digitally, clean up line drawings, turn photos into digital collages and more: learn how James uses these skills to create murals, fashion items, paintings, and digital artworks.
Participants will have the opportunity to ask James for advice on digital artwork ideas and illustration concepts, and see ‘behind the scenes’ of his development of ULTRA, 4A Centre for Contemporary Art’s major 2021 Lunar New Year exhibition commission.
James Jirat Patradoon (b. 1985, Thailand, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand and Sydney, Australia) is a primarily illustrative artist working across installation, painting and graphic design. Patradoon’s work is informed by a wealth of cultural references: from 80s aesthetics and 90s fashion, to comic books and tattoo design, he renders his ideas in flashes of neon and monochrome. Fusing Japanese anime with pop-horror and searing, luminous colours, his work is clean and graphic, exploring humanities depths and fractures and creating his own hyperreal infernal paradise.
Patradoon’s recent solo exhibitions include Inferno (2019), Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; Death Metal Hands (2018), Lamington Drive Gallery, Melbourne; Fever (2016) Superchief Gallery, New York City; and Bodyache (2016), Goodspace, Sydney. He has been included in several group exhibitions and festivals including Art Basel Miami (2019), Miami; Violent By Design (2017), Exhibit A Gallery, Los Angeles, MediaLive Festival (2017), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Pow Wow Hawaii (2016), Honolulu; and Hit The Bricks (2014), Look Hear, Newcastle. His standalone style has led to work with high profile international clientele, including collaborations with the likes of Coca Cola, Facebook, HBO and Microsoft.
In A Tool is a Tool by Azadeh Hamzeii, the narrative oscillates between scenes captured by two parties: Azadeh’s mother in Tehran and the artist in Brisbane. The work hinges on finding a cotton fluffing tool (bow) in Iran and constructing it outside of its country of origin, in a Men’s Shed in Australia. The story morphed into zany ritualistic acts between the artist and the males in the shed referencing a Cinéma Verité performative style, where connections between her and male performers during creation of the tool become the purpose. The result is not a documentary about making a cotton fluffing bow; it is about a wordless dialogue between generations and craft histories.
The artist would like to express her gratitude to George Wolf for the dedication, expertise and care throughout this project and to the South Brisbane Men’s Shed community and Alan Elphinstone for their support. A special mention for Dr. Chris Bennie, the artist’s mentor for the encouragement and his insightful and constructive feedback during the concept planning and execution of the work.
Azadeh Hamzeii, by Reina Takeuchi
Azadeh Hamzeii’s nuanced and performative practice explores her personal and familial connections between two countries: Iran and Australia. A Tool is a Tool documents two intertwined narratives that revolve around a cotton fluffing tool constructed across continents. The first narrative is that of Hamzeii’s endeavours to construct a cotton fluffing tool at a workshop in the heart of Brisbane. The second narrative involves Hamzeii’s mother traversing regions of Tehran in search of cotton fluffing workers. The stories cross several borders, times and spaces, from quiet, dry Brisbane backyards and men’s sheds, to the arid and dusty streets of Tehran where Hamzeii’s mother filmed her cotton-fluffing research on shaky, lo-fi FaceTime phone recordings.
Originally used in Iran to fluff cotton, the tool Hamzeii constructed in A Tool is a Tool is one that has been outmoded in favour of the more efficient and increasingly dangerous process of machination: feeding cotton into a churning machine with one’s bare hands. Here, Hamzeii provides us with rare glimpses into the connections forged using this tool. Connections not only between Hamzeii and her mother, but also those between the men she has documented and the unassuming rituals they have with the complex tools with which they work.
The construction of the tool in Queensland becomes akin to magic, a process Hamzeii frames with performative specificity. The workshop is a place of play, male bonding, camaraderie and innovation in the Australian context. It represents an escape from the rigours of life, normalcy and responsibility, providing with it, a place for masculine dreaming and creativity. In Tehran, the craftsmanship of cotton fluffing speaks directly to a ruthless economy, the brutal realities of relentless labour and the undeniable death of magical thinking in the face of extreme adversities.
Yet cotton fluffing is as beautiful as it is laborious. The compressed cotton expands and becomes fluffy once again, ready to be used and stuffed into material. Hamzeii’s mother remarks on the graceful quality of the cotton as she documents Iranian men tearing the fluffed cotton from machines, “It looks like the cotton is dancing and flying with your music.” In many ways, Hamzeii has at once succeeded in creating both a relic from another time that is also entirely different, a uniquely crafted object reconstructed ad-hoc from memories and online images. A transformation, a Frankenstein of its original and something else – something in-between the past and present. She has created an object in homage of what was, in a place that could not be any further removed from its country of origin.
It’s not really about the tool, is it? It is about the process. It’s about a process involving FaceTime conversations, planning, recreating and constructing – a process of holding on to and maintaining the tenuous threads between family, homelands, ways of life, craft histories and dying traditions.
This project was commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in collaboration with Metro Arts (Brisbane), with an exhibition component to be realised in December 2021.
With a focus on the dialogues between the individual and the universal, Azadeh Hamzeii mines her personal history and cultural background as an Iranian based in Meanjin (Brisbane). Drawing from a range of subjects and materials including votive offerings, beeswax, fishing hooks, her father’s old film negatives and Keffiyeh, Hamzeii investigates the localised significance of objects and the potential to elevate their meaning, creating a broader human narrative. She is alumni of Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, held a Bachelor of Fine Arts majored in Interdisciplinary Sculpture Making and a Diploma of Photography from Tehran University, Fine Arts Department.
Reina Takeuchi is an Australian-Japanese artist-researcher, dance maker and curator currently working at 4A as an Assistant Curator. Influenced by her experiences living peripatetically across Asia and South-East Asia, Takeuchi uses an auto-ethnographic approach with her artistic research and performance processes. Her practice spans across visual arts, choreography, curatorial projects, written publications and creative facilitation.
Sharafat Ali is an award-winning photographer whose work focuses on conflict, politics, faith and daily life in war-torn Kashmir.
Alana Hunt is an artist and writer living on Miriwoong country in the North-west of Australia. She has been working on evolving iterations of Cups of nun chai since 2010, most recently published by Yaarbal Books.
Arif Ayaz Parrey is a Kashmiri writer infused with nun chai.
Parvaiz Bukhari is a journalist based in Srinagar, Kashmir. In 2016 when Cups of nun chai was serialised in the Kashmir Reader, he was an editor with the daily newspaper.
Uzma Falak is a poet, essayist and filmmaker from Kashmir. She is currently a DAAD Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg.
Biung Ismahasan presents for 4A Digital: recent research and curatorial practice, focusing on “Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together Towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond.”
Biung Ismahasan is a Bunun (one of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous Nations) curator, artist and researcher. He is a PhD candidate in Curating from Centre for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex in the UK. His thesis entitles “Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together Towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond.”
His research relates to contemporary Indigenous curatorial practice and aesthetics, focusing on Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art. Ismahasan emphasises issues of participation, performativity and the historiography of Indigenous curation and exhibition design. He has received a MA in Cultural Policy, Relations & Diplomacy from the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014. His most notable curatorial projects include Dispossessions: An Indigenous Performative Encounter 20142019, an international performance art exchange of Indigenous artists from Taiwan. He was a curatorial assistant of Let The River Flow: The Sovereign Will And The Making of A New Worldliness in April 2018 at Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo; he has curated Dispossessions: Performative Encounter(s) of Taiwanese Indigenous Contemporary Art in May 2018 at Goldsmiths; he had curated yearly theme-based exhibition Ngahis Routes: When Depth Become Experiment which have collaborated with seven Taiwanese Indigenous artists at the Taoyuan City Indigenous Cultural Centre in 2019; he recently curated the Rukai Nation installation artist Eleng Luluans Between Dream in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel at the second exhibition in the National Gallery of Canadas series of presentations of contemporary international Indigenous art between November 2019 and October 2020.
Smoke Cloak (performance stills) from Dabil-bung (Broken Water) Series.
(a project addressing water theft and water sovereignty in this continent now called Australia)
During 2019, in severe drought conditions, I undertook a journey with my children that began at a freshwater lake on my homeland – a large sand island in saltwater country. The purpose of the journey was to meet with and amplify the voices of the First Nations Peoples whose country is fed by the extensive river system known since colonisation as the Murray-Darling. This project called for the return of the management and care of the now depleted river system to its Traditional Owners and Custodians. Simultaneous with this project was another initiated by Uncle Bruce Shillingsworth, Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree whereby First Nations People gathered to camp, to dance, and to sing-up the rain all along the river system. (Refer website) https://yaamangunnabaaka.com.au
Smoke Cloak® is actually the registered trademark of a commercial security system, used by retail businesses that produces a dense vapour in the event of an intrusion. It is designed to force the thief to leave the building empty-handed. The term smoke-screen is in common use to refer to the political strategy of covering up or hiding activities that may be unethical or illegal.
In this work from the Dabil-bung Series, I make a specific reference to the efforts of government and corporate investors to conceal the true extent of the over-allocation of water from the river system for commercial gain. The environmental and social cost of the unsustainable production of cotton through a massive irrigation project, largely for the apparel industry, has been disregarded, cloaked by the drive for profit in the inequitable relations of power that prevail.
My work also references the way in which smoke has been instrumental in the relations of power between Traditional Custodians of this country and its colonisers. Beginning with Cook’s ‘voyage of discovery’ 250 years ago, smoke from the fires of Australia’s First Peoples were observed and recorded in the ship’s journals, providing proof that the land was already occupied, and not the “Terra Nullius” (land belonging to no one) that was the basis for the British Crown’s claim of our country. Furthermore, smoke from signal fires built by our people all along Australia’s east coast communicated our observations in advance of the ship navigated by Cook.
With the arrival of the colonists, and their quest for farming and grazing land, smoke from our campfires was used as an indicator that water was nearby, and that this would be useful land for their purposes.
Today, Australia’s First Peoples continue our Traditional ritual of “smoking” for spiritual healing.
Junbar balganya – Smoke is rising (Guwar language – Mugumpin – Quandamooka)
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded Aboriginal country on which I work and live, and recognise their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.
Libby Harward. November 2020.
Libby Harward is a descendant of the Ngugi People of Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) in the Quandamooka (Moreton Bay Area, South East Queensland, Australia). Known for her early work as an urban graffiti artist under the pseudonym of ‘Mz Murricod’, and her performance-based community activism, Harward’s recent series, ALREADY OCCUPIED, engages a continual process of re-calling – re-hearing – re-mapping – re-contextualising – de-colonising and re-instating on country that, which colonisation has denied Australia’s First Peoples. This political practice engages Traditional Custodians in the evolution of ephemeral installations on mainland country which has become highly urbanised and calls for an artistic response that seeks to uncover and reinstate the cultural significance of place, which always was, and remains to be there. Her current place-based sound and video work engages directly with politically charged ideas of national and international significance.
In 2020, 4A Digital is
This digital work is best viewed on browser to experience integrated sound.
Intradependent is a digitally manipulated self-portrait that explores the tension between the natural compulsion for personal excellence, and a countervailing urge to self-sabotage. Contextualised with the Psychoanalysis theory of Moral Masochism, the work depicts two identical figures, one repressing the other yet depending on her support; and the other providing support while enduring the weight of the former. In this enclosed ecosystem, an individual is simultaneously the perpetrator and the victim; the consumer and provider. This dynamic alludes to the perplexity and interchangeability of one’s internal performed roles, coined by Lau as an ‘intradependent’ mentality.
The Freudian notion of a divided and duplicated self is a recurring theme in my practice. In my auto-ethnographical and performative works, I stage internal dialogues to convey the duality and fluidity of my social identities, an amalgamation of my Hong Kong upbringing and Australian education. Adopting a meta-referential approach, my interdisciplinary practice draws from the conventions of studio practice to provide an intimate interpretation towards the process of art making, and the phenomenon of self-representation and tacit social rules in the context of the art scene.
In Intradependent, while the duo can be read as dependent and supportive respectively, there is also an element of self- inflicted punishment. The kneeling figure is conditioned to prolonged endurance bearing the weight of the sitting figure. In the theory of Moral Masochism, Psychoanalyst Roy Schafer suggested in his article “Those Wrecked by Success” (1988) that self-destructive behaviours could be stimulated by a fear of achievement. While the yearning for personal achievement and social acceptance is a dominating theme in my works, I observe a self-sabotaging tendency. The paralysing fear of mediocrity has seemingly left me shrouded in an unconscious guilt. Similar to the kneeling figure, I am immobilised by weight of my own ambition.
Ultimately a self-portraiture about art making, the overlapping of the artist and the muse in Intradependent is an Ouroboros – a serpent biting at its own tail. As the artist consumes and exploits the muse for her work, the two figures seemingly become a reluctant cannibal and a willing victim. An extension to my work A Stagnant Stack, the violence and turbulence are however neatly concealed in the stillness of the monochromatic portrait, reflective of my profession as a commercial Art Director, and paying abidance to the tacit rule of always maintaining decency.
Gwan Tung Dorothy Lau is Hong Kong-based contemporary artist working with digitally manipulated performative self-portrait photography and video, installation and performance. She completed her MFA with distinction at RMIT and Hong Kong Art School after receiving her BFA (Visual Arts) from QUT. She represented the institution at the HATCHED: National Graduate Show. In addition to being featured in VOGUE Hong Kong, Vice Creator and RealTime, Lau has participated in the Tropical Lab international artist residency and the Creative Mornings lecture series. Lau has exhibited internationally, notably at Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Hong Kong Arts Centre Pao Galleries and Metro Arts Brisbane. For her commercial works, Lau founded GTDL Creative, a studio that provides art direction and consultation for media productions.
Presented as part of 4A Digital: Cups of nun chai: online book launch with Alana Hunt, artist and writer and Sanjay Kak of Yaarbal Books in conversation with Jasmin Stephens
Watch an online panel between Alana Hunt (artist and writer) and Sanjay Kak (filmmaker and founder of Yaarbal Books), in conversation with Jasmin Stephens (curator) to celebrate the release of the book ‘Cups of nun chai’, as a part of 4A Digital.
Held on 8 December, the talk focused on ‘Cups of nun chai’, an evolving body of work brewed for over a decade by Alana Hunt as a requiem to the killing of over 118 people during pro-freedom protests in Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2010.
It unfolded over two years of tea and conversation, accumulated progressively online, appeared as a newspaper serial in the Kashmir Reader from June 2016 – April 2017, and has most recently been published by Yaarbal Books, New Delhi.
ONLINE.
TUESDAY 8 DECEMBER 6:00PM-7:30PM AEDT
Join artist and writer Alana Hunt and filmmaker and founder of Yaarbal Books, Sanjay Kak, in conversation with curator Jasmin Stephensfor an in-depth discussion as we release the decade long body of work Cups of nun chai into the world in book form with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art as a part of 4A Digital.
Cups of nun chairecords the sharing of one hundred and eighteen cups of nun chai, and just as many conversations. Each cup was a part of a growing memorial for one hundred and eighteen civilians killed in the protests that shook the Kashmir valley during the summer of 2010.
In these exchanges the political unfolds through a profoundly personal experience, and events, places and sentiments that are often obscured from view are given breathing space. People, homes, memory—and flavour—combine to make tangible what so many outside Kashmir do not know.
This is an archive of small moments, marking each loss and moving against the normalisation of political violence and death. Spanning the spheres of contemporary art, literature, social-science and journalism, Cups of nun chai is a poignant act of memorialisation—a means of remembering, reading and reminding.
Adroit, and shot through with an extraordinary, even stubborn, compassion, it reflects on Kashmir, but also on nation-making and colonisation, and on power and violence. The histories, political forces and grief behind this work emerge gradually, but with great sensitivity. And eventually with an unexpected degree of ferocity.
Published by Yaarbal Books and designed by Itu Chaudhuri Design. With additional contributions from Parvaiz Bukhari and Uzma Falak. The book will be available in select book stores in Delhi and Srinagar and online via www.cupsofnunchai.com
Publication of this book is supported by The State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.
Alana studied in Sydney, Halifax and New Delhi, and since 2009 she has led several award-winning art and publishing projects. These have circulated in the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament, as a reading in the history department of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as a newspaper serial in Srinagar, Kashmir, and as an unofficial street sign at the base of Australia’s most under-utilised dam wall. Alana will be exhibiting new work in The National: New Australian Art 2021 at Carriageworks.
Sanjay Kak is a documentary filmmaker and writer of Kashmiri-origin who lives in New Delhi. He has been producing award-winning films on environmental activism and resistance politics since the 1980s. The film Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007), the edited volume Until My Freedom Comes: The New Intifada in Kashmir (Penguin, 2011) and the photobook Witness (Yaarbal Books, 2017) have widely influenced the way Kashmir is seen in India. In 2008 he participated in Manifesta7, the European Biennale of Art, in Bolzano, Italy, with the installation A Shrine to the Future: The Memory of a Hill, about the mining of bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha. Born in 1958, Sanjay read Economics and Sociology at Delhi University, and is a self-taught filmmaker. He is actively involved in the documentary film movement, and in the Campaign against Censorship and the Cinema of Resistance project.
Yaarbal Books is an independent publishing house based in New Delhi, India. It takes its name from a Kashmiri language word for the riverbank, and suggests a place of conviviality, where conversations can take place. The logo, a bold Y integrated with a slingshot, is a fair representation of its intentions: both resourceful and resolute, at once toy and weapon. It also stands in for a commitment to swim against the tides of power, commerce, and conformity. Its first title, the 2017 photobook ‘Witness – Kashmir / 1986-2016’ was listed in New York Times Magazine’s year-end list of Best Photo Books of 2017. Yaarbal is an imprint of New Delhi based Octave Communications, a production house with a three decade long track record in documentary film and television, and headed by film-maker and writer Sanjay Kak.
Jasmin Stephens is an independent curator and lecturer in curatorial studies and contemporary art in Asia. She has contributed to programming by institutions and led by artists across Australia and in Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. Currently curating with Contemporary Art Tasmania and teaching at UNSW Sydney, Jasmin also works with artists and curators as a researcher and strategist.
KazKom is a Japanese Australian illustrator, 2D animator, and comic artist based in Sydney, Australia. With an education background in animation, Kaz has found her love in story telling with contributions seen in Meet Me In The Pitt and HAG MAG. Her works are usually playful and silly and made up of comedic short bits, however, Kaz has recently started exploring a more monologue type comic to illustrate her experiences and thoughts.
via Zoom Webinar: register in advance for this webinar here.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Join Dr. Shuxia Chen in conversation with Dr Yu-Chieh Li for a discussion on photographs, photocopies, and lianhuanhua in the context of the early works of Wang Youshen.
After the first electrostatic photocopier was successfully replicated in 1966, based on an imported Xerox photocopier, the Chinese photocopier machine industry continued to develop, particularly from the mid-1980s. With relatively easy access, and a zeal for experimentation typical of the ’85 New Wave Movement, the use of photocopiers to produce new artworks emerged in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. Having reopened in 1978, after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the CAFA curriculum encouraged artistic exploration in different media and materials. By examining works, particularly lianhuanhua “linked/serial pictures”, produced with a photocopier by Wang Youshen, then a student in the Nnianhua (new year painting) and Lianhuanhua Department at CAFA, this talk investigates the combination of photography and photocopying as an experimental medium, and how reproduction endowed traditional genres such as lianhuanhua with a new “aura” in 1980s China.
In this talk, Dr. Shuxia Chen argues that the way this new “aura” was generated by crossing over between media, materials and genres, broke boundaries in a manner typical of postmodern or contemporary art practices, and hence sheds light on the emergence of contemporary art in China from the 1990s.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Dr. Shuxia Chen is an art historian and curator of Asian art. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University, an MA in Art History from the University of Sydney, and an MA in Studio Art (Honours) from Sydney College of the Arts. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese photography, artist groups, and post-socialist visual culture. Shuxia’s research has been published in journals such as Trans-Asia Photography Review, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Made in China and Artforum. Since 2007, Shuxia has also worked with a range of museums and galleries in China and Australia as a curator and exhibition manager. Her current curatorial projects include: “A Home for Photography Learning” (Beijing and Hong Kong, 2018-2020), “Auspicious Beings” (Sydney, 2020-2021), and “Wayfaring: ‘70s and ‘80s Taiwanese
Photography” (Canberra, 2020).
Dr Yu-Chieh Li is the inaugural Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art and Design, Sydney. She was an Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013-2015) and adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia (2017-8) in London. Her research focuses on two areas: performance art and artist-led research responding to decolonial struggles in the Sinosphere, and the tension between locally-generated art discourses and neoliberal globalisation. Her publications appear in Art in Translation, Art Monthly Australasia, and post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, with an edited volume Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky recently published by Springer. Currently she is working on a book project examining the artistic autonomy of post-socialist China.
Presented by UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Series organisers: Prof Paul Gladston and Dr Yu-Chieh Li.
Image: Wang Youshen, 1990, Portrait Series, 王友身1990-人像系列·资料
4A Digital Hits the Streets: Joanna Frank and Spectator Jonze 23 November – 17 December 2020 Various street locations in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is thrilled to announce 4A Digital Hits the Streets, an ephemeral exhibition that will transform digital artworks into interactive street posters across Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney this summer. Programmed as part of 4A’s online commissioning platform, 4A Digital, this project features the mesmerising works of Joanna Frank and Spectator Jonze, and are accompanied by a custom-made augmented reality animation created especially by the artists for 4A.
Simply point your phone towards the QR code on the poster, download the Eyejack app (if you don’t have it already), and hover your screen to activate Joanna Frank and Spectator Jonze’s works.
Spot a poster? Let us know on Instagram via @4a_aus and #4ADigital for your chance to win 4A summer prize packs, including limited-edition artist prints, a 4A tote bag, and publications.⠀
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4A Digital Hits the Streets takes place in these locations and others:⠀
📍Sydney: 23 Nov – 17 Dec
Alexandria, CBD, Darlinghurst, Leichhardt, Marrickville, Mascot, Newtown, Paddington, Surry Hills and more.⠀
📍Melbourne: 23 Nov – 14 Dec
CBD, Southbank, Carlton North, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Footscray, Richmond, Box Hill, Thornbury, Preston, Prahran and more.⠀
📍Brisbane: 27 Nov – 11 Dec
Airport, Fortitude Valley, Griffith Uni, Indooroopilly, Kangaroo Point, Kelvin Grove, Mt Gravatt, Paddington, Woolloongabba and more.⠀
To celebrate 4A Digital Hits the Streets, 4A curators Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi invited Joanna Frank and Spectator Jonzeto create new works that capture their vivid, character-driven aesthetics, with anthemic themes that celebrate the resilient and dynamic nature that comes with being a woman artist.
For the heroine-driven work, DEADALIVE, Taiwanese-Australian artist-musician Jonze tackles the taboo of coronavirus and maintaining creative stamina during times of unrest. Jonze explains: “For the poster, I wanted to capture the feelings of suffocation, isolation, health technologies and anxiety, but I also wanted to show that out of the rubble, I found the fighter, the survivor and also the amazing fortunes that 2020 has brought me as well.”
Frank’s pulsating work, Face is the Index of the Mind, pays ode to the lived experiences of creative women of colour: “Having resilience as a migrant is parallel to being an artist: we have this ability to use limited resources and materials to our advantage, and I think this is pretty astonishing when it comes to making art,” says Frank. “I created the work as a reminder of the value and power that women hold in this world.”
Around 300 posters will be prominently displayed in partnership with leading poster distributor Plakkit, and with support from the City of Sydney. To elevate the experience, these images are integrated with an augmented reality component custom-created by Frank and Jonze. Enter the artists’ conceptual worlds by downloading theEyejack app on their smartphone, pointing their screen towards the posters, and activating their AR animation in real-time.
Gerakaris says: “4A Digital Hits the Streets allows 4A to highlight contemporary artists in a guerilla-style exhibition. Alongside the augmented reality videos the project is a unique hybrid of street art, design and digital art showcasing the bold and psychedelic work of Frank and Jonze. Frank’s work, Face is the index of the mind, is a self-assertion of power and confidence, twisting science fiction aesthetics into a visage of a female-driven future.”
Adds Takeuchi: “Spectator Jonze is an evocative multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans across digital media, drawing, performance and sound. Having experienced the COVID-19 virus first hand, DEADALIVE speaks directly to Jonze’s strength as a fighter, artist and survivor in the face of adversity. It’s with great pleasure that we present her work alongside Joanna Frank’s as a part of our initiative.”
The posters are distributed at various sites via our partnership with leading poster distributor Plakkit, and with support from the City of Sydney.
Stay tuned for updates viaInstagram from 23 November onwards.
Joanna Frank is a Sydney based artist/designer born in Chennai, India. Her collages are a series of visual experiments that are created in a dynamic moment. They combine a variety of collected imagery such as personal photos, logos, religious icons, video screen shots and magazine ads. Through both intention and chance these images are layered, distorted and assembled to create new narratives. Frank has exhibited at Goodspace Gallery (Sydney) and Down/Under Space (Sydney). Her work has been published in Apostrophe Magazine, and The Lifted Brow and appeared on album covers and posters for Gauci, DMA’s, Triple One and more. Her commercial clients have included EMI, Pseushi and Universal Music. Joanna Frank is also a musician, and in October, she released her latest EP, FRANK-X 𝒲𝒾𝓁𝒹 𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒!
Artist statement
“My new work, Face is the index of the mind, is a reflection of my experiences as a creative woman of colour. I believe that pursuing a career in the creative field is just as important as working in medicine or technology, so I want to leave a cultural mark on society through my art. As a migrant, I also feel like I owe it to myself to offer society a different perspective than seeing things from a centralised lens. Maybe this comes from the fact that children of immigrants have this pressure to succeed? Having resilience as a migrant is parallel to being an artist: we have this ability to use limited resources and materials to our advantage, and I think this is pretty astonishing when it comes to making art. If I could do something with so little, imagine what I can do with so much!
Spectator Jonze
Artist bio
Spectator Jonze is the artist moniker of Deena Lynch. Lynch was born in Yokohama, Japan to a Taiwanese mother and an Australian father. She migrated to Australia under less than certain circumstances when she was 6 years old. For Lynch, art became a medium she utilised as a cathartic vessel to uncover the secrets she had even hidden from herself. ‘Spectator Jonze’ is the culmination of self-discovery and healing that has evolved into a project of passion – bringing mental health to light by depicting the often taboo subject of our individual battles into a colourful, comedic display of imperfectly perfect beauty. Lynch’s other projects include her work as Jaguar Jonze, where her enigmatic yet vulnerable songwriting has seen her music recognised in NME. To celebrate the release of Jaguar Jonze’s latest single, DEADALIVE, she is currently touring across Australia in November and December.
Artist statement
“This year was chaos for all of us, for the creative industries (especially in music), and for my health fighting COVID-19. I’m both a visual artist and musician so naturally, for this project, I wanted to draw on what this year meant for me. DEADALIVE was a track I released in September under my music project Jaguar Jonze, it was written in a pressure-cooker environment of uncertainty and tension. I wrote it in our New York apartment earlier this year when we were stuck in the beginning of the pandemic lockdown during our US tour, and then finished it off in Sydney while under hospital care for 40 days recovering from COVID-19. I’ve been in three quarantines this year, finally making it home after 6 months. It was a period of time that tested my resilience and fortitude. For the poster, I wanted to capture the feelings of suffocation, isolation, health technologies and anxiety, but I also wanted to show that out of the rubble, I found the fighter, the survivor and also the amazing fortunes that 2020 has brought me as well.”
Image captions:
4A Digital Hits the Streets – Poster image (cropped): Spectator Jonze, DEADALIVE (detail), 2020, courtesy the artist; Joanna Frank, Face is the Index of the Mind (detail), 2020
Joanna Frank, self-portrait (cropped); courtesy the artist.
Spectator Jonze, self-portrait; courtesy the artist.
Joanna Frank, Face is the Index of the Mind, 2020, courtesy the artist.
Spectator Jonze, DEADALIVE, 2020, courtesy the artist.
Mel Stringer is a Filipino-Australian Illustrator and Comic Artist currently based in Whidbey Island, a small island near Seattle, Washington.
Her artwork ranges from cute, digitally-created curvy girls full of attitude to her more rough comic work that is distributed in the form of photocopied zines.
A lot of her work is autobiographical in one way or another, whether it’s a direct diary entry or just inspired by her own experiences.
You can see more of Mel’s work by visiting her Patreon.com/melstringer site where she creates monthly art packages for supporters.
In 2020, 4A Digital is
PUBLIC PROGRAM
Watch a candid conversation between Filipina-Australian artist Mel Stringer and 4A Assistant Curator Reina Takeuchi, conducted between Stringer’s home studio at Seattle, USA and 4A’s Haymarket gallery in Sydney, Australia. In this episode, Stringer discusses the diaristic themes that drive her playful autobiographical practice, including notions of body positivity, cultural diaspora, and female-driven empowerment. The interview took place on 10 October 2020 as part of Sleepless in Seattle, commissioned for 4A Digital.
Johanna Ng is a multidisciplinary artist based in Carlingford. She is currently studying a BFA at the National Art School. She enrolled at the peak of her Saturn return.
viaZoom Webinar: register in advance for this webinar:
Join Thibaut de Ruyter, architect, curator and critic with moderator Paul Gladston for a discussion on the complexities of contemporary art in the ‘Central Asia’ region. Thibaut will also be joined by Viktoriya Erofeeva for an in-conversation as part of this event.
Asian studies in universities, museums dedicated to Asian artefacts and even tourism in Asia often start their geography somewhere in India or West China to end 4,000 kilometres further in Japan. Very few ethnological collections in Europe own pieces from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, countries that are usually brought together under the terminology of Central Asia. (Interestingly, the existence of a “centre” means that all that surrounds it becomes a periphery.) Despite their position between Europe and Asia, they stay often unknown territories for the rest of the world. But those countries, located between the Caspian Sea, the Middle East, Russia, China and Mongolia, represent a surface almost as big as Europe and a population of 100 million inhabitants.
For sure, Central Asia has been colonised and dominated by Russia since the early 19th century and the existence of the Soviet Union during the 20th left deep traces in the actual society. The countries of Centra Asia only gained their independence 30 years ago. But starting with the ancient Silk Road, ending with its new inception and version (the so-called Silk Road 2.0) via the Great Game, their history, culture and identity are a complex question with different roots and paths. For many inhabitants of Central Asia, Russian is still the lingua franca, religion has been so oppressed that it has only become a topic recently, political situations can be far away from the expected democratic standards, and economic development is mostly there for some happy few with a good network. And, as pretty often in countries where the press or the media are not free, it is the artists who are taking the role of commentators, critics, activists.
The talk will, at first, introduce this badly known region (named here with a touch of provocation “The Black Hole”) in terms of history and geography. Then, through the works of several contemporary artists, discuss the actual situation in those countries and, finally, open perspectives about their development by commenting young art initiatives and institutions.
Thibaut de Ruyter is a French architect, curator and critic. He has been living and working in Berlin since 2001. His interests are based on new media and their archeology, the relationship between art and architecture, and the artistic scene in post-soviet countries and particularly in Central Asia.
His latest projects are a travelling exhibition for Goethe-Institut in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Die Grenze (with Inke Arns) who was displayed in 11 cities between 2017 and 2019 while his exhibition A Song for Europe was presented at the V&A, London 2017 and Schauspielhaus, Stuttgart 2018. In 2019, on the occasion of the 100 birthday of the Bauhaus in Germany, he co-curated with Marjolaine Levy the exhibition 26 x Bauhaus that was to be seen in Berlin, Bremen and Munich. He edited or co-edited the books: Zeitgeist (Archive books, Berlin), Industrial on tour and Industrial Research (Revolver Verlag, Berlin) and Stadtbild (Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin). As an art and architecture critic, he writes or has been writing for the magazines Artpress, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, Fucking Good Art, Frieze d/e, L'Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Architectuul. In 2015 he co-founded ALUAN, the first Kazakh art magazine, with Gaisha Madanova. He has been a member of the French section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) since 2008.
www.thibautderuyter.com
Viktoriya Erofeeva
Bachelor in Theory and History of Fine Arts, with a field of activities including: art-criticism, art-management, art-journalism. Main activities: writing articles about art and culture, giving lectures, assistant curator, organization of art events. Past roles include as (September 2016 to May 2020) manager and art critic at the private gallery ZERO LINE, Tashkent and (since June 2020) freelance correspondent for the independent media about today’s Uzbekistan – hook.report. Since September 2020, she works in the editorial office of ariadna.media, a new independent media platform about contemporary art in Central Asia.
Presented by UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Series organisers: Prof. Paul Gladston and Dr Yu-Chieh Li
Freda Chiu is a Sydney-based freelance illustrator and educator at The University of Technology Sydney. She is inspired by her love of children’s picture books, indie comics, horror movies and good stories.
In this 4A KIDS activity, Freda invites you to make characters with her – who will you create?
Nathan Beard is a Perth-based artist who uses various mediums such as photography and sculpture to unpack the influences of his Thai-Australian heritage.
In this 4A KIDS activity, make your fingernails dance with Nathan’s fun tutorial!
Lee Lai is from Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, and currently makes comics and illustrations in Tio’tia:ke (known as Montreal, Quebec). She has been featured in The New Yorker, The Lifted Brow, Room Magazine, and Meanjin Journal. Her first graphic novel Stone Fruit is due to be released by Fantagraphics in 2021, and has been translated into four languages.
“Mixed a few handfuls of home-listening favourites over the last few months and recorded them straight to tape after three practice takes during one overcast afternoon in mid-September 2020. No specific emotions/themes were cast to mind when approaching the mix, but one could say it’s sluggish, sensual and sombre (all at the same time) upon listening back.”
– Strict Face
Strict Face is a Filipino producer/DJ hailing from Adelaide, South Australia. Whilst a member of the NLV Records roster since its inception, he has also released music on Local Action and Gobstopper Records over the years. He has frequently worked internationally, having toured throughout the UK & Europe and hosted radio shows in Paris, Hong Kong and London, while establishing a ongoing relationship with the underground club music scene in both his hometown and throughout Australia.
SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 2020
Shireen Taweel in conversation with Reina Takeuchi
William Street Creative Hub, Darlinghurst, Sydney
Watch a conversation between Lebanese-Australian artist Shireen Taweel and 4A Assistant Curator Reina Takeuchi in Taweel’s Sydney home-studio, presented as part of the 4A TALKS series.
In this episode, Taweel discusses her artistic practice and coppersmith techniques, as well as the cross-cultural histories and social relationships that inform her work, which incorporates sculpture, installation and sound. Takeuchi and Taweel also reflect on the the stories and concepts behind Taweel’s work, tracing transcendence, on view at 4A in the exhibition Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel (3-25 September).
The interview took place on 5 September 2020 in Taweel’s studio on William Street, Darlinghurst, where city life and traffic bustle can be heard intermittently in the background.
Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation views, 2020, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Shireen Taweel in her studio at Darlinghurst, Sydney; photo: Leigh Griffiths for Broadsheet Sydney.
Shireen Taweel in her studio at Parramatta Artists Studio, 2018, courtesy Parramatta Artists Studios; photo: Jacquie Manning
Shireen Taweel studio image; photo: Eloise Fuss.
Shireen Taweel, tracing transcendence, 2018, The Substation; photo: Matthew Stanton.
Instagram process images and videos by Shireen Taweel.
Join Frank Vigneron, Chairperson and Professor, Fine Arts Department, CUHK in conversation with artists Natalie Lo Lai Lai and Monti Lai about socially engaged art in rural Hong Kong, with moderator Paul Gladston.
Mainland China is experiencing a renewal of art education in rural settings thanks to official policies developed as part of the ‘Beautiful Countryside’ initiative. This top-down initiative has seen, for instance, the establishment of brand-new teaching centres set up by major universities with financial support from the highest echelons of local government. By contrast, in Hong Kong rural art projects have been initiated mainly due to grassroots initiatives. Even though some of those projects have been funded by branches of the local government of the Hong Kong SAR, most have been led by independent artists and activists eager to explore local sociocultural identities as well as develop alternative artistic lifestyles.
Emerging from which are new regionally-grounded communities of engagement with aestheticized thinking and practice. Several of the projects in question are described in this presentation. At a time of heightened uncertainty in the Hong Kong SAR brought about by the imposition of new national security laws, artists/activists involved in such grass roots initiatives are no longer sure of the freedoms previously guaranteed by China’s “one country, two systems” framework. This discussion will take stock of socially-engaged art practices in rural Hong Kong and how they might be taken forward under changed conditions.
About the speakers:
Lo Lai Lai Natalie is based in Hong Kong. A former travel journalist, Lo is interested in the development and the construction of nature. She is a learner at the collective organic farm Sangwoodgoon (Hong Kong) where she also explores, as an artist and a Hongkonger, the lifestyle of “Half-Farming, Half-X”, a practice that seeks alternatives and autonomy. Lai Lai finds her interests in food, farming, fermentation, slow-driving, surveillance, and meditation. Mixing multiple media including moving image, photography, and installation. Her works are collected by the Sigg Collection and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (US).
Monti LAI is an environmental artist and a farmer recognized for works that reflect on the relationship between art and the environment. Monti received her MFA from Aalto University majoring in Environmental Art. Her artworks range from site-specific environmental installations to drawings and participatory art. She set up the Farmside Art Research Lab to explore her agroecological concerns through artisan farming practice.
Frank Vigneron received a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History from the Paris VII University, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Paris IV Sorbonne University and a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1990 and joined the Department of Fine Arts, CUHK in 2004. His research focus is on the history of Chinese painting from the 18th century onwards and on different aspects of contemporary Chinese art seen in a global context.
Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales and was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. Paul has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with regard to the concerns of critical theory and, in doing so, has been formative on the development of a critically informed contemporary Chinese art studies both internationally and inside China. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), which received ‘publication of the year’ at the Awards of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2014 to 2017 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.
Presented by UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Series organisers: Prof. Paul Gladston and Dr Yu-Chieh Li
As part of Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, artist Shireen Taweel and exhibition curator Reina Takeuchi will be present at 4A on Saturday 12 September between 11am-1pm to give visitors an opportunity to discuss the works with them in person.
Please note, in line with COVIDSafe visitor guidelines, there is a limit of 8 visitors to our Haymarket gallery at one time. If you would like to reserve a time to meet the artist or visit the exhibition from 3 – 25 September, please make a booking here.
Shireen Taweel (b. 1990, Bankstown, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is a multimedia installation artist whose work broaches issues of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through language and the constantly shifting public space of the social, political and religious axiom. Her artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation, expressed through hybridity and plurality. The project development of Shireen’s works are often site-specific, weaving local narratives and research with a focus on experimentation in material and sound through site. Shireen’s constant acquisition of traditional coppersmith artisan skills is a research vessel for community-focused conceptual development, and through a progressive application of the collected artisan techniques and a manipulation of the traditional acts of making that leads to possibilities of cross-cultural discourse, opening dialogues of shared histories and fluid community identities.
Andrew Yee is multidisciplinary artist working across illustration, video, installation and podcasting. Yee’s formative years spent in Sydney’s East Ryde district created a disconnect with his surroundings, searching for his identity through a consumption of 2000s manga, pro-wrestling, the spectacle of K-pop and the emotional draw of music. His visual practice offers a meditative glimpse into concepts of personal identity and emotions often crafted through imaginative narrative forms presented in an idiosyncratic, surreal and comic-inspired style.
To coincide with the exhibition Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®, 4A presented an Instagram Live talk on 16 August with artists and sisters Lauren Hernandez and Kass Hernandez, who work under the collaborative name Crossing Threads. Holding Patterns curator Con Gerakaris spoke with the duo about the socio-cultural, environmental and familial stories that inform their practice, as well as the interesting materials and methods that make up the multi-textural works on display at 4A. This live-streamed talk was recorded in our Haymarket gallery and is part of our 4A TALKS series.
Crossing Threads® is the collaborative work of Australian-born sisters of Filipino heritage Lauren Hernandez (b. 1988, Sydney) and Kass Hernandez (b. 1989, Sydney). These self-taught tapestry artists first explored the practice of weaving in early 2015 by attending a beginner’s workshop. Known for their large-scale and highly textural handwoven pieces, the Hernandez sisters seek to emulate the natural forms found in nature. Their carefully curated fibre selections include Australian Merino wool, plant-based fibres, up-cycled/dead-stock fabrics and other foraged items that aren’t traditionally used in fibre art. Their practice has led them to develop their recognisable ‘interknot’ technique, made up of intertwining hand-knotted chains of varying texture and thickness which graduate to a relief. The artists continually draw spiritual inspiration from their surrounding landscapes and personal experiences and are materialised through their abstract designs.
Make kabsah with me weaves together personal and broader narratives – touching on the history of migration through West Asia, the complexities of the Arab cultural landscape and the immigrant experience in Australia.
These narratives are told through conversations with my father; a first-generation Saudi, who grew up in Riyadh to a Syrian family, and migrated to Hobart around 30 years ago.
Memory and significance is explored through a dish that is widely loved within the Arab world but relatively unknown in Australia. This work reflects on cooking as a format for communication and exchange online, as well as a means of surface-level cultural consumption – and considers whether these existing roles can be used to provoke a curiosity for deeper cross-cultural engagement.
Nadia Refaei is an artist based in nipaluna (Hobart). She received a Bachelor of Arts in 2014 and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2015 from the University of Tasmania. Her arts and curatorial practice draws on both personal and broader histories to explore the power dynamics and politics of intersectional identity as an Arab-Australian. Nadia uses photography, installation and video to interrogate Western imperialist narratives, examining issues such as displacement, cultural dislocation and the body. Her practice combines both process-based and research-driven methods.
Monuments is a site-responsive work by artist Dean Cross– an ongoing project since 2016, intended for exhibition every two years. Handfuls of white ochre – consisting Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country where the artist grew up, and gathered with permission from local elder and custodian of the land Aunty Matilda House – build a grid that spreads across the gallery floors. A number of the ‘monuments’ are interspersed with gold leaf. With each handful representing one year of colonisation in Australia, Cross’ Monuments to strength, survival and custodianship challenge colonial concepts of ceramics, memorialisation and memory. Says Cross: “A Western statue is a depiction; my monuments are the real thing”[1].
Monuments is exhibiting at 4A in 2020 as a precursor and grounding work to 2021 4A exhibition Drawn by stones. Drawn by stones brings together artists who utilise the ceramic medium to interrogate contested histories, stolen land, Indigenous sovereignty, and concepts of national identity. In 2021, exhibiting artists from Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan will further investigate the creation of a sense of ‘nationhood’ through ceramics, demonstrating how the medium can both memorialise and tell alternative histories.
Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is of Worimi descent. He is a trans-disciplinary artist primarily working across installation, sculpture and photography. His career began in contemporary dance, performing and choreographing nationally and internationally for over a decade with Australia’s leading dance companies. Following that Cross re-trained as a visual artist, attaining his Bachelor’s degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and his First Class Honours from the ANU School of Art and Design.
Cross has shown his work extensively across Australia. This includes the exhibiting of Monuments as part of the 2018 Indigenous Ceramic Prize at the Shepparton Art Museum, curated by Anna Briers and Belinda Briggs; Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Nici Cumpston (2017); RUNS DEEP a solo show at Alaska Projects, Sydney (2018); The Churchie Emerging Art Prize (2016); The Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize (2015); and the Macquarie Group Emerging Art Prize (2015) where his work was awarded the Highly Commended prize by artist Joan Ross. In 2020, Cross has staged solo exhibitions I LOVE YOU. I’M SORRY at Firstdraft Gallery, and A Sullen Perfume at Yavuz Gallery. Cross has also exhibited at Outerspace, Brisbane; Alaska Projects; the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, as a part of the NEXTWAVE Festival Melbourne, with curator Amelia Winata; and at Artbank, Sydney in Talia Smith’s In a World of Wounds. Dean was also selected to be a part of the 4A Beijing Studio Residency Program in Beijing, China in 2018. Dean’s work has been collected extensively and is held in significant public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of South Australia, The Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, and the Canberra Museum and Gallery. He is represented by Yavuz Gallery, Sydney and Singapore.
[1] Cross, Dean, quoted in “Of Salt and Ochre: Contemporary Clay and Kinship with Country”, Briers, A and Briggs, B, The Journal of Australian Ceramics, July 2018.
Watch a short artist talk with Dean Cross, where he reflects on this monumental work at 4A, and the stories and legacies that inform his trans-disciplinary practice. Filmed at 4A on 15 September 2020, this video features an introduction by 4A Deputy Director Bridie Moran, who curated Dean Cross: Monuments as a precursor to the 2021 Drawn by stones exhibition.
Dean Cross, Monuments (2018 – ongoing indefinitely, 2020 iteration), handfuls of Ngunnawal ochre & gold leaf, dimensions variable; photos: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian art; courtesy the artist.
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. These exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
Referring to the aeronautical manoeuvre of an airplane forced to delay its landing procedure to avoid potential disaster, a holding pattern suggests divergence from an established routine and the suspension of normalcy. Crucially, it is an action of adaptability: a pilot executing specific turns whilst accounting for wind speed and direction to establish its course. The pattern achieves seemingly limitless flight, looping until given permission to commence its landing operations, once again returning to earth and reality. It is in this moment of suspension that we find ourselves undertaking our own rituals of contemplation, addressing our own pathways forward in a time of stillness.
For the exhibiting artists COVID-19 has been an unexpected intervention, a force majeure. Forced out of their routines, artists have now been given opportunities to reflect on what it means to be creatively-engaged during a time of crisis. Contemplating artistic practice with the arts industry shut down, Holding Patterns demonstrates the resilience and ingenuity of artists during this time.. Some have taken time to rest and recharge, quietly laying projects to rest to make way for new ideas, while others have pivoted to hone their craft.
Through textiles, sculptures, metallurgy, drawing and painting, the artists of Holding Patterns deftly navigate cultural histories, identities, object permanence and transmutation through process-based practice. As the first exhibiting artist, Kien Situ creates architecturally-informed sculptures of domestic and sacred objects and furniture rendered with obscurity in form, function and material. The complex ‘interknot’ technique of Crossing Threads® embraces compositional tension and release in the contrasting tones and textures of their lyrical, abstracted pieces. Shireen Taweel modernises the traditional art of copper-smithing to create pieces that blur the line between jewellery and sculpture, opening dialogues of shared histories and relationships between communities of fluid identities. Sofiyah Ruqayah’s indeterminate forms draw upon mutations of human and non-human realities, generating connections between tangible bodies and aetheric dreams and spirit worlds informed by cultural myths of embodiment.
Fusing together their own creative impulses within traditional methods, these artists make mass departures from ‘normal’ culturally-concerned art making. It is within these strays from tradition and the ‘expected’ that new cultural dialogues can begin to emerge, representing the hybridity of Asian-Australian contemporary art practice. By merging traditional Asian techniques and labour-intensive processes, Holding Patterns relishes in craftsmanship and provides opportunities to glimpse the artists’ material worlds of contemplation and stillness, offering momentary suspension from our own holding patterns.
ArtistBiographies:
Kien Situ (b. 1990, Sydney)is a sculpture and installation artist meditating on memory, cultural amnesia and identity in relation to the aesthetics of constructed objects and environments. Drawing upon familiar spatial, formal, textural, tectonic and material experience of his East Asian upbringing, Kien utilises and dissects his Eurocentric architectural education to create objects which reinterpret formative aesthetic and sensory experiences obfuscated by a diasporic childhood. His works are a physical melding of this experience, casting industrial gypsum cement with the regional, “artistic” material of Chinese Mò ink, a material central to the artist’s practice as part of the investigation into the symbiotic relationship between geography, place and identity.
Crossing Threads® is the collaborative work of Australian-born sisters of Filipino heritage Lauren Hernandez (b. 1988, Sydney) and Kass Hernandez (b. 1989, Sydney). These self-taught tapestry artists first explored the practice of weaving in early 2015 by attending a beginner’s workshop. Known for their large-scale and highly textural handwoven pieces, the Hernandez sisters seek to emulate the natural forms found in nature. Their carefully curated fibre selections include Australian Merino wool, plant-based fibres, up-cycled/dead-stock fabrics and other foraged items that aren’t traditionally used in fibre art. Their practice has led them to develop their recognisable ‘interknot’ technique, made up of intertwining hand-knotted chains of varying texture and thickness which graduate to a relief. The artists continually draw spiritual inspiration from their surrounding landscapes and personal experiences and are materialised through their abstract designs.
Shireen Taweel (b. 1990, Bankstown, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is a multimedia installation artist whose work broaches issues of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through language and the constantly shifting public space of the social, political and religious axiom. Her artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation expressed through hybridity and plurality. The project development of Shireen’s works are often site-specific, weaving local narratives and research with a focus on experimentation in material and sound through site. Shireen’s constant acquisition of traditional coppersmith artisan skills is a research vessel for community focused conceptual development, and through a progressive application of the collected artisan techniques and a manipulation of the traditional acts of making that leads to possibilities of cross-cultural discourse opening dialogues of shared histories and fluid community identities.
Sofiyah Ruqayah (b. 1992, Sydney) is a Sydney-based artist working across drawing, installation, collage and painting to explore the strange territories between human and nonhuman realities. She is interested in themes of mutation, dream and spirit worlds. Drawing upon imagined and felt connections between various bodies, presences and memories, as well familial and cultural myths of embodiment, Sofiyah’s practice invites us to speculate on our nonhuman origins and intertwined fates. In 2020, Sofiyah is undertaking a 12-month studio residency at Parramatta Artists’ Studios, and will present her first solo exhibition at 4A in October, as part of the Holding Patterns exhibition series. She has exhibited both locally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Lubov Gallery (New York), Peacock Gallery (Sydney) and at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (Sydney) with Woven Kolektif, a collective of emerging Australian artists with personal ties to Indonesia.
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. Curated by Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi, these exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
To coincide with the exhibition, 4A presented an Instagram Live talk on 16 August with artists and sisters Lauren Hernandez and Kass Hernandez, who work under the collaborative name Crossing Threads. Holding Patterns curator Con Gerakaris spoke with the duo about the socio-cultural, environmental and familial stories that inform their practice, as well as the interesting materials and methods that make up the multi-textural works on display at 4A. This live-streamed talk was recorded in our Haymarket gallery and is part of our 4A TALKS series.
Crossing Threads® is the collaborative work of Australian-born sisters of Filipino heritage Lauren Hernandez (b. 1988, Sydney) and Kass Hernandez (b. 1989, Sydney). These self-taught tapestry artists first explored the practice of weaving in early 2015 by attending a beginner’s workshop. Known for their large-scale and highly textural handwoven pieces, the Hernandez sisters seek to emulate the natural forms found in nature. Their carefully curated fibre selections include Australian Merino wool, plant-based fibres, up-cycled/dead-stock fabrics and other foraged items that aren’t traditionally used in fibre art. Their practice has led them to develop their recognisable ‘interknot’ technique, made up of intertwining hand-knotted chains of varying texture and thickness which graduate to a relief. The artists continually draw spiritual inspiration from their surrounding landscapes and personal experiences and are materialised through their abstract designs.
Exhibition Documentation:
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®: (Back Right): THE DIVIDE, 2020, alpaca, bamboo, canvas, cotton, cotton roping, felted Merino wool, hand cut denim, hand cut leather, hand dyed raffia, hand dyed Shibori, hemp, linen, marine roping, Merino wool, mixed natural fibres, Pima cotton; suspended off a painted Tasmanian oak wooden dowel; handwoven by Kass Hernandez. Left Wall Right: Crossing Threads, Consolation, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, handspun upcycled yarn, hemp, leather, linen and mixed natural fibres framed in Tasmanian oak. Handwoven by Kass Hernandez, courtesy the artists.
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®: (Back Right): THE DIVIDE (detail),2020, alpaca, bamboo, canvas, cotton, cotton roping, felted Merino wool, hand cut denim, hand cut leather, hand dyed raffia, hand dyed Shibori, hemp, linen, marine roping, Merino wool, mixed natural fibres, Pima cotton; suspended off a painted Tasmanian oak wooden dowel; handwoven by Kass Hernandez, courtesy the artists.
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®: (Back Right): THE DIVIDE (detail),2020, alpaca, bamboo, canvas, cotton, cotton roping, felted Merino wool, hand cut denim, hand cut leather, hand dyed raffia, hand dyed Shibori, hemp, linen, marine roping, Merino wool, mixed natural fibres, Pima cotton; suspended off a painted Tasmanian oak wooden dowel; handwoven by Kass Hernandez, courtesy the artists.
Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020, courtesy of the artists.
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®, UNDER MY SKIN (detail view), 2020, Bamboo, chenille, Egyptian cotton, hemp, Japanese silk, jute, leather, linen, merino wool, mulberry tussah, raffia and wire on galvanised steel frame Handwoven by Lauren and Kass Hernandez, photo: Kai Wasikowski, image courtesy of the artists.
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®, UNDER MY SKIN, 2020, Bamboo, chenille, Egyptian cotton, hemp, Japanese silk, jute, leather, linen, merino wool, mulberry tussah, raffia and wire on galvanised steel frame Handwoven by Lauren and Kass Hernandez, courtesy of the artists.
Crossing Threads®;Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020. Crossing Threads®: (Back Right): THE DIVIDE, 2020, alpaca, bamboo, canvas, cotton, cotton roping, felted Merino wool, hand cut denim, hand cut leather, hand dyed raffia, hand dyed Shibori, hemp, linen, marine roping, Merino wool, mixed natural fibres, Pima cotton; suspended off a painted Tasmanian oak wooden dowel; handwoven by Kass Hernandez. Left Wall Right: Crossing Threads, Consolation, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, handspun upcycled yarn, hemp, leather, linen and mixed natural fibres framed in Tasmanian oak. Handwoven by Kass Hernandez, courtesy the artists.
Crossing Threads®; Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020, Kass Hernandez of Crossing Threads® with the following works: (Left) Crossing Threads®, Seek, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, hemp, Japanese silk and paper, linen, mixed natural fibres and sari silk framed in Tasmanian oa. Handwoven by Lauren Hernandez. (Right) Crossing Threads®, Consolation, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, handspun upcycled yarn, hemp, leather, linen and mixed natural fibres framed in Tasmanian oak. Handwoven by Kass Hernandez.
Image: Crossing Threads®; Holding Patterns: Crossing Threads®; Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, August 2020.From Left: Crossing Threads®, Seek, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, hemp, Japanese silk and paper, linen, mixed natural fibres and sari silk framed in Tasmanian oa. Handwoven by Lauren Hernandez. Centre: Crossing Threads®, Consolation, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, handspun upcycled yarn, hemp, leather, linen and mixed natural fibres framed in Tasmanian oak. Handwoven by Kass Hernandez. Right: Crossing Threads®, Inward State, 2020, bamboo, cotton, hand dyed Merino wool, hemp, Japanese silk and paper, linen, mixed natural fibres and sari silk framed in Tasmanian oak. Handwoven by Lauren Hernandez, courtesy the artists.
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. Curated by Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi, these exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
Kien Situ (b. 1990, Sydney) is a sculpture and installation artist meditating on memory, cultural amnesia and identity in relation to the aesthetics of constructed objects and environments. Drawing upon familiar spatial, formal, textural, tectonic and material experience of his East Asian upbringing, Kien utilises and dissects his Eurocentric architectural education to create objects which reinterpret formative aesthetic and sensory experiences obfuscated by a diasporic childhood. His works are a physical melding of this experience, casting industrial gypsum cement with the regional, “artistic” material of Chinese Mò ink, a material central to the artist’s practice as part of the investigation into the symbiotic relationship between geography, place and identity.
Exhibition Documentation:
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Stele), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 128 x 64 x 32cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view) Left: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Centre: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Scroll), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 88 x 64 x 8cm. Right: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Column), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 136 x 24 x 24cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view) Front, Kien Situ, Shanshui (Column), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 136 x 24 x 24cm. Back left: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Scroll), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 88 x 64 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view). Courtesy the artist.
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. Curated by Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi, these exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
Shireen Taweel (b. 1990, Bankstown, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is a multimedia installation artist whose work broaches issues of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through language and the constantly shifting public space of the social, political and religious axiom. Her artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation, expressed through hybridity and plurality. The project development of Shireen’s works are often site-specific, weaving local narratives and research with a focus on experimentation in material and sound through site. Shireen’s constant acquisition of traditional coppersmith artisan skills is a research vessel for community-focused conceptual development, and through a progressive application of the collected artisan techniques and a manipulation of the traditional acts of making that leads to possibilities of cross-cultural discourse, opening dialogues of shared histories and fluid community identities.
Exhibition Documentation:
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Holding Patterns Part 3: Shireen Taweel (Installation view), photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’, 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’ (detail), 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’ (detail), 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’, 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’ (detail), 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
Shireen Taweel, Holding Patterns: Shireen Taweel, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, September 2020.
Shireen Taweel, ‘tracing transcendence’, 2018, pierced copper, band 1: 30 x 180 x 180cm; band 2: 30 x 210 x 210cm; photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist.
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. Curated by Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi, these exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
To coincide with the exhibition, 4A presented an artist talk with Sofiyah Ruqayah in conversation with 4A Assistant Curator Reina Takeuchi. The interview explores how inspiration, rest and balance have guided the artist through these unprecedented times. Ruqayah also reflects on her experience of isolation and personal research into animal and marine life, and how these learnings have informed her 4A show.
Sofiyah Ruqayah (b. 1992, Sydney) is a Sydney-based artist working across drawing, installation, collage and painting to explore the strange territories between human and nonhuman realities. She is interested in themes of mutation, dream and spirit worlds. Drawing upon imagined and felt connections between various bodies, presences and memories, as well as familial and cultural myths of embodiment, Sofiyah’s practice invites us to speculate on our nonhuman origins and intertwined fates. In 2020, Sofiyah is undertaking a 12-month studio residency at Parramatta Artists’ Studios and will present her first solo exhibition at 4A in October, as part of the Holding Patterns exhibition series. She has exhibited both locally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Lubov Gallery (New York), Peacock Gallery (Sydney) and at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (Sydney) with Woven Kolektif, a collective of emerging Australian artists with personal ties to Indonesia.
Exhibition Documentation:
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah(installation view), 4A Centre forContemporary Asian Art, Sydney
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah (installation view), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Floor: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Harbingers of Doom(detail), digital collage print on satin, faux fur, plywood, storm glass, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist.
Wall: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Self-fulfilling prophecies, 2020, digital collage print on paper, pins, 124.9 x42cm, courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Sofiyah Ruqayah, Harbingers of Doom (detail), digital collage print on satin, faux fur, plywood, storm glass, dimensions variable.
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Sofiyah Ruqayah, Self-fulfilling prophecies, 2020, digital collage print on paper, pins, 124.9 x 42cm.
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah (installation view), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Floor: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Harbingers of Doom(detail), digital collage print on satin, faux fur, plywood, storm glass, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist.
Wall: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Self-fulfilling prophecies, 2020, digital collage print on paper, pins, 124.9 x42cm, courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns: Sofiyah Ruqayah (installation view), 4A Centre forContemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Floor: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Harbingers of Doom(detail), digital collage print on satin, faux fur, plywood, storm glass, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist.
Wall: Sofiyah Ruqayah, Self-fulfilling prophecies, 2020, digital collage print on paper, pins, 124.9 x42cm, courtesy the artist.
Meg O’Shea a Korean adoptee maker of comics, drawings and sometimes pictures that move, from Sydney, Australia. She has contributed to The Nib, The Lifted Brow, The Suburban Review, Minicomic of the Month Club, Meet Me In The Pit, Treepaper Comics and ABC Radio National’s Radio with Pictures.
Translation from the Persian/Farsi to English by Zuzanna Olsweska & Fatemeh Shams
حشرات را شکنجه نکنید
کتابها
کتابهای مفلوج رازهایشان را برای همه فاش میکنند
پلهها
پلههای روسپی به هر پوتینی پا میدهند.
تصّور اینکه
باد پنجره را باز خواهد کرد
و بوی بهار در اتاق خواهد پیچید
تصوّر اینکه
کسی که دوستش داری، عاشق خواهد شد
درست درلحظهای
كه مورچههای سرباز، چشمهایت را برای ملکه میبرند
تصوّر اینکه
ساعت دوباره زنگ خواهد زد
زندگی ادامه خواهد داشت
نگرانم میکند
نگران چون دزدی که پایش به میز میخورد
نگران چون آخرین وسوسه های ابلیسی غمگین،
بر بستر پیامبری لجوج
□
قرار نبود مردهها حرف بزنند
امّا از من به شما نصیحت
“هرگز حشرات را شکنجه نکنید”.
Don’t Torture Insects
Books
The paralysed books reveal their secrets to one and all.
Steps
The prostitute steps give themselves gladly to every boot.
The thought that
The wind will blow open the window
and the scent of
spring will creep into the room.
The thought that
Your beloved will fall in love
exactly at the moment that
the soldier ants
carry your eyes away to the queen.
The thought that
the clock will strike two
and life will go on
makes me anxious
Anxious as a burglar whose foot bumps into a table, clumsily
Anxious as the last temptations a sorrowful satan
whispers at the bed of an obstinate prophet.
The dead aren’t supposed to speak
But a piece of advice from me to you:
Never torture insects.
دلتنگي
ای شعر من
تو نیز آواره ای
روزی در ” کابل ” دود می شوی
روزی در ” پاریس” به زندان می افتی
روز دیگر در ” ناروو”
بند بندت
پاره پاره می شود
ای شعر من
تو نیز گرسنه ای
چون ” بكوا “
که لبان خشکش را به مسافران نشان می دهد
چون شهناز که گیس هاش را می فروشد
به نانی سرد
چون رئیس جمهور که ما را می فروشد
به نانی گرم
ای شعر من
تو نیز دلتنگی
و سرما همه را خواهد کُشت.
My poem
My poem
You, too, are an exile
One day you go up in smoke in Kabul
One day you’re thrown into prison in Paris
Another day in Nauru
your verses
are torn, torn apart.
My poem
You, too, are hungry
Like the Bakwa plain which offers its dry lips to the travellers
Like Shahnaz who hawks her tresses for a cold piece of bread
Like the president who sells us
for a hot piece of bread
Oh, my poem
You, too, are homesick
And the cold is going to kill us all.
Note: The Bakwa is a vast, hot plain between Kandahar and Kabul, where many travellers have been killed or wandered astray
دیگرگونه
آن شب
آن شب که دراز کشیده بودی
نگاه کردم بر تو
و سرم را میان دستانم گرفتم
که چگونه خوابیده ای در اتاقم؟
که بیست و یک ماه از هم دوریم.
یک تکه ماه هم باریده بود از کلکین
و می توانستم تنت را ببینم
که گس بود و غزل بود.
آن طرف تر نشسته بود “موتزارت” بر چوکی پلاستیکی
پیانو می زد
و دیگران بسیاری نگاه می کردند از میان چوب های سقف
تمام شب نگاه کردیم تو را
و زیبایی تو را
صبح
صبح رفتن بود
پرسیدی: “برمی گردی”؟
نگاهت نکردم
“نمی دانم”
و نشستم در تاکسی
تاکسی دور شد
نگاه نکردم به پشت سر
که عشق ما دیگرگونه بود
و غمگین و پنهان بود.
Another kind
That night
As you lay down
I looked at you
And took my head in my hands.
I thought: how can you be sleeping in my room?
We had been apart twenty-one months.
A piece of moon drizzled in from the window
and I could see your body, tender as a ghazal.
Mozart, sitting a little further away on a plastic chair, played piano,
many others watched from cracks in the ceiling’s woods.
Watched you for the entire night
in all your beauty.
Morning was morning of departure.
You asked: will I come back?
I did not look at you.
“I do not know”- I said.
And sat in the taxi.
The taxi left,
I did not look back.
Our love was of another kind,
Gloomy, concealed.
Elyas Alavi’s practice is interdisciplinary bridging elements from poetry to visual arts, from archive to everyday events with the intention to address issues around trauma, memory, identity, displacement, social and political crises.
He reflects upon his background as a displaced Hazara (a marginalized ethnic group originally from Afghanistan), and uses his particular experiences and contemplations as an epistemological model for the dislocation of people and collective memories.
Alavi graduated from a Master of Visual Arts at the University of South Australia in 2016 and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2013, and has exhibited at IFA (Kabul), Mohsen Gallery (Tehran), Robert Kananaj (Toronto), Firstdraft (Sydney) and Chapter House Lane (Melbourne) as well as AceOpen, Felt Space, Nexus Arts, CACSA Project Space (all Adelaide). He is the recipient of a 2019 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Alavi has published three poetry books in Iran and Afghanistan. He regularly runs art and poetry workshops in schools and community centres in Adelaide.
Rachel Ang is a comics artist from Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Lily/The Washington Post, and Australian journals like The Lifted Brow, Going Down Swinging and Meanjin.
Alana Hunt lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia and has spent lots of time in South Asia, and more specifically Kashmir. These places shape her artworks and relationships.
For 4A Kids, Alana wants you to make your own special find-a-word.
Louise Zhang is a Chinese-Australian artist who makes paintings, sculptures and more. Based in Sydney, Louise is interested in movies, Chinese mythology, animals and plants – and gross stuff.
For 4A Kids, Louise has drawn a very special koi colouring-in page – with hidden symbols to find….
For Garry Trinh, lockdown evoked a mental paralysis he has felt only twice before. The first instance is almost universal: the stasis of waiting in an airport with your flight repeatedly delayed only to be cancelled and your retreat into a hotel room. The disconnection between mental readiness (“the first thing I’m going to do when I get home is…”) and the physical inability to progress in your journey or even go out for fresh air. Just simply waiting.
The second experience is specific and personal: Garry’s two weeks in Luxor, Egypt. Opting out of the typical three-day tourist whirlwind he sought to explore the city by foot and camera in hand. Garry’s photographic practice began as a method of documenting graffiti before a piece was bombed or tagged and soon found a meditative comfort in having a camera on him and possessing the ability to capture a moment on a whim. Through a combination of his chameleonic persona, attentive eye, sense of humour and innate ability to seemingly always be in the right place at the right time has resulted in idiosyncratic photographic works highlighting the inert mundanities of suburban life with playfulness and wonder.
Unfortunately in Luxor his fly-on-the-wall practice was not so covert and faced a barrage of undesired attention from opportunistic locals, causing Garry to grow weary of the mental strain of exploring the city and once again retreating to a hotel room.
Created during lockdown Lots of Problems can be Solved with a long walk demonstrates Garry wrestling against an instinct of retreat. He took solace in photography during the forced upheaval of daily routine. Selected from a plethora of images the photographs that form the basis of his new work are directly and indirectly reflective of the experience of life during a pandemic. Some subject matter is overt–we all have those ubiquitous footpaths encountered daily during our 5:30pm walk we never wish to see again–while other pieces saw Garry challenge his practice from a personal and technical position to photograph abstracts such are resilience, change, comfort and permanence.
His breakthrough came in the editing room. “I’ve been thinking a lot about templates,” Garry told me. Since establishing a painting practice, he has been relearning his relationship to the creation and reproduction of images. Lessons have been learned the hard way: there is no undo function for a brush stroke on canvas and you must go where the painting will take you. His template concept stems from a desire to mitigate error while having a modular-like setup providing the ability to experiment with colour and material yet retain a recognisable result. Garry cited Jason Revok’s spray can device paintings on this: “I wish I invented that.”
Previous experiments with painting on or disassembling photographs often felt almost sacrilegious, but the digital manipulation found in this new body of work was natural. The added gestures are emblematic of a new approach to expanded photography for the artist. Garry’s new work is layered with shapes and symbols removed from their compositional context and transmuted into fragments of light and colour. The shards are reminiscent of accidental print misalignment, another long-time fascination for the artist, yet demonstrate a nuanced recognition for patterns stemming from a deep understanding of the medium.
Lots of Problems can be Solved with a long walk are available for individual purchase as A2 Lambda c-type prints at cost price with delivery.
Garry Trinh is an artist working in photography, video, painting and works on paper. He makes art about the uncanny, unexpected and spontaneous moments in daily life. He is perplexed by the perception of artists as coffee-drinking loafers who work whenever they feel like it. He doesn’t even drink coffee. His works are about a way of looking at the world, to reveal magic in the mundane. He is never bored and never late.
Con Gerakaris is a curator, arts administrator and writer based in Sydney. He is interested in facilitating artistic investigations into the relationships between people and places, both physical and digital, and how to navigate the changing landscapes we inhabit. Con’s curatorial practice often wrestles with personal and cultural identity, the symbiosis of humans and architecture and questioning the methods of exhibiting digital art in a gallery.
4A Digital is a platform for creative and academic exploration, giving artists, writers, academics and professionals the opportunity to experiment and investigate concepts and ideas outside of the exhibition and published journal formats.
Humyara Mahbub is an illustrator in Sydney. She has been drawing comics for more than ten years. She’s in therapy, so don’t worry about it.
You can visit Humyara’s website here and Instagram here.
4A Digital is a platform for creative and academic exploration, giving artists, writers, academics and professionals the opportunity to experiment and investigate concepts and ideas outside of the exhibition and published journal formats. This is the first volume in an ongoing monthly series of webcomics by Australian authors and artists.
These photos are of Eunmi Pang, a Korean shaman based in Goyang which is a city just outside of Seoul. I shot these photos during a research trip last year.
I first found out about Eunmi when I was researching Korean shamanism for a project. She was one of two English-speaking shamans that came up on Google. She stood out to me because she used to be a fashion model before she was a shaman. I emailed her and got a response right away. Although her English was great, there was a digital communication barrier that my terrible Korean couldn’t overcome. The back and forth of emails fizzled out quickly and I completely forgot about her soon after. I guess that’s the magic of the internet: it can throw something into arms reach and then straight back into the void.
Korean shamanism involves ghosts, spirits, fate and magic. There are 300,000 practicing shamans in Korea today. It’s been around since forever and is still a huge part of Korean society and culture, it’s not a dead historical thing. It’s hard to believe shamanism can exist in a modern country known for its K-pop and plastic surgery but I think that’s because Koreans actively hide it from the outside world. There’s a weird stigma around shamans and people are generally quite secretive about their relationships with them. I once asked my mum if she’d ever met one and she denied it with a suspicious defensiveness only to admit later that she’d visited one when she was younger “but it was only one time!”. It’s kept well hidden but it’s one of those things: if you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy to find. Or in my experience some kind of magic leads you straight to it.
After that failed email exchange with Eunmi I realised I needed to physically go to Korea to get any real research done. I committed myself to learning Korean properly and after a year I went to Seoul. I had no idea what I was going to do, my Korean was still pretty bad at that point (and still is now). Thinking about how I would manage anything with such poor language skills made me nervous so I procrastinated from preparing for the trip entirely. When I arrived I only had a vague plan to stay in a temple on a mountain because it seemed like an appropriate place to get rid of my anxiety.
Korea has a government-funded ‘temple stay’ program where a big bunch of temples are open to the public. You can stay at a temple for a few days, hang out in nature and do various Buddhist things. Most temples were closed or filled up by the time I was sitting in my Airbnb trying to book one on my laptop. With the power of internet magic I eventually found one that wasn’t too far away and two days later I was there. The temple was huge and empty. It probably housed many more monks in the past than it does now. Buddhism used to be the big thing in Korea but Christianity has taken over. There are churches absolutely everywhere in Seoul. There are also heaps of Buddhist temples but they’re hidden in the mountains and far fewer people go to them these days. Religions come and go but shamanism has always been there in the background.
When I arrived at the temple there was only one other person doing temple stay. She was a Korean-American woman and her Korean just as bad as mine. Talking to her filled me with more dread and anxiety because we were speaking in English and I felt like I should’ve been practicing Korean, let alone “researching”. I put my phone on airplane mode and spent the first day wandering aimlessly on the mountain by myself. On the second day I had lunch with the American lady. The temple dining hall had chairs and tables for a hundred people but we were the only ones there. It was eerily dark, quiet and empty.
I don’t remember how it came up in conversation but we started talking about Korean shamanism. I told her about my project and she said “Oh you should meet this shaman I know, she’s very interesting, she used to be a fashion model”. Naturally, the first person I met in Korea knew a shaman and would openly talk about this taboo topic with me. All of a sudden I remembered I’d emailed a shaman a year prior, ex-fashion model Eunmi, and that was exactly who the American lady was talking about. After lunch I turned airplane mode off, emailed Eunmi again and met with her two days later. It was like the magic of the internet, everything you need is right there if you just search for it.
It seemed so simple and obvious at the time but thinking about it now, it was actually an incredibly lucky chain of coincidences. Of all the places I could’ve been, of all the people I could’ve met, of the 30,000 shamans I could’ve encountered, I was led straight back to Eunmi. I later found out that the Korean-American woman had travelled to Korea to become a shaman herself under Eunmi’s teaching. It was as if I’d met her not by chance but by some force of fate. I was always at the right place at the right time and Eunmi later told me it wasn’t a coincidence. She said I had a sort of guardian angel: it was the spirit of my great grandmother who was a shaman herself and she was helping me with my research.
Hyun Lee is a writer, director and photographer based in Sydney.
4A Digital is a platform for creative and academic exploration, giving artists, writers, academics and professionals the opportunity to experiment and investigate concepts and ideas outside of the exhibition and published journal formats.
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation. In her work, Lim transforms herself into invented fictional personas who traverse through time and cultures to explore how national identities and stereotypes cut, divide and bond our globalised world.
This 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) initiated touring project presents Lim’s most recent body of work, The Ambassador series. In this three-part project, Lim takes on a Mao-like persona who sits halfway between truth and fantasy – dressed in a gold lamé suit and matching bowl haircut. Throughout each of her works, the Ambassador takes on new roles in uncovering the Australian-Asian narrative – drilling down into racial politics, the social costs of manufacturing and the role of architecture in shaping society.
Eugenia Lim’s (b. 1981 Melbourne, Australia) work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Tate Modern, GOMA, ACMI, HUN Gallery NY, and FACT Liverpool. She has received a number of Australia Council for the Arts grants and residencies, including a residency at the Experimental Television Centre NY and exchange at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Recent residencies include Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio and the Robin Boyd Foundation. Collaboration, artistic community and the intersection between art and society informs her practice: in addition to her solo work, she co-directed the inaugural Channels: the Australian Video Art Festival, is a board member at Next Wave, the founding editor of Assemble Papers and co-founder of interdisciplinary collective Tape Projects.
Marikit Santiago is an artist who lives in Western Sydney, where she makes artworks that investigate culture and her own Filipino background and Australian nationality.
For 4A KIDS, Marikit makes an appropriation artwork with us – perfect for this time of isolation!
Since 2008, my artistic practice has been an exploration and investigation of cultural identity, experience and memories through a practical experimentation utilising the pinhole camera. My personal experience as a post-war Australian Chinese-Vietnamese refugee generates difference, with the question of otherness, diaspora, dislocation, displacement and liminality continually circulating around the tension of belonging, yearning and memory. This sense of difference informs how I use the pinhole camera and inspires multiple perspectives associated with the geographic, political and social landscapes of Australia and Vietnam.
The pinhole has played a prominent role in the history of Western culture. Artists, philosophers and scientists including Brunelleschi, da Vinci, Dürer, Raphael, Kepler, Newton, and Déscartes employed the pinhole as the starting point for some of their theories: crucially, the theory of fixed-eye point or single-point perspective described as a structured reality that holds our entire visual world together[1]. While many Western artists since the Renaissance have represented the world with a central or single-point perspective and focus on salient objects in a scene, their Eastern counterparts have concentrated on context information with multiple perspectives reading from Heaven to Earth in their paintings.
Increasingly, pioneering artists – da Vinci, Monet, Cezanne and Picasso – sought to challenge single-point perspective in 2D works, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Contemporary artists have attempted to abandon the theory of single point perspective offered by the camera lens, “to reinvestigate the altering, destruction, or natural evolvement of one-point perspective, thereby creating another visual structure,”[2] as articulated by David Hockney in his endeavour to redefine space.
As pinhole photography is more about the experimentation involved in the process it permits certain freedoms in comparison with other image-making photographic approaches. Because its process embodies chance, pinhole photography is similar to the way many of us live our lives. As a result, this method of experimental photography presents the most interesting and creative modifications for low-cost film cameras, manual printing techniques and unconventional use of the medium. Photographers who successfully operate and create resolved images virtually master a knowledge of optics: the understanding of the interplay of light is a fundamental element for photographers in their visual creativity. Apart from placing the pinhole camera in a certain space or location and dictating the nature of the hole filtering the light, the user has little control over how light and emulsion interact with each other. Even if the camera is placed in the exact same position, at the exact time of day and using the exact same material, each resultant single image will be different. This difference runs the full spectrum, from subtle to substantial, to a point where what has been captured does not seem to bear any meaningful resemblance to other images.
A great deal of understanding about other cultures derives from our comprehension of visual language and capacity to recognise and interpret our relationship to space and time. The extent to which aspects of our inhabited space can be apprehended also depends on time: like an f-stop in the camera aperture, the wider your vision is open to the outside world the more you are able to take in. Like the flattened depth of field of the pinhole camera, there may be some confusion or incomprehension between new and old. By taking these observations in slowly and by not opening completely, you are better able to analyse the information in order not only to more clearly ascertain the difference between the old and new, but also to keep your vision open in the search for new information as you explore these temporal spaces. While other types of cameras are both equally important and valuable to my practice and conceptual concerns, the use of the ‘dot’ or pinprick of light in my pinhole camera is more capable of revealing these complex realities of the liminal space that Vietnamese refugees face in relation to their negotiation of diaspora identity and of home. My dot is not only a mark, it is also reference a point: a point in time, a point of departure or arrival, a point of dislocation and relocation, and a point of view or a fixed point of single perspective.
Dacchi Dang, Fish of the Day from Full Circle series, 2009. Dacchi Dang, Morning Light on Biota Street from Full Circle series, 2009
Dacchi Dang, Old Rock, 2009. Dacchi Dang, Landscape, 2009
Dacchi Dang, Woman Hut, 2009
Feature image: Dacchi Dang, Faith from the Full Circle series, 2009
[1] Eric Renner,1995, Pinhole Photography, ibid., p. ix
[2] Eric Renner, 1995, ibid., pp.157-158 dacchi-dang
Dr. Dacchi Dang is a Sydney-based photographic artist and independent researcher, specialising in alternative photographic processes.
4A Digital is a platform for creative and academic exploration, giving artists, writers, academics and professionals the opportunity to experiment and investigate concepts and ideas outside of the exhibition and published journal formats.
AN IMPORTANT UPDATE FROM
4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will close our office and galleries from Wednesday 18 March to ensure the health and well-being of our staff, creatives, audience and wider community.
From Wednesday 18 March, 4A will also suspend all planned public programming and performances (at 4A galleries and with partners at the Chinese Garden of Friendship and through our touring program Eugenia Lim: The Ambassador) with a look to reschedule these programs upon reopening and deliver additional digital content where possible.
4A and International Curators Forum have decided to postpone the exhibition I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney. With a desire to realise the exhibition at a time when our creative team can work together in Sydney and audiences can engage with the artworks and our planned public programs, the Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney project is at this time postponed from April 2020 until November 2020. The exhibitionThings That Fall Apart will be rescheduled to our 2021 program. The 4A Curators Intensive is now planned for November 2020 in line with the Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney exhibition.
4A staff will be working from home in this period and we are working to make sure that our program will return to our gallery and partner spaces better than ever, and that you can stay engaged with and support the important work of our creative community in this time of isolation.
While 4A will close our physical gallery space in this period, we are looking forward to engaging with you digitally – on our Instagram, Facebook, Mixcloud, YouTube – and through our website, archive and the 4A Papers. Stay tuned for updates about our public programming, events and exhibitions through these platforms, and stay in touch with our team through email and phone – details here: http://www.4a.com.au/about-4a/people/
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will close our office and galleries from Wednesday 18 March to ensure the health and wellbeing of our staff, creatives, audience and wider community. The 4A Curators Intensive is now planned for November 2020 in line with the Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney exhibition’s postponement.
Anna Louise Richardson, Danielle Fusco, Emily Wakeling, Farzana Khan,Olivia Welch, Perri Sparnon, Priya Pavri, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Tian Zhang and Wilson Yeung have been selected as the participants of the 2020 4A Curators’ Intensive.
This is the fifth iteration of the Intensive program that has been offered biennially since 2012 with support from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. In 2020, the program aligns with the first iteration of4A and International Curators Forum (ICF)’s exhibition,I am a beating heart in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney. With a focus on diaspora, the 2020 program will expand, complicate and even destablise the term itself engaging with the complexities, challenges and continued relevance that the diasporic experience and diasporic art have today.
About the curators:
Anna Louise Richardson
Anna Louise Richardson is an independent, interdisciplinary curator and artist particularly interested in art practices concerned with place making, the archive and identity politics.
Living and working on a cattle farm in Western Australia, her drawing practice investigates rural identity and mythology through relationships with the natural world complicated by human intervention, intergenerational expectations and the role of animals in culture, commerce and ecology.
Graduating with a BFA from Curtin University in 2013, she is currently curator of The Alternative Archive, a survey of regional practice in Western Australia at John Curtin Gallery co-curated with Director Chris Malcolm; Refractive Realities: 2020 PICA Salon; and the John Stringer Prize 2020.
Richardson has curated independent projects at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Fremantle Arts Centre, Galerie Pompom, Moana Project Space, Chapter House Lane for Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, co-curated exhibitions at Arts Project Australia for Next Wave 2016, a touring exhibition for ART ON THE MOVE and worked for Artsource. She also participated in the Australia Council Emerging Arts Professionals Program for the Venice Biennale in May 2019.
Danielle Fusco
Danielle Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and collaborator from Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar/ Perth, Western Australia. Danielle is passionate about supporting early career artists and producing innovative, exciting and engaging cultural experiences for the community, outside of an institutional framework where possible. In 2018 Danielle graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Master of Art Curatorship. Between 2018 and 2019 Danielle was the gallery manager for Perth based artist-run initiative Paper Mountain. Her independent curatorial projects include Trace-makers (2018), What makes a Mountain (2019), and Speak softly, carry a big stick (2020). Most recently Danielle has been working on a community arts project, Forward Bound, a roving exhibition program sponsored by the City of Vincent Perth (2020). By working in two ways simultaneously, Danielle reflects on her role as a contemporary curator, striving to contribute to meaningful change and genuine impact within the arts and cultural landscape.
Emily Wakeling
Emily Wakeling is Assistant Curator at Artspace Mackay and recently held the role of Assistant Curator, Asian and Pacific Art, at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Working across curating, art writing, and museum learning, Emily spent six years in Tokyo in multiple arts-related roles including Editor of the arts website Tokyo Art Beat. As Co-director of Brisbane art space Boxcopy, Emily curated a program of local Indigenous and non-indigenous artists as well as “All We Can Do is Pray,” a group exhibition of Japan-based artists finding parallels between Japanese survivors of World War II and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Her curatorial projects are spread across Japan and Australia, including solo exhibitions of Archie Moore and Courtney Coombs in Tokyo art spaces, and the Japanese group exhibition “Come Close: Japanese Artists within their Communities” at Bus Projects, Melbourne. Emily is also a long-serving freelance writer who has contributed to Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, Japan Times, Tokyo Art Beat, Art Review Asia, Real Tokyo, Eyeline and Art Monthly Australia.
Olivia Welch
Olivia Welch is an arts and cultural professional working as the Gallery Programs & Touring Exhibitions Coordinator for Museums & Galleries of NSW. Her research and curatorial interests are in sharing the stories of those culturally and linguistically outside of Australia’s advertised grand narrative, and looking into practices that interrogate the colonial foundations of the museum through the permanent collection and its collection policies.
Most recently she curated Our Common Bond for MAY SPACE, Sydney. She has also worked as an exhibitions and curatorial assistant, researcher and editor at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum’s Modern Collection in Lisbon, Portugal.
Perri Sparnon
Perri Sparnon is a curator and researcher based in Melbourne. She has been a research associate at The University of Adelaide’s Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) since 2015, where she facilitated the development of a series of international conferences, exhibitions and publications including the landmark ‘Ilm: Science, Religion and Art in Islam. She has also contributed curatorial research to projects at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Islamic Museum of Australia. She is currently the managing editor of Index Journal (www.index-journal.org), Australia’s only online peer-reviewed art history journal. Perri’s research focuses upon the art and architectural histories of the Islamic world in Western and Southeast Asia. Her publications in this area include ‘Science and Art: Anatomical illustration in early Islamic optics’ (2019). In 2018, she was awarded the International Council of Museums Australia’s International Museum Day essay prize for a paper on hyperconnected museums.
Priya Pavri
Priya Pavri is an independent curator currently based in Narrm/Birraranga (Melbourne, Australia). Her work explores how art can address issues of social and political importance and present layered and complex truths, while building empathy and understanding for experiences and stories outside one’s own.
With a background in Law and Arts, Priya has lead community projects in the not-for-profit and government sector in urban and remote Australia, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. She is currently the General Manager of Next Wave Festival, an Australian arts organisation that is committed to a world where artists and audiences from all backgrounds can come together to participate in ground breaking new art and ideas; the Director of Road to Refuge, not-for-profit organisation that provides platforms for refugee voices in their words and on their terms, and a co-founder of ‘I Had One Too’ an online platform to share stories about abortion, and discuss how laws and public perceptions impact safe and accessible women’s health services in Australia.
Priya has a history of growing community projects and organisations through unique and creative endeavours, and is committed to seeking alternative models of working with community that challenge existing leadership and governance structures.
In 2019, Priya received a Carclew Fellowship for Social Justice and the Arts, to develop a curatorial and film practice. Most recently, she curated Illusion a multi-venue exhibition on Kaurna Country (Adelaide, Australia).
Sebastian Henry-Jones
Sebastian Henry-Jones is an emerging curator lead by an interest in writing, DIY thinking and the potential of the exhibition format to cultivate strategies of collectivity, social responsibility and tenderness that poetically communicate across cultural and social difference. He looks to embody these ideals in his work by centring the needs, ideas and requirements of those that he works with, and so his practice is informed by striving for a personal ethics with sincerity, generosity, honest communication and learning at its core.
Seb has staged group exhibitions and independent projects in Sydney and interstate, and is a co-founder of Desire Lines and Emerson. He is a board member at Runway Journal, and has most recently worked as a curatorial assistant for The 22nd Biennale of Sydney, titled NIRIN.
Tian Zhang
Tian Zhang is a curator and producer working at the intersections of art and cultural practice. Her work often involves a recalibration of rituals and cultural phenomena within our understandings of contemporary art and life. Her curatorial work has been nominated for a MGNSW Imagine Award, and presented at Customs House Sydney, Peacock Gallery in Auburn, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts and Metro Arts, Brisbane.
Tian is a founding co-director of Pari, a new artist-run initiative for Parramatta and formerly Chair and co-director of Firstdraft (2018-9). She has experience working across disciplines, most notably as producer at Urban Theatre Projects where she created multiple award-winning socially-engaged and site-specific works for Sydney Festival (Bankstown:Live, 2015 and Home Country, 2017) and a documentary on ABC’s Compass (One Day For Peace, 2015). She is an alumni of the Australia Council for the Arts’ Future Leaders Program 2018 and the British Council’s INTERSECT Program 2019 for changemakers.
Wilson Yeung
Wilson Yeung Chun Wai is an artist-curator, researcher and creative producer. He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University. Wilson is a collaborator of Independent Curators International and an alumnus of Shanghai Curator Lab at Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University.
Wilson’s special interest lies in collective curatorial practices and Asian contemporary art in an Australian context. His practice-based research ‘Curating the In-Between’ focuses on exploring the role of curators and curatorial practices in order to develop collective curatorial strategies and frameworks. This research articulates curatorial practice that interrogates the role of a curator in facilitating cross-cultural collaborations as a ‘cultural collaborator’.
Wilson’s works have been presented nationally and internationally, including Jogja Biennale, Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Fine Art Asia, Hong Kong Art Centre, Ox Warehouse Macau, International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference and AAANZ Conference.
To celebrate Lunar New Year 2020 in the Darling Harbour precinct, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is creating a special installation to mark the festival. On 25 January 2020, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will start celebrating the 2020 Lunar New Year with a series of colourful Lunar New Year Moon Gates designed by Sydney based artist Louise Zhang. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the Lunar New Year, Louise’s work will see the Darling Harbour Precinct come to life with colourful facades that invite visitors to walk through and feel good fortune ahead of the year of the rat. A traditional architectural element of many Chinese Gardens and with different spiritual meanings, each of Zhang’s bright moon gate’s will feature highly detailed traditional floral motifs, celebrating Lunar New Year. Beautifully detailed lilies will feature prominently on each gate with the lily considered to be the most lucky flower for this year’s zodiac.
Louise Zhang (born 1991) is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture and installation.Zhang explores the dynamics of aesthetics, contrasting the attractive and repulsive in order to navigate the senses of fear, anxiety and a sense of otherness reflecting her identity. Her work is inspired by horror cinema, Chinese mythology and botany, adopting and placing symbols and motifs in compositions of harmonic dissonance. Zhang’s solo exhibitions include Art eats its young, 2018, Artereal Gallery, Sydney; Soft Horror, 2017, Organhaus, Chongqing, (China); and Human Jerky: meatbags through the eyes of technology and Emotions invented by the Internet, 2018 Verge Gallery, Sydney. Her clients include City of Sydney, Apple, Lendlease and the Australian Embassy, Beijing. Zhang is represented by Artereal Gallery.
See the gates outside the Chinese Garden of Friendship in the Darling Harbour Precinct throughout the Lunar New Year festival from 25 January – 9 February 2020.
From 5PM, 25 January, 2020, meet at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
$25 +bf. Buy tickets here
Club 4A returns for a third year in 2020, programmed as part of Sydney Festival. Club 4A is all about taking performance art back to the club.
CLUB 4A: TROPPO GALAKTIKA PRESENTS: SALTY BITCH
TROPPO GALAKTIKA is proud to present SALTY BITCH. Beginning at 4A we gather to move in performance procession to the club / SALTY BITCH is resistance and agitation / SALTY BITCH is sweat rimmed flavour / SALTY BITCH is stank face riding dancefloors / SALTY BITCH is cool breeze evaporation leading SALTY BITCH to invigilate on Barangaroo
Curated by the amazing Troppo Galaktika, as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and UNSW Galleries exhibition Wansolwara: One Salt Water, for Club 4A’s third iteration expect performances, music, dance and just the right amount of salt. Meet at 4A at 5PM on January 25 to be taken to a secret location.
Starting the night with new work from artist Nadeena Dixon, make sure you arrive at 4A between 5-6PM to join us as we make our way from the gallery to the club – with the location for our night-long party only released on the day!
Club 4A: Troppo Galaktika presents: SALTY BITCH features performances throughout the night from Seini “SistaNative” Taumoepeau, Bhenji Ra, and STELLY G, wearable art from Luna Aquatica, a visual feast from VJ Vaxxx on the club screen, soundtracked by sets from DJ Sista Agz, DJ SOVTRAX, AYEBATONYE, KILIMI + more.
ABOUT 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary Asian and Australian culture through research, documentation, development, discussion and presentation of contemporary visual art. We believe that Asian cultural thinking will have an important impact on the future. 4A’s aim is to ensure contemporary visual art plays a central role in understanding the dynamic relationship between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. 4A has a distinctive approach to addressing Australia’s cultural diversity through a dynamic program including local and international exhibitions, public programs, workshops, seminars, symposiums and community activities. These have been recognised locally and internationally as having raised awareness of Asian-Australian art and culture and Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region.
Louise Zhang is a Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. With an interest in cinema – specifically, theatrical horror – Louise explores the dichotomies between what is attractive and monstrous. She appreciates ‘otherness’ – the under-appreciated and overlooked – and brings new life to kitsch materials through playful and whimsical creative processes. This workshop series will be drawing from her practice to encourage young creatives to be inspired by the decorative architecture of
the Gardens and create their own individualistic, unique charm flower! Get ready for Lunar New Year 2020 this school holidays at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, joining Louise to make lucky charms that feature Chinese zodiac flowers. In this two-hour workshop, learn about the (sometimes surprising) meaning and uses of each zodiac sign's
flower and create your own flower as part of a special take-home hanging charm inspired by Louise’s work – the perfect Lunar New Year accessory or gift for family. After the workshops, come back to Darling Harbour during Lunar New Year festival to see Louise’s work come to life in a series of special Moon Gates to walk through. For participants aged between 7-17 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, with bookings online required to ensure all participants get to complete their take-home charm flower. Places are limited for each workshop, which is free with entry to the Chinese Garden of Friendship.
Louise Zhang ( b.1991) is a Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. With an interest in horror cinema, particularly the body horror genre, Zhang is interested in the dynamics between the attractive and repulsive. By exploring how themes of perceived innocence such as prettiness and cuteness can be contrasted with notions of the perverse and monstrous, Zhang explores the intersection of fear, anxiety and a sense of otherness in the construction of identity. Zhang’s solo exhibitions include Art eats its young, 2018, Artereal Gallery, Sydney; Soft Horror, 2017, Organhaus, Chongqing, (China); and Human Jerky: meatbags through the eyes of technology and Emotions invented by the Internet, 2018 Verge Gallery, Sydney. Her clients include City of Sydney, Apple, Lendlease and the Australian Embassy, Beijing. Zhang is represented by Artereal Gallery.
All materials provided, with bookings online required to ensure all participants get to complete their take-home charm flower. Places are limited for each workshop, which is free with entry to the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Register online at
This workshop has been produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
4A’s artist-led workshops throughout 2019 are supported by Create NSW’s Audience Development Fund, a devolved funding program administered by Museums & Galleries of NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.
Turtles, a Fish, and Ghosts... is a solo exhibition featuring works by artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt.
Artist’s Statement:
I have worked on mural projects in temples and other public spaces during the fifteen years before I moved to Australia in 1996.My works had largely been involved with Buddhist themes such as the Life of the Buddha or the Narratives of Buddha’s Previous Lives.Now I live and work in Australia, my works have changed accordingly.They involve more of my own experience and personal life.
The work is the exhibition Turtles, a Fish and Ghosts… are from 1999-2002.They include earlier work about the lives of the Buddha in which I chose to work on a six-panel screen instead of on the wall.
The other works are later and reflect my experience in Australia.The four sets of triptychs, Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire depict my reaction to Australian scenes through the interpretation of Thai pictorial elements.The division of subject matter in these works is as if we are looking out through the window from the inside of a temple.This view comes from my habit of looking out at things when I had to work mural paintings around the door and window space on the temple wall.
Another group of works from the same period reflects on my life in the past, recorded as a memory flash-back.One pair of paintings is about my brother’s ordination which took place not long before moving to Australia.The other pair records my experience at nine years of age when I was mesmerized by a grand Buddhist ceremony in a Thai temple, with monks chanting for days and nights over rows of hundreds and thousands of newly cast Buddha statues.
The exhibition Turtles, a Fish and Ghosts… shows the transition of my work when moving into another country, as well as sees the possibility of using skill in narrative painting for a new and different way of looking.
Acknowledgements
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Thanks also go to Sherman Galleries, Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Robert Lindsay Gallery, Span Galleries and Gallery 4A.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt is represented by Span Galleries, Melbourne.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce that we have been certified as a Climate Active carbon neutral organisation, set by the Australian Government Department of Environment and Energy. As a founding member of Climate Active, 4A is only the second arts organisation in NSW to be certified, along with the Sydney Opera House.
As one of the goals in 4A’s Sustainability Plan (2018-19), Climate Active certification has allowed our organisation to measure a base year of emissions, reduce these where possible, offset remaining emissions and set sustainable goals moving forward. 4A has committed to measuring our carbon footprint yearly, with external auditing to occur every three years to ensure goals and KPIs are addressed long term.
Undertaking the certification process has enabled 4A to identify the different areas our organisation could address to improve sustainability. Within our gallery building these include our electricity usage, freight, catering, waste-to-landfill, recycling, advertising, paper usage, printing and office IT. Beyond this we were able to understand the scope of carbon generated by our offsite programs including exhibitions, performances, symposiums, research trips, professional development opportunities, travel and accommodation for staff, artists, writers and professionals that we employ. Certification has engaged all 4A staff in collecting data to measure our carbon footprint and encouraged a working culture that is conscious of reducing this footprint where possible.
4A’s sustainability priorities are first and foremost to reduce energy consumption and waste that we can already identify, whilst approaching carbon offsetting as a last resort for the aspects of our footprint that we are working to reduce. In the 2018 calendar year, 4A produced a total of 138.9 tCO2-e. Our offset purchases were split equally three ways; Forests Alive (Tasmania), Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve Project (Central Kalimantan, Indonesia) and Dachunhe Sanji Hydropower (Yunnan Province, China). 4A chose these three offset projects to reflect our engagement across Australia and the wider Asia region.
SYD CHINESE GARDEN OF FRIENDSHIP. 3.00 – 5.00PM, SAT 30 NOV 2019.
This summer at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Sydney artist Tane Andrews for a special one-off botanical workshop – over drinks and snacks!
In making artworks, Tane works with perishable organic materials including; flowers, living cocoons, wood, and water, as well as more durable products such as pearls, marble and bronze.
In this workshop, small groups of participants will work with Tane to go on an adventure through the Chinese Garden of Friendship and select and sketch inspiration from the Garden. Learn about the skills used by Tane – including botanical identification, sketching and colour – to re-create nature and create your own botanical illustration to take home, all over drinks and snacks at the Gardens by Lotus.
This special one-off event has limited places available, with a drink on arrival and all supplies included – and is free with entry to the Chinese Garden of Friendship.
Sat 30th Nov, 3pm-5pm, Chinese Garden of Friendship, Pier St, Darling Harbour
This workshop has been produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
Join Paul Gladston, Inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at UNSW, in conversation about his latest book – with Alan Cruickshank, editor of di’van | A Journal of Accounts at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art:
In recent decades the previously assumed dominance within the international art world of western(ized) conceptions of aesthetic modernity has been challenged by a critically becalming diversification of cultural outlooks widely referred to as ‘contemporaneity’. Contributing to that diversification are assertions within mainland China of essential differences between Chinese and other artistic cultures.
In response to the critical impasse posed by contemporaneity, Paul Gladston charts a historical relay of mutually formative interactions between western(ised) post-Enlightenment artworlds and those prevalent historically and contemporaneously within China as part of a new transcultural theory of artistic criticality. Informed by deconstructivism as well as syncretic Confucianism, Gladston extends this theory to a reading of the work of the artist Zhang Peili and his involvement with the Hangzhou-based art group, the Pond Association (Chi she). Revealed is a critical aesthetic productively resistant to any single interpretative viewpoint, including those of Chinese exceptionalism and the supposed immanence of deconstructivist uncertainty.
Addressing art in and from the People’s Republic of China as a significant aspect of post-West contemporaneity, Gladston provides a new critical understanding of what it means to be ‘contemporary’ and the profound changes taking place in the art world today.
“essential reading for a better understanding of contemporary Chinese art and visual culture in the global context.”
– Jason C. Kuo, Professor of Chinese Art, University of Maryland, USA
“a landmark work both in terms of cultural-criticism and art-historical analysis”
– Paul Manfredi, Professor of Chinese, Pacific Lutheran University, USA
“anchor[s] reflections on issues of immense contemporary importance”
– Johnson Chang, Curatorial Director, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
“an important contribution to critical discourse on contemporary art”
– Birgit Hopfener, Associate Professor of Art History, Carleton University, Canada
About the speakers:
Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales and was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. Paul has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with regard to the concerns of critical theory and, in doing so, has been formative on the development of a critically informed contemporary Chinese art studies both internationally and inside China. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), which received ‘publication of the year’ at the Awards of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2014 to 2017 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.
Alan Cruickshank is the founding editor and publisher of di’van | A Journal of Accounts, a new journal now in its third year offering critical interpretations on contemporary visual art and its art-historical, theoretical and socio-political contexts in the greater Asia-Pacific region. Alan was previously Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide and Editor of Broadsheet magazine between 2000 and 2015. He is currently Honorary Fellow, Centre for Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Delving through more than a century of the Dion family, an indelible part of the Illawarra’s social fabric as members of the Chinese diaspora and operators of the region’s bus services, On the Move tells a story of migration, survival, acceptance and community spirit of a remarkable family through archival material and responses from contemporary artists.
Exhibition artists: Matt Chun, Pia Johnson and Naomi Segal.
Curator: Mikala Tai
On the Move: The Dion Familyis exhibited at Wollongong Art Gallery from 1 December 2019 – 26 February 2020. The exhibition is produced and presented by Wollongong Art Gallery in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art with support from The Dion Family.
Join a talk by historian and author Dr Joseph Davis. Followed by an Open mic: Read your poetry or prose on the theme of bus travel, the Dion Family exhibition, or an anecdote about traveling on a Dion bus (5 minutes per participant).
Produced and presented by Wollongong Art Gallery in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the South Coast Writers Centre with support from The Dion Family.
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. In this edition of Please Explain, as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art exhibition John Vea: If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? speakers discuss the realities and unrepresented stories in contemporary globalised era migrant labour, which emerged as a key indicator of regional socio-economic relationships between Australia, New Zealand and many Pacific nations.
Taking the words of Australian deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack – who echoed the title of Vea’s exhibition when he came under fire for claiming the Pacific Islands will survive climate change because their workers come here to “pick our fruit”, following the August 2019 Pacific Island Forum in Tuvalu – as a starting point, this discussion will question such preconceptions about temporary migrant labour, and discuss the lived experience of the migrant worker.
Framed by Vea’s 2015 text The Emic Avenue; art through Talanoa and the concept of talanoa (a process of inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue) as research method, speakers Christine Afoa, Malaemie Fruean, Leo Tanoi and John Vea, with moderator Micheal Do, will discuss the stories, experiences and representations of Pacific migrant workers and the role art and storytelling can play in reframing and challenging the ideas of equality and validity of a global workforce.
Moderator:Micheal Do, 4A Assistant Curator and John Vea: If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? curator with Dr Mikala Tai.
Speakers:
Christine Afoa is a Samoan-Australian writer born and raised in the Bankstown area. She is undertaking a creative writing degree at the University of Technology. Christine has performed poetry for SoFar Sounds Lounge and Bankstown Poetry Slam and her short stories have been published in UTS Writers’ Anthology 2018: Light Borrowers, 2019: Infinite Threads and Sweatshop Women: Volume One. Christine is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
Malaemie Fruean is Chair, NSW Council for Pacific Communities. Established in 2003, the organisation was established to create opportunities and lend support to Pacific Communities in New South Wales, Fruean has led the organisation since its inception. Prior to this Fruean worked in community, cultural development for over two decades with experience as an educator and community liaison and leader.
Leo Tanoi is a creative producer specialising in Pacific contemporary arts practice. With over two decades of experience, Tanoi has held a number of roles and worked with artists including Greg Semu, Shigeyuki Kihara, Angela Tiatia and Michel Tufferey. From 2010 – 2015, Tanoi was the Creative Producer, Pacific Programs at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. In this time, he developed a number of projects including ‘Body Pacifica’ (2010) which won the Museums & Galleries NSW’s Imagine Award for Best Exhibition and Public Engagement Program. Prior to this, Tanoi contributed to ‘Edge of Elsewhere’ as a community and cultural advisor on ‘Edge of Elsewhere’ (2010 – 2012), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre. Tanoi currently is a freelance Creative Producer in the arts & culture sector and has been a peer assessor for Create NSW from 2016-2019. He is also an aspiring visual artist.
John Vea is an Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) based artist who works with sculpture, video and performance art. Vea works with tropes of migration and gentrification that exist within Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean). By enacting stories that have been collected through everyday interactions with people, both in his home community and abroad, with a journalistic sensibility he offers a sometimes humorous and always powerfully symbolic emic viewpoint to the Western meta narrative.
Victoria Garcia is a Filipino-Australian artist and textile designer based in Sydney. Through drawing, textile design and interactive installations, Victoria creates heavily patterned, immersive environments which both question and reenact her Filipino Australian identity, narratives of colonialism, and her deep connection to the landscape. Victoria has been commissioned by major brands and companies including Warner Brothers Productions, Microsoft and Sass and Bide.
For the September/October School Holidays at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, join Sydney artist and designer Victoria Garcia for a special series of textile art workshops. In this workshop, small groups of participants will work with Victoria to learn the basics of botanical illustration, taking the surrounds of the Chinese Garden of Friendship as inspiration. Then, work with Victoria to turn your illustration into a piece of textile art, illustrating a fabric artwork that you can take home.
For participants aged between 7-18 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, with bookings online encouraged to ensure all participants get to complete their take-home artwork.
About the artist: Victoria Garcia is a Filipino-Australian artist and textile designer based in Sydney. Through drawing, textile design and interactive installations, Garcia creates heavily patterned, immersive environments which both question and reenact her Filipino Australian identity, narratives of colonialism, and her deep connection to the landscape. Garcia has been commissioned by major brands and companies including Warner Brothers Productions, Microsoft and Sass and Bide, and has produced large-scale public artworks for Wollongong Central and Ambush Gallery (2017), Broadway Shopping Centre (2016) and Oxford Art Factory (2013). In 2017 Garcia was awarded the Southlands Breakthrough Emerging Artist Award from Penrith Performing and Visual Arts and a Summer Studio Residency with Penrith Regional Gallery. Her work has been featured in ‘PATTERNBOX’ curated by The Textile Art Centre New York, and published by Princeton Architectural Press.
With a strong background in design and visual art, she works across fashion textiles and illustration, homewares, interiors, and costume/film. Victoria’s approach to art and design has been heavily influenced by her illustrative work and she specializes in creating hand drawn imagery and pattern. She is currently represented by illustration agency International Rescue.
Victoria Garcia’s Textile Art Workshops are produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the September/October 2019 school holidays program. 4A’s artist-led workshops throughout 2019 are supported by Create NSW’s Audience Development Fund, a devolved funding program administered by Museums & Galleries of NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.
Departing from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Join exhibiting artist Nusra Latif Qureshi, Curator Dr Mikala Tai and Curatorial Assistant Nanette Orly for a special exhibition tour of Strategies of Intent, followed by a traditional Chinatown breakfast at a much-loved local eatery where attendees will discuss some of the stories and ideas behind the Nusra’s works and the themes explored in the exhibition.
About the exhibition: Nusra Latif Qureshi’s first solo Australian institutional exhibition presents her ongoing investigation into the symbolism and assumptions embedded in art history. Reflecting on almost two decades of practice Qureshi’s attempts to undermine, shift and negate historical imagery reads as a warning for the contemporary age, where assumed realities can be little more than constructed visions.
Qureshi’s practice is characterised by meticulous layering, fragmentation, erasure and juxtaposition of visual material. Through such intervention, she investigates little known histories of colonial eras, questions established narratives and engages with the politics of representation. Through an examination of the visual histories of the South Asian region Qureshi has developed a new visual vernacular in which to examine and interrogate the act of historicisation.
Strategies of Intent brings together key works from Qureshi’s oeuvre as well as a series of new commissions by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. These commissions are Qureshi’s most ambitious to date and include a series of installations that draw on key colonial imagery, engage with the reverence of weaponry and critique the museological convention of collecting and ownership.
Nusra Latif Qureshi (b. Lahore, Pakistan, lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) attended the National College of Arts, Lahore and completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Qureshi’s practices engages with the visual histories of the South Asian region and Australian culture, questioning conventional interpretations, pulling apart and reconfiguring the found patterns to construct new narratives. Her work has been exhibited widely in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Afghanistan, Italy, India, Japan, France, Switzerland, Finland and her home countries of Pakistan and Australia. Most recently she was exhibited at the Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, Austria as well as Brisbane’s QAG/GOMA. Her work has been collected widely including the British Museum, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Qureshi is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and is currently the artist in residence at the Lyceum Club, Melbourne.
WOLLONGONG. TUES 3 and THURS 5 DECEMBER 2019, 10AM – 12PM
All Aboard! The moving tale of Dion’s Bus Service Celebration of Abilities Week workshops with Angie Cass. Make a collage of a bus and make it travel from Austinmer to Kiama using the magic of stop motion animation. You’ll use photos and colourful printed paper to recreate the routes of the Dions’ buses in the Illawarra.
Free, bookings and enquires email vvidulich@wollongong.nsw.gov.au or phone 02 4227 850
Representing the third generation of the Dion family, Les Dion together with family historian John Birchmeier will present an overview of the family background; the arrival of the first generation in Wollongong in 1907 to take up market gardening and development from 1923 of new business interests including bus services under the second generation.
Program Speakers: Damian McDonald, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Professor Mary Roberts
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. In this edition of Please Explain, as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art exhibition Nusra Latif Qureshi: Strategies of Intent, speakers discuss the mobility of meaning and challenges presented by historical objects and imagery in a post-Orientalist world. Taking the work of artist Nusra Latif Qureshi and the text Networked Objects (2013)by Mary Roberts as a starting point, this discussion will ask whether Colonial objects still hold potency today in institutions and artistic practice; and investigate how artists and curators can work to challenge and engage with constructed histories of objects in shifting contexts.
Reading Recommendation: Mary Roberts, Networked Objects, 2013, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Speaker Profiles:
| Moderator: | Dr Mikala Tai is the director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. As a curator, researcher, and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art, she has collaborated with local, national, and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Recent curatorial projects at 4A include “The Burrangong Affray” (co-curated with Micheal Do, 2018), “Before the Rain” (2017); “I don’t want to be there when it happens” (co-curated with Kate Warren and expanded at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts with Eugenio Viola, 2017); and “Jogja Calling” (2016). She received critical acclaim for her organization of the performance program at Art Central Hong Kong (2016 -2018). Her independent curatorial projects include “Trompe-l’œil” (Sullivan + Strumpf Singapore, 2018) “Abdullah M.I. Syed: Diving Economy—Structures” (Aicon Gallery, New York, 2017), “Closing the Gap: Contemporary Indonesian Art” (Melbourne International Fine Art, 2011), and “Yang Yongliang: On the Quiet Water” (Fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, 2009). Tai has taught at Monash University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), and the University of Melbourne in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Tai’s writing can be found in several exhibition catalogues in addition to periodicals such as Broadsheet Journal, Art Monthly Australiasia, Photofile, Vault, and Ocula. In 2015, Tai received her PhD, focusing on the influence of the global city on China’s local art infrastructure.
| Damian McDonald’s principal research areas are firearms and edged weapons, and how they are influenced by, and influence culture, as well as their design. He is interested in health and medicine, particularly the history of the material culture of the discipline, and the ways society’s notions around health and medicine change under the continuing advances in this area. His interests also include music and musical instruments, particularly rock music and the Australian underground music scene, subcultures of the 1970s and 80s and their influences on contemporary youth culture, and the material culture of computer technology.
| Nusra Latif Qureshi (b. Lahore, Pakistan, lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) attended the National College of Arts, Lahore and completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Qureshi’s practices engages with the visual histories of the South Asian region and Australian culture, questioning conventional interpretations, pulling apart and reconfiguring the found patterns to construct new narratives. Her work has been exhibited widely in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Afghanistan, Italy, India, Japan, France, Switzerland, Finland and her home countries of Pakistan and Australia. Most recently she was exhibited at the Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, Austria as well as Brisbane’s QAG/GOMA. Her work has been collected widely including the British Museum, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Qureshi is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and is currently the artist in residence at the Lyceum Club, Melbourne.
| Professor Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Professor of Art History. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art with particular expertise in Orientalism, the history of artistic exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe and the culture of travel. Her books include: Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-century visual culture (University of California Press, 2015), Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke, 2007) and four co-edited books: The Poetics and Politics of Place. Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Pera Museum and University of Washington Press, 2011) Edges of Empire. Orientalism and Visual Culture (Blackwells, 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors, (Duke, 2002) and Refracting Vision. Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power Publications, 2000/2012).
FAIRFIELD CITY MUSEUM & GALLERY – Saturday 13 July – Saturday 12 October 2019.
Join us to celebrate the opening of In Conversation: FX Harsono x Ida Lawrence, a cross-generational and cross-cultural dialogue between internationally renowned Indonesian artist FX Harsono and Australian-Indonesian artist Ida Lawrence.
Curated by Emily Rolfe and Bianca Winataputri, the exhibition presents a new body of work by Ida Lawrence alongside the seminal work, Writing in the Rain, 2011, by FX Harsono.
The exhibition is the result of a partnership between Fairfield City Museum & Gallery and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art through the 4A Curators’ Intensive Program, 2018.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the participants in our 2019 4A Beijing Studio Program.
Jessica Bradford, Owen Leong and Emily Parsons-Lord have been selected to embark on a month-long residency in September 2019 at the studios renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
The 4A Beijing Studio is now in its seventh year of providing early and mid career Australian artists with a unique opportunity to research new projects, develop new professional networks and witness first-hand the changes occurring in one of the most vibrant cities in Asia.
Jessica Bradford, Owen Leong and Emily Parsons-Lord were selected by a committee comprising Susan Acret, board member, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Cameron Macqueen, Chief Operations Officer, ArtChain Global; Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, artist and 2016 4A Beijing Studio Resident; Natalie Seiz, Curator, Asian Art, Art Gallery of NSW; and Shen Shaomin.
Bradford, Leong and Parsons-Lord were selected based on the strength of their applications, the potential benefits for their practices and capacity to extend their own cross-cultural networks.
The 2019 4A Beijing Studio will give these artists a fantastic opportunity to place their practices within a much broader international art context in a city such as Beijing. The Studio program covers airfares, accommodation, daily meals, travel/medical insurance and a small stipend. Moreover, it will provide an ongoing professional mentorship, cross-cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks in China.
Bradford, Leong and Parsons-Lord will travel to China in September 2019.
About Jessica Bradford
Jess Bradford is a Singaporean-born and Sydney-based artist working across painting, ceramics, video and installation. Her work explores her mixed race heritage by examining representations of cultural identity. Her current body of work explores these topics through a Chinese cultural theme park in Singapore named Tiger Balm Garden. The park exhibits painted concrete dioramas based on Chinese folklore, myths and legends. Privately built in the 1930s by the Burmese-Chinese brothers behind the medicated ointment ‘Tiger Balm’, and publicly bought in the 1980s, the park has been renovated several times by various owners to portray different representations of Chinese culture. The project questions how we define Chinese culture, while engaging with personal and collective memory and concepts of cultural inheritance.
Bradford has held solo exhibitions at Galerie Pompom, Firstdraft, and MOP Projects. Her work has been included in curated group shows at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art (2019), Delmar Gallery (2017), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2015), Fairfield Museum & Gallery (2014) and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest (2013). Bradford holds an MFA by Research from Sydney College of the Arts, and was a recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize, John Fries Memorial Prize, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and the Jenny Birt Award. Bradford is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney.
About Owen Leong
Owen Leong is a contemporary artist working across performance, photography, video and sculpture. His artistic practice uses personal mythologies to explore identity and transformation. He is interested in systems of power, culture and representation. His work uses the body, subjectivity and personhood to reflect on universal aspects of human nature.
Leong’s work has been exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; Monash Gallery of Art; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Singapore Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; and the National Museum of Poznan, Poland.
In 2017, Leong was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize, Australia’s richest prize for young contemporary artists working in any medium. In 2016 Leong was a recipient of the MAMA National Photography Prize and in 2015, he won the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Leong has received numerous awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and Asialink. He has held artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai; and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong.
His work is held in the public collections of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Newcastle Art Gallery, and private collections in Australia and internationally.
About Emily Parsons-Lord
Emily Parsons-Lord’s artworks vanish into thin air. Creating art that exists at the fringes of natural sciences and politics, she transforms research into poetic artworks that can be inhaled, disappeared, or melt before your eyes.
Emily Parsons-Lord makes ephemeral installations and performances that are informed by research and critical dialogue with climate sciences, natural history, and politics. Her work attempts to reconcile lofty vast infinities of our place in time and space, and slippages to the political realities of being a human today in discourses of climate change. Employing tragi-humour, scale, and performance, Emily interrogates the materiality of invisibility, magic, and stories we tell about reality.
Working out of Parramatta Artist Studios, recent work includes recreating the air from past eras in Earth’s evolution, recreating starlight in coloured smoke, multichannel video, and experimenting with pheromones, aerogel, and explosions. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and participated in Primavera, 2016, the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship, 2017, Bristol Biennial – In Other Worlds, 2016, John Fries Award, 2018, A BROKEN LINK, Central St Martin’s, London UK, 2017, and Stuttgart Film Winter Festival for Expanded Media, Firstdraft Sydney, and Vitalstatistix, Adelaide.
4A Beijing Studio Program 2019 is supported by ArtChain Global.
In 2019, for the first time, this special 4A initiative is being supported by ArtChain Global, a new platform working at the intersection of blockchain technology and contemporary art. With ArtChain Global’s generous support, we are able to amplify opportunities for artists to explore the region.
4A is pleased to announce that the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program 2019 program recipient is studio artist, independent writer and children’s author Matt Chun. Chun will be travelling to Indonesia in 2019 and realise two publication outcomes.
Matt Chun’s successful application to the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program offered two writing proposals that demonstrated diversity in subjects. The first centres around nationalism and the colonisation/decolonisation of public space, specifically taking the historic square of Lapangan Banteng in Jakarta as a site for a discussion of the layered semiotics of monuments erected in the eras of Dutch colonial rule and post-independence Indonesia. Matt’s second proposal will see him engage with fellow artist Jumaadi’s practice within the context of the latter’s East Javanese exploration of the narrative traditions of the region, specifically his ongoing presence within communities of artists around Yogyakarta.
4A Program Manager and Editor of the 4A Papers, Pedro de Almeida said of the award and Chun’s success:
“4A’s Emerging Writer’s Program, offered for the fourth consecutive year, attracted proposals from NSW, ACT, VIC and WA. The diversity of creative and professional backgrounds of applicants reflected the spirit of 4A’s professional development program as an opportunity for a broad scope of creators to engage with the arts and culture of the region. Writing proposals came from artists, curators, cultural producers, filmmakers, performers, students and, of course, emerging writers ranging from critics to poets. With Indonesia as the focus country this time round, 4A was particularly impressed by the overall depth of understanding. We congratulate Matt Chun on being selected in 2019 to undertake research in Jakarta and Yogyakarta for what promises to be two engaging original texts for publication in 4A Papers and Art Monthly Australasia.”
2019 4A Emerging Writer’s judge Anne Loxley, Senior Curator, C3West, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia said:
“Matt Chun’s proposal stood out for the originality, maturity and sophistication of his pitch to research and write about Lapangan Banteng in central Jakarta, using the monument as a means of centring a critical discussion around the colonisation/decolonisation of public space. Similarly, his second proposal to write about Jumaadi’s practice specifically within the context of his East Javanese arts community, craft practices and
narrative traditions of the region offers a refreshing attempt to situate a well-known Sydney-based artist in broader cultural relationships.”
2019 Emerging Writer’s Program judge and Art Monthly Australasia Editor, Micheal Fitzgerald, said:
“It is a pleasure continuing Art Monthly Australasia’s support for 4A’s Emerging Writer’s Program given its value in supporting writers to undertake field work in the region. Matt Chun’s submission
struck me as particularly original in its culturally nuanced approach. We look forward to working with Matt to develop his proposal for publication.”
About Matt Chun:
Matt Chun is a studio artist, independent writer and children’s author, working from his seaside studio in Bermagui, a small town on Yuin country in regional NSW. He also divides his time between Melbourne and Taipei. Matt lives, works and travels with his 8-year-old son, making portrait, landscape and travelogue studies across a range of media. He has undertaken tenures as artist-in-residence in Australian at Casula Powerhouse, Nishi Gallery and New Acton Precinct, and in Taiwan at both Bamboo Curtain Studio and Guandu International Art Festival. His first Taiwanese solo exhibition will be held at Pon Ding Space, Taipei, in September. As a writer, Matt is primarily interested in Australian national identity and the visual culture of colonisation, combining first-person narrative reportage with field research into the semiotics of public space. His essays have appeared in Overland Literary Journal, Meanjin Quarterly and Runway Experimental Art. Matt’s second picture book for Australian publisher Little Hare is due for release in October. His first, Australian Birds, released in 2018, has been listed as a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book and is currently shortlisted for the CBCA Award for Best New Illustrator. He is currently working on a graphic novel for young children.
Lee Tran Lam is a journalist and zine-maker based in Sydney. Her writing has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Gourmet Traveller, Time Out Sydney, Rolling Stone, The Big Issue and even Turkish Vogue. She’s been making zines for more than 20 years (often about food and places) and they’ve featured in local exhibitions, libraries in Australia and the US, and Ebony Bizys’ Hello Tokyo book. She also hosts The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry podcast and Local Fidelity on FBi Radio.
This July school holidays, join Lee Tran for a special (and free!) zine-making workshop series at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, from July 8 – 19. In this workshop, small groups of participants will go on an adventure through the Chinese Garden of Friendship and visit in-house restaurant The Gardens by Lotus with Lee Tran. Capturing the journey with Polaroid pictures, participants will learn about what makes food fun.
Then, work with Lee Tran to turn this journey into a zine – a self-made magazine – that you can take home.
For participants aged between 6-15 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, with bookings online encouraged to ensure all participants get to complete their take-home artwork. Entry to all workshops in this series is free with entry to the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Book here!
ArtistBiography:
Lee Tran Lam. Photo: Will Reichelt
Lee Tran Lam is a Sydney based writer, radio producer, editor and creator who works across publishing, podcasting, zine making and much more. Lam has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Gourmet Traveller, Time Out Sydney, Rolling Stone, Good Food Guide, Good Weekend, The Lifted Brow, The Big Issue and even Turkish Vogue magazine. She has worked full-time in editorial positions for 14 years – most recently as managing editor of Inside Out and a writer and producer at the Good Food website. Lam has been presenting Local Fidelity on FBi radio since 2007. In her spare time, she runs The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry blog and podcast. The blog was singled out as one of the city’s best in “The Foodie’s Guide To Sydney” and the podcast was picked as a “Podcast We Love” by SBS (and a “Chef’s Favourite” by Bon Appétit) and chosen to be archived by the National Library.
Lam has also appeared on ABC radio, been a guest speaker at various festivals (such as Audiocraft, Vivid, Food and Words, National Young Writers Festival), hosted Q&As for institutions like Kinokuniya and Sydney Living Museums, featured work in several exhibitions, plus curated the food program at Underbelly Arts festival.
This workshop has been produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
As part of the public programming for The Invisible Hand, 4A presents a continuation of discussion after our ‘Please Explain‘ panel, with two additional deep dive discussions highlighting the most pressing issues facing users and consumers of technology and media in the Asia-Pacific.
Data Practice: an in-conversation with Andrea Lau and Mitchell Whitelaw
2.00 PM – 3.00 PM
Data has been called ‘the new oil’ — a valuable resource that is getting increasing attention from business, government, communities and citizens. But how might we work with data from a practical, critical and creative standpoint? Andrea Lau talks with Mitchell Whitelaw about the emerging contours of ‘data practice’, touching on models of independent practice, engaging with government and business, poetry vs functionality and cross-cultural perspectives.
About the Speakers:
Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and practitioner with interests in digital art, design and culture, especially generative systems, data-aesthetics, and digital cultural collections. His work has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Fibreculture, and Senses and Society. His current work spans materiality, data and culture, with a practical focus on creating “generous interfaces” for digital heritage. He has worked with institutions including the State Library of NSW, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Australia, developing innovative interfaces to their digital collections. Mitchell is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University.
Andrea Lau is a data visualisation designer and co-founder and director at Small Multiples. In her role, Andrea leads the user experience and delivery of projects for Small Multiples’ government, media and innovative ASX-listed clients. She is responsible for spearheading business development, providing data visualisation direction, and educating organisations on the value of communicating stories through data. Andrea brings over ten years’ experience in digital services having worked at the ABC, Interaction Consortium and MediaSmart. With a particular interest in educating others on the power of data visualisation, she has been an instructor at General Assembly, Masterclass Tutor at Guardian News and Tutor/Lecturer at the University of Sydney.
Designing a Participatory Economy with Cameron Tonkinwise
3.00 PM – 4.00 PM
Interaction Design has helped create platforms that appear to seamlessly match supply-and-demand. Marketed as liberatory, these platforms have become exploitative ‘gig economies.’ It is nevertheless possible to redirect these platforms to promote more local, fairer ways of cooperatively providing services. This talk explores some of the interaction design patterns that could help establish ‘platform cooperatives.’
About the Speaker:
Cameron Tonkinwise is a Professor, School of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney. Prior to this, he was Director of Design Studies and Doctoral Studies at the Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. He has previously held the role of Associate Dean Sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design and was co-Chair of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School in New York, United States of America.
“If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?” Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010)
Responding to The Invisible Hand, an exhibition that considers how digital platform technologies are exploiting technological convenience to co-opt personal data in an uncertain zero-sum game, this edition of Please Explain will be moderated by Ariel Bogle, Technology Reporter for The ABC, and include panelists David Vaile, stream leader for the Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Faculty of Law, and Prof. Bronwen Morgan, Professor, School of Law, University of New South Wales (UNSW), alongside The Invisible Hand exhibiting artists Sunwoo Hoon and Mijoon Pak (Korea).
There is no area in life, business or society that has not been upended and rethought through platform technology companies. Nowhere is this more prevalent than the region of East Asia with the likes of Facebook and Google and their East Asian counterparts Naver, Tencent and Rakuten. It presents as no surprise that many people are anxious about our individual and collective futures and feel that as a society, we have little agency in how it is unfolding. Responding to 4A exhibition The Invisible Hand, this edition of Please Explain will focus on the writing of controversial computer philosophy writer, Jaron Lanier and his work ‘You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto‘ (2010), and our speakers will unpack the impact of platform technology companies in East Asia. The talk will explore the nature of platform technology companies, how these companies are destabilising the nature of democracy and governance, how data is being logged and co-opted by these companies and the possibilities for the future of our digital landscape.
Speakers: David Vaile, Bronwen Morgan, Sunwoo Hoon + Mijoon Pak Moderator: Ariel Bogle
Missed the event? Listen to the audio recording below:
Following Please Explain, 4A presents two deep dive discussions that highlight some of the most pressing issues facing users and consumers of technology and media in the Asia-Pacific.
The Invisible Hand is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been supported by the Korean Cultural Centre and was assisted by The Freedman Foundation International Scholarship for Curators. The program is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).
Coinciding with the exhibition opening of The Invisible Hand, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents Korean musician and performance artist Byungjun Kwon’s (권 병준) ‘This Is Me’.
Beginning with a single whistle, Byungjun Kwon’s This Is Me is an experimental electroacoustic improvisational performance involving multiple layers of reverberated and looped sounds accompanied by an interactive video programmed projection. Sonically comprising of sounds made by the artist orally and simple percussive bells, the piece is an exercise in the electronic manipulation of live recorded sound. Kwon’s performance is created concurrently with a piece of video recording and face recognition software developed by Junghoon Ha. The artist is seated at a table while a camera scans his face and others drawn on paper throughout the performance while the software recognises these images as base data for face mapping. As the piece progresses, several famous faces of actors, politicians and artists are mapped to Kwon’s face via a projector, erasing the artist as if wearing a mask. In contrast to the self-assured title, This Is Me reflects on the inherent anonymity of our current digital era where our personal identity can be endlessly manipulated to erase all traditional conceptions of self. A study of an identity crisis in real time, the work is meditative in concept with the artist adopting famous visages all while toying with the automated software. Faces such as George Bush, Marilyn Monroe and Nam June Paik are twisted and contorted at Kwon’s whim all while creating a symbiotic relationship between the artist, the camera, the software and projector, underscored by transformed man-made sounds.
This Is Me was first performed on 10 August 2013 at Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburg for the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival and has since been performed at the Nam June Paik Art Centre, Gyeonggi, South Korea and Blockhaus DY10, Nantes, France (2015).
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Byungjun Kwon (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul) is a musician and performance artist and pioneering figure of South Korea’s underground music scene. Beginning his career in the early 1990s as a singer/songwriter, Kwon released seven albums prior to relocating to Amsterdam, The Netherlands to study sonology and work for STEIM as a hardware engineer, a centre for the research and development of new electronic musical instruments. Since returning to Korea in 2011 he has expanded his practice into contemporary performance art, composing and performing experimental audio-visual works. His prior work in rock music, dance music, original film soundtracks, theatre scores and fashion runway soundtracking form an unconventional basis for his approach to creating and manipulating sound to form complex pieces. Recent projects include This Is Me, Edinburg International Festival 2013, Edinburgh, Scotland (2013); Artificial Garden, Mediacity Seoul 2012: Spell on You, Seoul, South Korea (2012); and My Instrument My Sound, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, South Korea (2012), alongside several electronic instrument projects at various workshops.
This performance is presented in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, The Korean Cultural Centre, Australia and the Kim Kim Gallery, and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism with support from the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) as part of the Traveling Korean Arts Project ‘Take ( ) at face value’.
SYDNEY. 4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART. Saturday 29 June 2019. 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Minja Gu, Pasta Nowadays
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents Minja Gu’s (Korea) Pasta Nowadays. Minja Gu’s works explore the cyclical forces of consumerism in society. Using durational performance, Gu facilitates contexts that transform everyday occurrences into ceremonies and rituals.In a performance lasting approximately two hours, Gu will use the ubiquitous act of making pasta as a relational act that encourages pause, reflection and communication among her participants. The noodles are made from diverse brands and flavors of flour from diverse origins and participants are welcome to wander in and out of the performance as they wish.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Minja Gu (b. 1977, Daejeon, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul) is an artist working predominantly in performance and video exploring ideas related to universal objects of human experience such as labour, time and love. Her works often deconstruct everyday actions and occurrences into ceremonies and rituals, emphasising the irreversibility of time and the permanence of action. Gu’s key recent exhibition history includes works at Performance x 4A, Art Central, Hong Kong (2018); The Korea Artist Prize, National Museum of Modern And Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2018); Impakt Festival – FotoDok, Utrecht, The Netherlands (2016); And No Matter What the Phone Rings – The 6th Moscow Biennale, Moscow, Russia (2015); Our Hesitant Dialogues, Art Sonje Centre, Seoul, South Korea (2013); and the 08 Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan (2008). Gu received the award of excellence in the SongEun Art Award in 2010.
This performance is presented in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, West Space, The Korean Cultural Centre, Australia and the Kim Kim Gallery, and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism with support from the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) as part of the Traveling Korean Arts Project ‘Take ( ) at face value’.
LIQUID ARCHITECTURE and 4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART present a night of splayed club influences via Chinese producer RUI HO. Known for her work on Shanghai label Genome 6.66 MBP and her genre-defying live performances, RUI HO makes her Melbourne debut alongside JALE’s fine mesh of synthetic textures and a new performance by PAPAPHILIA x MOSSY 333, HAM LAOSETHAKUL’s oscillating explorations and the data smearing AI of RHUNTER.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
RUI HO: A genre-blending tour de force, Berlin-based non-binary Chinese producer and artist RUI HO makes electronic music that infuses modern club music with traditional Chinese sounds, described as “a loose narrative of ancient warfare and imaginary events”. 戰記 is RUI HO’s debut EP, and their second release on Genome 6.66 Mbp. From grimy drums to epic soaring trance, their sound combines the intensity of the club with sweet and refreshing melodies from their past and present.
JALE is a DJ and irrepressible energy-source. She has cemented her place in the Melbourne club scene, creating sets featuring new sounds from around the world intended to disrupt and reimagine the idea of contemporary club music. JALE trades strict loyalty to any sub-genre for a free-wheeling mix of moods and tempos that subverts overly-familiar clubbing soundscapes.
RHUNTER constructs huge spectralist panoramas, held together at the seams by precise percussion that flickers between creaky electroacoustics and punchy HD SFX. His treatment of sound material is like hearing the hallucinatory product from a noise removal algorithm pushed beyond its intended domain; something uncompromisingly sharp, rippling, ringing, totally embracing its own digitality. But this digitality is not a cold digitality, finding its counterpoint in various organic interventions ranging from liquid bass stabs to autotuned lamentations to the occasional oceanic drum kit adventure. This translates into variously-sized tension-release-structures, keeping the material constantly breathing and moving. Crisp samples and smeared tones lose and regain assumed form, the density of the discrete sound components always inviting new permutations.
HAM LAOSETHAKUL is a Thai born Melbourne based DJ. His exploratory sets – voyage through codes and data of sound where oscillations of noise pulses in and out of life – represent his personal experience from the confines of his worldly walls. He employs linear narrative to construct a visual palette of his escapades which he expresses through a sonic exploration: takes mind through a vastly hypnotic and romantically awkward journey, allowing curiosity to be understood through uninhibited and experiential means.
Together PAPAPHILIA x MOSSY 333 imagine the connectivity between music and the body through movement – exposing the shared quality of poetics.
MOSSY 333: is a multi-disciplinary artist focused on painting, music, and performance. Her stage work evokes insight to the subjectivity of her trans feminine experiences regarding body and movement, casting a critical gaze on heteronormative cis-gendered conditioning. Her performances demystify the often essentialised idea of a trans woman, to remind people that “trans women are women with autonomy and complexities”.
PAPAPHILIA aurally interrogates the aesthetics of political representation, exploring how sensorial disorientation informs collective belonging. She blends the poetics of exaltation and sorrow from 90s dance music, RnB, disco, pop and traditional pop standards, into an electronic palette drawn from the dystopian poetics of contemporary technological disposability. Slopped pop samples morph into the stoned rhythms of backwashed synths that ebb from the rhythmic flow of acid techno to deep house.
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Curated by Mat Spisbah
Video by Benjamin Portas
Presented by Liquid Architecture and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Supported by City of Melbourne
Angel Music Bar is not a wheelchair-accessible venue
We acknowledge the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Taungurong, Dja Dja Wurrung and the Wathaurung people of the Kulin Nation as the custodians of the land in which this event takes place, and we recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and becoming.
Get ready for an inspired, creative studio right on the footsteps of Broadway Sydney. 4A has teamed up with Broadway Sydney to create a space for emerging Sydney creatives with the BROADWAY SYDNEY X 4A CREATIVE STUDIO. This new creative space is designed to facilitate local artistry in the area that is set to be used by independent curators, arts writers, arts administrators, and practising artists. Get ready for an inspired, creative studio space right on the footsteps of Broadway Sydney.
We’re thrilled to welcome independent curator Nanette Orly, arts writer and arts worker Soo Min-Shim, and emerging artist Naomi Segal as the first creatives to take up residence.
MEET THE CREATIVES//
Nanette Orly @nanettekorly
Nanette Orly is an independent curator based in Sydney. Her curatorial practice is deeply engaged with themes surrounding identity, development, cultural histories and offering alternative perceptions of contemporary society. Drawn to migratory aesthetics and research-based practices to form interdisciplinary group or collaborative exhibition concepts, Orly has curated exhibitions across a number of Sydney, regional and interstate galleries over the past five years. Recent curatorial projects include Transcendence (2018) at Firstdraft, Full Circle (2018) at The Lock-Up and 긴장 (that’s why I get so tired now) (2018) at Seventh Gallery in Melbourne. She is currently the Co-Director of artist run initiative Cold Cuts Project Space in Petersham and Board Member of the online publication Runway Australian Experiment Art. Orly has also been a successful participant in 4A Curators’ Intensive 2018 program in Sydney and was awarded the Project Curator of the Critical Animals Research Symposium 2018, based in Newcastle.
Soo Min-Shim @soominshim
Soo-Min Shim is an arts writer and arts worker living on stolen Gadigal land. She received her Bachelor of Art History and Theory (First Class Honours) from the University of Sydney and is currently a Director at Firstdraft Gallery 2019-2020. She has written for several Australian and international publications including Art & The Public Sphere, ArtAsiaPacific, The Artling, Art + Australia, Art Almanac, Runway Conversations, un Extended, and Running Dog.
Naomi Segal @_naomisegal
Naomi Segal is an emerging artist and curator engaging with contemporary Asian and diasporic art. She is drawn to cultural recovery, remembrance and love – specifically how the love of her Chinese family traverses linguistic and cultural
barriers. Peach Blossom Spring is her first curatorial project. Recent art awards include the Girl Genius Award (2018), Little Things Art Prize (2017) and Art Speaks Japanese (2016). She is mentored by Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE and has worked as an Assistant Program Coordinator for The Japan Foundation, Sydney. She has just curated a major exhibition, Peach Blossom Spring, at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney.
The Broadway X 4A Creative Space can be found in Broadway Sydney on the corner of Parramatta & City Road and is officially open now.
Join The Invisible Hand exhibiting artist Baden Pailthorpe and exhibition curator Micheal Do for a traditional Chinatown breakfast at a much-loved local eatery followed by a walkthrough of the exhibition and a discussion of some of the stories and ideas behind the artists’ works and the themes explored in The Invisible Hand.
The Invisible Hand considers how digital platform technologies are exploiting technological convenience to co-opt personal data in an uncertain zero-sum game. With work from Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan, this exhibition explores current and projected complications and contradictions in the digital realm that increasingly oscillate between technological evangelism and scepticism.
$25.00 +bf, includes breakfast. This program is included as part of our public programs for The Invisible Hand, book here
The Ambassador presents three distinct series by Melbourne-based artist Eugenia Lim that centre upon a gold-suited figure who appears halfway between truth and fantasy. In each series, Lim transforms herself into her eponymous invented persona, the Ambassador, an insatiability curious character who traverses time and space, playfully exploring Australia’s cultural and built landscapes.
This exhibition marks the first exhibition of Eugenia Lim’s work and presents all three bodies of work together for the first time. Together, they represent a compelling and witty examination of contemporary Australia from a female, performative and Asian-Australian perspective. As the Ambassador, Lim ‘shapeshifts’ to unearth multiple dimensions of the Asian-Australian narrative – drilling down into racial politics, the social costs of manufacturing, and the role of architecture in shaping society – exploring how national identities and stereotypes cut, divide and bond our globalised world.
Curated by Mikala Tai, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, The Ambassador is travelling to eight galleries and art centres across Australia between 2019 and 2021 through Museums & Galleries of NSW.
A 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.
It is with great sadness that we note the loss of Edmund Capon OBE, AM, who has passed away in London.
Edmund Capon was a stalwart of Sydney’s art world and his passion, intelligence and sharp wit is remembered by all that had the opportunity to work with him and around him. Over the past four years Edmund has been the Chair of the 4A Board and has revitalised the organisation with his contagious energy and deep understanding of Australia’s relationship with Asia. During this period, he has reaffirmed the organisation’s commitment to fieldwork, research and scholarly pursuits while also demonstrating an unwavering commitment to artists and their artistic processes.
The Board and team at 4A are deeply saddened by the loss of our fearless leader but are most upset by the loss of our friend. Above all Edmund was a great supporter of us all in our work endeavours and our lives at home. On every occasion he made the workplace a fun and rigorously challenging place to be.
‘We are devastated to have lost Edmund, our endlessly inspiring colleague, who has done so much for Australia’s engagement and understanding of Asian art and culture. We are only just beginning to understand the extent of the wonderful legacy that he has left. I am also devastated to have lost such a great friend and mentor. Edmund will remain an important person to both 4A and myself for a very long time to come.’ – Mikala Tai, Director 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
‘Edmund’s vision, that of Australia’s proximity to Asia preceded well before the founding of 4A; we are so grateful as a board to have benefited from his deep knowledge and guidance over the years that he was chair. He shall be greatly missed. The Board and wider 4A Family send their love to Joanna and the Capon family on their loss of such a great and loved man.’ – John Young, Board Member 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Messages of condolences can be sent to: hello@4a.com.au
Ken and Julia Yonetani talk about their exhibition What the Birds Knew, uranium glass and the impact of the Fukashima nuclear disaster on their new work.
Come aboard for a typical Chinatown breakfast at a much-loved local eatery with By All Estimates exhibiting artist Jessica Bradford and exhibition curator Pedro de Almeida, followed by a walk through of the exhibition and discussion of some of the stories and ideas behind the artists’ works.
Taking Singapore as a locus of multiple regional identities, By All Estimates brings together works by artists that give form to narratives obscured by the city-state’s rapid urban and social development and the coexistence of competing projections of cultural inheritance and recognition. Over the past decade especially, Singapore’s investment in cultural institutions has been seen as an attempt to position the nation as a beacon of cultural capital in Southeast Asia. Underpinning this expansion lies an ever evolving matrix of received and contested narratives that within certain contemporary public realms—from the streets of the city to the corridors of the museum—jostle, overlap or otherwise mingle in approximations of the influence of multiple ethnic representations and economic imperatives. This exhibition presents works by Kolkata-based artist Rathin Barman, Singapore-born Sydney-based artist Jessica Bradford, Singaporean London-based artist Erika Tan, and Singapore-based artist Moses Tan.
Jessica Bradford (b. 1987, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney. Her work explores her mixed race heritage by questioning stereotypical representations of cultural or national identity. She has held solo exhibitions at Firstdraft, MOP Projects and Galerie Pompom, and is a 2018 Parramatta Artists Studios resident. Bradford’s work has been included in curated group shows at Delmar Gallery (2017), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2015), Fairfield Museum & Gallery (2014) and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest (2013). Bradford holds an MFA by Research from Sydney College of the Arts, and was a recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been a finalist in the John Fries Memorial Prize, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and the Jenny Birt Award. Bradford is represented by Gallerie pompom, Sydney.
By All Estimates is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the British Council and Singapore Tourism Board.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is back again at the NGV’s Melbourne Art Book Fair. Join us to find a range of 4A supported and commissioned publications, artist prints, designs and fashion. Artists featured this year include: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, FX Harsono, Jason Wing, Shen Shaomin, Reko Rennie, Jason Phu, Chris Yee, and more.
4A is proud to be launching Eugenia Lim: The Ambassador at the Fair in conjunction with the national tour of Lim’s exhibition The Ambassador. Lim will be onsite and can personalise your copy of this limited print run.
Since its launch in 2015, the annual Melbourne Art Book Fair has attracted more than 50,000 visitors annually, making it the most visited publishing event in the Asia-Pacific region.
The fifth Melbourne Art Book Fair in 2019 will see 4A join diverse emerging and established local and international publishers, artists and writers, across a four-day program of ideas, discussions and book launches at the National Gallery of Victoria. The 2019 program explores ideas around experimental and discursive publishing, challenging how we think about the publishing field.
Join artist Chris Yee and curator Con Gerakaris of 4A’s Lunar New Year exhibition HI MEDUSA! With a special Con-Yee Dumpling tour at The Chinese Garden of Friendship. Riffing off of 4A’s popular Congee Breakfast program, Chris and Con will give a guided tour of the exhibition throughout the gardens followed by an optional dim sum snacks and drinks at The Chinese Garden of Friendship’s new restaurant, The Gardens by Lotus.
Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA!is an exhibition that creates a tangible connection between the Chinese-Australian communities of Sydney and provides a unique opportunity for visitors to engage with the history of the Garden through neo-traditional artworks depicting modern and historical Lunar New Year cultural imagery.
Presenting twelve new and existing bespoke tapestries by emerging Sydney artist Chris Yee, visitors to the Chinese Garden of Friendship during Lunar New Year 2019 go on a journey through the Gardens, discovering detailed, beautiful and humorous images at every turn. Yee’s design work evokes the experiences and narratives of the Chinese diasporic communities of the city expressed through a graphic sensibility that echoes that architectural forms and decorative embellishments of the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Hand woven, the tapestries in this special exhibition, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, compliment the natural flow of the venue, synthesising a harmonious environment of traditional and contemporary artistic expression.
Chris Yee (b. 1989, Sydney) is an East Ryde (Sydney) based artist, illustrator and designer who specialises in traditional “pen and paper” methodologies. Chris’ main influences stem and vary from 90’s post-apocalyptic manga, rap and punk aesthet- ics. Through his imagery he constructs narratives ranging from the humorous to the monstrous and macabre. Chris’ solo exhibitions include Mad Love, 2015, Japan Foundation, Sydney; Panorama, 2015, Kind Of- Gallery, Sydney; and has par- ticipated in group and collaborative exhibitions including No Más (with Andrew Yee), 2018, Wedge Gallery, Sydney; SOFT, 2016, Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; and Goliath Ballroom (with James Jirat Patradoon), 2015, Goodspace, Sydney. Out- side his art practice, Chris is a designer who has produced work for some of Australia’s best-known brands, including VIVID Festival Sydney, Sony Australia, Samsung – Opera House, Vans, Red Bull and Gelato Messina.
2-3 PM EXHIBITION TOUR ONLY: $5.00 +BF 2-4 PM EXHIBITION TOUR + AFTERNOON TEA AT LOTUS: $25.00 +BF
Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA! has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿 is the first retrospective of leading contemporary Chinese artist Xiao Lu. The exhibition is anchored by Xiao Lu’s performance work Dialogue from the landmark China/Avant-Gardeexhibition at the National Art Gallery, Beijing, in February 1989. This work, in which the artist fires a gun at her own art installation, is a milestone in the development of contemporary art in China. It has also has been read as a critical turning point in China’s recent history. While Dialogue remains an iconic work of that era, it is also one of the most misunderstood pieces of contemporary Chinese art. Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 examines Xiao Lu’s creative interest in deep emotion, extreme action, and chance. Spanning a period of 30 years, the exhibition presents significant performance works by Xiao Lu including a new commission that explores the artist’s ongoing connection to Australia.
Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou) works with performance and installation. She is a graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989 and became famous after she fired a gun at it, which led to her temporary arrest and an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue《对话》, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate, London (2018) and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikang Insurance Group Art Collection, Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and Australia.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Tables: China/Avant-Garde exhibition archival materials. Back: Xiao Lu, Dialogue (对话 ), 1989, C-type print on vinyl, documentation of installation, and performance: 11.10am,
5 February 1989, China/Avant-Garde exhibition, National Art Gallery, Beijing. Reproduced courtesy Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Xiao Lu. Projection: China/Avant-Garde exhibition, set of 210 archival 35mm colour transparency slides produced by Fine Arts Magazine, 1991. Private collection. Far Left: Wang Youshen, China/Avant-Garde exhibition. Before and after the ‘Shooting Incident’ (detail), 1989 – 2019, inkjet prints, dimensions variable, courtesy Wang Youshen. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu, Dialogue (对话 ), 1989, single channel video, 2:04 minutes, documentation of installation and performance: 11.10 am, 5 February 1989, China/Avant-Garde exhibition National Art Gallery, Beijing. Reproduced courtesy Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Xiao Lu. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Tables: China/Avant-Garde exhibition archival materials. Back: Wang Youshen, China/Avant-Garde exhibition. Before and after the ‘Shooting Incident’ (detail), 1989 – 2019, inkjet prints, dimensions variable, courtesy Wang Youshen. Bottom Right: China/Avant-Garde exhibition, set of 210 archival 35mm colour transparency slides produced by Fine Arts Magazine, 1991. Private collection. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. China/Avant-Garde exhibition archival materials. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Left: Xiao Lu, Tides (絅蟙) (detail), documentation of performance, Sydney, 18 January 2019, installation: sand, bamboo poles. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist. Right: Xiao Lu, Sperm (精子), 2006, C-type print, 120 x 160cm, edition 6/10, printed 2016, documentation of performance: 21-23 May 2006, Long March Project – Yan’an, Kangda Hotel, Yan’an. Courtesy Long March Space and the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Xiao Lu, 15 Gunshots… From 1989 to 2003, (15枪…从1989 到 2003), 2003, 15 black and white digital prints, framed and then punctured by a bullet, 100 x 45 cm, printed 2018, edition 12/15, photographs by Li Songsong. Courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Left: Xiao Lu, Polar (极地) (detail), 2016, C-type prints, 80 x 120 cm, editions 1/9 and 5/9, printed 2018, documentation of performance: 23 October 2016, Beijing Live 1, Danish Cultural Center, 798 Arts District, Beijing, China. Photographs by Yi Zhilei. Courtesy the artist. Right: Xiao Lu, Polar (极地), 2016, single channel video, 4:43 minutes, documentation of performance: 23 October 2016, Beijing Live 1, Danish Cultural Center, 798, Beijing, China. Filmed by Zhang Zhiqiang and Li Kai, edited by Zhang Li and Xiao Lu. Courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 , detail installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Left: Xiao Lu, Tides (絅蟙) (detail), documentation of performance, Sydney, 18 January 2019, installation: sand, bamboo poles. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist. Centre: Xiao Lu, One (合), 2015, single channel video, 3:10 minutes, documentation of performance: 5 September 2015, Live Action 10, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Filmed by Zhang Zhiqiang, edited by Xiao Lu. Courtesy the artist. Right: Xiao Lu, One, (合一) (detail), 2015, C-type print, 120 x 80 cm, edition 6/10, printed 2017, documentation of performance: 5 September 2015, Live Action 10, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Photographs by Lin Qijian. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Xiao Lu, Tides (弄潮), 18 January 2019, Sydney, sand and, bamboo, inkjet print on silk. Photograph by Jacquie Manning. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
CHINESE GARDEN OF FRIENDSHIP, SYDNEY. 2 FEBRUARY – 17 FEBRUARY 2019.
Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA! is an exhibition that creates a tangible connection between the Chinese-Australian communities of Sydney and provides a unique opportunity for visitors to engage with the history of the Garden through neo-traditional artworks depicting modern and historical Lunar New Year cultural imagery.
Presenting twelve new and existing bespoke tapestries by emerging Sydney artist Chris Yee, visitors to the Chinese Garden of Friendship during Lunar New Year 2019 go on a journey through the Gardens, discovering detailed, beautiful and humorous images at every turn. Yee’s design work evokes the experiences and narratives of the Chinese diasporic communities of the city expressed through a graphic sensibility that echoes that architectural forms and decorative embellishments of the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Hand woven, the tapestries in this special exhibition, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, compliment the natural flow of the venue, synthesising a harmonious environment of traditional and contemporary artistic expression.
Chris Yee (b. 1989, Sydney) is an East Ryde (Sydney) based artist, illustrator and designer who specialises in traditional “pen and paper” methodologies. Chris’ main influences stem and vary from 90’s post-apocalyptic manga, rap and punk aesthet- ics. Through his imagery he constructs narratives ranging from the humorous to the monstrous and macabre. Chris’ solo exhibitions include Mad Love, 2015, Japan Foundation, Sydney; Panorama, 2015, Kind Of- Gallery, Sydney; and has par- ticipated in group and collaborative exhibitions including No Más (with Andrew Yee), 2018, Wedge Gallery, Sydney; SOFT, 2016, Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; and Goliath Ballroom (with James Jirat Patradoon), 2015, Goodspace, Sydney. Out- side his art practice, Chris is a designer who has produced work for some of Australia’s best-known brands, including VIVID Festival Sydney, Sony Australia, Samsung – Opera House, Vans, Red Bull and Gelato Messina.
Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA! has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Documentation:
All images by Chris Yee.
L-R: Chris Yee, TEAM, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship; 4 CORNERS, 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, MIRRORBALL, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 175 x 160cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, SYDNEY WORLD TOUR, 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, UNITED NATIONS, 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, EYES (CLASSIC), 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 152.4 x 63.5cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, BOSS BABY, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, MAINLAND, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 152.4 x 127cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, STOCK XCHANGE, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, BOY MEETS WORLD, 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 152.4 x 127cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, PEACE PLACE, 2017, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
Chris Yee, TWINS EFFECT, 2019, 100% American made, woven cotton yarn, 127 x 152.4cm, installation view, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
DARLING HARBOUR PRECINCT, SYDNEY. 2 FEBRUARY – 18 FEBRUARY 2019.
To celebrate Lunar New Year 2019 in the Darling Harbour precinct, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is creating a special installation to mark the festival. Leading international artist Choi Jeong-Hwa has collaborated with 4A to present a continuation of his Happy Happy Project with his world-renowned inflatable flying pink pig Love Me, Pig visiting Sydney for the first time. Two editions of Love Me, Pig have been adapted for display as part of the Lunar New Year Festival in Sydney and will be the centre point of celebrations in Darling Harbour, with one positioned outside the Chinese Garden of Friendship, and one outside the ICC.
Choi Jeong-Hwa has always been inspired by everyday objects where he builds oversized sculptures from moulded plastics and inflatables. His work is characterised by its ability to speak to audiences with Mr Choi seeking to make art not for museums or galleries but for everyone. In Sydney new editions of Love Me, Pig have been created to celebrate the Lunar New Year of the Pig and playfully celebrates the pig as an East Asian symbol for wealth, fortune and luck.
On the first weekend of the festival from Saturday 2 February, watch the pigs come to life for their first inflation and see live water painting from calligraphy expert, Master Dongyang, as he creates an engaging public performance, painting wishes for Sydney in the coming year – a special moment that will activate these spaces. Audiences will be invited to water paint their own wishes for the new year on the grounds around Love Me, Pig.
After the painting event to coincide with the opening of the Lunar New Year festival, Love Me, Pig will remain on display until February 18, throughout the New Year celebrations.
Choi Jeong-Hwa (b. 1961 Seoul, South Korea) is an artist and designer whose work moves between the disciplines of visual art, graphic design, industrial design and architecture. Inspired by the harmony and chaos of the urban environment, Choi undermines the hierarchy of the museum by installing his pieces on the outside of buildings.
His playful practice comments on the privileged environment of art institutions and questions the prized status of artworks amidst a consumer-frenzied world. He is well known for large scale surreal installations from found objects. He constructed a 10-storey building installation made from 1,000 discarded doors, and decorated Seoul’s Olympic Stadium with garlands made from 2 million pieces of trash, transforming the building’s surface into glittering, jeweled structure. In his other pieces, he explores ideas of artificiality and permanence through the use of plastic, food, and flowers.
Choi participated in many Art festivals and exhibitions. He was the Korean representative in “Secret Beyond the Door”(2005), at Venice Biennale, Italy. Most recently he participated in the Bangkok Art Biennale (2018), The Asia Pacific Triennial (2015) at QAGOMA and has held a solo exhibition Choi Jeong Hwa: Happy Together (2016) at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. He declines to categorize his work, leaving the audience to define his pieces at a personal level, as his motto states: “My art is your heart”.
4A is pleased to present an in conversation with leading contemporary Chinese artist Xiao Lu, on the occasion of her first retrospective, Impossible Dialogue, at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, at The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Xiao Lu will be in dialogue with two of the exhibition’s co-curators Claire Roberts and Xu Hong to view and discuss videos of some of the artist’s recent performance works.
The conversation will focus on Xiao Lu’s ongoing creative interest in deep emotion, extreme action and chance, and connect with broader themes including art and gender, feminism, activism and the writing of art histories.
Presented by the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and the exhibition Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, in association with The IMA, Brisbane.
Acknowledgements:
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now(FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Header Image: Xiao Lu, One, performance, 5 September 2015, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Photograph by Lin Qijian, courtesy Xiao Lu.
Bollywood auction banquet is the fourth fundraiser for Gallery 4A. This year’s banquet includes an art auction of works by significant artists including Marion Borgelt, Cherine Fahd, Felicia Kan, Dani Marti, Kate Beynon and My Le Thi.
Cultural Revolution is an annual fundraiser art auction and banquet presenting and promoting the work of emerging Asian-Australia artists. The supported works include artists like Liu Xiao Xian, Deborah Paauwe, Guo Jian, Aaron Seeto, Ruth Watson, Cherine Fahd, My Le Thi + Tim Johnson, Shen Jia Wei, David McKay.
Saigon 75′ is the fourth annual 4A Charity Banquet held at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. The artists of supported include works by Guan Wei, Lindy Lee, Dacchi Dang.
Giantsteps is a solo exhibition of leading Chinese contemporary artist, Wang Jian Wei. To be opened by Tony Bond, Head Curator of Wester Art at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Artists: Luke Butterworth, Brad Hammond, Cecelia Huynh, Samantha Rath, Paula Wong.
Nightvision IV is a program of short silent video works showcasing the talents of young and emerging national and international artists projected on to the Asia-Australia centre ground-floor window. Curated by Aaron Seeto, Nightvision screens sunset to sunrise every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings.
Jia (Family, House, Home) is a group exhibition presented with the Carnivale Multicultural Arts Festival. To be opened by Mr King Fong OAM.
The exhibition toured internationally with an opening held at the Hong Kong Fringe Club on 4 February 2004. Included speeches by Douglas Gautier (Executive Director, HK Arts Festival), the officiating guests John Phibeam, Deputy Consul-General of Australian Consulate General Hong Kong, and Benny Chia, Director of Fringe Club, and participating artists Lindy Lee and William Yang respectively. A video of the opening can be found on Asian Art Archive.
Artists: Dadang Christanto, Emil Goh, George Poonkhin Khut + John Tonkin, Selina Ou, Vienna Parreno + Krysztof Osinski, Melissa Ramos, Koky Saly, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, My Le Thi, Suzann Victor
Open Letter is a touring exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of Australia’s dialogue partnership with ASEAN.
Process is a group exhibition presenting the works of Emil Goh, Guan Wei and My Le Thi. To be opened by Councillor Phillip Black, City of Sydney at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre.
Artist Talks
Friday 22 October 2.00PM
Workshop
Saturday 23 October 2pm
The artists Guan Wei and My Le Thi will be conducting workshops and public interactive projects during this exhibition.
On Thursday November 29, join artist Justine Youssef and her mother Siham Chamoun for a special one-off cooking class. Siham is the amazing brains behind Sahtein Lebanese Feasts, an Instagram account which documents traditional Arabic recipes and intimate familial stories related to her village in Lebanon. She provided our wonderful mezze platters at Justine’s 4A opening, as well as the breakfast spread at the Manoosheh Breakfast Tour.
From 6PM, join us at 4A to learn how to make Warak Enab – delicious, rice-stuffed grape leaves – and join your classmates, Justine and her mum for a light dinner.
Places for this special workshop are strictly limited to 10 participants and tickets are $60, inclusive of all cooking materials, instructions, light dinner and drinks.
Please Explain: Why is My Curriculum White? Panel Discussion
Thursday 22 November 2018
6.30PM–8.00PM
Moderator: Justine Youssef
Speakers: Alissar Chidiac , Dr Jason De Santolo , Jennine Khalik, Dr Omid Tofighian
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. In response to the Why Is My Curriculum White campaign this edition of Please Explain considers Omid Tofighian’s article in The Conversation that challenges our education system to rethink and reframe Eurocentric norms that currently provide the foundations from which to learn. Joining him are Sydney based community workers and artists who base their practices in diversifying ideas of ‘the norm’ and seek to tell complex, diverse and sometimes paradoxical stories of who we are today. This conversation is led by Justine Youssef, who has curated this panel as part of her 4A exhibition, Justine Youssef: All Blessings, All Curses.
Missed the event? Listen to the audio recording below:
Speaker Profiles:
| Moderator: Justine YOUSSEF
| Justine YOUSSEF is currently living on the unceded territory of the Darug peoples. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney, Australia and is currently working from the Parramatta Artist Studios. She has been awarded the New South Wales Artists’ Grant (NAVA and Create NSW), as well as a studio residency at Blacktown Arts. She has held collaborative solo exhibitions at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, and Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo with Duha Ali in 2018, and has participated in group exhibitions at Airspace Projects, Marrickville; Bankstown Art Center, Bankstown; Sullivan+Strumpf, Zetland; and Collab Gallery, Chippendale. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Association for the Visual Arts; the National Art School Drawing Archive; and the Sydney Gallery School.
| Alissar CHIDIAC
| Alissar Chidiac has been working in different contexts of community and cultural engagement for almost 40 years. Since 1991 her focus has been on Arab Australian cultures, through contemporary cultural production, cultural heritage and performance work. She worked at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (1998-2004) where she initiated a diversity of critical projects, innovative exhibitions and Arab community partnerships through the ‘wattan project’. She creatively developed model programs with Auburn Community Development Network, including ‘Inside Out_Muslim Women Exploring Identities and Creative Expressions’ (2005-2007) and ‘Moving Calligraphy_Visual Storytelling’ (2009-2010) bringing together artists of Arabic and Chinese calligraphies and local Aboriginal artists. In 2011-2012 she was Creative Producer of Casula Powerhouse Art Centre’s national initiative ‘No Added Sugar: Engagement and Self-Determination: Australian Muslim Women Artists’. Alissar worked as Creative Producer with ‘Auburn Cartographies of Diversity’ (2015-2017) activating community engagement and producing local exhibitions in Auburn. She has also been contracted by Fairfield City Council in 2017-2018 to facilitate professional development and mentorship programs with emerging artists and community members. Alissar and Maissa Alameddine are currently Artist Coordinators with Arab Theatre Studio Creative Hub in Granville, supported by Cumberland Council, through Create NSW’s ‘Making Spaces’ program. Alissar initiated Arab Theatre Studio in 2014, after a Space Residency with Urban Theatre Projects in 2013. In 2005 Alissar was awarded a two-year Fellowship by the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2010 she won the annual ‘Ros Bower Award’, honouring a lifetime contribution to community arts and cultural development.
| Dr Omid TOFIGHIAN
| Dr Omid Tofighian is a lecturer, researcher and community advocate, combining philosophy with interests in rhetoric, religion, popular culture, transnationalism, displacement and discrimination. He completed his PhD in Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and graduated with a combined honours degree in Philosophy and Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Omid has lived variously in the UAE where he taught at Abu Dhabi University; Belgium where he was a visiting scholar at K.U. Leuven; the Netherlands for his PhD; and intermittent periods in Iran for research. His current roles include Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney; faculty at Iran Academia; and campaign manager for Why Is My Curriculum White? – Australasia.’ He contributes to community arts and cultural projects and works with asylum seekers, refugees and young people from Western Sydney. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles and is author of Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016) and translator of Manus by Behrouz Boochani (Picador 2017).
| Jennine KHALIK
| Jennine Khalik is a Sydney-based journalist and digital producer at the ABC. She was formerly a reporter with the national broadsheet The Australian, in news and art, and with NewsLocal.
| Jason DE SANTOLO
| Dr Jason De Santolo (Garrwa and Barunggam) is a researcher, creative producer & father committed to forging a sustainable world for future generations through transformative research strategies, storytelling & practices of renewal. Born in Larrakia homelands – Darwin, he moved to Aoteaoroa/NZ at an early age, and studied treaty & international environmental law. His unique research practice integrates video, creative practice & renewal strategies through a Garrwa driven decolonising research paradigm. In 2014 he received a UTS Research Excellence Scholarship and graduated in 2018 with a creative doctorate that explores the renewal of song traditions through his passion for filmmaking & collective aspirations for self determination.
The Artists’ Christmas Car Boot Sale is curated by Sydney-based artist Garry Trinh. Descend to the lower levels of World Square to encounter established and emerging artists. Step into cars transformed into mini galleries and fossick in boots for one-off original art just in time for Christmas. Think driver-seat seances, artworks delivered straight from the studio and intimate car boot performances.
Featuring DJ Coris, refreshments and a pop-up Gift Wrapping service with all proceeds being donated to Wesley Mission to tackle homelessness in Sydney, this will be a Christmas Market like no other!
The Car Boot Sale will take place on Thursday 6 December, 2018 on Level 5 of World Square Shopping Centre (644 George St, Sydney NSW 2000).
Garry Trinh (born Sydney, Australia and lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is an artist working in photography, video, painting and works on paper. He holds a BA in Psychology and a BA in Visual Communications / Photography and Digital Imaging from the University of Western Sydney.
Trinh was the winner of the Sydney Life photography prize in 2007 and won the Auburn Mayoral Photographic Prize in 2009 and 2010. His photo book Just Heaps Surprised to be Alive was nominated for Photography Book of the Year at the 4th International Photo book Festival at Kassel, Germany. From 2017-2018 Trinh was a full time tenant at Parramatta Artists Studios. His work is collected by the Art Gallery of NSW and Artbank. He has been exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Blacktown Arts Centre, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Stills Gallery, Gallery 4A and many others.
Trinh makes art about the uncanny, unexpected and spontaneous moments in daily life and to express his personal ideas. He is perplexed by the perception of artists as coffee-drinking loafers who work whenever they feel like it. He doesn’t even drink coffee. His works are about a way of looking at the world, to reveal magic in the mundane. He is never bored and never late.
Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Chair of the Board of 4A, and
Mikala Tai, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
invite you to join us at the opening of:
Justine Youssef: All Blessings, All Curses Exhibition opening: 6-8PM, Thursday 1 November To be officially opened by artist Lindy Lee.
All Blessings, All Curses presents recent and newly commissioned works by Sydney-based artist, Justine Youssef. Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Youssef’s practice explores the stifling white heat of global xenophobia with deeply personal and universal ruminations that layer the smell, sights and textures of her ancestral homeland, Lebanon.
This opening event starts at 6:00PM with drinks and an opening address.
Click to RSVP to this special event by Friday 19 October.
Exhibition runs 2 November – 16 December 2018.
Curated by Mikala Tai. Curatorial Assistant Tian Zhang.
#AllBlessingsAllCurses @4a_Aus
www.4a.com.au
Image above: Duha Ali and Justine Youssef, 2018, Kohl (still), single channel video, 4:18; courtesy the artists.
Join artist Justine Youssef and curator Mikala Tai for a tour of All Blessings, All Curses followed by a Sobhiyeh – Lebanese Breakfast – in the gallery. Hear from the artist about the process of developing this series of works over a traditional Lebanese breakfast of za’atar manoosheh, labneh and olives.
$25 (+bf) includes breakfast. Book here.
Join Sydney-based artist Kai Wasikowski to make your own garden image and turn it into a beautiful ‘sun-print’ photograph, inspired by the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Drop into the gardens between 11-1pm on Mon 8, Tue 9, or Thu 11 October to learn how to use materials to make a botanical scene.
Have fun developing your “gardening” skills, arrange your own garden scene using plants, then create a take-home ‘nature’ photograph using the sun, whilst exploring the plants, colours and textures of the Garden of Friendship.
With professional photographer and artist Kai, you’ll make a blue and white print, ready to frame display at home! Whether you stay for 15 minutes or the full two hours this fun workshop will help you create a botanical print and learn basic photographic principles.
For participants aged between 5-12 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, drop in session, no bookings required. Garden Worlds is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Kai Wasikowski and the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the October 2018 school holidays program.
As part of World Square’s Moon Festival 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has commissioned a special family workshop for visitors to make their own lantern to celebrate the festival. Learn how to decorate and create a candy-coloured take-home lantern with Sydney-based artist Louise Zhang. All workshops are free, with a drop-in capacity for 20 participants. Each workshop finishes with a Moon Festival Parade.
PEACOCK GALLERY, AUBURN. 15 September – 21 October 2018.
Opening: Saturday 15 September 2018, 1:30 – 3:30pm.
As part of the 2018 Curators’ Intensive presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art two emerging curators have been selected to curate an exhibition at Peacock Gallery.
Chapter One: Thinking through it is a project curated by Sabrina Baker that exists as a reading room, research space and open studio. Artists have contributed things that influence their working methods and you’re invited to dive into their practice through the stacks of books taken from bedside tables and studio desks, the photographs, knick knacks and stuff that feeds into the development of their work.
Hannah Donnelly, Thea Jones, Shivanjani Lal, Nikki Lam, Anja Loughhead, Stephen Pham, and Jason Phu work with different materials and methods to craft works that explore place in relation to the self.
Each of the artists explore themes of personal identity and myth making with a grounding in being both inside and outside of their local environments – where they are now and where they have been before.
PEACOCK GALLERY, AUBURN. 15 September – 21 October 2018.
Opening: Saturday 15 September 2018, 1:30 – 3:30pm.
As part of the 2018 Curators’ Intensive presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art two emerging curators have been selected to curate an exhibition at Peacock Gallery.
Tongues (curated by Isabel Rouch) is the first offering in an ongoing curatorial project, exploring the varied effects language can have on us as individuals.
The exhibition questions how our experience of the world and self changes with language, and what can be lost or gained through translation.
Tongues brings together the personal perspectives of multidisciplinary, Sydney based artists, Yeliz Yorulmaz, Kai Wasikowski and Eugene Choi; each sharing the experience of being multilingual or growing up in a multilingual context.
All three respond to the theme of identity through language, reflecting particularly on how their exposure to linguistic diversity has influenced them, and in addition, how their art practice fits into this layered understanding and correspondence.
Come aboard for a typical Chinatown brekkie at a much-loved local eatery followed by a walk through the exhibition and discussion of some of the stories and ideas behind the artists’ works in Temporary Certainty.
$25 (+bf) includes breakfast.
Departing 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket, NSW
On the final weekend of The Burrangong Affray and to mark the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival, join artist Jason Phu in collaboration with Eugene Choi for a special lion dance performance.
There will also be an opportunity to contribute to the offerings to be made when the artists next visit the township of Young.
For more information about The Burrangong Affray click here.
Artist Biographies:
Eugene Choi (b. 1993, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Sydney) is a performance-based artist whose practice has evolved around the physicality of constructing internal and external structures working across sculpture, performance, installation, video and text. Often influenced by the body in movement, Choi’s practice travels between controlled and uncontrolled states by engaging herself in unfamiliar, yet composed situations, relying on the live response of her physical and emotional body. A self-made system of geometry becomes integral between objects, bodies and space, attempting to achieve equilibrium.
Jason Phu (b.1989, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Sydney) studied at COFA, Sydney graduating with honours in 2011 and NSCAD, Nova Scotia. He works across a range of mediums from installation, painting and sculpture where he traces the connections between the tradition of Chinese brush and ink painting and contemporary practice. His work has been informed by several China based residencies at CAFA, Beijing; DAC Studios, Chongqing; and Organhaus, Chongqing which has enabled him to further investigate the tradition of calligraphy. Recently Jason has had numerous solo exhibitions in Australia including Westspace, Melbourne; Nicholas Projects, Melbourne; CCAS Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra; and ALASKA PROJECTS, Sydney. He won the coveted Sulman Prize in 2015 and in the same year received a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship which allowed him to develop his practice between China and Australia.
PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION:
All images: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Header image: Jason Phu, In the morning I wake the rooster. In the afternoon I drive across the mountains & waters. At night I cut all my ties, 2018, multimedia installation, dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
| Speakers: Rushdi ANWAR; Alana HUNT;Associate Professor Phillip GEORGE; Djon MUNDINE, OAM; Sarker PROTICK
| 4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. Responding to Temporary Certainty presented at 4A this edition of Please Explain seeks to examine ideas and issues around nationalisms, sovereignty and memorialisation.
Join artists Rushdi Anwar, Alana Hunt and Sarker Protick alongside speakers Associate Professor Philip George and Djon Mundine OAM who will take a key premise articulated by political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson in his seminal text Imagined Communities (1983) as a jumping off point for a broad discussion.
| Pedro is Program Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and exhibition curator, Temporary Certainty.
| Rushdi ANWAR
| Rushdi Anwar (b. Halabja, Kurdistan) is a Melbourne-based artist, currently working between Australia and Thailand. His installation, sculpture, painting, photo-painting and video work often reflect on socio-political issues relating to Kurdistan, Iraq and the Middle East. He explores these issues through an investigation of form, utilising a material vocabulary and different processes of making. Anwar was educated in Kurdistan and Australia, studying at the Institute of Kirkuk- Kurdistan and Enmore Design Centre/Sydney Institute. He holds a Master of Fine Art (2010) and a PhD in Fine Art (2016) from RMIT University, Melbourne. He has held solo and group exhibitions widely in Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, Kurdistan, Norway, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and USA. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include 12th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2018), and the 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2019). Anwar’s works are held in the collections of the Australian War Memorial, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and in private collections. He has curated exhibitions in Kurdistan (2010), Thailand (2012, 2015), and Australia (2013). Following several artist-in-residence programs in Thailand, he co-founded and co-coordinated the Australian Thai Artist Interchange, Melbourne (2012–2016), an organisation founded to enhance cross-cultural exchange, awareness and appreciation of art and culture between Thais and Australians. Rushdi is a founding member, with Brook Andrew and Shiraz Bayjoo, of the artist collective The Working Collection.
| Alana HUNT
| Alana Hunt (b. 1984, Sydney) makes contemporary art, writes and produces culture through a variety of media across public, gallery and online spaces. She lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia and has a long-standing engagement with South Asia. The politics of nation making and the colonial past and present of Australia and South Asia are central to her practice. Since 2009, she has orchestrated participatory art and publishing projects that have activated different media forms in the public sphere to shed light on Kashmir. Paper txt msgs from Kashmir (2009–2011) prompted media in India and Pakistan to speak about a state-wide mobile phone ban they had previously been silent on. This work won the Fauvette Laureiro Artist Scholarship. In 2016, the seven-year participatory memorial Cups of nun chaicirculated as a newspaper serial in Kashmir, reaching thousands of people on a weekly basis during a period of civilian uprising and state oppression. This work won the 2017 Incinerator Art Award. Her essay, A mere drop in the sea of what is, published by 4A Papers (Issue 1, November 2016), explored the art circulating on the ‘streets of social media’ in Kashmir and made it into the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament. In 2018, Alana undertook a residency in Sulawesi with Rumata Art Space & the Makassar International Writers’ Festival and will present Cups of nun chai at Tufts University Art Gallery, Massachusetts, and a series of artists presentations at Tufts, Brown, and Parsons universities. Her work is held in both public and private collections including Artbank and the Macquarie Group Collection.
| Associate Professor Phillip GEORGE
| UNSW’s Associate Professor Phillip George’s practice operates across zones of cultural difference, exploring and making connections between the complexities that exist between East and West. His work draws connections between Australian beach culture and the fractured, turbulent zones of the Middle East. George has exhibited widely over the past thirty years with exhibitions throughout Australia, Europe, America and Asia. In 2008 George produced his seminal exhibition, Borderlands at the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney, NSW. His work is in private and public collections in Australia and internationally.
| Speaker: Djon MUNDINE OAM
| Djon Mundine OAM, member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales, is a curator, writer, artist and activist. He has held prominent curatorial positions in many national and international institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Queensland Art Gallery. Between 1979 and 1995 he was the Art Advisor at Milingimbi and Ramingining in the Northern Territory. He was the concept artist of the Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia in 1988. In 1993 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture. In 2005-2006 he was Research Professor at The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan. He is currently an independent curator of contemporary Indigenous art.
| Speaker: Sarker PROTICK
| Sarker Protick (b. 1986, Bangladesh) is a Dhaka-based artist whose work explores the possibilities of time, light and sound. His portraits, landscapes and photographic series engage philosophically with the specificities of personal and national histories. Sarker’s approach across various mediums incorporates detailed observations and subtle gestures as a means of creating personal spaces, often minimal and atmospheric. He was named in British Journal of Photography’s annual ‘Ones to Watch’ and Photo District News’ (PDN) 30 emerging photographers of the year. Sarker is the recipient of Joop Swart Masterclass, World Press Photo award, and Australian Photobook of the Year grand prize. His body of work Exodus was awarded the Magnum Foundation Grant 2018. Sarker’s work has been shown in museums, galleries and photo festivals internationally, including Art Dubai; Paris Photo; Singapore Art Week; Dhaka Art Summit; Chobi Mela International Photography Festival, Dhaka; Latvian Contemporary Museum of Photography, Riga; and Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Netherlands. Sarker is a faculty member at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, and currently represented by East Wing Gallery, Dubai.
Organised by the Australian Centre for Asian Art & Archaeology, University of Sydney and Gallery 4A, Sydney with the financial support of the ARC Asia-Pacific Futures Research Network, the School of Letters, Art and Media of the University of Sydney, and Gallery 4A.
This workshop will provide a forum for statement and debates by artists, art theorists, art administrators and curators on what constitutes Asian-Australian art. We will debate whether this kind of hyphenated naming and categorisation has value, and if so what kind? Should cultural identification, in current condition of national and global art, be deferred as simply a situation of reference of art practice, where of the artist of the theorising and exhibiting agencies? There is an increasing body of work by Australian artists whose stating point is their own family links to different Asian cultures, and there are artists without such a background who increasingly work directly in Asian countries or with Asian references. These positions have resulted in a complex web of Asian and Australian encounters.
The workshop will be organised in four sessions with the confirmed speakers listed below:
Saturday 27 September
Morning: Art Practice: Asian-Australian Artists
Speakers include: Ah Xian, Gennady Liu, Yuji Sone, Suzann Victor, John Young
Afternoon: Art Theory
Speakers include: Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, Cuong Le, Francis Maravillas, Djon Mundine, Nicholas Tsoutas
Sundau 28 September
Morning: Art Practice: Australian Asian Artists
Speakers include: Vernon Ah-Kee, Prapon Kumjim, Rodney Glick, Lindy Lee, Jamil Yamani
Fashion and art collide in a one-night only collaboration between designer Belinda Lai and photographer Alice Wesley-Smith, to be held at the Asia Australia Arts Centre (Gallery 4A).
The unique fashion pieces on display are originally sourced from clothing from the 1900s through to the 1970s:
“The concept is to reinstate the gentle tradition of keeping clothing as heirlooms, similar to other forms of jewellery and adornment. Clothes are no longer just ‘rags of the ragtrade,’ but keepsakes that can be treasured from generation to generation.” – Belinda Lai
The photography draws upon the extensive experiences of Wesley-Smith throughout Europe and, in particular, Asia where she constantly draws inspiration. The interaction of these displaced communities within the social context of Australia is of particular interest in her photographic work.
Belinda Lai was the winner of the Mercedes-Benz Startup Young Fashion Designer of 2004.
Alice Wesley-Smith is currently working on a solo exhibition of her recent experiences in East Timor.
You are invited to join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Thursday 30 August as we open major group exhibition Temporary Certainty.
Rushdi Anwar Alana Hunt Sarker Protick
Taking in geographies shaped by sudden shifts of historical change wrought by complex interventions and their subsequent social impact in the greater Asia region, Temporary Certainty presents works by artists that are indelibly marked by their emergence within conditions of uneasy reconciliation. With a focus on Bengal, Kurdistan and the Kimberley region of Western Australia, this exhibition explores how artists approach the question of reconfiguring regional cultural adaptation in contemporary forms that embody the consequences of broader geopolitical expediencies.
Grappling with tensions between certainty and doubt, permanence and all that is ephemeral, Temporary Certainty contemplates the value of what can be apprehended—much less held onto—with any guarantee in a present age lurching towards ever greater polarisations.
Temporary Certainty is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Rushdi Anwar’s commissioned work has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The presentation of Sarker Protick’s Exodus has been supported by The Esplanade, Singapore, with additional support from the Australian Centre for Photography.
You are invited to join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Thursday, 28 June, as we open major exhibition The Burrangong Affray.
Between November 1860 and September 1861 the New South Wales goldfields of Burrangong, near the present day township of Young, were the site of Australia’s largest racially motivated riot. Rising antagonism over gold mining access and cultural habits saw trivial misunderstandings intensify into racial tensions that erupted into violence across the goldfields. Over ten months, Chinese miners were subjected to threats, robbery and sustained acts of violence. This anti-Chinese sentiment swept through the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s and by the early 1860s reached a flashpoint in New South Wales, provoking public discussion and debate. In Sydney, the NSW Parliament responded to the contention by passing legislation to restrict Chinese immigration and began, alongside Victoria and South Australia, to write the prelude to the White Australia Policy.
For The Burrangong Affray, through a series of residencies in Young and surrounding historical sites over the past 18 months, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has commissioned Chinese-Australian artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge trace the events and repercussions of this period of civil disobedience. Supported by historian Dr Karen Schamberger, the artists’ research-led practice interweaves these accounts of history to create contemporary mediations that reflects upon the forces of identity, economics, race and otherness in Australia today.
This exhibition is the second iteration of a four-part exhibition project. The first was realised in Young in April. 2018.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. Responding to The Burrangong Affray presented at 4A this edition of Please Explain seeks to examine the lasting effects of this somewhat overlooked incident in Australia’s history. Join artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge, along with historian Dr Karen Schamberger and writer and journalist Gabrielle Chan as they discuss the histories and the resonances in the current day of the Burrangong Affray and associated events.
Missed the event? Listen to the audio recording below:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is delighted to host the launch of Dr Sophie McIntyre’s new book Imagining Taiwan: The Role of Art in Taiwan’s Quest for Identity.
Taiwan’s quest for identity and international recognition has been the most important and fiercely contested issue for nearly half century, both nationally and internationally. Imagining Taiwan is the first in-depth and comprehensive study, published in English, which critically explores the pivotal role played by the visual arts in Taiwan’s identity discourse. Drawing on 25 years of research, Sophie McIntyre analyses the ways in which identity narratives have been imagined, interpreted and transmitted, locally and globally, through the production, selection, display and reception of Taiwan art. This book focuses on the post-martial law era, a transformative period when democratisation gave rise to a heightened sense of Taiwanese consciousness, and a growing awareness of Taiwan’s place in the world. Artists, curators, art critics and scholars in Taiwan actively engaged in identity issues in unique, and often subversive ways. The author reveals how, with the turn of the new millennium, identity discourses in the visual arts shifted, from a Taiwan-centred narrative into a transnational vision embracing local, regional and global perspectives. Imagining Taiwan brings together primary and archival sources, and nearly 200 images, many published for the first time. It is an essential reference for specialists and students in art, curatorship, museums, and Taiwan and China studies, and it will also appeal to those seeking a greater understanding of the wider region.
Sophie McIntyre is a scholar and curator of art from the Asia-Pacific, with expertise in art from Greater China. She received her PhD from the Australian National University (2013) and has lectured and held fellowships in universities in Australia, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. She has also curated more than 30 exhibitions, several of which featured art from Taiwan. Her texts have been widely published in books, journals, and catalogues in Australia and internationally
Twenty years ago 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art was founded by a group of young professionals and artists who banded together to raise money, create work and produce a space that celebrated the connection of Australia to the Asia-Pacific region. With $7,000 raised by these early patrons 4A secured its first space in Sydney’s Chinatown and began to research, document, develop, discuss and present contemporary visual art from our shared region. Today our work is internationally recognised and we are Australia’s leading visual arts organisation working within the Asia-Pacific.
The 4A Set is a new community of art lovers who are passionate about creating cultural understanding between Australia and Asia. Not your regular patrons program, the 4A Set is for friends, mates, lovers, colleagues. Whatever the size of your social set, 4A will connect you and your group with the latest in Asian-Australian contemporary art and voices through a series of dinners, parties and networking opportunities year round – while providing vital support for 4A and Asian and Australian artists.
If you are interested in joining the 4A Set and finding out more, get in touch with 4A Development Manager, Bridie Moran – bridie.moran@4a.com.au
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the University of Melbourne invite you to join us for 4A’s 2018 symposium, This Is How We Do It: Museums and Galleries in Asia.
This Is How We Do It: Museums and Galleries in Asia brings together leading professionals from museums and galleries across wider Asia to share experiences and discuss what’s next for our region’s cultural and creative spaces. With international experts including Philip Tinari (China), director of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Joselina Cruz (Philippines), director of the Museum of Contemporary Art & Design (MCAD), Manila; and Reem Fadda, independent curator (Palestine); alongside local speakers representing community, state and national institutions and organisations, this symposium seeks to generate debate and discussion around the central question of how Australia’s arts ecology can learn from and embrace new models and practices from our Asian neighbours.
A day-long symposium, this event is free to attend but RSVPs are required due to limited seating capacity and catering which will be included for all registered attendees. Click here to register.
To download the day’s program, complete with bios, click here.
| Prof. Su BAKER AM (Australia), Pro Vice-Chancellor Engagement and Director, Centre of Visual Arts (COVA), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
| Dr Mikala TAI (Australia), Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
10.15AM – 10.30AM Opening presentation
| Prof. Charles GREEN (Australia), Professor of Contemporary Art, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Charles Green frames the day’s discussions by providing a brief contextual overview of Australia’s varied engagements and relationships with Asia within changing global contemporary art contexts.
10.30AM – 11.15AM Focus presentation
| Reem FADDA (Palestine), independent curator based in Ramallah, Palestine.
In August 2017, the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah opened its inaugural exhibition, Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al Quds). Through her curatorial direction, Reem Fadda examined the city of Jerusalem as a case study that aimed to metaphorically represent globalisation and its failures and expose the challenges imposed by militarisation and occupation that Jerusalem and its people are facing. Combining a multifaceted approach that included commissioned site-specific artworks in the grounds and gardens of the Museum, alongside a program that supported civic institutions in the city that have adopted an enduring methodology of collective struggle, Reem discusses the processes by which a new museum in an old city engaged more than just art and artists in a process of mutual knowledge production as a frontier of resistance.
11.15AM – 12.30PM Panel 1 – Old spaces, new stories: the future of responsive institutions
| Speakers: Dr Rebecca COATES (Australia), Director, Shepparton Art Museum; Reem FADDA (Palestine); Dr Anthea GUNN (Australia), Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial; Kirsten PAISLEY (Australia), Deputy Director, National Gallery of Australia.
| Moderator: Dr Mikala TAI
How do museums and galleries that have long held a central responsibility to maintain and build upon collections ensure that their priorities are responsive to changing local and global contexts? Whether it be the question of the decision-making processes behind the acquisition of artworks, the question of programming and wider cultural engagement with audiences, or the role of advocacy and education, established institutions in today’s climate are unavoidably charged with expectations of reflecting, responding and developing new curatorial strategies, new content, new audiences and new experiences. Bringing together leading gallery directors and curators with extensive experience in tackling these expectations, this panel will focus on the essential imperative of established institutions to maintain relevance.
12.30PM – 1.30PM Lunch break
1.30PM – 2.15PM Focus presentation
| Joselina CRUZ (Philippines), Director, Museum of Contemporary Art & Design (MCAD), Manila
Joselina Cruz’s curatorial projects over the past decade have been defined by her commitment to developing spaces and platforms, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Philippines more specifically, a region whose cultural infrastructure has rapidly evolved while also growing its own cultural projections and methods of engagement with local and international audiences. Central to her concerns as a curator and a cultural leader is the responsibility of prompting conversations about the intertwined structures of power and influence, in art as well as politics, alongside providing opportunities for artists’ voices and platforms for cultural self-determination. Joselina will explore these subjects through a discussion on recent projects including Pacita Abad: A Million Things to Say (2018) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness for MCAD (2017), and The Spectre of Comparison, the Philippines Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), that presented artists Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo in an exploration of the ‘double-consciousness’ of colonial experiences and legacies.
Presentation supported by Artspace, Sydney.
2.15PM – 3.30PM Panel 2 – Expanded and expansive: curatorial approaches that push the boundaries of the institution
| Speakers: Joselina CRUZ (Philippines); Reuben KEEHAN (Australia), Curator Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA); Natalie KING (Australia), independent curator and Enterprise Professor, Victorian College of Arts; Dr Sophie McINTYRE (Australia), independent curator and Lecturer, Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology.
| Moderator: Dr. Olivier KRISCHER (Australia), Deputy Director, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney.
Institutions, by their inherent organisational nature, have a marked tendency to institutionalise the production of knowledge. This can, and often does, have the unintended effect of creating barriers for engagement and participation by the communities they purport to serve and reflect. Often criticised as ‘gate-keepers’, whether deserving and substantiated or not, an increasing number of museums and galleries have responded to this perception by introducing independent voices within their curatorial programs. Offering insights based on the diverse and extensive experiences and accomplishments of working in Asia, the panelists will address the challenges at play when institutions seek to break down boundaries between artists, communities and cultures more broadly, as well as identify successful examples of collaboration and representation within expanded modes of cultural engagement.
4.00PM – 4.50PM In conversation
| Speakers: Philip TINARI and Lisa HAVILAH (Australia), Director, Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia.
Join one the world’s leading experts in contemporary Chinese art as Phil Tinari sits down with Lisa Havilah for a conversation that will encompass such topics as the exponential growth of international engagement with Chinese art and culture; the effect of rising art market value of contemporary Chinese art upon the emergence of a new generation of artists; the fear of censorship and questions of artistic and institutional independence; and China’s strategic investment in soft power through cultural infrastructure and its promotion.
Session co-presented with Melbourne Art Week.
4.45 PM – 5.00PM Questions from the audience and concluding remarks
| Speaker: Dr Mikala TAI
This Is How We Do It: Museums and Galleries in Asia is co-presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and The University of Melbourne. Additional support thanks to our partners at Artspace Sydney, and Melbourne Art Week.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to partner with Melbourne Art Fair and University of Melbourne, with support from Federation Square, to present Philip Tinari as the keynote speaker at Melbourne Art Fair.
Prior to joining UCCA, Tinari launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art published by the Modern Media Group, in 2009. He is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of that magazine’s Chinese edition in 2007. Widely regarded as an authority on China’s contemporary art scene, he was co-curator, with Alexandra Munroe and Hou Hanru, of the 2017 exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Join artist Jason Phu in a special artist led tour of The Burrangong Affrayand the Haymarket area. The exhibition tour includes a visit to a nearby Buddhist Craft and Joss Stick store, where Jason will unpack the significance of this craft as it relates to exhibition, followed by a traditional Taiwanese congee breakfast.
A 4A workshop at the Chinese Garden of Friendship with Diego Bonetto
This hands-on learning experience led by food adventurer Diego Bonetto invites children to go on adventure through the Garden’s plants and stories, Explore the gardens and learn about the history of these special plants before creating a crafty story using vegetables and plants. This workshop is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the July 2018 school holidays program.
For participants aged between 5-10 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided.
Wild stories: the heroes and villains in our gardens is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership Diego Bonetto and the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the July 2018 school holidays program.
Artist Biography:
Diego Bonetto is a wild food advocate based in Sydney, most famous for his offering of urban foraging workshops. Building on the knowledge acquired while growing up on a farm in Italy, Diego introduces people to the ever-present food and medicine plants that surround us. He collaborates extensively with chefs, herbalists, environmentalists and cultural workers promoting new understanding of what the environment has to offer. He works to enable convivial conversations around belonging, sustainability and agency. In other words he offers an alternative for people to re-engage with their neighbourhoods, streets and footpaths through edible adventures.
The Chinese Garden of Friendship is filled with shadows. Children are invited to join leading Chinese-Australian artist Tianli Zu to try their hand at the traditional Chinese art of paper cutting. Whether you spend ten minutes or an hour with her you will be able to create a work that mimics the shadows of the gardens.
For participants aged between 5-10 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, drop in session, no bookings required.
Tracing Shadows: Paper Cutting Workshop is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Tianli Zu and the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the July 2018 school holidays program.
A 4A workshop at the Chinese Garden of Friendship with Kristone Capistrano
The Chinese Garden of Friendship is filled with flowers, trees and hidden animals. Join Sydney-based artist Kristone Capistrano and try to capture them on paper. Drop into the gardens between 11-1pm to learn the basics of sketching with a leading local artist. Have fun developing your observational drawing skills whilst exploring a variety of drawing techniques, including cross-hatching, stippling and positive/negative space. You will also have the chance to draw one of your sketches onto a glossy ceramic tile, ready to display at home! Whether you stay for 15 minutes or the full two hours Kristone will help you sketch your favourite part of the garden to take home
For participants aged between 5-10 years, accompanied by a responsible adult. All materials provided, drop in session, no bookings required.
Sketching Skills 101 is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Kristone Capistrano and the Chinese Garden of Friendship for the July 2018 school holidays program.
ArtistBiography:
Kristone Capistrano is a Philippine-born Sydney based emerging artist working in contemporary drawing and portraiture. In 2017 whilst still completing his Honours year in Fine Arts, Kristone was awarded the first prize for the Royal South Australian Portrait Biennale, Commended prize for the Lloyd Rees Youth Award, and both the Local Artist and People’s Choice awards for the Blacktown Art Prize. Kristone has participated in multiple group exhibitions in Australia including exhibitions held at the Blacktown Arts Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery. He is currently preparing for his forthcoming solo exhibitions at Crowther Contemporary in Melbourne and Tong Lau Space in Hong Kong. His works are included in the Blacktown City Art Collection, as well as in numerous private collections in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Manila. Kristone is also a qualified English and Visual Arts teacher with extensive experience in teaching both Primary and Secondary education.
Chris Doyle: The Space of a Kiss is an official event of Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival and presents a series of photo-collages at Gallery 4a [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art].
Christopher Doyle (b. 1952) is an Australian-Hong Kong cinematographer who has worked on high profile films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and extensively in Hong Kong with director Wong KariWai on Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and In The Mood for Love. He has won awards at Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, an AFI Award for cinematography, four Golden Horse awards and six Hong Kong Film Awards.
SYDNEY // Thursday May 17 2018 // 6.30-8.00PM (Bar opens from 6pm)
Bankstown Poetry Slam, recognised widely as the largest regular poetry slam in Australia, brings to 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art a BPS style slam in the heart of Sydney. As one of the final programs in the SNACKCHAT series presented for the Biennale of Sydney join us for a snacks, drinks and slam. With 5 randomly chosen members of the audience judging the performances, the poets will have the stage and 3 minutes to win the crowd over with their clever wordsmithery. The evening will also feature a guest poet, stay tuned for details.
SNACKCHAT is a new series of events by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, creating conversations about Sydney’s diverse cultural fabric over shared snacks from different community groups.
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. Responding to Akira Tayakama’s Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project presented at 4A as part of the Biennale of Sydney this edition of Please Explain is curated by Dr Elly Kent.
Australia seems to be quite happily multicultural but very comfortable being mono-lingual. Despite being a country of hundreds of languages our education system remains steadfastly focused on cursary study of languages that is not interwoven throughout primary and tertiary education. As a result we remain a nation that fails to celebrate our cultures through language and we fail to prepare our next generations to be global citizens. Where do we go from here?
Join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for a robust debate.
Speakers: poet/writer Lorna Munro; Kevin Ngo, poet and Bankstown Poetry Slam organiser; Jane Stratton of LOST IN BOOKS, and linguist Asefeh Zeinalabedini.
Moderator: Dr Elly Kent
Want to bone up on the conversation before the night? Please see our recommended reading here.
Missed the event? Listen to the audio recording below:
*Image courtesy of the Biennale of Sydney. Document Photography.
Exhibiting artists at Gallery 4A at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art]: Stella Brennan (NZL), Chen Chieh-jen (TWN) and Kai Syng Tan (SGP)
Expansive in both curatorial ambition and footprint, Zones of Contact expanded beyond its principal, inner-city venues to other sites, including art centres in south-west Sydney suburbs of Blacktown and Campbelltown, in a desire to reach broader audiences. The scale of the undertaking was equalled by Merewether’s inclusive research process, which included visits to many countries in the two years prior to the 2006 Biennale.
Thematically, the exhibition dealt broadly with events, ideas and concerns that shape our lives, as well as our sense of past and future. It explored zones in which people live and move: cities and settlements, the merging and separation of public areas and private territories, and places where people encounter one another. In an attempt to map the world through its artists, Merewether gathered work about landscape and territory, notions of home and homeland, and the impact of cross-cultural encounter.
Sub-themes of colonialism, experiences of war and conflict, displacement, migration and mobility in the exhibition played out against experiences of living in an increasingly cosmopolitan, globalised world.
Stella Brennan (b. 1974, Auckland, New Zealand) is an Auckland-based artist, writer and curator. She has a Masters degree in Fine Arts from Auckland University. In 2003 she was the Waikato University’s inaugural Digital Artist in Residence. She is also the founder of Aotearoa Digital Arts, New Zealand’s only discussion list dedicated to New Media Art.
Chen Chieh-Jen (b. 1960, Taoyuan, Taiwan) is a Taipei-based artist and filmmaker.
Tan Kai Syng (b. 1975, Singapore) is a performance and installation artist. Her video recordings of folk recalling events highlight the difference in histories, suggesting a questioning of historical truth. Challenging hegemonic narrative structures in oral histories, Syng attempts to reconstruct history through collective subjective memory.
Sydney // Monday 30 April 2018 // 6.00-7.00PM
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Join our Program Information Night to meet with 4A staff to learn more about the 4A Beijing Studio Program, and/or 4A Curators’ Intensive. The evening will consist of a short presentation on what to expect from each program and information about the application process. Staff will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
If you’re not based in Sydney or can’t make it to the session, join in on Facebook Live from 6PM AEST here.
About the opportunities:
The 4A Curators’ Intensive is an initiative developed by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to encourage professional advancement amongst early career Australian cultural practitioners with an interest in curatorial practice. In 2018, the Curators’ Intensive, will take place in Melbourne between Tuesday 31 July – Saturday 4 August.
Now in its seventh consecutive year, the 4A Beijing Studio Program is a unique initiative that sees three Australian artists embark on a month-long residency in September at the studios of internationally renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin. This experience provides a unique opportunity for artists to be mentored by a leading international artist, undertake research for new works, develop professional networks and witness first-hand the changes occurring in one of the world’s most vibrant capitals. The program covers airfares, accommodation, daily meals, travel insurance and a small stipend.
Take is a collection of new video works by Paula Wong produced during her recent studies at Goldsmiths College, on a Samstag Scholarship. The ambiguous imagery in these silent video pieces destabilise the viewer by challenging their sense of the familiar, questioning the processes of vision and cognition.
Paula Wong is a based in Melbourne. She was included in the Moet & Chandon travelling exhibition in 1999 and has exhibited widely throughout Australia, at RMIT University Galleries; the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia.
The one thousand other things is an exhibition by Aaron Seeto, which explores the blurring of plots from B-grade Kung Fu films and stories retold through the family photo album. Using food, specifically 1000-year-old eggs and salt preserved duck eggs, relished Chinese delicacies; Seeto creates photographs using and old salt photographic process. On these eggs, texts from Kung Fu films are interspersed with pictures of distant relatives, plotlines of murder, intrigue and honour, popular Hong Kong cinema and Australian urban domestic environments converge.
Aaron Seeto is an emerging Sydney-based artist. He has been included in exhibitions at Wollongong City Gallery; Casula Powerhouse; Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and he is a participant in the Weather Report Project in The Hague, The Netherlands.
Xiao Xian Liu’s exhibition examines history and race in the context of his Chinese background. Games and The Way We Eat are new works that draw on the difference between what is native and what is introduced to Australia. Playing on famous Australian icons, the artist creates a humourous view of of our sense of identity. In My Other Lives traditional stereographs are incorporated with the artist’s face. This process alters the identity in the picture and contrasts the European with the Asian face.
Xiao Xian Liu is a Chinese artist based in Sydney. He has shown at the National Gallery of Australia and The Moet & Chandon Exhibition Passing Time at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Rubber Fish (Con Cá Con Su) is an exhibition by Michael Bullock which was made during an artist residency in Hanoi, Vietnam. It features a school of fish made from recycled car, bicycle and truck inner tubes, inflated and suspended in mid-air. The work was inspired by the contrast of social conditions in Vietnam. The fish is also a potent symbol in Vietnamese culture, portraying luck and fertility.
Descendants is an exhibition by Dong Wang Fan that examines cultural identity and spatial ambiguity. The five paintings in Descendants feature computer-generated objects to represent a kind of futuristic creature with mechanical parts.
Dong Wang Fan is a Chinese-born artist currently living in Sydney. He has held many exhibitions since migrating to Australia including at the Drill Hall Gallery; Australian National University; Wollongong City Gallery; Hazelhurst Regional Gallery; Campbelltown City Art Gallery and Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney.
My Pleasure is Your Tea is a series of works by Nelia Justo which explores the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures through an examination of historical trade ties between Europe and Asia in the 15th – 19th Centuries. By incorporating aspects of refined goods with mass produced electronic parts, Justo explores the cultural, sociological and economical repercussions created in trade between two cultural identities.
Nelia Justo is a French-born emerging artist based in Sydney. She has shown at numerous galleries throughout Australia, including the 13th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial; Jam Factory, Adelaide; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane as well as overseas.
untitled (viole(n)t crumble) is an exhibition of new work by Tim Silver of chocolate moulded Action Man figures. Using the stickiness of sugar as a raw material of commodification, Silver examines the relationship between art and commerce.
Tim Silver is an emerging Sydney-based artist who has exhibited in artist-run spaces in Sydney and Melbourne.
Singing History Quilts For New Chinese Australians is an exhibition by Greg Leong which explores the celebrations of the Centenary of Federation through textiles and karaoke. In this series, richly decorated quilts sing Australiana classics that have been translated into Cantonese. These intricately designed quilts combine iconic Australian paintings with references to traditional Chinese textiles to explore an alternative perspective on the recent celebrations.
Greg Leong is a Tasmania-based artist who has exhibited at Tamworth Regional Gallery, Object Gallery, as well as internationally In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
You Make Me Feel Like Love, Peace and Happiness is an exhibition of new works by Dani Marti.
Linda is a teaser and a seducer. Linda is the personification of Marti’s work of highly textural weave. Representing psycho-sexual tension, strands criss-cross to reveal sensual curves that are at the same time stretched taut along the plane. Like magnified swatches of fabric, the works act as conjuring devices, giving the viewer leave to create their own Linda provided it is within the bounds which dictates her persona.
linda 216 A4 digital prints, pins on board approx. 350 x 250 x 60 cm. Image supplied by artist.
Dani Marti is a Sydney-based artist. He has had exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Gitte Weiss Gallery and Gallery 19.
Li Ji: Warrior Girl is an animated video and audio installation by Kate Beynon. Li Ji is the modern reincarnation of an ancient Chinese heroine by the same name. As she wanders through Melbourne at night, she encounters new hostilities. But unlike the treat of the maiden-eating python of her past life, Li Ji battles with the issue of being accepted as Australian. Li Ji: Warrior Girl is an exploration into the complex issues of race, identity, migration and belonging.
In the experimental spirit of the Picasso flashlight drawings, Eugenia Raskopoulos has created an elegant photographic exhibition that plays with the veracity of the black and white image. Untitled 00 is an extension of work exhibited earlier this year at the Australian Centre for Photography where the artist, light source in hand, documented the making of minimal and extravagant gestures in front of the camera.
Sue Pedley’s installation at Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] has been inspired by her participation in the Second Vietnamese Sculptural Symposium held in Hue in 1998. Using sounds that she has recorded from her local environment, her prints and installation expand upon ideas of visual and audio pattern and rhythm, representing vibrations of sound and silence with colour and line.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Michael Shaowanasai and Toby Huynh
Thai male prostitutes and the rituals of Chinese marriage feature in this exhibition by Thai-American Michael Shoawanasai and Vietnamese-Australian Toby Huynh.
Michael Shaowanasai focuses on sex for sale. His works at alternative galleries and public sites in Bangkok explore the male sex worker in one of the most infamous destinations for sex tourism within our region. Shaowanasai’s installation and performances for the Festival critically evaluate the sex industry in Thailand by recreating a Go-Go bar, complete with instructional video.
Toby Huynh’s digital images explore the rituals associated with Chinese marriages. Huynh’s work proposes and alternative set of rituals that Buddhist same-sex couples could perform. Would couples, for instance, kneel down in front of their ancestors and offer them tea? These images subtly evoke the tension between traditional cultural and religious values and contemporary gay and lesbian life.
Persuasion is a visual art event for the 2000 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
Li Shan is one of China’s most exciting artists. His sensuous paintings explore male sexuality through metaphor. The massive paintings of the Rouge series, for instance, feature photo-realistic black and white images of male nudes sprouting magenta and white lotus flowers.
These powerful works comment on issues related to aesthetics within China. Flower painting is a well respected Chinese tradition but in La Shan’s paintings flowers come to represent vitality and sexuality.
Skin Secrets is a visual arts event for the 1999 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
Culture Graft is the title of an exhibition featuring the work of three Chinese-Australian artists: Ah Xian, Wang Zhiyuan and Guan Wei. The title of this exhibition is intended to suggest the difficult and sometimes contradictory processes of acculturation – on aspect of the experience of migration – by using botanical technique of grafting as a metaphor. The definition of graft describes the coming together of two separate strands, while meld and grow together to become one. In the context of this exhibition this metaphor highlights a tension between different cultures (Chinese and Australian) making a clear distinction between the past and present.
Wang Zhiyuan, The Old Fable, 1998, ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.
Header image: Ah Xian, Fading Book Series – Mother Theresa (detail), 1998, toner on cloth bound book. Courtesy the artist.
Curator: Melissia Chiu
Artist: Truong Tan (b. Hanoi)
Truong Tan’s arresting lacquer panels and works on rice paper principally deal with gay issues in Vietnam. He poses questions related to the demonisation of gay people in government propaganda as well as the lack of serious health measures against the spread of AIDS. In effect, he questions moral and social attitudes in Vietnam towards gay men and women.
Chinoiserie was Linda Sang’s new exhibition at Gallery 4A. Utilising food from Chinese cooking as a material for art, Sang prepared a visual delight.
Linda Sang created a tableau which mimics a traditional Chinese household. Latticework window screens, red plush carpet and claw feet table provided a setting for the unexpected.
Header Image: Chinoiserie, 1997, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. From clockwise left to right: Linda Sang, Moss Table, 1997, painted wood, moss. Linda Sang, Tripe Butterfly Chair, 1995, latex, steel. Linda Sang, Jack Fruit Footstool, 1997, wood, latex. Linda Sang, “Miss Sang” after “Miss Wong”, Tretchlkoff, 1997, oil on canvas, wood, painted by Jude Walker. Linda Sang, Chinese Cabbage Standing Lamp, 1997, latex, steel, perspex. Linda Sang, Bitter Melon Butterfly Chair, 1997, latex, steel. With thanks to Jude Walker and Gail Daley. All images courtesy the artist.
Be part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Biennale of Sydney program SNACKCHAT . Partake in a conversation about the cultural fabric of Sydney with participant’s from Akira Takayama’s video work Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Theatre while enjoying some snacks from Hong Kong.
For this edition of SNACKCHAT Chun Yin Rainbow Chan and her mother Irene Chan reperform their songs from Akira Takayama’s Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Theatreand step you through a history of their family in Hong Kong. Accompanied by a visual presentation this is a SNACKCHAT not to miss!
This event is presented in collaboration with the 21st Biennale of Sydney.
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, pictured with her mum Irene Chan. Photo: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
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SNACKCHAT is a new series of events by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, creating conversations about Sydney’s diverse cultural fabric over shared snacks from different community groups.
Image: Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Theatre, 2018. Courtesy the artist and the Biennale of Sydney.
On April 21, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art led a community event with Australian-Chinese artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge in response the to events of The Burrangong Affray, including the Lambing Flat Riots, 1860 -1861.
We invited the community of Young and the surrounding areas to join the artists as they create a tribute at Chinese Cemetery, Murrumburrah and Blackguard Gully, Young. At each site the artists will lead us in a ceremony of incense burning, offerings and ceremonial gestures to welcome good luck and banish the bad spirits of the past.
Community members joined the artists as they pay tribute to these sites and these historic events.
Be part of the first SNACKCHAT – and partake in a conversation about the cultural fabric of Sydney with participant’s from Akira Takayama’s video work Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Theatre while enjoying some snacks from Fairfield’s Parents’ Cafe.
This event is presented in collaboration with the 21st Biennale of Sydney.
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SNACKCHAT is a new series of events by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, creating conversations about Sydney’s diverse cultural fabric over shared snacks from different community groups.
Image: Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Theatre, 2018. Courtesy the artist and the Biennale of Sydney.
Friday 16 – Sunday 18 March, 2018
Melbourne Art Book Fair
National Gallery of Victoria
Since its launch in 2015, the annual Melbourne Art Book Fair has attracted more than 50,000 visitors making it the most visited publishing event in the Asia-Pacific region.
The fourth Melbourne Art Book Fair in 2018 will bring together international and local publishers and practitioners in a weekend of free talks, book launches, performances, and stalls featuring art, design, architecture and photography publications from around the world.
Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, discursive, and educational projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is an independent not-for-profit organisation based in Sydney, Australia. 4A fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary culture through the commissioning, presentation, documentation and research of contemporary art. Our program is presented throughout Australia and Asia , where we ensure that contemporary art plays a central role in understanding and developing the dynamic relationship between Australia and the wider Asian region.
As part of our Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu exhibition program, join botanist David Mabberley and exhibition curator Micheal Do as they delve into the world of botanicals and art over breakfast in the heart of bustling Chinatown.
About David Mabberley
Professor David J. Mabberley AM is a British-born, Australian educator and author. He was consecutively Director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens (Seattle, USA), Keeper of the Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (United Kingdom) and Executive Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. He is now an Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, University of Oxford (United Kingdom), Professor Extraordinary, University of Leiden (The Netherlands) and Adjunct Professor, Macquarie University, Sydney. Among his varied academic interests are the taxonomy of tropical trees, notably citrus, and the history of science and botanical art. Internationally he is perhaps best known as author of the award-winning Mabberley’s plant-book: a portable dictionary of plants, their classification and uses, now in its fourth edition (2017). Of his six books on botanical art, Joseph Banks; Florilegium (Thames & Hudson) and Painting by Numbers: the life and art of Ferdinand Bauer (NewSouth) are also published this year.
Image courtesy The Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford.
As part of our Please Explain talks series, join Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu exhibition artist James Tylor and expert historians and botanists in a discussion of the work of Sir Joseph Banks and how artists are working to respond with and against this colonial science, history and legacy.
Speakers’ Biographies:
Ann Elias
Ann Elias is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney. Research interests include: camouflage as a military, social and aesthetic phenomenon; flowers and their cultural history; coral reef imagery of the underwater realm. Books include Camouflage Australia: art, nature, science and war (2011), Useless Beauty: flowers and Australian art (2015), and Coral Empire (in preparation for Duke University Press) about photographic and cinematic representations of the underwater at the colonial tropics in the early twentieth century. She is a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute, a serving member of the International Committee of the College Art Association of America, and International Liaison for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.
David Mabberley
Professor David J. Mabberley AM is a British-born, Australian educator and author. He was consecutively Director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens (Seattle, USA), Keeper of the Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (United Kingdom) and Executive Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. He is now an Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, University of Oxford (United Kingdom), Professor Extraordinary, University of Leiden (The Netherlands) and Adjunct Professor, Macquarie University, Sydney. Among his varied academic interests are the taxonomy of tropical trees, notably citrus, and the history of science and botanical art. Internationally he is perhaps best known as author of the award-winning Mabberley’s plant-book: a portable dictionary of plants,their classification and uses, now in its fourth edition (2017). Of his six books on botanical art, Joseph Banks; Florilegium(Thames & Hudson) and Painting by Numbers: the life and art of Ferdinand Bauer (NewSouth) are also published this year.
Richard Neville
Richard Neville is the Mitchell Librarian and Director of Education & Scholarship at the State Library of NSW. With a research background and acknowledged expertise in nineteenth Australian art and culture, he has published widely on colonial art and society, and curated numerous exhibitions focusing on these areas. He has also been extensively involved in the acquisition, arrangement, description and promotion of the Library’s renowned Australian research collections.
James Tylor
James’ artistic practice examines concepts around cultural identity in Australian contemporary society and social history. He explores Australian cultural representations through his multi-cultural heritage, which comprises Nunga (Kaurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Iberian and Norwegian) Australian ancestry. James’ work focuses largely on the 19th century history of Australia and its continual effect on present day issues surrounding cultural identity in Australia.
About Please Explain:
4A’s new series PleaseExplain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia.
Image credit: Sir Joseph Banks, Florilegium: Plate 63 (detail), 1980 – 1990, copperplate engraving. Image courtesy Angela Tandoori, Melbourne.
Join 4A for an evening discussion moderated by Kelly Doley.
This panel will focus on the role of independent grassroots spaces and projects in the Asia Pacific working together to support experimentation, political and critical practices and forge responsive conversations that larger institutions may not be able to provide. International panelists Anna Eschbach and Antonie Angerer discuss the complexities and successes of running one of Beijing’s first independent spaces alongside 4A’s Director Mikala Tai and Jeff Khan, the artistic director of Performance Space. Pondering questions of cross platform partnerships, transnational programming, methodologies for supporting experimental artistic practice and ideas of feminist performance practice this discussion will be robust and dynamic.
This event will be Auslan interpreted thanks to support from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Speakers:
Kelly Doley, independent artist and curator (Feminist South project)
Anna Eschbach and Antonie Angerer, Directors of i:project space, Beijing China
Jeff Khan, Artistic Director, Performance Space and curator of Liveworks Festival
Mikala Tai, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Experience China town’s food culture and public art under the the evening glow of its neon lights.
As part of the City of Sydney’s Sydney Chinese New Year Festival celebrations, 4A will lead a evening tour of Sydney’s China town that includes a brief history of its public art and magnetic regional cuisine.
The tour will also include a private tour of 4A’s exhibition, ‘Equal Area‘.
Image courtesy Lukezemephotography, Flickr. Image used under a Creative Commons License.
Join the 4A team on a morning tour of the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown, it’s art and magnetic regional cuisine.
As part of Lunar New Year celebrations, 4A will lead a morning tour of Sydney’s Chinatown that includes it’s public art and it’s magnetic regional cuisine.
The tour will include a private tour of 4A’s exhibition, ‘Equal Area‘ and culminate with a traditional Taiwanese congee breakfast.
Artists:
Sir Joseph Banks
Daniel Boyd
Newell Harry
Fiona Pardington
Michael Parekowhai
James Tylor
Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu examines how artists disturb the past by reframing and reworking the mythologies of nationhood. Focusing on the legacies of British imperialism in the South Pacific, the works presented in this exhibition offer a counterpoint to historical narratives that have emerged within colonial modes of scientific categorisation.
The voyage of the HMS Endeavour from 1768–1771, led by the then little known Lieutenant James Cook with botanist Joseph Banks, collected a staggering quantity of plant life from across the Asia Pacific – approximately 30,000 specimens from Australia and New Zealand alone, representing over 3,000 species, of which 1,400 were wholly new to science.[1]
The scale of this taxonomy, the science of naming and defining plant and animal life was, for these pioneers, without precedent and in many cases they created unstable, even flawed, systems of vocabulary, hierarchies and methods to describe this ‘new world’. [2]
Many of these instances outlast them to this day, for example, Cook named the ‘Kangaroo’ phonetically after ‘gangurru’, the term used by Aboriginal people on the North-East coast for local, large, grey marsupials. [3] Had Cook realised the plurality of Aboriginal language and that this word was foreign to most Indigenous people in Australia, the outcome could have been very different.[4] Nevertheless, examples like this set the template for generations of legends and myths.
The NotNiwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu draws upon these conflicting (and occasionally confounding) myths. By investigating and subverting colonial prejudices inherent in the formulation of language and conceptions of nature, the artists provide new frameworks and connections, enabling us to recognise the world anew.
A selection of archival and recent works from artists Sir Joseph Banks (United Kingdom), Daniel Boyd (Australia), Newell Harry (Australia), Fiona Pardington (New Zealand), Michael Parekowhai (New Zealand) and James Tylor (Australia) is brought together for this exhibition – inclusive of a series of Banks’ copperplate etchings of Australian botanical illustration rarely seen in a contemporary exhibition context. This exhibition continues 4A’s series of exhibition projects that examine the shared histories and ties between Australia and our Asia-Pacific neighbours.
About the artists:
Sir Joseph Banks
b. 1743, London, England d. 1820, London, England
Sir Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, GBC, PRS was a highly decorated British naturalist and botanist that made a number of significant contributions towards the natural sciences. Following his election as President of the Royal Society, he and collaborators boarded the HMS Endeavour, James Cook’s first great voyage of Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. During this trip, he and his team collected over 30 000 specimens from Australia and New Zealand alone, representing 3 000 species, of which 1400 were wholly new to science. Illustrator Sydney Parkinson documented these specimens. Through this momentous trip, he would become a de-facto ambassador for Australia as a destination for botanic research during England’s colonial project. Upon his return to England, Banks and lifelong collaborator, Daniel Solander oversaw an encyclopedic engravings of plant life using the illustrations by Sydney Parkinson. These were printed in black ink, and then in colour ink almost 200 years after Bank’s death.
Daniel Boyd
Kudjila/Gangalu b. 1982, Cairns, Australia lives and works in Sydney, Australia
Daniel Boyd is internationally recognised for his contemporary history paintings that interrogate Eurocentric perspectives of Australian colonial history. His technique borrows from Central Australian Aboriginal dot paintings and Impressionist pointillism, imbuing colonial scenes and ancestral figures with an affecting sense of intrigue, memorialisation and loss. His recent exhibitions include: Bitter Sweet, Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns, Australia (2017); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015); Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts: A Time for Dreams, Moscow, Russia (2014); Bungaree: The First Australian, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Lake Macquarie, Australia (2013); The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2012); One Caption Hides Another, Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2011); We Call Them Pirates Out Here, MCA, Sydney, Australia (2010); Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2008); and Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia (2007). Boyd’s work are held in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Australia; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Newell Harry
b. 1972, Sydney, Australia lives and works in Sydney, Australia
Newell Harry’s practice encompasses a wide range of processes, media and installations that feature cultural references drawn from his travels – from Australia’s eastern seaboard, to the Vanauato archipelago, India, north-east Asia and his ancestral home of Capetown, South Africa. His works consider the legacies of the colonial project on native language, culture, politics and economies throughout these regions. His recent exhibitions include: Tidalectics, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art 21, Autgarten, Vienna, Austria (2017); Sonnant et trebuchant, Les Abattoirs, Musee FRAC Occitan, Toulouse, France (2017); Grounded, National Art School Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2017); Sugar Spin: You, Me, Art and Everything Else, Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2016); Tarrawarra Biennial of Australian Art, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, TarraWarra, Australia (2016); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015) and (Untitled) 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2012). Harry’s works are held in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; Newcastle Art Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia and Monash University Art Collection, Melbourne, Australia.
Fiona Pardington
b. 1961, Auckland, New Zealand lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand
Fiona Pardington photographic practice delves deep into the world of public and private collections. Using the still life format Pardington has photographed museum objects, particularly ‘taonga’, objects sacred to Maori culture. She often presents these treasures alongside a tableau of native flora and fauna, and found objects – creating unique portraits of historical and contemporary Maori, New Zealand and pacific culture. Her recent exhibitions include: A Beautiful Hesitation, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand; Christchurch Art Gallery,Christchurch New Zealand (2015-16); In My Dreaming I Saw – Moea Iho Nei I Au, Suite, Wellington, New Zealand, (2015); lux et tenebris Momentum Worldwide, Berlin, Germany (2014); Supernatural, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2014) and The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2011). Pardington’s works are held in the collections of Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, USA; Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand and Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia.
Michael Parekowhai
b. 1968, Wellington, New Zealand lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand
Michael Parekowhai carefully dissects Maori identity politics, culture and history through his layered art making that warps references and allusions to art history, personal memories, grand-narratives of nationhood and popular culture. Through lustrous photographs, sculpture and installation, he reinvents these imagery and material, creating quirky parables that invite open interpretation and intrigue. His recent exhibitions include: The English Channel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); Soft Core, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia (2016); Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2015); Menagerie, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Australia (2014); On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand (2013); Peripheral Relations; Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2012) and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, Palazzo Loredan Dell’Ambasciatore, Dorsoduro, Venice (representing New Zealand), 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2011). Parekowhai’s work is held in the collections of Musee Du Quai Branly, Paris, France; Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and Arario Gallery, Chungcheongnam-do, Korea.
James Tylor
Nunga (Kaurna) and Maori (Te Arawa). b. 1986 Mildura, Australia lives and works in Adelaide, Australia
James Tylor examines cultural identity in Australian contemporary culture. Using the lens of his multi-cultural heritage, which comprises Nunga (Kaurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Iberian and Norwegian) Australian ancestry, he experiments with range of historical and experimental photographic processes, to examine 19th century Australian history and its legacy on identity in Australia. His recent exhibitions include: Resolution: New Indigenous Photomedia, Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, Australia (2017); The witching hour, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Ramsay Art Prize Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia (2017, finalist); New Matter: Recent forms of Photographs, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2016); Endless Circulation: TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Australia (2016) and Territorial Encounters, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia (2016). Tylor’s works are held in the collections of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
[1] P. J. Hatfield., The Material History of the Endeavour in Chambers, N. (ed.), Endeavouring Banks (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016).
[2] M. Hetherington and H. Morphy, Footprints in the Sand: Banks’s Maori collection, Cook’s first voyage 1768-71 (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2009).
[3] R. Cilento, 1971, Sir Joseph Banks, F.R.S., and the Naming of the Kangaroo, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 26, pp. 157 -161 and H. Parsons, British-Tahitian collaborative drawing strategies on Cook’s Endeavour voyage in Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (ed.), Indigenous Intermediaries: new perspectives on exploration archives (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2015).
Exhibition Documentation All images: Document Photography
Foreground: Michael Parekowhai, The Moment of Cubism & Nude Descending a Staircase 2009, hand-finished bronze, patina.
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Background: Installation view, Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu, 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art, 2017.
Installation view, Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2017.
L – R: Michael Parekowhai (from the series ‘Beverly Hills Gun Club’), Alex Hamilton, Dave Douglas, J.D. Jones, 2004,
sparrow, two pot paint, aluminium, 78 x 13 x 10 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Foreground: Daniel Boyd, Decomissioned skull boxes, Natural History Museum, London, 2013. Background: Installation view, Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2017.
L – R: Fiona Pardington, Still Life with Freud and Puriri, 2012, pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 82.5 x 110 cm. Fiona Pardington, Captive Female Huia, 2017, pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 110 x 146 cm. With thanks Te Manawa Museum, New Zealand. Courtesy the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland.
L – R: Daniel Boyd, King No Beard, 2008, oil on linen, 167 x 122 cm. Collection, Clinton Ng. Daniel Boyd, Sir No Beard, 2009, oil
on canvas, 153 x 137.5 cm. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and STATION, Melbourne.
L – R: Sir Joseph Banks, Florilegium: Plate 63 (edition 100/100), 1980 – 1990, copperplate engraving. Sir Joseph Banks, Florilegium:
Plate 57 (edition 100/100). 1980 – 1990, copperplate engraving. Courtesy Angela Tandori Fine Art, Melbourne. James Tylor, Terra
Botanica I (Eucalyptus gracilis), Terra Botanica I (Eucalyptus-leucoxylon), Terra Botanica I (Eucalyptus-leucoxylon II), Terra
Botanica I (Grevillea banksii), Terra Botanica I (Pennisetum-alopecuroides), Terra Botanica II (Agathis-australis), Terra Botanica
II (Banksia ericifolia), Terra Botanica II (Ipomoea batatas I, Kūmara), Terra Botanica II (Metrosideros-excelsa, Pohutukawa),
2015, becquerel daguerreotype, various dimensions. Courtesy the artist and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.
L – R: James Tylor, Terra Botanica I (Pennisetum-alopecuroides), 2015, becquerel daguerreotype, 28 x 23 cm. James Tylor, Terra
Botanica II (Agathis-australis), 2015, becquerel daguerreotype, 14 x 11 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.
Installation view, Not Niwe, Not Nieuw, Not Neu, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2017.
Newell Harry, Circle/s in the Round: WHITE WHINE, 2010, neon. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
L – R: Michael Parekowhai (from the series ‘Beverly Hills Gun Club’), John Taffin, Alex Hamilton, Dave Douglas, J.D. Jones, 2004,
sparrow, two pot paint, aluminium, 78 x 13 x 10 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
James Tylor, Terra Botanica I (Eucalyptus gracilis), Terra Botanica I (Eucalyptus-leucoxylon), Terra Botanica I (Eucalyptus-leucoxylon II),
Terra Botanica I (Grevillea banksii), Terra Botanica I (Pennisetum-alopecuroides), Terra Botanica II (Agathis-australis), Terra Botanica
II (Banksia ericifolia), Terra Botanica II (Ipomoea batatas I, Kūmara), Terra Botanica II (Metrosideros-excelsa, Pohutukawa), 2015, becquerel daguerreotype, various dimensions. Courtesy the artist and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.
Newell Harry, Circle/s in the Round: WHITE WHINE, 2010, neon, 135 x 110 x 5 cm. Newell Harry, Circle/s in the Round: LEVEL ROTOR, 2010, neon, 135 x 110 x 5 cm. Newell Harry, Circle/s in the Round: AVID DIVA, 2010, neon, 135 x 110 x 5cm. Newell Harry, Circle/s
in the Round: MALAYALAM RACECAR, 2010, neon, 135 x 175 x 5 cm.
Raqs Media Collective
Reena Saini Kallat
Raj Kumar
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth
Mithu Sen
Adeela Suleman
Abdullah M I Syed
Starting from the fragile and complex socio-political relationship between India and Pakistan in the era of contemporary warfare, I don’t want to be there when it happens investigates, in a broader sense, the psychology of trauma.
The artists invited to participate in this exhibition reference unpleasant situations; from their own everyday experience of the contradictions and problems they face in their personal universe to the alarming signals of the profound existential unease of our age.
I don’t want to be there when it happens explores the relationship between art practice and trauma, loss and grief. It is an examination of what art can contribute in the aftermath of such experiences, of how it can produce meaning and discourse through the act of engagement.
The exhibition is organised as partnership between the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts(PICA) and 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art and expanded on the occasion of its presentation at PICA. The original exhibition was held at 4A between August and October.
Adeela Suleman’s work to be shown in I don’t want to be there when it happens has been co-commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and The Keir Foundation.
Lee Kun-Yong with Australian artists Huseyin Sami, Daniel Von Sturmer and Emily Parsons-Lord.
Equal Area presents the work of Lee Kun-Yong, one of Korea’s most seminal conceptual artists, charting the development of his visual and theoretical methodology that has expanded possibilities for performance art since the 1970s. Lee is widely acclaimed for his innovative series of performances that examine the the connection between the logic of the mind and the gestures of the body. Throughout his career, Lee has investigated the connection between the human psyche and action through the act of performance and performance. His performances often test this relationship through the act of repetition, demonstrating how the construct of logic is subjective to its locale — slight shifts in each performance capture the body within present moments, leaving traces of an ‘event’.
In this unique presentation of photographic documentation of performances spanning his almost six-decade career, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art brings Lee Kun-Yong’s practice into dialogue with three contemporary Australian artists. Equal Area opens with a special performance of Snail’s Gallop, one of his most critically lauded works which he is staging in Australia for the first time. This is followed by a series of performances and live interventions by Australian artists, taking place in dialogue with the residue of Lee’s performances, that build on this examination of the repeated gesture and elucidate Lee’s influence on global contemporary performative practice.
Lee Kun-Yong (b. 1942, Sariwon, Korea; lives and works in Gunsan, Korea) is one of Korea’s most seminal conceptual artists, exploring the nexus between the human mind and its connection to the world. His experimental performative practice emerged in 1970s South Korea, a period where the country was marked by diminished civil rights and martial law, including civilian assembly controls and tightly scrutinised codes of social propriety. Through this period, Lee led numerous artistic responses to the political climate, creating subversive automated drawing experiments that made subtle yet identifiable comments on the authoritarian state. He continues his line of experimentation today, collaborating with new artists and bringing his messaging into the 21st century.
Lee Kun-Yong’s exhibition history includes: Experimental Art of Suwon in the 1980–1990s: It’s Not Quite That (2017), Suwon iPark Museum of Art, Suwon, Korea; As the Moon Waxes and Wanes (2016), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea (MMCA); Lee Kun-Yong in Snail’s Gallop (2014), MMCA; Korean Historical Conceptual Art 1970–80s: Jack-of-all-trades (2010), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea; Lee Kun-Yong: Logic, Life, Commonplace (1998), Fine Arts Center of The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Seoul, Korea; A Groping for the Identity of Korean Contemporary Art II: The Art in the ‘Reduction’ and ‘Expansion’ Period (1991), Hanwon Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Korean Contemporary Art: The Trend of the 1970s (1974), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan; 8th Biennale de Paris (1973), Paris, France; and 15th Bienal de São Paulo (1979), São Paulo, Brazil.
His works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Wanju, Korea; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, USA.
Emily Parsons-Lord (b. 1984, Bathurst, NSW; lives and works Sydney) is a cross-disciplinary contemporary artist whose art and practice is informed by research and critical dialogue with materials and climate science, through investigation into air and light, both materially, and culturally. Parsons-Lord’s work interrogates notions of the ‘natural’, the universe, and considers deep history and speculative futures, with works that engaged with the materiality of invisibility, magic, and the stories we tell about reality.
Select exhibitions include: NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging), Artspace, Sydney (2017); There is nothing accidental or surprising about this, Vitalstatistix for Climate Century, Port Adelaide (2017-2018); The Future Leaks Out, Liveworks Festival, Carriageworks, Sydney (2017); Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2016); Trod by Beasts Alone, Wellington St Projects, Sydney (2017); Bristol Biennial: In Other Worlds, Bristol, UK (2016); Our Fetid Rank (Margaret Thatcher’s bottom lip and Bill Clinton’s tongue), Firstdraft, Sydney (2015); Ever Fresh, STILLS gallery, Sydney (2015); Underbelly Arts 2015, Cockatoo Island, Sydney (2015); busied and bruised with looking, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth (2015).
Parsons-Lord has been a finalist in the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) in 2017 and the Fishers’ Ghost Award in 2016. Her work is held in the collection of Artbank, Australia.
Huseyin Sami (b. 1979, United Kingdom; lives and works Sydney) has been exhibiting since the late 1990s, with a multi-disciplinary practice that engages with painting, sculpture and installation. Sami’s work challenges and investigates the possibilities of paint itself – working with the colour, form and materiality of household acrylic paints but without any of the tools, gestures or decisions normally associated with the medium – letting paint drop and pool and paintings to ‘virtually make themselves’. Sami’s practice poses questions and develops new strategies for the production of paintings.
Selected exhibitions include Superposition of three types, Artspace, Sydney (2017); Shut up and Paint, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne (2016); Whispers from a Band of Myth Makers, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2015); Assemblage II, 107 Redfern Projects, Sydney (2014); Never Underestimate a Monochrome, Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Rancho Cucamonga, USA (2013); 3, with Koji Ryui and Brandan Van Hek, Alaska Projects, Sydney (2013); Twenty/20, UTS Gallery, Sydney and Dubbo Regional Gallery, NSW (2010); Blue Blah! And other works, Kunst Projects, Berlin, Germany (2009); and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004). He was the winner of the 2005 Fauvette Louriero Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship.w
Sami’s work is held in many public collections, including that of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Artbank, Australia; Saatchi & Saatchi, New Zealand, as well as in private collections in Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the United States.
Daniel von Sturmer (b. Auckland, New Zealand, 1972; lives and works in Melbourne) is a leading video and multimedia artist whose works investigate and orchestrate the fields of relation between things, people, light, space, video and time. von Sturmer’s practice integrates video, photography and installation and often tests the ways in which the audience views artworks inside and outside the gallery.
In 2007, von Sturmer represented Australia at the 52nd Venice Biennale, showing in the Australian Pavilion. Recent exhibitions include: Electric Light (facts/figure), Bus Projects, Melbourne (2017); Under the Sun, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney and Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2017); Red Green Blue: A History of Australian Video Art, Griffith University Art Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane (2017); Collective Visions: 130 Years, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria (2017); Shut Up and Paint, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2016); The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2015); 21st Century Heide: The Collection Since 2000, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria (2015); Camera Ready Actions, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Daniel von Sturmer, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2013); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013); Time & Vision: New work from Australian artists, The Bargehouse, London (2012); Negotiating this world: Contemporary Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); Set Piece, Site Gallery, Sheffield, United Kingdom (2009); The Object of Things, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2007).
von Sturmer’s work is held held in a number of significant collections, including that of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria; Chartwell Collection, New Zealand; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; The Michael Buxton Contemporary Australian Art Collection, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales; and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Exhibition Documentation
Front: Lee Kun-Yong performing Eating Biscuit, first performed in 1975, (re-performed in 2018) biscuits, bandages and splints, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney. Behind: Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, photographed in 1975 (reprinted in 2017), C-type print. All works courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Image: Document Photography.
Front: Lee Kun-Yong performing Eating Biscuit, first performed in 1975, (re-performed in 2018) biscuits, bandages and splints, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney. Behind: Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, photographed in 1975 (reprinted in 2017), C-type print. All works courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view (pre-performance): Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Left to right: Huseyin Sami, Painting Cut Performance, 2018, Acrylic paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery. Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-2, first performed in 1975, (re-performed in 2018) acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Lee Kun-Yong Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Pre-performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. All commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2018. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Front: Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Back: Lee Kun-Yong performing The method of Drawing 76-3, first performed in 1976, acrylic paint on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea.
Front: Lee Kun-Yong performing Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Behind: Lee Kun-Yong, The Method of Drawing 76-3, first performed in 1976, re-performed in 2018. Acrylic paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. These works have been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Front: Lee Kun-Yong performing Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Pre-performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Behind: Lee Kun-Yong, The Method of Drawing 76-2, first performed in 1976, re-performed in 2018. Acrylic paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. These works have been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lee Kun-Yong performing Untitled, 2018. Charcoal, dimensions variable. Performance view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Pictured: Left to right: Huseyin Sami, Painting Cut Performance, 2018, performance, acrylic paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery. Lee Kun-Yong, Untitled, 2018. Charcoal, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. All commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2018. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Front: Lee Kun-Yong, Terrorism is an enemy of Humankind (re-performed in 2017), white sheet, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Left to right: Huseyin Sami, Painting Cut Performance, 2018, Acrylic paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery. Lee Kun-Yong, Untitled, 2018. Charcoal, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-2, first performed in 1975, (re-performed in 2018) acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. All commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2018. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Front: Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, first performed in 1979, (re-performed in 2018) paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Left to right: Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-3, first performed in 1976, (re-performed in 2018), Acrylic paint on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Daniel von Sturmer, Electric Light (facts/figures/4A), 2017, animated light installation, dimensions variable. Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-4, first performed in 1976 (re-performed in 2017), dimensions variable. All commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2018. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Left to right: Lee Kun-Yong and Huseyin Sami, The method of Drawing 76-1-18 and Painting Performance (with feet), 2018. Acrylic paint on door, dimensions variable. Lee’s work courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Sami’s work courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery.
Installation detail view: Lee Kun-Yong: Equal Area, 2018, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Front: Emily Parsons-Lord, a raging event of continual noise (the Sun), 2018, performance, dimensions variable. Behind, left to right: Lee Kun-Yong, Snail’s Gallop, photographed in 1975 (reprinted in 2017), C-type print. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Lee Kun-Yong Logic of Place, first performed in 1975, (re-printed in 2017), C-type print, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-2, first performed in 1975, (re-printed in 2017) paint on canvas, dimensions variable. Lee Kun-Yong, The method of Drawing 76-4, first performed in 1976 (re-printed in 2017),paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. All commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2018. All courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea. Image: Document Photography Image: Document Photography.
Front: Emily Parsons-Lord, a raging event of continual noise (the Sun), 2018, performance, dimensions variable.
Front: Emily Parsons-Lord performing a raging event of continual noise (the Sun), 2018, performance, dimensions variable.
Front: Emily Parsons-Lord performing a raging event of continual noise (the Sun), 2018, performance, dimensions variable.
In February, 4A takes performance art back to the club. 4A has been working with some of the most exciting and adventurous performance artists over recent years and in 2018 we leave the confines of the white cube and venture into the darkness of the club! For one night only, Club 4A in Sydney and Melbourne will present some of Australia’s leading performance artists as well as acclaimed international acts.
In Melbourne on Saturday 17 February as part of White Night, Club 4A takes over the Toff in Town with Rainbow Chan, Amrita Hepi and DEADKEBAB (Japan), with additional artists: Makeda, Strict Face, Jalé , and Coris.
In Sydney on Friday 23 February, head down to Dynasty Karaoke to see with Rainbow Chan, Amrita Hepi and DEADKEBAB (Japan), supported by Slim Set, Tzekin (V Kim), and Jikuroux and Coris (DJ).
Tickets for Club 4A Sydney have officially SOLD OUT.
SET TIMES
Doors: 7.00pm
Coris x Amrita Hepi: 7.00pm
Slim Set: 8.00pm
DEADKEBAB & PSYCHIC$: 9.00pm
Rainbow Chan: 10.00pm
Tzekin: 11.00pm
Jikuroux: 12.00am
DJ Plead: 1.00am
DJs b2b2b2…..: 2.00am – close
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and other venues
Artistic Director: Mami Kataoka
SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement will examine the theory of ‘superposition’ by investigating how it might operate in the world today. 70 leading international artists – chosen to offer a panoramic view of how opposing interpretations, can come together – will participate across seven venues. The exhibition at Artspace, Sydney will feature exceptional new projects by a diverse field of celebrated international artists.
Exhibiting artists at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art:
Akira Takayama: Born 1969 in Saitama, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan; Yokohama, Japan; and Frankfurt, Germany Jun Yang: Born 1975 in Qingtian, China. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria; Taipei, Taiwan; and Yokohama, Japan
Biennale of Sydney
2018 marks the 45th anniversary of the Biennale of Sydney and its twenty-first edition. The Biennale provides a platform for art and ideas and is recognised for commissioning and presenting innovative, thought-provoking art from Australia and around the globe. A leading international art event, The Biennale of Sydney has showcased the work of nearly 1,800 artists from more than 100 countries. It has attracted over 4 million visitors since its inception in 1973 and holds an important place on both the national and international stage.
The Biennale of Sydney is located on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Land andpay respect to Elders, both past and present.
Mami Katoka, Artistic Director
Internationally renowned curator Mami Kataoka is a key figure in analysing socio-historical and generational trends, particularly in the context of Japanese and Asian art, and frequently writes and lectures on contemporary art in Asia.
She has held the position of Chief Curator of the Mori Art Museum (MAM) in Tokyo since 2009, and Senior Curator since 2003. At MAM, Kataoka has curated numerous notable exhibitions including ‘Roppongi Crossing’ (survey show of contemporary Japanese art) (2004, 2013), ‘Sensing Nature: Perception of Nature in Japan’ (2010); as well as major survey shows of prominent artists in Asia such as Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Ai Weiwei, Lee Bul, Makoto Aida, Lee Mingwei and N.S. Harsha.
Exhibition Documentation All images: Document Photography
Jun Yang, Xīní / Xuělí Blue Room, 2018 (detail), installation and printed wallpaper, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and ShugoArts, Tokyo.
Jun Yang, Xīní / Xuělí Blue Room, 2018 (detail), installation and printed wallpaper, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and ShugoArts, Tokyo.
Jun Yang, Xīní / Xuělí Blue Room, 2018 (detail), installation and printed wallpaper, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and ShugoArts, Tokyo.
Jun Yang, Xīní / Xuělí Blue Room, 2018 (detail), installation and printed wallpaper, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and ShugoArts, Tokyo.
Jun Yang, Xīní / Xuělí Blue Room, 2018 (detail), installation and printed wallpaper, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou; and ShugoArts, Tokyo.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Akira Takayama, Our Songs – Sydney Kabuki Project, 2018, video documentation of performances that took place on 28 January 2018, 250 mins, installation view (2018) at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art for the 21st Biennale of Sydney. Filmmaker: Hikaru Fujii. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Neilson Foundation and generous assistance from the Japan Foundation; the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Mami Kataoka. Courtesy the artist.
Venue: Art Central Hong Kong, 9 Lung Wo Road, Central, Hong Kong.
Building upon its critically acclaimed performance programme, Australia’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) returns to Art Central with a series of interactive and live works that address contemporary concerns of excess and dispossession. In an era characterised by polarities, and expansive disparity across societies, the pervasive sense of tension informs the thematic of the programme. Showcasing leading contemporary artists from across the Asia-Pacific region, the works respond directly to global unease through a series of daily on-site performances. Participating artists include: Caroline Garcia (Australia), FJ Kunting (Indonesia), Sam Lo (Singapore) as well as artist duo Sampson Wong & Lam Chi Fai (Hong Kong).
About the Artists and their Artworks:
Sampson Wong and Lam Chi Fai’s new media installation, Pavilion for our living, contemplates the housing crisis currently affecting Hong Kong citizens. The installation invites participants to experience the micro-apartments that many Hong Kong citizens call home. Temporarily simulating one of these apartments within the art fair environs, the exhibition space becomes one of containment. Once inside the simulated space the viewer gains access to audio interviews with micro-apartment dwellers on how they navigate these literal spaces, along with the problems attached to living inside one of these homes.
Sampson Wong (b.1985) and Lam Chi Fai (b.1985) are Hong Kong based artists who have collaborated in art-making since 2010. Their collaborative works received the First Prize in Freedom Flower Awards, the Gold Award and Silver Award of ifva and were exhibited in the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Slought Foundation. They have formed the Add Oil Team to focus on projects concerning creative activism, the collective were committedly practiced during Hong Kong‘s Umbrella Movement, and their projects have been recently exhibited in the 5th Asian Art Biennial.
Caroline Garcia’sThe Vitrine of Dancing Cultures, references the seminal performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco. Garcia’s work interrogates the anthropological phenomenon of the ‘ethnographic exhibition’, which has placed subaltern bodies on display in museums, zoos, circuses and theatres throughout history . Garcia develops and builds upon this concept in The Vitrine of Dancing Cultures where the artist’s cis-female, coloured body is encased within a vitrine, confronting degrees of politicisation, as her cultural identity and gender is put on show. The Vitrine of Dancing Cultures is a museographic dance installation that presents auto-ethnographic portraits of Garcia, bringing forth her Filipino ancestry. She engages in a durational dance ritual using a Nintendo Wii to examine the neocolonisation of popular culture and cultural tourism. Through repetition, this performance brings into question an individual’s stamina when facing expectations of cultural competence and visibility.
Caroline Garcia (b.1988) is a culturally promiscuous performance maker. She works across live performance and video through a hybridised aesthetic of cross-cultural dance, ritual practice, new media, and the sampling of popular culture and colonial imagery. In her work, Garcia centres peripheral bodies by adopting the role of shape shifter – sliding into the gaps between cultures, experiences of otherness, and timeless clichés of exotic femininity. Garcia has presented at Manila Biennale: OPENCITY2018 (Manila, Philippines), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival (Melbourne, Australia).
Performance times:
Monday 26th: 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Tuesday 27th: 3.00pm – 3.45pm
Wednesday 28th: 3.00pm – 3.45pm
Thursday 29th: 3.00pm – 3.45pm & 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Friday 30th: 3.00pm – 3.45pm & 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Saturday 31st: 3.00pm – 3.45pm & 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Sunday 1st: 3.00pm – 3.45pm
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TALK andGoal: Strong Relationship, but first, talk! are two durational performances by Indonesian artist FJ Kunting. TALK is a durational exercise in the resistance of excess. The artist explores the struggle and the fight for his voice to be heard. Tethered to a contraption of tools and pipes he attempts to speak, however his speech is reduced to bubbles that, over time, envelop him. As exhaustion nears, the futility of his effort becomes apparent with the artist ceasing to struggle and the bubbles slowly disappear. In Kunting’s second performance,Goal: Strong Relationship, but first, talk, language remains the heart of all communication. Kunting examines the ebb and flow of conversation as two figures, faceless except for a spout, appear in a wordless discussion. Talk is reduced to a bubble exchange, with each figure conversing through a stream of bubbles. While infinitely playful, these performances reveal patterns of conversation, exchange and balance in relationships.
FJ Kunting (b.1982) is a Yogyakarta, Indonesian based artist who has been developing a performance practice since 2012. Widely regarded as one of Indonesia’s most exciting performers, Kunting is fundamentally interested in an examination of human relations and engagement. His live performances are durational and hypnotic.
Progress: The Game of Leaders, invites audiences to participate in a high-stakes game of imagined nation building. Artist Sam Lo poses the question: “Where will you be standing when the First World falls?” Working with giant Jenga blocks, participants are invited to prioritise and select the building blocks of their ideal society. In your nation, will economic progress be favoured over military spending? Higher standards of living or increasing globalisation? As players jockey for top position in the imaginary nation’s guidance, the structure grows more precarious and its foundations ever more compromised. The game can only end one way.
Sam Lo (b.1986), also known by the moniker SKL0, is a Singaporean contemporary artist whose work is heavily inspired by daily observations and research on the sociopolitical climate. In 2013 her practice was placed under scrutiny, following her 2013 arrest for vandalism and subsequent sentencing of 240 hours of community service, bringing issues such as public space, freedom of expression and activism to the fore. Progress: The Game of Leaders was commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and premiered at MPavilion as part of Melbourne Festival, 2017.
Between November 1860 and September 1861 the New South Wales goldfields of Burrangong, near the present day township of Young, was the the site of Australia’s largest racially motivated riot. Rising antagonism over gold mining disparities and cultural habits saw trivial misunderstandings intensify into racial tensions that erupted into violence across the goldfields. Over 10 months, Chinese miners were subjected to threats, robbery and sustained acts of violence.This anti-Chinese sentiment had swept through the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s and by the early 1860s had reached a flashpoint in New South Wales, provoking public opinion and debate. In Sydney, the NSW Parliament responded to the contention by passing legislation to restrict Chinese immigration and began, alongside Victoria and South Australia, to write the prelude to the White Australia Policy.
Informed by a series of residencies in Young and surrounding historical sites, Chinese-Australian artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge trace the events and repercussions of this period of civil disobedience. Supported by historian Dr Karen Schamberger, the artists’ research-led practice interweaves these accounts of history to create contemporary mediations that reflects upon the forces of identity, economics, race and otherness in Australia today. In April 2018 their creative investigations will be realised in Young. This collaborative history project will bear a legacy publication.
This exhibition is the first iteration of a four-part exhibition project. The second will be realised at 4A’s Haymarket home from June 29 – August 14, 2008, followed by a publication and then a public monument in Young.
YOU ARE INVITED.
On Saturday April 21, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is leading a community event with Australian-Chinese artists John Young Zerunge and Jason Phu in response the to events of The Burrangong Affray, including the Lambing Flat Riots, 1860 -1861.
We invite the community of Young and the surrounding areas to join the artists as they create a tribute at Young Chinese Cemetary, Murrumburrah and Blackguard Gully, Young. At each site the artists will lead us in a ceremony of incense burning, offerings and ceremonial gestures to welcome good luck and banish the bad spirits of the past.
Join the artists as they mark each of they pay tribute to these sites and these historic events.
Date: Saturday 21 April 2018
Time and Location: 10am at Young Chinese Cemetary and 11:30am Blackguard Gully. Followed by an informal meeting with the artists.
Bring: Something that makes noise, a pot or a pan, a whistle, a recorder or a drum.
Contact and RSVP details: hello@4a.com.au or 9212 0380
Jason Phu (b.1989, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Sydney) studied at COFA, Sydney graduating with honours in 2011 and NSCAD, Nova Scotia. He works across a range of mediums from installation, painting and sculpture where he traces the connections between the tradition of Chinese brush and ink painting and contemporary practice. His work has been informed by several China based residencies at CAFA, Beijing; DAC Studios, Chongqing; and Organhaus, Chongqing which has enabled him to further investigate the tradition of calligraphy. Recently Jason has had numerous solo exhibitions in Australia including Westspace, Melbourne; Nicholas Projects, Melbourne; CCAS Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra; and ALASKA PROJECTS, Sydney. He won the coveted Sulman Prize in 2015 and in the same year received a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship which allowed him to develop his practice between China and Australia.
John Young Zerunge (b.1956, Hong Kong; lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) started his artistic practice in the 1980s with writings on conceptualism and post-modernism. Within four-decades of artistic production, Young’s oeuvre has seen various transformations within his practice of painting and installation. In the last decade his work has focused on two strands, Abstract Paintings and historical re-imaginings in the form of the History Projects; starting with Bonhoeffer in Harlem (Berlin, Bamberg) then in the last five years, projects based on the history of the Chinese Diaspora in Australia since 1840. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria in 2005 and Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University Canberra in 2013 and he has been included in major exhibitions in the likes of New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin.
Dr Karen Schamberger (b.1980, Australia. Lives and works in Canberra, Australia) researches and writes about Australian museums, migration and cultural diversity. Her thesis ‘Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums’ (2016) examined the way that objects mediate relations between people of culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society, as well as the roles that museums play in these relations. One of her thesis case studies traced the biography of the ‘Roll-Up No Chinese’ banner created during the 1860-61 Lambing Flat riots and now held by the Lambing Flat Folk Museum in Young, NSW.
She currently works at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra as part of the curatorial team developing a new environmental history gallery. She has previously worked in curatorial roles on the ‘Identity: Yours, Mine Ours’ exhibition (2011) at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne and the ‘Australian Journeys’ gallery (2009) at the National Museum of Australia.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body
Between November 1860 and September 1861 the New South Wales goldfields of Burrangong, near the present day township of Young, was the the site of Australia’s largest racially motivated riot. Rising antagonism over gold mining disparities and cultural habits saw trivial misunderstandings intensify into racial tensions that erupted into violence across the goldfields. Over 10 months, Chinese miners were subjected to threats, robbery and sustained acts of violence.This anti-Chinese sentiment had swept through the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s and by the early 1860s had reached a flashpoint in New South Wales, provoking public opinion and debate. In Sydney, the NSW Parliament responded to the contention by passing legislation to restrict Chinese immigration and began, alongside Victoria and South Australia, to write the prelude to the White Australia Policy.
Through a series of residencies in Young and surrounding historical sites, Chinese-Australian artists Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge trace the events and repercussions of this period of civil disobedience. Supported by historian Dr Karen Schamberger, the artists’ research-led practice interweaves these accounts of history to create contemporary mediations that reflects upon the forces of identity, economics, race and otherness in Australia today. This collaborative history project will bear a legacy publication.
This exhibition is the second iteration of a four-part exhibition project. The first was be realised in Young in April. 2018.
Jason Phu (b.1989, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Sydney) studied at COFA, Sydney graduating with honours in 2011 and NSCAD, Nova Scotia. He works across a range of mediums from installation, painting and sculpture where he traces the connections between the tradition of Chinese brush and ink painting and contemporary practice. His work has been informed by several China based residencies at CAFA, Beijing; DAC Studios, Chongqing; and Organhaus, Chongqing which has enabled him to further investigate the tradition of calligraphy. Recently Jason has had numerous solo exhibitions in Australia including Westspace, Melbourne; Nicholas Projects, Melbourne; CCAS Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra; and ALASKA PROJECTS, Sydney. He won the coveted Sulman Prize in 2015 and in the same year received a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship which allowed him to develop his practice between China and Australia.
John Young Zerunge (b.1956, Hong Kong; lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) started his artistic practice in the 1980s with writings on conceptualism and post-modernism. Within four-decades of artistic production, Young’s oeuvre has seen various transformations within his practice of painting and installation. In the last decade his work has focused on two strands, Abstract Paintings and historical re-imaginings in the form of the History Projects; starting with Bonhoeffer in Harlem (Berlin, Bamberg) then in the last five years, projects based on the history of the Chinese Diaspora in Australia since 1840. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria in 2005 and Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University Canberra in 2013 and he has been included in major exhibitions in the likes of New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin.
Dr Karen Schamberger (b.1980, Australia. Lives and works in Canberra, Australia) researches and writes about Australian museums, migration and cultural diversity. Her thesis ‘Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums’ (2016) examined the way that objects mediate relations between people of culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society, as well as the roles that museums play in these relations. One of her thesis case studies traced the biography of the ‘Roll-Up No Chinese’ banner created during the 1860-61 Lambing Flat riots and now held by the Lambing Flat Folk Museum in Young, NSW.
She currently works at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra as part of the curatorial team developing a new environmental history gallery. She has previously worked in curatorial roles on the ‘Identity: Yours, Mine Ours’ exhibition (2011) at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne and the ‘Australian Journeys’ gallery (2009) at the National Museum of Australia.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body
Exhibition documentation
John Young Zerunge, Lambing Flat, 2018, digital print on paper, chalk and paint on paper, 27 works; overall dimension 3200 x 7100mm, each work 1000 x 700mm. Jason Phu, Do not stick your hand in the fire, sit near it and observe the stars, 2018, framed editioned photograph on paper, 1212 x 812mm. John Young Zerunge, Action: Covering, 2018, framed digital photographic series on paper, 2 works, each work 1212 x 812mm. John Young Zerunge, The Field, 2018, HD video, 8.05 minutes. John Young Zerunge, Action: Covering, 2018, objects from the performance Action: Covering at Blackguard Gully, Young, 21.04.2018: metal bucket, spade, felt blankets. All works commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
John Young Zerunge, The Field, 2018, HD video, 8.05 minutes, installation view. All works commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Jason Phu, Do not stick your hand in the fire, sit near it and observe the stars, 2018, framed editioned photograph on paper, 1212 x 812mm. John Young Zerunge, Action: Covering, 2018, framed digital photographic series on paper, 2 works, each work 1212 x 812mm. All works commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view, clockwise, from left: Jason Phu, ROLLING ROLLS ROLLED ROLL, 2018, ink on sheet, dimensions variable, 4 works, each work 1200 x 1200mm. John Young Zerunge, Lambing Flat, 2018, digital print on paper, chalk and paint on paper, 27 works; overall dimension 3200 x 7100mm, each work 1000 x 700mm. All works commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Installation view, clockwise, from left: Jason Phu, ROLLING ROLLS ROLLED ROLL, 2018, ink on sheet, dimensions variable, 4 works, each work 1200 x 1200mm. John Young Zerunge, Lambing Flat, 2018, digital print on paper, chalk and paint on paper, 27 works; overall dimension 3200 x 7100mm, each work 1000 x 700mm. All works commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
John Young Zerunge, Lambing Flat, installation view, 2018, digital print on paper, chalk and paint on paper, 27 works; overall dimension 3200 x 7100mm, each work 1000 x 700mm, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography. Image: Document Photography.
Jason Phu, In the morning I wake the rooster. In the afternoon I drive across the mountains & waters. At night I cut all my ties, installation view (installation view), 2018, multimedia installation, dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Jason Phu, In the morning I wake the rooster. In the afternoon I drive across the mountains & waters. At night I cut all my ties, installation view (installation view), 2018, multimedia installation, dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Jason Phu, In the morning I wake the rooster. In the afternoon I drive across the mountains & waters. At night I cut all my ties, installation view (installation view), 2018, multimedia installation, dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Jason Phu, In the morning I wake the rooster. In the afternoon I drive across the mountains & waters. At night I cut all my ties, installation view (installation view), 2018, multimedia installation, dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray: Jason Phu and John Young Zerunge. Image: Document Photography.
Temporary Certainty is shaped by an investigation of sudden shifts of historical change wrought by complex interventions in the greater Asia region. Showcasing new works from Australian artists Rushdi Anwar and Alana Hunt alongside a new body of work from Sarker Protick, this exhibition brings together three distinct voices that share long-standing commitments to humanitarian and activist concerns. With a focus on Bengal, Kurdistan and the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Temporary Certainty explores how artists approach geography as a marker of the consequences of broader geopolitical expediencies.
The three distinct geographical contexts represented in this exhibition, each with their seemingly disparate environmental challenges and contingencies, are here connected by the way the artists have explored questions of nationalisms, the legacies of sovereignty, and contested narratives of memorialisation. Equally defined by more urgent concerns and experiences of displacement and transience, the works presented in Temporary Certainty are distinguished by their emergence within conditions of uneasy reconciliation. Additionally, a common thread between each artist’s vision across the works presented in this exhibition is the central importance of the photographic image as a medium that excels at mediating between space and time, reality and illusion. The artists utilise this visual language, alongside other mediums and methodologies, in a shared pursuit of seeking to unveil the symbolic resonances that inhabit built environments within fractured contexts.
Alana Hunt’s activities as an artist are defined by her commitment to broadening and challenging the possibilities of communicating ideas in the public realm. For Temporary Certainty, Hunt has created a new work, Faith in a pile of stones (2018), that takes as its focus Lake Argyle. Located near the artist’s home in the town of Kununurra, Lake Argyle was constructed in 1971 (and filled by 1974), following the damming of the Ord River. An immense human-engineered reservoir of freshwater whose capacity is more than eighteen times the volume of Sydney Harbour, its construction for the purpose of irrigation for agricultural production drowned places of significance and altered the ecologies of country belonging primarily to Miriwoong, but also Gija and Malgnin people. Hunt reconfigures the monumental aspect of the dam wall in a work that explores the convergence of the bureaucratic management of natural resources driven by colonial dreams of development that have been shaped by faith in the idea of permanence.
Rushdi Anwar presents two works that are deeply related to the artist’s experiences as a member of the Kurdish diaspora. The video and sound installation Facing Living: The Past in the Present (2015) shows a pair of hands that proceed to tear up and piece back together an official portrait of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein until the image is overwhelmed by black adhesive tape, an act that balances between destruction and creation, erasure and elegy for those who suffered under Hussein’s rule. We have found in the ashes what we have lost in the fire (2018) is the artist’s response to his recent experience of entering a church in the town of Bashiqa located in north east Mosul, part of disputed territories between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraqi government. This work explores unsettling similarities between the destruction, transience and renewal faced by displaced and uprooted communities globally and the built environments they are forced to leave.
Sarker Protick’s Exodus (2015–ongoing) considers the expediencies of decolonisation while at the same time being a haunting meditation on the universal contingencies of time. Over a selection of photographs and moving image, the artist explores the decaying buildings and surrounding lands of the feudal estates in East Bengal that were previously owned by Hindu jamindars, or landlords. Following the Liberation War of 1971 that abruptly established the newly independent nation of Bangladesh, huge migrations took place across Bengal. This saw wealthy Hindu landowners abandon their estates for India in fear of the kind of violent reprisals that had erupted following the Partition of India in 1947, while at the same time many Muslims fled West Bengal heading east. A series of controversial laws dating from 1948, culminating in the Vested Property Act of 1974, allowed the confiscation of property by Bangladeshi authorities from groups declared ‘enemies of the state’. Since then, these estates have commonly been left in disrepair, taken over by nature and appropriated by local villagers—another chapter in a landscape indelibly marked by the influence of Mughal rule and British imperialism (1).
Grappling with tensions between certainty and doubt, permanence and all that is ephemeral, Temporary Certainty contemplates the value of what can be apprehended—much less held onto—with any guarantee in an age lurching towards ever greater polarisation.
Temporary Certainty is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Rushdi Anwar’s commissioned work has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The presentation of Sarker Protick’s Exodus has been supported by The Esplanade, Singapore, with additional support from the Australian Centre for Photography.
(1) Sarker Protick’s Exodus was internationally premiered in the exhibition The Life of Things at The Esplanade, Singapore, from 19 January to 8 April 2018. This text incorporates aspects of curator Sam I-shan’s accompanying text for this exhibition.
Artists:
Rushdi Anwar (b. Halabja, Kurdistan) is a Melbourne-based artist, currently working between Australia and Thailand. His installation, sculpture, painting, photo-painting and video work often reflect on socio-political issues relating to Kurdistan, Iraq and the Middle East. He explores these issues through an investigation of form, utilising a material vocabulary and different processes of making. Anwar was educated in Kurdistan and Australia, studying at the Institute of Kirkuk- Kurdistan and Enmore Design Centre/Sydney Institute. He holds a Master of Fine Art (2010) and a PhD in Fine Art (2016) from RMIT University, Melbourne. He has held solo and group exhibitions widely in Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, Kurdistan, Norway, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and USA. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include 12th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2018), and the 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2019). Anwar’s works are held in the collections of the Australian War Memorial, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and in private collections. He has curated exhibitions in Kurdistan (2010), Thailand (2012, 2015), and Australia (2013). Following several artist-in-residence programs in Thailand, he co-founded and co-coordinated the Australian Thai Artist Interchange, Melbourne (2012–2016), an organisation founded to enhance cross-cultural exchange, awareness and appreciation of art and culture between Thais and Australians. Rushdi is a founding member, with Brook Andrew and Shiraz Bayjoo, of the artist collective The Working Collection.
Alana Hunt (b. 1984, Sydney) makes contemporary art, writes and produces culture through a variety of media across public, gallery and online spaces. She lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia and has a long-standing engagement with South Asia. The politics of nation making and the colonial past and present of Australia and South Asia are central to her practice. Since 2009, she has orchestrated participatory art and publishing projects that have activated different media forms in the public sphere to shed light on Kashmir. Paper txt msgs from Kashmir (2009–2011) prompted media in India and Pakistan to speak about a state-wide mobile phone ban they had previously been silent on. This work won the Fauvette Laureiro Artist Scholarship. In 2016, the seven-year participatory memorial Cups of nun chai circulated as a newspaper serial in Kashmir, reaching thousands of people on a weekly basis during a period of civilian uprising and state oppression. This work won the 2017 Incinerator Art Award. Her essay, A mere drop in the sea of what is, published by 4A Papers (Issue 1, November 2016), explored the art circulating on the ‘streets of social media’ in Kashmir and made it into the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament. In 2018, Alana undertook a residency in Sulawesi with Rumata Art Space & the Makassar International Writers’ Festival and will present Cups of nun chai at Tufts University Art Gallery, Massachusetts, and a series of artists presentations at Tufts, Brown, and Parsons universities. Her work is held in both public and private collections including Artbank and the Macquarie Group Collection.
Sarker Protick (b. 1986, Bangladesh) is a Dhaka-based artist whose work explores the possibilities of time, light and sound. His portraits, landscapes and photographic series engage philosophically with the specificities of personal and national histories. Sarker’s approach across various mediums incorporates detailed observations and subtle gestures as a means of creating personal spaces, often minimal and atmospheric. He was named in British Journal of Photography’s annual ‘Ones to Watch’ and Photo District News’ (PDN) 30 emerging photographers of the year. Sarker is the recipient of Joop Swart Masterclass, World Press Photo award, and Australian Photobook of the Year grand prize. His body of work Exodus was awarded the Magnum Foundation Grant 2018. Sarker’s work has been shown in museums, galleries and photo festivals internationally, including Art Dubai; Paris Photo; Singapore Art Week; Dhaka Art Summit; Chobi Mela International Photography Festival, Dhaka; Latvian Contemporary Museum of Photography, Riga; and Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Netherlands. Sarker is a faculty member at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, and currently represented by East Wing Gallery, Dubai.
Exhibition Documentation
Alana Hunt, Faith in a pile of stones, 2018, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, installation incorporating photography, video and sound dimensions variable; archival video appropriated from ‘Ord River Dam’ produced by Film Associates Pty Ltd for Public Works Department WA (currently Water Corporation WA); Photography: B. Lobascher and J.Green; Narration: D. Ellery; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Alana Hunt, Faith in a pile of stones, 2018, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, installation incorporating photography, video and sound dimensions variable; archival video appropriated from ‘Ord River Dam’ produced by Film Associates Pty Ltd for Public Works Department WA (currently Water Corporation WA); Photography: B. Lobascher and J.Green; Narration: D. Ellery; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Alana Hunt, Faith in a pile of stones, 2018, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, installation incorporating photography, video and sound dimensions variable; archival video appropriated from ‘Ord River Dam’ produced by Film Associates Pty Ltd for Public Works Department WA (currently Water Corporation WA); Photography: B. Lobascher and J.Green; Narration: D. Ellery; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Alana Hunt, Faith in a pile of stones, 2018, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, installation incorporating photography, video and sound dimensions variable; archival video appropriated from ‘Ord River Dam’ produced by Film Associates Pty Ltd for Public Works Department WA (currently Water Corporation WA); Photography: B. Lobascher and J.Green; Narration: D. Ellery; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Installation view of Temporary Certainty a t 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, clockwise left to right: Sarker Protick, Elegy to Empire (f rom the series Exodus), 2015–ongoing, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, black & white photographs (selection of 19); 22.5 x 28.0 cm (each photograph); courtesy the artist. Sarker Protick, Arrival (from the series Exodus) , 2015–ongoing, single-channel HD video and sound installation; 8:00 mins; courtesy the artist. Rushdi Anwar, Facing Living: The Past in the Present, 2015, single-channel HD video and sound installation; 12:30 mins; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Sarker Protick, Elegy to Empire (from the series Exodus), 2015–ongoing, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, black & white photograph; 127.0 x 101.5 cm; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Sarker Protick, Elegy to Empire (from the series Exodus), 2015–ongoing, installation view (detail) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, black & white photographs (selection of 19); 22.5 x 28.0 cm (each photograph); courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Installation view of Temporary Certainty a t 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, left to right: Rushdi Anwar, We have found in the ashes what we have lost in the fire, 2018, installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; print on plexiglass, photograph printed on paper, mixed medium, resin embedded within wooden box; 12 boxes: each box 32.5 x 22.5 x 9.0 cm (one edition); installation dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; courtesy the artist. Rushdi Anwar, Facing Living: The Past in the Present, 2015, single-channel HD video and sound installation; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; 12:30 mins; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Rushdi Anwar, Facing Living: The Past in the Present, 2015, single-channel HD video and sound installation; installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; 12:30 mins; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Rushdi Anwar, We have found in the ashes what we have lost in the fire, 2018, installation view (detail) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; print on plexiglass, photograph printed on paper, mixed medium, resin embedded within wooden box; 12 boxes: each box 32.5 x 22.5 x 9.0 cm (one edition); installation dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Rushdi Anwar, We have found in the ashes what we have lost in the fire, 2018, installation view (detail) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; print on plexiglass, photograph printed on paper, mixed medium, resin embedded within wooden box; 12 boxes: each box 32.5 x 22.5 x 9.0 cm (one edition); installation dimensions variable; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski
All Blessings, All Curses presents recent and newly commissioned works by Sydney-based artist, Justine Youssef. Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Youssef’s practice negates the stifling white heat of global xenophobia with deeply personal and universal ruminations that layer the smell, sights and textures of her ancestral homeland, Lebanon.
The strength of Justine Youssef’s practice lies in the poetics of her storytelling and observations: a teacher blackens Arabic script, fearing that it contains a religious hate message; a smoke detector deafeningly sounds as a mother burns bakhoor to rid the house of the evil eye; the looks of confusion two girls receive as they scrub clean a Persian rug in their driveway. These scenes represent the lived experience of the artist who transforms everyday occurrences into visual metaphors.
Justine Youssef’s intuitive methodology draws upon this archive of personal memories as a departure point for All blessing, all curses. Employing sculpture, video, installation and text, Youssef examines the difficult experiences of misunderstanding with the grand subjects of faith, love, family and home. In doing so, she creates immersive experiences that are both epic and intimate – whispering invocations of promise, comfort and resistance.
Justine Youssef (b. 1992) is currently living on the unceded territory of the Darug peoples. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney, Australia and is currently working from the Parramatta Artist Studios. She has been awarded the New South Wales Artists’ Grant (NAVA and Create NSW), as well as a studio residency at Blacktown Arts. She has held collaborative solo exhibitions at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, and Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo with Duha Ali in 2018, and has participated in group exhibitions at Airspace Projects, Marrickville; Bankstown Art Center, Bankstown; Sullivan+Strumpf, Zetland; and Collab Gallery, Chippendale. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Association for the Visual Arts; the National Art School Drawing Archive; and the Sydney Gallery School.
Exhibition Documentation
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Exterior view of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, In gallery interior: Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, dimensions variable, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion. Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, Ashes to ashes or palm ash to your wrist, 2017, single channel video, 25 second, installation view, 4A Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Left: Justine Youssef, Ashes to ashes or palm ash to your wrist, 2017, single channel video, 25 second, installation view, 4A Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Right: Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef, Ashes to ashes or palm ash to your wrist, 2017, single channel video, 25 second, installation view, 4A Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef, All Blessings, All Curses (Blood on the earth), 2018, sandstone and taxidermied scorpion, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. This commission has been made possible by the generous support of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Set group. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef, Ashes to ashes or palm ash to your wrist, 2017, single channel video, 25 second, installation view, 4A Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back right: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front left: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back right: Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kai Wasikowski.
Front left: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back right: Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front right: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back left: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Centre Front: Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Middle Back: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Justine Youssef, An Other’s Wurud, 2017-ongoing, Installation incorporating photographic documentation, video and mixed media including David Austine and Burnet roses, water, two ring gas burner, gas cylinder, aluminum pot, sleve, pavers and glass bottles, dimensions variable, installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Leila El Rayes, Burying that which binds into the chest of my beloved, 2018, photographic documentation (of single channel video, 6 minutes), 2 photographs, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back left: Youssef and Duha Ali, Kohl, 2018, Three channel video installation, 4 minutes, and 3 brass bowls, kohl, sandstone and clay, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. This work was produced with the support of the NAVA NSW Artist’s Grant 2017. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Front: Justine Youssef and Leila El Rayes, Burying that which binds into the chest of my beloved, 2018, photographic documentation (of single channel video, 6 minutes), 2 photographs, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski. Back left: Justine Youssef and Duha Ali, Body/Cartography, 2018, 3 channel video, 4 minutes, two rugs, 280 x 190cm and 230 x 315cm, and photographic documentation, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
Friday 13 – Sunday 15 October, 2017 VOLUME 2017 | Another Art Book Fair Artspace
Artspace, in partnership with Printed Matter, Inc., New York and Perimeter Books, Melbourne, presents VOLUME 2017 | Another Art Book Fair. The second edition of this biennial event will take place from 13 – 15 October at Artspace.
Artspace will welcome 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art x Para Site, alongside over 70 fellow exhibitors from across Australia and the world, including Amsterdam, Hong Kong, South Korea, Colombia, France and the United States. In addition to an international line up of publishers, artists, collectives, galleries and distributors, there will be a free program of talks, artist-led workshops, book launches, readings and performances.
Fair Dates & Hours Friday 13 October | Doors Open 3pm; Launch 6 – 9pm
Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 October | 11am – 6pm
Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, discursive, and educational projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is an independent not-for-profit organisation based in Sydney, Australia. 4A fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary culture through the commissioning, presentation, documentation and research of contemporary art. Our program is presented throughout Australia and Asia , where we ensure that contemporary art plays a central role in understanding and developing the dynamic relationship between Australia and the wider Asian region.
In partnership with Feminist South, 4A is pleased to host the monthly Feminist South reading group on the last Thursday of the month. This reading group is Phase 1 of the Feminist South research and curatorial project led by Kelly Doley and i:project space, Beijing.
Feminist South is a curatorial project and research platform spanning across 2017-2019 that aims to generate critical dialogue around contemporary feminist performance practice in the context of the Asia Pacific.
Rather than attempting to fit Western feminist theories and movements onto the multiplicities that make up practice in the Asia Pacific, the project seeks to create its own terms of reference in order to decentre and disrupt the conventional understandings of feminist art and create new narratives for practices that are located in the here and now.
All welcome, please join the discussion. Email kellydoley@gmail.com to join the Feminist South mailing list and RSVP.
Sydney Contemporary ticket holders Location: The Old Clare Hotel, Chippendale
Where you will you will party like a VIP
Step through the velvet ropes and into the Old Clare
At this party hosted by international speculative superstar Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, you’ll be showered in gold, mix with the glitterati, and drink only the finest.
Secret password required.
Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition has been co-commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Project 11. 4A would like to thank Project 11 for their generous support of this project.
Join 4A Assistant Curator Micheal Do for a tour of I don’t want to be there when it happens, followed by a congee breakfast.
I don’t want to be there when it happens brings together artists who explore the psychology of contemporary trauma. Recent works by Raj Kumar, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth and Adeela Suleman all confront the larger socio-political realities of Pakistan in the era of contemporary warfare. Through video and installation, the artists address the experience of the individual in the midst of a continuous state of war. By scanning the landscape with nonsensical logic, futilely seeking to document destruction, and questioning the appropriation of religion, the artworks in the exhibition avoid resolution and closure. Instead, they highlight the individual’s inability to comprehend the expansive uncertainty of combat, and the impossibilities of representing the trauma of conflict.
Speakers: Abdul Rahman ABDULLAH, Mehwish IQBAL, Khaled SABSABI and Nur SHEKEMBI.
Join 4A for the first event in 4A’s new series Please Explain that invite presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia. In the inaugural series, co-curated by Nur Shkembi and Mikala Tai, the Australian Muslim experience is front and centre with thought provoking discussions on feminism, fantasy, politics and racism and features members of the collective Eleven.
The first panel, Please Explain: Fear of small numbers and the geography of anger, brings together artists Abdul Rahman Abdullah, Khaled Sabsabi and Mehwish Iqbal with academics and curators Nur Shkembi and Associate Professor Philip George. Taking cues from Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger, artistic practice and academic work are considered in light of the questions Appadurai raises about the darker side of globalisation and multiculturalism.
In partnership with Feminist South, 4A is pleased to host the monthly Feminist South reading group on the last Thursday of the month. This reading group is Phase 1 of the Feminist South research and curatorial project led by Kelly Doley and i:project space, Beijing.
Feminist South is a curatorial project and research platform spanning across 2017-2019 that aims to generate critical dialogue around contemporary feminist performance practice in the context of the Asia Pacific.
Rather than attempting to fit Western feminist theories and movements onto the multiplicities that make up practice in the Asia Pacific, the project seeks to create its own terms of reference in order to decentre and disrupt the conventional understandings of feminist art and create new narratives for practices that are located in the here and now.
All welcome, please join the discussion. Email kellydoley@gmail.com to join the Feminist South mailing list and RSVP.
The Feminist South reading for July is:
Article complicating the narrative that contemporary art was bestowed upon China by the West: Carol Yinghua Lu, ‘Accidental Conceptualism’, eflux Journal #01 – December 2008
Wu Tsang discussing working in Asia as a queer trans identified artist and the use of ‘Western’ terms: ‘Wu Tsang A Life in Process’, Leap Magazine, No. 38 19 May 2016 by Stephanie Bailey
Presented as part of Sydney Contemporary – 7 – 10 September 2017
Is there something truly universal nowadays, when human conception about value has been influenced by many factors and layered dimensions? What is more valuable when all of this factors and dimensions are detached? The answer then refers to “time”. Hahan observes that human’s process, actions, opportunities, predictions, and hopes cannot be separated from time.
Join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Hahan at Sydney Contemporary 2017 for your chance to become part of an experimental art market in Speculative Entertainment No. 1 Sydney Edition.
“Speculative Entertainment No.1” is an ongoing project that developed from Hahan’s experiments about time and privilege, as well as an interest to experiment with the art market and use it as medium. This work is intended to hack the art market, and particularly to hack the artwork collecting system which usually limited. This work was initially exhibited during ARTJOG 9 (2016), an annual artist-based art fair in Yogyakarta, and has also been presented in conjunction with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian art at Art Central Hong Kong (2017).
This work consists of a 7.5 m x 2.6 m painting which is divided into 1,619 square lots. Each lot is sized 10 cm square and the price for each lot is twice the entrance fee of the art fair. During the exhibition period at scheduled time, the audience can become “collectors” with the same opportunities, hopes, privileges, and speculations by choosing any lot they want at the venue. The audience members who purchase the lot(s) are encouraged to speculate by re-selling it according to their own speculative price and Hahan, as the artist, will charge 10% commission from the selling.
About the artist:
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan (1983, Kebumen, Indonesia) lives and works in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Hahan’s art making is concerned with the tussle between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, blurring realism with decoration. Hahan incorporates film, music and street culture into a distinct visual language, creating a sense of movement and spontaneity in what can be described as a topsy-turvy reality steeped in satirical humor. In recent years, he attempts to display an art with the concept that emphasises the interaction with the visitors and relate it with the development of art in global as well as its society. He also one of the founders of Ace House Collective, a young artists’ collective and initiative space based in Yogyakarta which trying to capture the culture of Indonesian contemporary society through multidiscipline work process, collaboration, and research.His works have been collected by several art museum including Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Brisbane, Australia and National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Melbourne, Australia.
Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition has been co-commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Project 11. 4A would like to thank Project 11 for their generous support of this project.
Documentation:
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Speculative Entertainment No.1 Sydney Edition (performance documentation), Sydney
Contemporary Art Fair 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University invite you to join us for 4A’s 2017 symposium, When South is North: contemporary art and culture in South Asia and Australia.
With local and international speakers drawn from all over South Asia, this symposium is led by artists, cultural commentators, scholars and grass-roots workers who understand the real issues which affect art and culture from the region. With keynote presentations from artists Adeela Suleman (Pakistan) and Reena Kallat (India) and curator and Director Vidya Shivadas (India)– plus a wide range of Australian-based artists, academics, politicians, community workers and more – When South is North aims to build dialogue around South Asia and Australia in a contemporary arts context.
The focus of the day will be on question-making, debate and discussion – focusing on the hows and whys within the region’s contemporary art and cultural landscapes.
A day-long symposium, this event is free to attend, but RSVPs are required as catering will be included for all registered attendees.
When South is North – Symposium Schedule:
9.00 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome
| Prof. Paul JAMES, Western Sydney University, Director, Institute of Society and Culture
| Dr. Mikala TAI, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
10.00 – 10.30 Opening Presentation
| Speaker: Associate Professor Devleena GHOSH
| Associate Professor Devleena Ghosh of the University of Technology, Sydney, sets the tone for the day, discussing her fields of research in colonial, postcolonial, environmental and global studies, specifically in the Indian Ocean region.
10.30AM – 11.30AM Focus Presentation
| Speaker: Reena KALLAT (India)
Session supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
| Reena Kallat’s practice spans drawing, photography, sculpture and video and engages diverse materials, imbued with conceptual underpinnings. She has widely exhibited at institutions across the world such as Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Vancouver Art Gallery; Saatchi Gallery, London; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Casa Asia, Madrid and Barcelona; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; amongst many others. Here, Kallat discusses her practice and experiences of working across cultural boundaries.
11.30AM – 1.00PM Panel 1 – Art in, of, from, South Asia? Artists working across cultures and geographies.
| Moderator: Pedro DE ALMEIDA
| Speakers: Reena KALLAT (India), Ramesh Mario NITHIYENDRAN, Nusra Latif QURESHI, Adeela SULEMAN (Pakistan) and Abdullah M.I SYED
Session supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
| The politics and geography of South Asia are neither neutral or exact. Artists from this region continue to undergo post-colonial cultural and political processes of national building, whereby issues of freedom of speech, national identity-making and economic forces continue to revise and re-invent art making practices and art historical study. Drawing together artists from across Australia and South Asia, this panel discusses artists’ experiences working within and outside South Asian contexts in contemporary art.
1.00PM – 2.30PM Lunch Break/Networking/Parramatta Artist Studios Visit
Thanks to the generous support of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney, lunch will be provided for all registered attendees from 1PM. From 1.30PM, attendees are invited to attend our optional Parramatta Artists Studios tour:
1.30 – 2.30pm: Parramatta Artists Studios: Open Studios
2 Minute Walk from PS1
Level 1 & 2, 68 Macquarie St, Parramatta
Tour and artist talks with Marikit Santiago and Kalanjay Dhir begins at 1.45pm
Meet Parramatta Artists Studios artists and see works in progress from artists working across artistic disciplines. 2017 artists include Khadim Ali, Kate Beckingham, Penelope Cain, Emma Fielden, Annie McKinnon, Salote Tawale, Hannah Toohey, Cigdem Aydemir, Harriet Body, Kalanjay Dhir, Caroline Garcia, Anna McMahon, Marikit Santiago, Shireen Taweel and Garry Trinh.
2.30PM – 3.30PM Focus Presentation
| Speaker: Vidya SHIVADAS (India)
| Vidya Shivadas is the Director of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, and a curator based in New Delhi. After her Bachelors in Sociology from Delhi University and a Masters in Art Criticism from Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda, she joined Vadehra Art Gallery in 2002. She has curated exhibitions at the Gallery which include Something I’ve been meaning to tell you (with Sunil Gupta), April 2011; Faiza Butt, Ruby Chishti, Masooma Syed (three Pakistani women artists), April 2009; Fluid Structures: Gender and Abstraction in India, April 2008; among others. In 2009, she was a guest curator at Devi Art Foundation and worked on the solo exhibition of Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman. In 2007, she was invited to participate in the educational programming for Documenta 12 from May to September 2007 in Kassel, Germany.
3.30PM – 5.00PM Panel 2 – Situating South Asian arts and culture in Australia
| Moderator: Dr Mehreen FARUQI
| Speakers: Sunil BADAMI, Melanie EASTBURN, Amrit GILL, Gary PARAMANATHAN, S. SHAKTHIDHARAN
Through census data, in 2011, close to 1 million Australians identified as of South Asian background. This panel will explore the work of prominent organisations and institutions who have made significant impacts on South Asian art and culture in Australia. Our panelists, with backgrounds encompassing policy-making, community arts, literature and media, will unpack what guides cultural decision making and how these decisions impact history, artistic output and authenticity.
5.00PM – 6.00PM Networking drinks
Thanks to the generous support of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney, drinks will be provided for all registered attendees.
6.00PM – 6.45PM Keynote Presentation
| Speaker: Adeela SULEMAN (Pakistan)
With an introduction from Phillip KEIR. The Keir Foundation has co-commissioned Adeela’s work as part of 4A’s associated exhibition, I don’t want to be there when it happens.
| Internationally regarded artist, coordinator of Vasl Artists’ Collective in Karachi, and Associate Professor and Head of the Fine Art Department at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Adeela Suleman is a force to be reckoned with. In this keynote presentation, Suleman will discuss her experience as an artist, educator in Karachi, Pakistan and the violence and censorship she has encountered in her work.
6.45PM – 7.00PM Questions from the audience and concluding remarks
| Speakers: Distinguished Professor Ien ANG, Western Sydney University, with Adeela SULEMAN (Pakistan)
| Questions from the audience to Adeela Suleman will be moderated by and followed with concluding remarks and thank you from Distinguished Professor Ien Ang, Western Sydney University
SPEAKER LIST
| Professor Ien Ang
| Distinguished Professor Ien Ang is a Professor of Cultural Studies and was the founding Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. She is one of the leaders in cultural studies worldwide, with interdisciplinary work spanning many areas of the humanities and social sciences. Her books, including Watching Dallas, Desperately seeking the audience and On not speaking Chinese, are recognised as classics in the field and her work has been translated into many languages. Her current ARC research project is entitled Sydney’s Chinatown in the Asian Century: from Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub (with Donald McNeill and Kay Anderson in collaboration with the City of Sydney). She currently chairs an Expert Working Group on Asia Literacy: Language and Beyond, for the Australian Council of Learned Academies’ Securing Australia’s Future program. She complted her PhD, 1990, Social and Cultural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, a Doctorandus/Mphil, 1982, Mass Communication, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Kandidaats/BA, 1977, Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
| Sunil Badami
| Sunil Badami is a bon vivant, raconteur and flâneur. He’s also a writer, performer, academic and broadcaster. He’s written for publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, The Australian, The Monthly, The New Daily, The Australian Literary Review, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Art and Australia, Seizure, Southerly, Westerly, Island and Meanjin, and his work has been published in anthologies in Australia and overseas, including in Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Essays. In addition to regularly chairing and hosting launches, events and festivals, he’s appeared on stage at the Sydney and Melbourne Writers’ Festivals and the Belvoir Street and Griffin Theatres. He presented the national ABC Local Radio show Sunday Takeaway, and continues to appear regularly on ABC TV, ABC Local Radio, Double J and Radio National, where his documentary Riddle. Mystery. Enigma was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marulić. He was also the final Grand Champion of the long-running TV quiz show Sale of the Century. He’s currently editing his novel for publication.
| Pedro de Almeida
| Pedro de Almeida has been program manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art since 2012. Pedro’s critical writing on art is published regularly, appearing in ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly Australasia, Broadsheet Journal, LEAP, Photofile and un Magazine among others. He is editor of 4A Papers, a newly established online platform for writing on contemporary art and culture in the Asia Pacific region, and is a member of Broadsheet Journal’s international editorial advisory board. Pedro recently participated in the Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2017, Kolkata, an annual platform for developing and sustaining discourse on curatorial practice and exhibition making through critical discussion and debate.
| Melanie Eastburn
| Melanie Eastburn is Senior Curator of Asian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From 2004 until 2016 she was Curator of Asian art at the National Gallery of Australia. Melanie has also worked at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, 2003-2004, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney 2001-2003. She was closely involved in negotiating the long-term loans to the NGA from the National Museum of Cambodia and has curated a number of exhibitions including: Glorious: earthly pleasures and heavenly realms, AGNSW, from May 2017; Time, light, Japan, AGNSW, December 2016 – May 2017; The story of Rama: Indian miniatures from the National Museum, New Delhi (coordinating curator; curator: Dr Vijay Mathur), NGA, 2015; Divine worlds: Indian painting, NGA, 2012; Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu, NGA, 2007; Fruits: Tokyo street style, Powerhouse Museum, 2002 | Dr Mehreen Faruqi
| Dr Mehreen Faruqi joined the NSW Legislative Council in June 2013 and is the first Muslim woman elected to any Parliament in Australia. Prior to this she was the Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at University of NSW and an Associate Professor in Business and Sustainability. She is a civil and environmental engineer with a PHD in Environmental Engineering. Since migrating from Pakistan to Australia in 1992, with her young family, Mehreen’s work has focused on developing real solutions to social and environmental challenges.
| Amrit Gill
| Amrit Gill is Senior Manager, International Projects at the Australia Council for the Arts. Amrit has over 10 years’ experience in the Australian arts sector in community arts and cultural development, social enterprise, and international cultural relations. At the Australia Council she has managed the review of international residencies programs as well as the implementation of the Council’s first international arts strategy. Prior to joining the Australia Council, Amrit worked at Milk Crate Theatre, the British Council, and Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE). She holds a Bachelor of Art Theory/Arts from the University of New South Wales.
| Devleena Ghosh
| Devleena Ghosh teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She has researched and published widely on the cultural and political relationships between the British colonies of India and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as on coal and climate change in India and Australia. She is the recipient of the WangGung Wu Award for best article (“Burma-Bengal Crossings: Intercolonial Relationships in Pre-Independence India”) in the Asian Studies Review in 2016.
| Professor Paul James
| Professor Paul James is a professor of Globalisation and Cultural Diversity at Western Sydney University, and has been the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society since 2014. He is a social theorist and writes on topics related to globalisation, sustainability, social change and the human condition. Paul James has been an editor and author of roughly thirty books, most importantly he brought out a 16 volume series called ‘Central Currents in Globalization’, which maps all the older disciplnes in the social sciences and humanities. He is the Research Director for the international organisation Global Reconcilliation. He is on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Honary Professor at King’s College London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (London). He is editor of Arena Journal, as well as an editor/board-member of nine other international journals, including Globalizations and Global Governance. He completed his PhD, 1991, Ashworth Social Theory Centre, Department of History and Philosophy Science, University of Melbourne, and his BA (Hons), 1981, Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne.
| Reena Saini Kallat
| Reena Saini Kallat’s (b. 1973, Delhi, India) practice spans drawing, photography, sculpture and video engages diverse materials, imbued with conceptual underpinnings. She has widely exhibited at institutions across the world such as Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Kennedy Centre, Washington; Vancouver Art Gallery; Saatchi Gallery, London; SESC Pompeia and SESC Belenzino, Sao Paulo; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Casa Asia, Madrid and Barcelona; ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; Chicago Cultural Centre amongst many others. Her works are part of several public and private collections including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Initial Access (Frank Cohen Collection), UK; Fondazione Golinelli, Italy; Bhaudaji Lad Museum, Mumbai; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Ermenegildo Zegna Group, Italy and Burger Collection, Hong Kong amongst others.
| Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
| Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (b. 1988 Colombo Sri-Lanka, Australia from 1989) Sri Lankan-born, Sydney-based artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran creates rough-edged, vibrant, new-age idols that are at once enticing and disquieting. He experiments with form and scale in the context of figurative sculpture to explore politics of sex, the monument, gender and religion. Formally trained in painting and drawing his practice has a sculptural emphasis which champions the physicality of art making. He has exhibited at various spaces and contexts including the Art Gallery of South Australia’s flagship exhibition, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and The National: New Australian Art 2017. He has presented solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia, The Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Shepparton Art Museum. In 2014, Nithiyendran was awarded the 2014 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (emerging) administered through Artspace. In 2015, he was the winner of the 2015 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, Australia’s richest and premier award for artists working in the medium of ceramics. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation at the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit. His work is held in various collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, The Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Shepparton Art Museum.
| Gary Paramanathan
| Gary Paramanathan works at the intersection of arts, culture and community. Currently working at AFTRS, he has previously worked at Fairfield City Council, Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) and collaborated with a number of arts and cultural organisations. Gary Paramanathan was born in Sri Lanka. His foray into arts comes after completing a Bachelor of Commerce at The University of Sydney, and finding nothing amusing about a nine to five job. Gary is the founder and director of Colourfest Film Festival (2010-2017). He holds a Masters of International Communication from Macquarie University and also writes for the South Asian Australian blog southerncrossings.com.au. He hopes to please his brown parents someday by making lots of money and procuring a Dr. in front of his name.
| Nusra Latif Qureshi
| Nusra Latif Qureshi – 1973; arrived Melbourne 2001; lives and works Melbourne. Nusra Latif Qureshi trained in Lahore in the Mughal miniature painting tradition and has developed an extraordinary contemporary painting practice that engages with the rich, visual histories of South Asia. Qureshi is recognized as an important member of a generation of Pakistani artists who have revived and innovated the traditional art of Mughal miniature painting. Qureshi lectured at the National School of Art in Lahore from 1995 to 1999, and immigrated to Australia in 2001 to take up postgraduate study. She has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Asia, the United States, Europe and Australia.
| S. Shakthidharan
| Shakthi is the founder and artistic director of Western Sydney arts company CuriousWorks. His current projects are in partnership with, or have appeared at, Sydney Film Festival, Belvoir Theatre and Streaming Museum (New York). Shakthi was Associate Artist at Carriageworks from 2013-2015. In 2015 he was awarded the Phillip Parson’s Playwright Award from Belvoir Theatre and in 2011 the Kirk Robson by Australia Council for the Arts, given to an artist for their work in relation to social justice and community cultural leadership.
| Vidya Shivadas
| Vidya Shivadas is the Director of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, and a curator based in New Delhi. After her Bachelors in Sociology from Delhi University and a Masters in Art Criticism from Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda, she joined Vadehra Art Gallery in 2002. She has curated exhibitions at the Gallery which include Something I’ve been meaning to tell you (with Sunil Gupta), April 2011; Faiza Butt, Ruby Chishti, Masooma Syed (three Pakistani women artists), April 2009; Fluid Structures: Gender and Abstraction in India, April 2008; among others. In 2009, she was a guest curator at Devi Art Foundation and worked on the solo exhibition of Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman. In 2007, she was invited to participate in the educational programming for Documenta 12 from May to September 2007 in Kassel, Germany.
| Adeela Suleman
| Adeela Suleman – Born 1970 in Karachi, Pakistan. Suleman studied Sculpture at the Indus Valley School of Art and completed a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Karachi. She is currently the Coordinator of Vasl Artists’ Collective in Karachi, in addition to being Associate Professor and Head of the Fine Art Department at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Suleman has participated extensively with group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including Phantoms of Asia at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the 2013 Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Hanging Fire – Contemporary Art from Pakistan at The Asia Society, New York; Gallery Rohtas 2, Lahore; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Aicon Gallery, New York; and, the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Bologna, Italy (2008). Reviews and features of work appear in Artforum and the New York Times, among other publications. The artist lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan.
| Dr. Abdullah M.I. Syed
| Dr. Abdullah M.I. Syed – (b. 1974, Karachi Pakistan) is a contemporary artist and designer working between Sydney, Karachi and New York. Trained in diverse disciplines, his art practice weaves religious, cultural and socio-political narratives of east and west, seamlessly knitting together art historical references and concerns from each. Syed holds a PhD in Art, Media and Design (2016) and a Master of Fine Arts (2009) from University of New South Wales, Sydney. Syed’s works have been featured in nine solo exhibitions and several national and international curated group exhibitions.
| Dr. Mikala Tai
| Mikala Tai is a curator, researcher and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art and Australian design, who over the past decade has collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Mikala currently sits on the board of BUS Projects, Melbourne. She is on the Chinese New Year Festival Advisory Panel, and is an Editorial Advisor for UnMagazine as well as a seasonal lecturer and tutor at The University of Melbourne. In 2006 Mikala completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Melbourne and in early 2015 submitted her PhD at UNSW Art & Design examining the influence of the Global City on China’s local art infrastructure.
When South Is North would not be possible without the support of our project partners:
When South is North: Contemporary Art and Culture in South Asia and Australia was a one-day symposium produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in association with the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Presented at 1 Parramatta Square, Western Sydney University campus, Parramatta, on 16 August 2017. The symposium was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Adeela Suleman’s participation in this symposium and 4A exhibition I don’t want to be there when it happens was supported by co-commissioning partner The Keir Foundation with further assistance from Sherman Foundation.
Symposium Documentation All images: 4A’s Kai Wasikowski
Prof. Paul JAMES, Western Sydney University, Director, Institute of Society and Culture
Dr. Mikala TAI, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Associate Professor Devleena GHOSH
Reena KALLAT (India)
Reena KALLAT (India)
Panel 1 – Art in, of, from, South Asia? Artists working across cultures and geographies. | Moderator: Pedro DE ALMEIDA | Speakers: Reena KALLAT (India), Ramesh Mario NITHIYENDRAN, Nusra Latif QURESHI, Adeela SULEMAN (Pakistan) and Abdullah M.I SYED
Marikit Santiago in her studio at Parramatta Artist Studios. Visit as part of When South Is North.
Kalanjay Dhir in his studio at Parramatta Artist Studios. Visit as part of When South Is North.
Vidya SHIVADAS (India)
Vidya SHIVADAS (India)
Panel 2 – Situating South Asian arts and culture in Australia | Moderator: Dr Mehreen FARUQI | Speakers: Sunil BADAMI, Melanie EASTBURN, Amrit GILL, Gary PARAMANATHAN, S. SHAKTHIDHARAN
Panel 2 – Situating South Asian arts and culture in Australia | Moderator: Dr Mehreen FARUQI | Speakers: Sunil BADAMI, Melanie EASTBURN, Amrit GILL, Gary PARAMANATHAN, S. SHAKTHIDHARAN
I don’t want to be there when it happens brings together artists who explore the psychology of contemporary trauma. Recent works by Raj Kumar, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth and Adeela Suleman all confront the larger socio-political realities of Pakistan in the era of contemporary warfare. Through video and installation, the artists address the experience of the individual in the midst of a continuous state of war. By scanning the landscape with nonsensical logic, futilely seeking to document destruction, and questioning the appropriation of religion, the artworks in the exhibition avoid resolution and closure. Instead, they highlight the individual’s inability to comprehend the expansive uncertainty of combat, and the impossibilities of representing the trauma of conflict.
I don’t want to be there when it happens presents truth as a precarious oscillation between fiction and reality. The artists resist literal or documentary approaches to their subjects, relying instead on speculative, symbolic, ambiguous and unstable modes of representation. In doing so, they emphasise how the individual’s attempts to understand and comprehend the reality of contemporary conflict are equally characterised by uncertainty and irresolvability. I don’t want to be there when it happens also seeks to acknowledge and present a multiplicity of perspectives on the ongoing conflicts in Pakistan and its region—perspectives which are all too easily overlooked or obscured by Western media and political interests.
Curated by Kate Warren and Mikala Tai.
Image: Adeela Suleman (2017) I don’t want to be there when it happens. Courtesy the artist.
Adeela Suleman’s work to be shown in I don’t want to be there when it happens has been co-commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and The Keir Foundation.
In partnership with Feminist South, 4A is pleased to host the monthly Feminist South reading group on the last Thursday of the month. This reading group is Phase 1 of the Feminist South research and curatorial project led by Kelly Doley and i:project space, Beijing.
Feminist South is a curatorial project and research platform spanning across 2017-2019 that aims to generate critical dialogue around contemporary feminist performance practice in the context of the Asia Pacific.
Rather than attempting to fit Western feminist theories and movements onto the multiplicities that make up practice in the Asia Pacific, the project seeks to create its own terms of reference in order to decentre and disrupt the conventional understandings of feminist art and create new narratives for practices that are located in the here and now.
All welcome, please join the discussion. Email kellydoley@gmail.com to join the Feminist South mailing list and RSVP.
The Feminist South reading for June is: Introduction and Chapter One, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, Edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, Columbia 2013
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-birth-of-chinese-feminism/9780231162906 If you cannot get a copy yourself please get in touch. June’s Feminist South session will start with a quick discussion of the May text that we missed having a group chat about, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman : Aboriginal Women and Feminism, 2000.
Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far is the first survey exhibition of one of the preeminent Vietnamese-Australian artists working today. Presenting a selection of works spanning three decades by a founding artist member of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Dacchi Dang is principally concerned with articulating the complex nature of diasporic experience and an ongoing redefinition of ideas of place and of home. With a focus on the artist’s work across photography, printmaking, video and installation, An Omen Near and Far signals the central importance of art in coming to terms with the contingencies of the past and of the present.
Born in Saigon and having experienced the latter years of the Vietnam War before fleeing his homeland on a boat to be eventually accepted as a refugee in Australia, Dacchi Dang’s life and art is deeply informed by this trauma, loss and an ongoing search for belonging. An Omen Near and Far unveils a new installation work commissioned by 4A that employs photography and wax that burns and melts over the duration of the exhibition. Informed by a recent 2017 trip to Vietnam, this new work is conceptually connected to an earlier, ephemeral sculpture and performance originally staged as Upstairs/downstairs at Sydney’s National Art School in 1994. This latter work – ghostly documentation of which is included in the survey – saw Dang burn a wax sculpture imprinted with photographic imagery recorded by the artist in Vietnam in that same year, his first visit to his country of birth since arriving in Australia in 1982.
Dacchi Dang’s dislocating experience of returning to Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese district and where he grew up, and extended family members in Bến Tre province in the Mekong Delta, prompted him to photograph the people and landscapes of Vietnam voraciously. Having shot over 100 rolls of black-and-white film on his Hasselblad, Dang’s photographic archive of daily life in urban and rural Vietnam documents a time concurrent with the momentous historic occasion of the lifting of the trade embargo between the U.S. and the Republic of Vietnam that had been in place since the end of military conflict in 1975. Dang’s source imagery – now a time capsule of the developing nation in flux– resulted in a highly productive period of experimentation. Spectacle I (1996) and Spectacle II (1996), a suite of monochromatic photogravure prints and their corresponding gold plates, present intimate portraits of ordinary Vietnamese and montaged street scenes tempered by an uneasy balance between empathy and distance.
In addition to series of works over the past decades that explore landscapes as colonised and contested forms of cultural memory, from Paris to Peel Island in Queensland’s Moreton Bay, An Omen Near and Far offers a selection of historical material from the archives of both the artist and 4A: photographic proof sheets, exhibition ephemera, reviews, interviews and critical texts. This includes documentation of Dang’s seminal solo exhibition, The Boat, presented at 4A in 2001, a milestone in the development of wider public reception and understanding of art from Asian-Australian perspectives. The Boat garnered strong community responses, opening up dialogue by addressing the profound perils of seeking asylum while prompting a critical consideration of Australia’s changing treatment of refugees.
Accompanying the exhibition, 4A will host a panel discussion that will offer insights into the historical research and creative development currently being undertaken by Dacchi Dang for the Australian War Memorial’s Gillespie Bequest commission of a new body of work due for completion over 2017–2018. Exploring the experiences of Australian and Vietnamese–Australians military veterans of the Vietnam War, and engaging with the Memorial’s extensive collection and archives, Dang’s commission represents the first such instance to form part of the national institution’s art collection.
Dacchi Dang (b. Saigon, Vietnam, 1966) is an artist who lives and works in Sydney. He is a founding artist member of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Dang was born to a Chinese father and Vietnamese mother, and at the age of sixteen fled Vietnam with his brother and sister on a fishing boat. After a traumatic sea voyage the boat arrived on Malaysian shores where Dang was transported to the refugee camp of Pulau Bidong. Following nine months at the camp, he was transported to Kuala Lumpur where he was accepted as a Vietnamese refugee by Australia in late 1982.
Dacchi Dang works primarily with photography and printmaking, in various forms and processes, and also video and installation. His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally since the early 1990s. Solo exhibitions include Full Circle (2009), Metro Arts Gallery, Brisbane; Liminal (2006-2008), Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Spectacle I (1996), Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney; Spectacle II, Stills Gallery, Sydney. Group exhibitions include DDESSIN [14] (2014), Paris Contemporary Drawing Fair, Atelier Richelieu; Crossing Boundaries (2014), Sydney Town Hall; Edge of Elsewhere (2010-2012), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; Planet Ueno (2008); Taito Community Museum, Tokyo; Re-StArt (2008), 733 Art Factory, Chengdu; and News From Islands (2007), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1991) and a Master of Arts (1996) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney; Graduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management (2000) and Graduate Certificate of Applied Science in Cultural Heritage Studies specialising in Photography (2003) from University of Canberra; and a Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Arts) from Queensland College of the Arts, Griffith University, Brisbane (2013). Dang has undertaken numerous artist in residence programs including at Bundanon Trust (2001), Hill End (2001); Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2003) and Tokyo University of the Arts Geidai (2008). His work is held in public and private collections in Australia, France, China and Hong Kong. Over 2015-2018 Dang is producing new works commissioned by the Australian War Memorial Gillespie Bequest that explore the wartime experience of Vietnamese–Australians and its legacy today.
Exhibition Documentation All images: Document Photography
‘Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far’ installation view, 4A Centre For Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artists.
‘Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far’ installation view, 4A Centre For Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artists.
Dacchi Dang, Liminal, (2005) installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Dacchi Dang: Artist book, 2001, cyanotype on paper, bound with hand-stitch, 35 pages. Courtesy the artist and Bundanon Trust
collection, New South Wales.
Daachi Dang, Spectacle I (1996), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Clockwise from left: Daachi Dang, Spectacle I, 1996, gold plates. Courtesy the artist; Daachi Dang, Untitled (from the series
Spectacle II), 1996, photogravure. Courtesy the artist and Horsham Regional Art Gallery Collection, Victoria, purchased through
the Horsham Art Gallery Trust Fund with assistance from the Victorian Public Galleries Foundation, 1998.
‘Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far’ installation view, 4A Centre For Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artists.
Three images above – Exhibition Opening, 9 June 2017. Performance stills: Dacchi Dang, Et in Arcadia Ego, 2017, installation with wax, photographs, bamboo leaves, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Courtesy the artist.
OCT 4 – 15 – MPavilion as part of Melbourne Festival
Program venue:
MPavilion
Queen Victoria Gardens, St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC 3004
Progress: The Game of Leaders can be played:
Wednesday 4 October – 9AM – 12PM
Daily, Thursday 5 October – Sunday 15 October – 9AM – 4PM
Where will you be standing when the First World falls?
Like a giant round of Jenga with Western civilisation as the stakes, Progress: The Game of Leaders invites you to take on the role of building a country. What blocks will you favour: economic progress or military spending? Higher standards of living or increasing globalisation? As players jockey for top position in the imaginary nation’s guidance, the structure grows more precarious and its foundations grow ever more compromised. The game can only end one way.
Singaporean artist Sam Lo’s Progress: The Game of Leaders is a playful and interactive allegory that asks what is put in peril by the unfettered progress of the First World, and is a refreshing take on world politics for a time that sorely needs it.
SamLo (b. 1986), also known by the monikerSKL0, is a Singaporean contemporary artist whose work is heavily inspired by daily observations and research on the sociopolitical climate from which she executes through visual commentary comprising of text and imagery. The end results birth new meanings, lent to existing situations by incorporating ideas, messages and emotions with familiar visual codes into urban situations in hopes of creating experiences to invoke critical thought on the viewer’s everyday life.
Exhibitions include solo shows at One East Asia Gallery (Singapore, 2017) and at The Substation (Singapore, 2015), as well as showcases like The Affordable Art Fair (Singapore 2013) and Georgetown Festival (Penang, Malaysia 2014). The artist has also released a book titled ‘Greetings From Singapore‘ and recently completed a residency in Delhi with ST+Art Foundation involving The Singapore High Commission and Singapore Tourism Board.
Sam is also founder of the creative platforms Project XIV and INDIGOISM.
SYDNEY – 12PM – 2PM Saturday 1 July 2017
Departing: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket, NSW.
Join 4A’s Pedro de Almeida, for a lunchtime tour of Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far and get a taste of Haymarket with lunchtime congee, and an opportunity to meet artist Dacchi Dang and see his performance Et in Arcadia Ego.
Places for this special tour are limited and this event is presented as part of our June exhibition, Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far.
Congee and associated snacks are included in your ticket price.
Our Issue: Curatorial actions shaping a discourse about Asia from Asia
4A is pleased to host the Sydney launch of Anabelle Lacroix’s recent publication at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
5.30PM, Thursday May 25 2017, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. 181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket, Sydney
The publication will be launched by writer and curator Anabelle Lacroix in conversation with Luise Guest from White Rabbit.
About Our Issue:
After several continuous waves of European, Japanese and Chinese colonisation, Taiwan is now seeking to create a clear political and cultural identity of its own. Informed by its unique history Taiwan is home to a thriving and engaged contemporary art scene that is increasingly active. Our Issue is a new publication that captures a growing section of Taiwanese contemporary art.
In 2016 Taiwan has three major biennales running concurrently and a host of other cultural events offering a plethora of diverse contemporary offerings. It brought to the fore the strengthening of a discourse about ‘Asia from Asia’—from within, as opposed to a Western one—with ideas of decolonisation and ‘de-cold War’ at its centre. This essay sheds light, and discusses the growth of curatorial projects from within Asia that seek to profile a shifting discourse in the region. Examining major biennales, museum exhibitions as well as independent spaces and artist-run initiatives, Lacroix’s new publication considers emerging perspectives of contemporary Asian art in Taiwan.
This bilingual English – Chinese publication was published by the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts following Anabelle Lacroix’s curatorial residency at the museum. This residency is a reciprocal exchange between RMIT University and Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA).
Biographies:
Anabelle Lacroix is a curator based in Melbourne, currently working as a research assistant at the VCA, University of Melbourne on a project on Artist Run Initiatives in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, and produces the visual arts program of the Melbourne Festival. Prior to her Taipei residency she took part in the 2016 4A Curators’ Intensive, and is now co-curating an upcoming 2017 Liquid Architecture project in Taiwan.
Luise Guest is Director of Education and Research for the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art. With a background in art education and freelance writing focused on China, Luise’s art writing has been published in a range of online and print journals. Her book, ‘Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China’ was published by Piper Press in 2016, and she curated exhibitions in Hong Kong and Beijing to coincide with its launch in China. Luise’s current research focuses on contemporary female artists who subvert the conventions of ink painting and calligraphy. She blogs at www.anartteacherinchina.blogspot.com
This launch is held in conjunction with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Australian premier screenings of He Xiangyu’s The Swim which will begin at 6.3opm. You are welcome to attend.
4A invites interested applicants to join us on May 25 in Sydney to meet with 4A staff to learn more about the 4A Emerging Writers’ Program, and ask any questions you may have about the Program.
Applications are now open and close 5.00PM Friday 30 June 2017.
Sydney Info Night with 4A Papers Editor Pedro de Almeida- RSVP here.
Guest Speaker: 2016 Emerging Writer Minerva Inwald
5.30PM – 6.30PM, Friday 25 May
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St Haymarket, Sydney.
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program is open to Australian students currently undertaking a degree at honours or postgraduate level in art, history or related fields of study at an Australian tertiary institution. This program will be rigorous and is specifically designed for tertiary students with a keen interest in fieldwork research in art and culture, and someone who can demonstrate a flair and passion for writing.
The selected writer will undertake a one-week research trip to a Pacific nation in September 2017. Facilitated by 4A and its networks, the writer will be asked to conceive and deliver two writing outcomes for publication in 4A Papers and Program supporter Art Monthly Australasia. This may include a critical essay, historical research, interview, review, profile, or feature with accompanying online audio-visual content.
The writer will be supported by the team at 4A and in particular by Pedro de Almeida, Editor, 4A Papers and Michael Fitzgerald, Editor, Art Monthly Australasia.
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program has been developed as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s broader professional development program for early career arts professionals. Together with the annual 4A Beijing Studio Program and the biannual 4A Curators’ Intensive, the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program supports emerging Australian talent to work within the Asia-Pacific region.
Applications will be assessed by a panel and the selected writer notified within two weeks following the submission deadline.
If you have any questions in relation to the program or how to apply please contact Pedro de Almeida on (02) 9212 0380 or pedro.de-almeida@4a.com.au
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program is supported by Art Monthly Australasia.
Artists: Shumon Ahmed, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Bashir Makhoul, Veer Munshi, Shireen Taweel and Curtis Taylor.
The reconciliation between memory and reality plagues the act of returning. There is no resolution between the two. Memories are etched into the psyche hinged on topographical monuments, whispered words and subconscious everyday patterns while reality erases such symbology through the passing of time. Familiar Stranger examines this third, non-existent space that plagues the returnee as they seek to retrace their memories in places that have been rebuilt or reinscribed. With familiarity reduced to invisible archaeological sites the returnee searches for recognition and legitimacy in a now unacquainted geography.
The exhibiting artists examine the negation and erasure of familiarity by presenting place as a space defined by uncertainty. There is a continue shift between points of view that begets the collapse of spatial certainty and becomes defined by its own instability. For the migrant the idea of returning becomes an implicit part of their identity; the constant oscillation between the possibility and impossibility of return a daily taunt. In Familiar Stranger the moment of return is the focal point where, for some, it is a wistful hope and for others a violent decimation of expectancy. Resisting melodrama, the artists turn to the familial archive and the personal memorial to bring form to the constant internal struggle between what is and what was.
About the artists:
Bashir Makhoul (b. 1963, Galilee, Palestine, lives and works in Birmingham, United Kingdom) is a Palestinian artist born in Galilee in 1963. He has been based in the United Kingdom for the past 22 years. During this time he has produced a body of work, based on repeated motifs, which can be characterized by their power of aesthetic seduction. Once drawn into the work however, viewers find themselves engaged with something far more complicated than a beautiful pattern. Economics, nationalism, war and torture are frequently woven into the layers of Makhoul’s work and often the more explicit the material, the more seductive the surface.
Makhoul completed his PhD in 1995 at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. He has exhibited his work widely in Britain and internationally, including the Hayward Gallery, London, Tate Liverpool, Harris Museum, Preston, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, the Liverpool Biennial, Jordan National Museum, NCA Gallery Lahore Pakistan, the Florence Biennial, Haus am Lutzowplatz Berlin, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia, Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York, Changshu Art Museum, Suzhou Art Museum, Shenzhen Art Museum in China, 798 Yang Gallery Beijing and many others. In 2013, he presented his work at the Venice Biennial in Italy and Aichi Biennial in Japan. He will show at the Asian Triennial in Manchester UK in 2014.
Curtis Taylor (b. Broome, Western Australia, Australia, lives and works in Perth, Australia) is a filmmaker, screen artist, actor and a young Martu leader. Growing up in remote Martu desert communities and in the city, Curtis has both traditional Martu knowledge and a non-Aboriginal education. After finishing school in 2008 Curtis worked as Community Coordinator and Youth Development Officer at Martu Media (a division of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa), where he also spent 18 months working on the major Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route project as a filmmaker and youth ambassador. Curtis was the recipient of the 2011 Western Australian Youth Art Award and Wesfarmers Youth Scholarship. His screen work including the acclaimed short film ‘Mamu’ has been shown in international film festivals from Brazil to Nepal. Curtis has almost completed his film and media studies at Murdoch University. He was the Director’s Attachment and is the Narrator of ‘Collisions’.
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan ( b. 1990, Hong Kong, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) is a multidisciplinary artist who works across sound, performance and installation. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Sydney, she is interested in duality, diaspora and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society. Chan often evokes traditional Chinese methods or styles and represents them in uncanny ways. Her research engages with the authentic and the copy, exploring sites of exchange and desire which complicate Western notions of originality and “appropriate” consumption.
Central to Chan’s work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global media. Her work positions the fake as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values and contemporary commodity production. Sustained by a parasitic relationship to the original, the counterfeit interacts with the world in unpredictable ways. Chan investigates how these mimetic symbols, such as bootlegs or fake luxury goods, problematise the socially-regulated impulse of consumerist desire.
Tying together her works across installation and pop music is the relationship between nostalgia, migration and identity. Since winning FBi Radio’s Northern Lights Competition in 2011, Chan has been building a reputation as one of the most innovative artists in Australia with her highly personal, experimental pop music. She recently released her debut album Spacings (Silo Arts & Records) which was met with critical acclaim, handpicked as the feature album on FBi Radio, Radio Adelaide, RTRFM and scoring 4 stars from Rolling Stone. Under her techno project, Chunyin, Chan released Code Switch EP on UK label, Off Out, in September.
Chan has performed extensively with notable performances at the Sydney Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Iceland Airwaves Festival. She has exhibited works at Firstdraft Gallery, Liquid Architecture and Squiggle Space. In October 2016, she was invited by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to participate in the inaugural Longli International New Media Arts Festival in Guizhou Province, China. Chan has collaborated with choreographer Ivey Wawn for Out of The Studio, presented by DirtyFeet, and soundtracked ABC web-series The Glass Bedroom, directed by Kate Blackmore.
Shumon Ahmed (b. 1977, Bangladesh, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a Dhaka-based poet and an artist who explores the fusion between video, photography, Sound, text and performance, creating stories that while seemingly contradictory, are private yet collective. His work with the camera and film has also been likened to abstract painting due to his experimental processing techniques with unpredictable results that yield the melancholic.
Ahmed studied photography at the South Asian Media Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2006- 2009) & at The Danish school of Media and Journalism, Arhus, Denmark (2008).
His work has been previously exhibited in various galleries, festivals and screenings around the world including the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2012, 2014, 2016), Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2010), Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland (2010), Art science museum, Singapore (2016), Krinzinger Projekete, Austria (2016) and a recent solo exhibition at Project88, Mumbai, India (2015).
In April, Shumon will take part in Familiar Stranger, a group exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Veer Munshi (b. 1955, Kashmir, India, lives and works in Dehli, India), a Kashmiri artist who now lives in Delhi has consistently used his art to reflect his anguish at the situation in his home state, his pain and struggle spilling over onto his canvass. Making a human rights statement rather than a political one, he has constantly sought to highlight the turmoil that comes with his separation from his heritage, and to highlight the increasingly the narrow space that exists for culture and art in his state. He is also convinced that art. Because of its universal nature, can play a significant role in the resolution of the Kashmir situation. Unlike other contemporary artists, though, viewing pleasure is no motivator for veer in the creation of his art,rather it is about sharing a personally-felt experience as a ‘refugee’. His paintings and installations reflect a Kashmir that is in the context of the Kashmir.
Shireen Taweel (b. 1990, Bankstown, New South Wales, Australia, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is currently practicing at the Parramatta Artist Studios in Sydney. Much of Taweel’s practice is informed by her identity connected to the Middle East as her heritage further inspires her creative exploration through the refined processes in metallurgy. The nature of the relationship of her forms sit in a space between jewellery and sculpture, where her techniques of making takes the traditional art of copper-smithing into a contemporary context.
The works partake in a cross-cultural discourse, while the sense of the arcane and shifted structures opens dialogue between shared histories and relations between communities of fluid identities.
Taweel is a current Kickstart Helix Next Wave participant. Her recent solo shows include fractured//fluid terrains at SEVENTH Gallery, Melbourne (2017), translated roots at Verge Gallery, Sydney (2017) tomorrow, InshAllah at 55 Sydenham RD Marrickville, Sydney (2016) rhythms of the ritualistic at Gaffa Gallery, Sydney (2016) and promised denial at 146 ArtSpace, Hobart (2016). Taweel is also a nominee of The Jameel Art Prize (2018) at Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Exhibition Documentation All images: Document Photography
Left: Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Bashir Makhoul, Wounds, 2007 – 2008, lenticular print, 400 x 200cm. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography. Right: Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian
Art: Veer Munshi, Leaves like hands of flame, 2010 – 2012, two channel video, 5: 32. Courtesy the artist and Latitude 28, New
Delhi, India.
Left: Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Shumon Ahmed, What I have forgotten could fill an ocean, what is not real never lived, 2013, polaroid photographs, analogue phone set, original sarod score composed by Yusuf Khan and poetry recited by Nader Salam, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh & Project88, Mumbai, India. Image: Document Photography Right: Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Bashir Makhoul, Wounds, 2007 – 2008, lenticular print, 400 x 200cm. Courtesy the artist.
Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Shumon Ahmed, What I have forgotten could fill an ocean, what is not real never lived, 2013, polaroid photographs, analogue phone set, original sarod score composed by Yusuf Khan and poetry
recited by Nader Salam, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh & Project88,
Mumbai, India.
Right: Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Shireen Taweel, Al Nahas, 2015, etched copper, 90 x 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist. Shireen Taweel, Al Nahas, 2015, etched copper, 100 x 90 x 40. Courtesy the artist. Left: Installation view,
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Curtis Taylor works as below. Curtis Taylor, Karlaya, 2014, video, 23 seconds.
Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Marlu, 2014, video, 42 seconds. Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Marrka Marrka – Mirage, 2017,
red dirt and animated projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Parnajarrpa, 2014, video, 29 seconds.
Courtesy the artist.
Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art: Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然), To enclose one’s mouth, 2017, ink,
silk, wood, video loop, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Left: Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Curtis Taylor works as below. Curtis Taylor, Karlaya, 2014,
video, 23 seconds. Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Marlu, 2014, video, 42 seconds. Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Marrka
Marrka – Mirage, 2017, red dirt and animated projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Curtis Taylor, Parnajarrpa,
2014, video, 29 seconds. Courtesy the artist. Image, Document Photography. Right: Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary
Asian Art: Shireen Taweel, Dome, 2015, etched copper, 90 x 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist. Image, Document Photography. And
Shireen Taweel, Sophia, 2015, etched copper, 90 x 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Join 4A for an artist-led exhibition tour of Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far followed by a panel discussion centred on Dacchi Dang’s current production of a new body of work commissioned by the Australian War Memorial.
Showcasing work spanning three decades, Dacchi Dang: An Omen Near and Far is the first survey exhibition of one of the preeminent Vietnamese-Australian artists working today. Dang will lead a tour of the exhibition, offering insights into the evolution of his practice across photography, printmaking, and video, and discuss the development of his new installation work, specially commissioned by 4A for the exhibition, that has arisen from research undertaken during a return to Vietnam in 2017.
Following the tour, 4A hosts a panel discussion between the artist, Dr Anthea Gunn, Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial, and 4A Program Manager Pedro de Almeida centred upon Dacchi’s creation of a new body of work for the Australian War Memorial’s Gillespie Bequest commission (2016-2018).
In 2012 a bequest was left to the Australian War Memorial by the retired Major John Milton Gillespie, a Vietnam veteran and immigration consultant. In recognition of both this significant gift and Mr Gillespie’s life and work, the Memorial decided to use the bequest to commission work that explores the wartime experience of Vietnamese–Australians and its legacy today. Engaging Australian and Vietnamese–Australians military veterans of the Vietnam War – whom the artist has recorded interviews with around Australia – and engaging with the Memorial’s extensive collection and archives, Dang’s nationally significant commission will represent the first contribution from a Vietnamese–Australian artist to the Memorial’s art collection.
The exhibition tour led by Dacchi Dang will run for 30 minutes from 11.00am – 11.30am, followed by a 60-minute panel discussion from 11.30am – 12.30pm allowing time for audience questions.
‘Feminism is a Western Concept: a reading group’ 6.00PM – 7.30PM, Thursday 27 April 2017
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Haymarket NSW
From April, in partnership with Feminist South, 4A will host a a monthly Feminist South reading group on the last Thursday of the month beginning 27 April. This reading group is Phase 1 of the Feminist South research and curatorial project led by Kelly Doley and i:project space, Beijing.
Feminist South is a curatorial project and research platform spanning across 2017-2019 that aims to generate critical dialogue around contemporary feminist performance practice in the context of the Asia Pacific.
Rather than attempting to fit Western feminist theories and movements onto the multiplicities that make up practice in the Asia Pacific, the project seeks to create its own terms of reference in order to decentre and disrupt the conventional understandings of feminist art and create new narratives for practices that are located in the here and now.
All welcome, please join the discussion.
Readings for April are:
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggle,” in her Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp.221-251
Maura Reilly, “Introduction: Toward Transnational Feminisms,” Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (London/New York: Merrell, 2007), pp. 14–45.
Participants will be provided with reading links upon RSVP.
As part of the public program for Familiar Stranger, you are invited to join us for weekly Cantonese language classes on Thursday nights for the duration of the exhibition.
With a curriculum curated by Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, join us for these one-hour classes to either refresh or learn new language skills and gain a further insight into Chan’s work.
4A is pleased to announce that the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program 2017 program recipient is Mitana Arbon, current Honours student in Asian Studies at ANU. Mitiana will be travelling to Samoa in late 2017 to undertake research and build engagement with local artistic communities in Upolu and Savai’i.
Mitiana Arbon is an Honours student at the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. His research thesis examines how institutions curate and articulate an understanding of the Pacific as a cohesive art region through art. It draws upon a case study of the Pacific Collection at the National Gallery of Australia examining how its narrow curatorial focus on ‘traditional’ art pieces as reflective of Pacific Cultures, has limited a broader creative and aesthetic understanding of the current reality of multi-sited and diverse contemporary community practices.
Mitiana has a wide range of creative and personal interests in the Pacific region that stems from his dual academic engagement with the Pacific and his Samoan family, from the village of Tafua tai, Savai’i. He is also a Research Officer on Labour Mobility and Migration at the Development Policy Centre and an avid blogger on Pacific topics. His research interests include contemporary regional issues of development, politics, social change and heritage management.
4A Program Manager and Editor of the 4A Papers, Pedro de Almeida says,
“In its second year, 4A’s Emerging Writer’s Program attracted applicants from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. This year the Program was offered to emerging writers who are also current tertiary students at honours and postgraduate level. Additionally, in 2017 4A decided to put a focus on facilitating writers’ engagement with Pacific nations, cultures and artists. Applicants came from a variety of research areas including arts, art history, curatorial studies and Asian studies. 4A was impressed that the majority of the applicants had demonstrated a keen interest in and knowledge of the region, proposing fieldwork in Hawai’i, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu with subjects ranging from the development of private collections and museums to the visual culture that emanates from Vanuatu’s reggae music scene.”
2017 Emerging Writer’s Program judge Lisa McDonald (Associate Curator, Human History (Maori and Pacific) at Canterbury Museum and Adjunct Fellow with the School of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Canterbury) said:
“Mitiana’s project reflects his deep commitment to the field of Pacific studies. His proposal was of the highest merit and clearly demonstrated his academic engagement with current research methodologies. Privileging the agency of indigenous artists based in Samoa, his project will no doubt provide insightful analysis of the creative practices of contemporary makers. I congratulate Mitiana on his award and wish him every future success in both his professional and personal pursuits.”
Art Monthly Australasia Editor and 2017 Emerging Writer’s Program judge, Micheal Fitzgerald, said:
“Art Monthly Australasia is excited to be involved again with the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program, inaugurated last year with the ‘Sea Pearl White Cloud’ project in Guangzhou, and commends this year’s initiative in sending an emerging writer into the Pacific. Mitiana’s winning submission to conduct research with a number of contemporary artists based in Samoa was a stand-out proposal and promises to deepen this important new engagement with the region.”
About the judging panel:
Michael Fitzgerald was the arts editor for the South Pacific edition of Time magazine (1997-2007) before becoming managing editor of Art & Australia (2008-12) and helping relaunch Photofile magazine for the Australian Centre for Photography in 2013. He has been editor of Art Monthly Australasia since 2014.
Dr Lisa McDonald is Associate Curator, Human History (Maori and Pacific) at Canterbury Museum and Adjunct Fellow with the School of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Her research focuses on contemporary art from Melanesia, with emphasis on makers based in Port Vila and Port Moresby.
Pedro de Almeida is an arts manager, curator and writer, joining 4A as Program Manager in 2012. Over the past decade he has developed and delivered a broad range of artistic and cultural projects in partnership with local and international organisations that have been distinguished by their engagement with culturally and socially diverse artists, communities and audiences.
ABOUT THE 4A EMERGING WRITER’S PROGRAM
DEADLINE: Friday 30 June 2017
TRAVEL DATES: September 2017
Following the inaugural offering in 2016, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program that will support an emerging Australian writer to travel to the Pacific in September 2017 to realise two publication outcomes.
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program is open to Australian students currently undertaking a degree at honours or postgraduate level in art, history or related fields of study at an Australian tertiary institution. This program will be rigorous and is specifically designed for tertiary students with a keen interest in fieldwork research in art and culture, and someone who can demonstrate a flair and passion for writing.
The selected writer will undertake a one-week research trip to a Pacific nation in September 2017. Facilitated by 4A and its networks, the writer will be asked to conceive and deliver two writing outcomes for publication in 4A Papers and Program supporter Art Monthly Australasia. This may include a critical essay, historical research, interview, review, profile, or feature with accompanying online audio-visual content.
The writer will be supported by the team at 4A and in particular by Pedro de Almeida, Editor, 4A Papers and Michael Fitzgerald, Editor, Art Monthly Australasia.
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program has been developed as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s broader professional development program for early career arts professionals. Together with the annual 4A Beijing Studio Program and the biannual 4A Curators’ Intensive, the 4A Emerging Writer’s Program supports emerging Australian talent to work within the Asia-Pacific region.
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program has been made possible with the support of 4A Patrons Richard Funston & Kiong Lee.
KEY DATES
Applications open: Monday 3 April 2017
Sydney Info Night: Friday 26 May 2017 – RSVP here.
Applications close: Friday 30 June 2017 (5.00pm)
Samoa travel dates: September 2017
(exact dates of one-week itinerary to be determined in consultation with 4A).
APPLICATION GUIDELINES
The selected writer must be:
Over the age of 18 years.
An Australian citizen or permanent resident who is enrolled in a degree at honours or postgraduate level in art, history or related fields of study at an Australian tertiary institution at the time of application.
The definition of “emerging” is a writer who has not previously published more than 12 texts in any subject, in print or online (blogs or self-published platforms excluded).
4A will provide the selected writer with:
Return airfare from the recipient’s nearest state capital city to chosen Pacific nation.
Accommodation, per diems and travel insurance for the period of the trip.
An honourarium.
To apply, submit a single PDF document including:
A Cover Page with your name, address, phone number, email address and evidence of current tertiary enrolment (student ID card or similar).
A Letter of Intent addressing your interest in participating in the Program, articulating your specific area of interest in the Pacific and which nation you propose to travel to; how it will be beneficial to you; and how it will contribute to the development of your research and writing practice. Maximum one page.
A Statement that outlines your current writing or research focuses and interests. Maximum one page.
A CV illustrating relevant study and work experience, previously published texts, personal projects and achievements. Maximum one page.
A Writing Sample of up to 1,000 words (this can be unpublished and preferably in a professional writing style rather than academic in tone).
A Proposed Collection of Writings that you would produce as part of this project. Maximum one page.
Shortlisted writers will be asked to provide evidence of Australian permanent residency status, current enrolment at honours or postgraduate level at an Australian tertiary institution, and date of birth.
Applications should be submitted via email, post or in person to:
Pedro de Almeida
Program Manager / Editor, 4A Papers
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
In person: 181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket, NSW 2000
Applications were assessed by a panel and the selected writer notified within two weeks following the submission deadline.
If you have any questions in relation to the program or how to apply please contact Pedro de Almeida on (02) 9212 0380 or pedro.de-almeida@4a.com.au
The 4A Emerging Writer’s Program is supported by Art Monthly Australasia, and made possible with the generous support of 4A Patrons Richard Funston & Kiong Lee.
Image: Observation Society from the street during the install of Sea Pearl White Cloud, part of the 2016 4A Emerging Writers Program, May 2016. Photo: Pedro de Almeida.
Over two weeks spanning late May and early June 2016, Minerva Inwald, 4A’s 2016 Emerging Writers Program participant, traveled to Guangzhou, China, to experience the lead up to Sea Pearl White Cloud 海珠白雲, a collaborative two-stage exhibition project produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and local independent contemporary art space, Observation Society, that saw presentations in Guangzhou and Sydney. Sea Pearl White Cloud presented new works by Australian artist Lucas Ihlein and Hong Kong-based artist Trevor Yeung that are informed by questions of temporality, exchange and poetics while reflecting on the urban condition in the twenty-first century. Read her piece for the 4A Papers here.
Applications have now closed for the 2017 edition of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s annual Beijing Studio Program.
DEADLINE: 5PM, Monday May 8 2017
TRAVEL DATES: Tuesday, 12 September – Friday, 13 October, 2017
The program allows three early career artists will undertake a one month-long intensive studio program throughout September 2017 at the studios of internationally renowned Chinese-Australian, artist Shen Shaomin located in Huairou District on the outskirts of Beijing.
4A’s Beijing Studio Program provides a unique opportunity for these artists to research new projects, develop new professional networks and witness first-hand the changes occurring in one of the most vibrant cities in Asia. The program includes return airfares, accommodation, travel stipend and travel/medical insurance.
Applications have now closed and were due by 5PM AEST Monday May 8, 2017.
ABOUT SHEN SHAOMIN
Over the last twenty years Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin has forged an important international career with an emphasis on experimental, conceptual and installation works. Based in Beijing, and having spent over a decade in Australia, Shen’s work spans a number of medium and explores individual and collective experiences of humanity and their impacts on our natural and constructed surroundings. Shen Shaomin has previously exhibited with 4A in The Floating Eye, Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012); and presented the solo exhibition, The Day After Tomorrow (2011). His work has been included in Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010) and most recently featured as part of Busan Biennale 2016 and at Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong 2017. In China he has exhibited at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Shanghai Zendai MoMA, Shanghai; and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Across Europe and North America selected exhibitions include, Groniger Museum, Holland; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; ZKM Museum Karlrusche, Germany; Millennium Park, Chicago and Eli Klein Fine Art, New York.
The Program covers airfares, accommodation, daily meals, travel/medical insurance and a small stipend. Moreover, it will provide an ongoing professional mentorship, cross-cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks in China.
Application Guidelines
ELIGIBILITY AND CRITERIA
Applications are open to visual artists who are Australian permanent residents. We are looking for strongly emerging or midcareer artists’ who will will benefit from the professional mentorship, dialogue and bonding between residents, cross cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks in China.
Successful applicants will be chosen based on the quality of their past work, reasons for participation, viability of their participation and the potential benefits to the applicant’s artistic development.
Decisions will be made by an independent panel and all decisions are final.
Please submit support material which has been completed in the last two years.
PROGRAM PERIOD
Successful artists must be available for travel to Beijing, for one month beginning from Tuesday, 12 September – Friday, 13 October, 2017. Dates are non-negotiable. All three selected artists will be travelling at the same time.
REQUIRED INFORMATION
To apply for the 4A Beijing Residency Program please download a copy of the application form and include the following:
A statement of interest detailing why you would like to participate in the Studio Program and how you will benefit from the experience. Maximum 1 page, 12 point font.
A current CV. Maximum 1 page.
Support material in the format of a PDF document with 10 images and captions. Please supply video content as a URL web link (10 minutes max).
Please do not send us original material as it will not be returned.
SUPPORT MATERIAL
Please supply images in PDF at 72-dpi res with your application. Please include captions and explanations where appropriate. Please do not send individual files.
Video material must be uploaded to a website and URL should be supplied for viewing.
AMENITIES
Accommodation and facilities are housed in Shen Shaomin’s studio, 52km from Beijing city center (approximately 60 mins drive). These are newly built residences. The studio will provide daily meals in addition to a program’s stipend. A driver/translator available for a limited number of days to explore surrounding artists’ studio, galleries and other locations.
Chinese language skills are not necessary.
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Artists are responsible for obtaining necessary visas for entry into China and appropriate travel/medical insurance.
Artists are responsible for any excess baggage or freight to/from the Studio Program.
Artists will be asked to sign an agreement that outlines the terms of the Program and their travel.
Upon returning, artists will be required to take part in a public discussion about their trips.
Enquiries and applications should be directed to:
Micheal Do
Assistant Curator
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Phone: +61 2 9212 0380
Email:
m.do@4a.com.au
Studio Information Nights:
Join one of our Studio Information Nights to meet with 4A staff to learn more about the 4A Beijing Studio Program, and ask any questions you may have about the Program.
Sydney:
6-7PM, Wednesday April 26
Guest speaker: Justin Shoulder
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St Haymarket, Sydney. Click here to RSVP.
4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the Australian premiere of He Xiangyu’s latest film, The Swim.
The Swim is an art film with documentary characteristics. The artist returned to his hometown in Kuandian for three times – a poor county located by Yalu River on the China-North Korea border. Through interviewing and filming 6 veterans participating in the Korean War and 6 defectors fleeing from North Korean as well as their families, the film unveils the cruel reality hidden behind the beautiful scenery and presents the utopian fantasy projected on individuals.
This will be only the second international screening of this work (after an international premiere at the Guggenheim in February 2017).
He Xiangyu is a leading contemporary artist based between Beijing and Berlin who first garnered attention for his large-scale works, such as The Coca Cola Project and Tank Project. Xiangyu is represented by White Cube and his work is in the collections of:Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Pinault Collection, France; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Domus Collection, USA; Boros Collection, Berlin, Germany; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Mercator Foundation, Essen, Germany; Artron Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; M WOODS Museum, Beijing, China; Sishang Museum, Beijing, China.
Director’s Statement:
On the Tomb-sweeping Day in 2015, I went back to my hometown for ancestor worship. In China, it is a day when we mourn the deceased and wish them living a happy life in the other world. My hometown is a border town where I was born and grew up. I used to know well about the neighbours and the landscape. But after leaving for years, I found the landscape that seemed familiar and everlasting before had concealed certain strange reality now. The Utopia in my carefree childhood makes me feel complicated and ambiguous, which inspires me to rediscover the place and the people’s life there.
I spent more than half a year on field trips and collected a large amount of materials. The interviewees include a dozen North Korean defectors and over twenty veterans participating in the Korean War. Their narrations unveil the realistic face of my hometown. Following my childhood memory and local people’s narrations, I started my first filming in this April along the border between China and North Korea. Later, I went back twice. During the three filming trips, the experiences of the individual interviewees, their struggle in reality and their expectation for the future were so fascinating and touching. Although have gone through the geographical and spiritual departure and return, the land that used to be so familiar is still strange to me.
About He Xiangyu (b.1986, Dandong, China.Lives and works across Beijing, China and Berlin, Germany.)
He Xiangyu’s experimental practice can be seen as both a material testing ground and conceptual laboratory that investigates diverse personal, social and political themes. Part of a generation of Chinese artists who grew up during a period of rapid urbanisation, He Xiangyu is one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary Chinese art. He has said that “I’m seeking to adjust and guide people’s perception through the material changes within the object”, using a range of media to reflect on philosophic ideas such as the increasing materialism and obsolescence of our society as well as the effects of the institutionalisation and commercialisation of contemporary art.
He Xiangyu is represented by White Cube and has an international reputation. His solo exhibitions have been presented in London, Frankfurt, Sydney, Tokyo and Beijing. His works are included in numerous group shows, including Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs by Kadist Art Foundation, the Biennale de Lyon, Fire and Forget: On Violence in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, 28 Chinese in the Asian Art Museum/ San Antonia Museum of Art in San Francisco and San Antonia, Shanghai Biennale, Busan Biennale and exhibitions in many important institutions in the world.
He Xiangyu’s works have been collected by the Uli Sigg Collection (Switzerland), Rubell Family Collection (Miami, USA), Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, Switzerland), François Pinault Collection (France), White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney, Australia), Domus Collection (New York, USA), Boros Collection (Berlin, Germany), Long Museum (Shanghai, China), Stiftung Mercator (Essen, Germany), M Woods Gallery (Beijing, China) and the Si Shang Art Museum (Beijing, China).
This is the second time 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has presented He Xiangyu in Sydney. The Swim follows the 2012 exhibition of the Cola Project – where the artist worked with factory workers to boil thousands of litres of Cola, creating a black sludge which He used to create Song dynasty style ink paintings.
For more information about the Cola Project, click here.
SYDNEY – 10AM, Saturday 11 March 2017
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket, NSW.
Join 4A Assistant Curator, Micheal Do, for a morning tour of Before the Rain and get a taste of Hong Kong with breakfast congee. Places for this special tour are limited and this event is presented as part of Art Month Sydney.
Luke Ching, Liu Ding, Yuan Goang-Ming, James Kong, Tang Kwok Hin, Sarah Lai, Swing Lam, Ellen Pau and Sampson Wong.
Before the onset of a downpour there is a moment of heavy humidity that hangs low in the air. Building over time it signals the inevitability of a deluge that will interrupt and intercept patterns of normality. For Hong Kong, a city defined by humidity, the deluge that began on September 28 2014 was the result of a long and steady buildup of uncertainty, anxiety and the long held need to articulate a cohesive identity for the city. Before the Rain addresses the tensions that precipitated the recent political and civil urgency in Hong Kong and the city’s pressing need to reimagine its future.
The exhibiting artists frame the conversation from a multiplicity of perspectives presenting the complexity and concerns of a city facing a future planned by others. They approach the city with an intent to protect it; their works may appear as warnings but they are underpinned by a need to safeguard. Commissioned for the exhibition is a new work by Sampson Wong that transforms the entrance gallery into a narration of the Umbrella Movement. Ephemera taken from the streets, continuous loops of CCTV and news footage, blogs, tweets and newspapers will populate the gallery inviting the viewer to sift through the materials and navigate their own opinion of a city in flux. Before the Rain responds to a continuously evolving discourse, proving to be one of the most critical events in South East Asia’s recent history.
About the artists:
Luke ChingChin-wai(b.1972, Hong Kong; lives in Hong Kong) is an inter-disciplinary artist creating multimedia installations in which traditional and new media coexist in an imperfect balance. His work identifies and attempts to deconstruct the changer urban landscapes of his home city as emblematic of Hong Kong’s pluralist history as one location caught between the eastern and western hemispheres. Ching has held a number of solo exhibitions including Screensaver (2014), Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong; as park of the Folk Art Series (2008), Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, Blackburn, England; and 2 in 1 (2007), Hong Kong Visual Art Centre, Hong Kong. He has participated in group exhibitions not limited to Ceramics Show by Non-ceramics Artist (2015), 1a space, Hong Kong; The Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture (2014), CAFAM Biennage, Beijing, China; The Problem of Asia (2010), Chalk Horse, Sydney; and the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition 2005 (2005), Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong. Since completing his Master of Fine Art in 1998 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Luke Ching has received awards both in Hong Kong and abroad while undertaking residencies internationally in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Japan.
James Kong (b. 1985, Hong Kong; Lives and works in Hong Kong) graduated with a Bachelor of Science at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Since then, as an Interactive Media Engineer he dedicates his creative work to explore human-computer interaction and the application of multimedia techniques to theatrical environments. He also explores the possibilities of computational media in the arts. James has exhibitied at Exim Macau (2015) and the IFVA awards new media exhibition (2014).
Sarah Lai Cheuk Wah(b. 1983, Hong Kong; lives in Hong Kong) is a painter concerned with beautifying and capturing the aura of the mundane. Her subjects are often highly familiar objects or environments detached from the humdrum of everyday life, deprived of their utilitarian functions, allowing the artist to subtly abstract the concepts of form and function as relics of contemporary commodity culture. A recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Lai has consistently held solo exhibitions in Hong Kong including Unsettled Heart (2016), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Kong Kong; In Stasis (2015), Art Basel Hong Kong, Para Site, Hong Kong; and Safety Island (2013), Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong. Her works are collected internationally after participating in group exhibitions internationally, such as The 2nd CAFAM Future Exhibition (2015), CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China; I submit to the wisdom of the body (2015), Silverlens Gallery, Manila, Philippines; The Hong Kong International Art Fair (2013), Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong; and the Sovereign Art Prize (2010), ARTSPACE at Helutrans, Singapore.
Ellen Pau (b. Hong Kong; lives in Hong Kong) made her first super-8 film in 1984. Being a self-taught artist, she worked as a MTV director, cinematographer, video artist, curator, educator and arts administrator. Pau started her international career in 1995 at the Kwangiu Biennale in Korea, curated by Kim Hon-Yee and Nam-June Paik. She is the co-founder and artistic director for the media art organisation Videotage, and a member and curator of the organizing committee for the Microwave International Media Art Festival, Hong Kong since 1996. A radiographer by profession, Pau teaches part-time in Hong Kong University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, as well as being a full time medical image technologist. Pau is advisor to the HK Museum of Art, the HK Art Development Council and a number of festivals.
Sampson Wong (b. 1985, Hong Kong; lives in Hong Kong) is an artist, independent curator, academic and urbanist from Hong Kong. He engages in art-making, curatorial practice, teaching, research and writing, and see them as intellectual means exploring issues about urbanism, space, power and freedom. His research interests also include politics of epidemics and Hong Kong studies. He is now writing books about plagues in Hong Kong, urbanism and art, and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. His writings often appear in the Stand News and Mingpao (Sunday Life). Recent projects in 2016 include From 60 seconds to 2047, Countdown Machine and Land Visions: In Search of Land Art in Hong Kong. He also curated 2nd emptyscape art festival: Beyond the Village School 2016, Studio in-Situ – Assembling! 2016, and Affordable Art Basel! In 2015. He received his Ph.D in Urban Studies & Geography at the University of Manchester in 2014.
Yuan Goang-Ming (b. 1965, Taipei, Taiwan; lives in Taipei) is one of the foremost Taiwanese artists of media art, and has been a pioneer of video art in Taiwan, a medium in which he started working in 1986. In 1997, he received a Master’s degree in media art from the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. Combining symbolic metaphors with technological media, his work eloquently expresses the state of contemporary existence and profoundly explores the human mind and consciousness. Yuan has been the recipient of many awards, including the Jury Prize of the first Art Future 2000 by the Acer Digital Art Center. His works, ranging from photographs to multi-media installations, have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Taiwan Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Recent solo exhibitions include BEFORE MEMORY (2011, TKG+, Taipei), and DISAPEARINGTRACES (2011, TKG+, Beijing).
Swing Lam (b.1986, Hong Kong) specialises in various art forms, including painting, performance art, temporary architecture research and is involved in cultural and urban sketching studies. He writes arts and cultural columns for Ming Pao and Stand News amongst others. He earned a bachelor degree of Visual Arts in HKBU and a MA intercultural studies in CUHK and is one of the fotanian artists concentrated on drawing, painting and happenings. Swing started the project Flaneur 11 on 2012 spring; a project of waking across 10 cities over the world. Swing showed his project in Atelier Muji gallery as his first solo exhibition in spring 2013. RTHK also made a documentary of his work in January 2013. In 2014, he developed a facebook page to introduce and study some of the featured architecture, tools and creations found. It helped the public look into the temporary facilities from an artistic point of view. In the project Swing embraced his experience of walking through cities and his interaction with the public in this public space. Currently, Swing is working as a Lecturer in Lingnan University Community college for Art and design courses.
Exhibition Documentation
All images: Document Photography
Centre:Umbrella Movement (2017), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the
artist. Image: Document Photography. Walls: Swing Lam, Temporary structure research in Umbrella Revolution2014-2016 (2016),
installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, works on paper. Courtesy the artist.
Swing Lam, Temporary structure research in Umbrella Revolution2014-2016 (2016), works on paper. Installation view, detail.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Clockwise from left: Ellen Pau, Diverson (1990), single-channel video, 5:30. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian
Art. Liu Ding,A Sentence, (2016), poem, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Sarah Lai, Rub it until it is removed
(2015) single-channel HD video, 5:40, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Sarah Lai, Polish your own shoe
as long as you can (2015), single-channel HD video, 11:11, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Sarah Lai, Demarcated area (2017), performance with installation. Dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary
Asian Art. Luke Ching, 150 Lost Items (2014), mixed media, installation view. All courtesy the artists.
Luke Ching, 150 Lost Items (2014), mixed media, detail installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Left: Yuan Goang-Ming, The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014), installation view, single-channel video. Courtesy the artist. Right: Reproduced items and image from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, (2014), installation view, 4A Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art.
Reproduction items and image from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, (2014), installation view (detail), 4A Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive.
Real and reproduced protest posters from The Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, (2014), installation view, detail, 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive.
Sampson Wong, Capturing a hyperevent: artistic records of the Umbrella Movement (2017), installation view, detail, 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
SYDNEY: CHINESE GARDEN OF FRIENDSHIP 4 February – 5 February 2017 | 12.30pm-3.30pm
In this free family program as part of the 2017 Chinese New Year celebrations, join 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at the Chinese Garden of Friendship.
Decorate a life-size cardboard rickshaw with Chinese New Year motifs, and go on an artist-led story walk inspired by the work of Louise Zhang.
This event is held in partnership with and supported by the Chinese Garden of Friendship:
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 1, SYDNEY. In 2017 4A’s beloved Cinema Alley returns with Ten Years.
“If we can’t even see the storms in our future, how can we talk about hope? How can we find courage to change?”
As part of the exhibition Before the Rain five young Hong Kong directors consider the future of their city. Ten Years (103 minutes, Cantonese drama, with Chinese and English subtitles), was one of the 2015 HKAFF Center-pieces, is a collection of five short stories; a prophecy, and a fable for Hong Kong. Through their films, the directors raise questions about the most central issues concerning our city, and the audience is invited to ponder together:
a Where will our terrorist attacks come from?
【 Extras (浮瓜) Directed by: Kwok Zune (郭臻) 】
b What is left for us to protect, when the awareness to preserve is at its end?
【Season of the End (冬蟬) Directed by: Wong Fei-Pang(黃飛鵬)】
c How does the fading of Cantonese affect the life of the people?
【Dialect (方言) Directed by: Jevons Au (歐文傑)】
d Will there be self-immolators in Hong Kong, ten years from now?
All the stories are independent, yet at the same time, intricately related to one another. They are attempts to portray decisions and struggles of humanity in a dark age. Through films, they acknowledge a difficult future, and reflect upon the present.
The screening of Ten Years is complemented by the short film Miles to Go by HK URBEX. HK URBEX is a collective of visual storytellers from Hong Kong that explore the abandoned spaces of the megacity. In Miles to Go they appear in the main streets of the city during the Umbrella Movement of late 2014.
Jump aboard a customised, artist-commissioned rickshaw for curated local food tours throughout Haymarket as 4A celebrates Chinese New Year 2017.
4A’s Rickshaw Tales is a community-engaged program where people ride a customised, artist-commissioned rickshaw on curated tours through Haymarket.
Ride around the suburb on a rickshaw that has been customised by Sydney-based Chinese Australian artist Louise Zhang. Zhang’s lolly-esque globular painting style is evocative of the Asian sweets riders will get to sample as they learn about the stories behind the food at some of Haymarket’s most-loved snack stops. Participants will also be able to partake in a walking tour version of this program with a 4A staff member.Participants will also be able to partake in a walking tour version of this program with a 4A staff member.
Please note: this tour involves food sampling. While alternatives may be provided where possible, food intolerances and preferences are unable to be catered for. In the event of wet weather or extreme heat, refunds will be provided and alternative tour bookings offered where possible.
On February 4-5, bring the whole family to our childrens’ program, produced in partnership with the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Rickshaw Tales has been made possible with major support from the City of Sydney and is part of the 2017 Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Documentation:
Louise Zhang and 4A Gallery Director Mikala Tai ride a rickshaw Louise decorated to celebrate Chinese New Year (photo by
Jamie Williams/City of Sydney)
Louise Zhang with a rickshaw she decorated to celebrate Chinese New Year (photo by Jamie Williams/City of Sydney)
Louise Zhang with a rickshaw she decorated to celebrate Chinese New Year (photo by Jamie Williams/City of Sydney)
Artists: Shumon Ahmed, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Bashir Makhoul, Veer Munshi, Shireen Taweel and Curtis Taylor.
The reconciliation between memory and reality plagues the act of returning. There is no resolution between the two. Memories are etched into the psyche hinged on topographical monuments, whispered words and subconscious everyday patterns while reality erases such symbology through the passing of time. Familiar Stranger examines this third, non-existent space that plagues the returnee as they seek to retrace their memories in places that have been rebuilt or reinscribed. With familiarity reduced to invisible archaeological sites the returnee searches for recognition and legitimacy in a now unacquainted geography.
The exhibiting artists examine the negation and erasure of familiarity by presenting place as a space defined by uncertainty. There is a continuing shift between points of view that begets the collapse of spatial certainty and becomes defined by its own instability. For the migrant the idea of returning becomes an implicit part of their identity; the constant oscillation between the possibility and impossibility of return a daily taunt. In Familiar Stranger the moment of return is the focal point where, for some, it is a wistful hope and for others a violent decimation of expectancy. Resisting melodrama, the artists turn to the familial archive and the personal memorial to bring form to the constant internal struggle between what is and what was.
This event starts at 6PM with drinks on arrival, followed by a brief opening address from Brendan O’Flynn, Human Rights Watchand 4A Director and curator Mikala Tai, and performance from Chun Yin Rainbow Chan from 7PM – 7.30PM.
Wansolwara: One Salt Water is a series of exhibitions, performances and events from across the Pacific and throughout the Great Ocean. Wansolwara – a pidgin word from the Solomon Islands meaning ‘one-salt-water’ or ‘one ocean, one people’ – reflects not a single ocean, but rather a connected waterscape that holds distinct and diverse cultures and communities. Through art, performance and conversation, the project celebrates the depth and diversity of contemporary visual and material culture throughout these regions, placing customary practices alongside contemporary articulations in art, writing and the moving image.
Unfolding across multiple sites over the summer of 2020 Wansolwara: One Salt Water profiles the creativity of the region through multidisciplinary forms. Artists Terry Faleona, Ruha Fifita, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Shivanjani Lal, Paula Schaafhausen and Vaimaila Urale all present significant bodies of work that trace connections to the Pacific through language, tradition, dance and ceremony. Commissioned by 4A and UNSW Galleries, artist and curator Léuli Eshrāghi presents O le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa a focus within the exhibition that expands the Pacific from a geographical region to consider networks and exchange facilitated by the Great Ocean. The project brings fresh international perspectives to current endeavours to embody and awaken Indigenous sensual and spoken languages through works that focus on language, the body, gender, sex, desire and pleasure. It features works by asinnajaq, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, Mariquita Davis, Amrita Hepi, Caroline Monnet, Faye Mullen, Shannon Te Ao, Angela Tiatia and Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu.
4A and UNSW have also commissioned Troppo Galaktika, a Sydney-based collective to curate the third iteration of Club4A focused on the continuing and contemporary cultures of the Pacific. This evening of food, parades and performances weaves its way from 4A to a karaoke club in Haymarket, animating the streets of Sydney with performances that occur outside the gallery and within the living, pulsating nightlife of the city.
Alongside the exhibition a series of academic modes of enquiry elucidate key themes of the project. Australian based early-career writers Mitiana Arbon, Winnie Dunn, Enoch Mailangi and Talia Smith have been commissioned to participate in the Wansolwara Writers Program. Their critical responses to the exhibition will be shared on FBi Radio, through podcasts and in a special edition of 4A’s biannual online journal the 4A Papers available in May 2020. A day-long symposium at UNSW Art & Design and series of public programs will further illustrate, through research, the depth and diversity of creativity from the region.
Creatives: Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, Mitiana Arbon, asinnajaq, Mariquita ‘Micki’ Davis, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Winnie Dunn, Léuli Eshraghi, Ruha Fifita, Troppo Galaktika, Amrita Hepi, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Shivanjani Lal, Enoch Mailangi, Caroline Monnet, Faye Mullen, Paula Schaafhausen, José Da Silva, Talia Smith, Mikala Tai, Shannon Te Ao, Angela Tiatia, Vaimaila Urale, Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu and more to be announced.
This opening event starts at 6:00PM with drinks and an opening address.
Wansolwara: One Salt Wateris exhibited across both 4A (17 Jan – 29 Mar) and UNSW Galleries (17 Jan – 18 April).
Join us to celebrate the opening of Before the Rain, 4A’s first exhibition in 2017.
SYDNEY. 21 JANUARY – 19 MARCH 2017.
Luke Ching, Liu Ding, Yuan Goang-Ming, James Kong, Tang Kwok Hin, Sarah Lai, Swing Lam, Ellen Pau and Sampson Wong.
Before the onset of a downpour there is a moment of heavy humidity that hangs low in the air. Building over time it signals the inevitability of a deluge that will interrupt and intercept patterns of normality. For Hong Kong, a city defined by humidity, the deluge that began on September 28 2014 was the result of a long and steady buildup of uncertainty, anxiety and the long held need to articulate a cohesive identity for the city. Before the Rain addresses the tensions that precipitated the recent political and civil urgency in Hong Kong and the city’s pressing need to reimagine its future.
The exhibiting artists frame the conversation from a multiplicity of perspectives presenting the complexity and concerns of a city facing a future planned by others. They approach the city with an intent to protect it; their works may appear as warnings but they are underpinned by a need to safeguard. Commissioned for the exhibition is a new work by Samson Wong that transforms the entrance gallery into a narration of the Umbrella Movement. Ephemera taken from the streets, continuous loops of CCTV and news footage, blogs, tweets and newspapers will populate the gallery inviting the viewer to sift through the materials and navigate their own opinion of a city in flux. Before the Rain responds to a continuously evolving discourse thats shifts and tangents are proving to be one of the most critical events in South East Asia’s recent history.
This event starts at 4:00pm with drinks on arrival, followed by a brief opening address from Michael Lynch, CBE, AM; artist and artistic leader of the movement,Sampson Wong (HK); and 4A Director and curator Mikala Tai.
Curator: Felicia Kan
Artists: Stephen Bambury, Vicente Butron, Marco Fusinato, Melinda Harper, Felicia Kan and Susan Norrie.
Exhibition documentation
L-R: Susan Norrie, Violent Grey, 1997, oil on wood, glass frame, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Mori Gallery, Sydney. Vicente Butron, Yellow Painting, Done With A Modicum of Love (from s-l-s) no. 162, 1997, graphite and acrylic on aluminium. Felicia Kan, Liberty and Equality (Black/White), 1997, 2 panels, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Mori Gallery, Sydney. Melinda Harper, untitled, 1996, oil on canvas. Courtesy of David Pestorius Gallery, Brisbane.
An Endlessly Reflective Net of Jewels was Victoria Lobregat’s exhibition of new paintings, a series of small canvas boards arranged into discrete grids formed an unusual narrative with fragments from everyday life and symbols of different cultures.
Having worked as an illustrator and designer for Hot Tuna, Lobregat is familiar with the power of the symbol. Employing an idiosyncratic logic she pairs the spiritual with consumer desire – Lobregat combines motifs from a variety of sources ranging from Buddhist prayer symbols to logos from surf brands.
5×5 is a series of black and white silver gelatine prints about my journey and exploration of the Vietnam landscape.
During the war, it was very difficult for many Vietnamese to explore the country because of the heavy fighting in the country. After the war ended, South Vietnam was effected badly from the social and economic cause of the North Communist government. My family like many other families had to work hard to earn some money for living and did not have much time for leisure. Not until my return in 1995, I had an opportunity to explore the country landscape for the first time.
These landscapes have given me a deep impression. City and country life styles always have a big difference between them. The city have a polluted environment because from the noise of the transport, people or new development. In contrast, when I was in the country, I had the feeling of walking back in time. The life style was more simple than city life. My interest is to capture this beautiful tranquility, and relate this experience through the image. It is soft and misty, light falling gently to the land, and bursting out of a peaceful and calm atmosphere that is hard to forget.
If art production is thought of in a Freudian sense as being an act of compulsion then the joint exhibition of Elizabeth Pulie and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn at Sydney’s Gallery 4A must have been the result of the respective obsessive-compulsive conditions. Each artist presented four works created via manically repeated actions: intricate beading in the case of Pulie and multiple pointillist-style needle pricks in the case of Vongpoothorn.
Pulie’s and Vongpoothorn’s exhibition was the second to be held at the recently opened Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Exhibiting artists: Emil Goh, Lindy Lee, Hou Leong
Clockwise from left: Emil Goh, The Bride (The Last Nonya), 1996, type C print. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Emil Goh, The Wedding (The Last Nonya), 1996, type C print. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Lindy Lee, Birds of Appetite, 1996, wax and synthetic polymer paint on board. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Left: Hou Leong, An Australian: Cricket Hero, 1994, digital colour photograph. Installation view, detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist and Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney. Right: Lindy Lee, Birds of Appetite, 1996, wax and synthetic polymer paint on board. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Hou Leong, Autobiography: With Chairman Mao, 1994, digital photograph. Courtesy the artist and Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney.
Header Image: Clockwise from left: Lindy Lee, Birds of Appetite, 1996, wax and synthetic polymer paint on board. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Emil Goh, The Wedding (The Last Nonya), 1996, type C print. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Emil Goh, The Bride (The Last Nonya), 1996, type C print. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
An exhibition for members and friends of the Asian Australian Artists Association.
Artists: Rhonda Pryor, Anie Nheu, Nell, Jun Tagami, Leo Coyte, Anne Zahalka, Xiao Xian, Maryanne Wick, Sue Saxon, Mandy Ridley, Chengzhong Song, Yvonne Boag, Graeme Thompson, Fergus Tam, Andy Thompson, Terry Barrett, Gail Johns, Nadia Djordjevic, Maro F. Alwan, Christine Cornish, Ian Were, Mai Long, Eugenia Raskopoulos, My Lee Thi, Cherine Fahd, Tim Richardson, Jade Willie, Tim Silver
Curator: Benjamin Genocchio
Artists: Yenda Carson, Megan Marshall, Ruth Watson and Justene Williams.
Prima Donna offers a playful parody of Primavera, the annual showcase of young contemporary artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The work of the four artists included in the exhibition relates to the title in another way. Their work is grounded in the trivial events and mundane concerns of everyday life, yet produced with a sense of verve and spunk that is very much out of the ordinary.
Ruth Watson, Take Heart (detail), 1998, chocolate wrapping paper, silicone, pins, 160 x 160 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Ruth Watson, Take Heart (detail), 1998, chocolate wrapping paper, silicone, pins, 160 x 160 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Ruth Watson, Take Heart (detail), 1998, chocolate wrapping paper, silicone, pins, 160 x 160 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Header Image: Ruth Watson, Take Heart (detail), 1998, chocolate wrapping paper, silicone, pins, 160 x 160 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, ACT: 28 February – 22 March 1998
Sydney: 23 July – 8 August 1998
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Jacqueline Fraser, Ani O’Neill, Kelly Thompson and Yuk King Tan
Pasifika brings together the work of four artists who currently live and work in New Zealand. Yet Pasifika is not simply an exhibition of ‘New Zealand’ art. This exhibition explores the way in which four artists, from diverse cultural backgrounds, draw upon cultural practices using the formal idioms of international contemporary art. The work of the artists included in the exhibition can thus be located within a specific cultural context (New Zealand), but it cannot be reduced to or entirely explained by it.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Part of the Signs and Wonders project.
Catalogue available in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art library.
Suzann Victor’s (b. 1959, Singapore) work Waiting Room conjures up ideas of enclosure and theatricality. Consisted with previous works, her installation uses the body as a frame of reference. The walls are painted blood-red, over which delicate glass tears are attached in clusters. Bombarding the senses, the overall effect is disorientating, the space resembling a cavernous interior body while the tears are like escaping fluids.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Part of the Signs and Wonders project.
Catalogue available in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art library.
Juliana Wong (b. 1974, Hong Kong) is a Canberra-based artist. Her ambitious installation comprises of hundreds of LED lights forming a complex web of lights within the gallery space. The constant flickering of these tiny red lights combine to form arbitrary patterns and words. This work represents a technologically responsive painting.
Showcase is an exhibition of four young Sydney artists who graduated from art school not more than five years ago. These artists were all born elsewhere, namely Thailand, China, Philippines and Japan. Their inclusion of elements from their respective backgrounds offers a distinctly fresh perspective towards materials and everyday life.
Woven Threads: Picturing Tribal Women in Mindanao is a project which consists of an exhibition of photographic works about two indigenous communities, the T’boli and Manobo people who live on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.
This body of work investigates specifically the place of women within its community. The photographs explore these via the traditional and contemporary rituals performed by women in daily life. The images were gathered during a ten day field trip and use both documentary and formal modes to address this subject.
Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to announce our Members Annual Open Exhibition, the final exhibition of the year.
Over seventy members and friends of the Asian Australian Artists Association inc. have contributed work to the show at Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art], to celebrate a successful 1999. The exhibition will be opened on Saturday 5 December at 6pm by Chinese Community leader King Fong.
Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to present two artists whose work addresses a sense of place – a sense of where we are in the world, as part of Australian Perspecta 1999.
Ruth Watson’s work attempt to re-position Australia and New Zealand, where she was born, from their marginal place within the discourse of cartography. Featured in the exhibition, Interrupting the World (1999), for instance, is a light-coloured carpet stained with red wine, resembling the aftermath of a party. Although the spontaneity of the spills resemble the ambiguous blobs of a Rorschach image, they also represent a view of the globe.
My Le Thi’s work focuses on an exploration of racial politics through physical signifiers such as hair, eye and skin colour. Her controversial work from 1997 consisted of a series of small heads cast in the likeness of Pauline Hanson, each painted a different colour in red, black, yellow and white, representing different racial groups. This work was a critique of racial stereotypes embodied in the political agenda of the One Nation party.
Thi’s installation for this exhibition is titled Transformation (1999), and involves members from the Sydney Vietnamese community, whose shoes or casts of their own feet are featured alongside Thi’s in the show. Thi considers shoes to be an idiosyncratic symbol of journey and life experience and, by including shoes made by others, aims to present a cacophony of different stories of migration from Vietnam to Australia.
Ruth Watson, D.I.Y. World #1, 1999, mixed media on linen, pins, 240 x 240 cm. Installation View, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Image Courtesy the artist.
Ruth Watson, Experimental Contact, 1999, wallpaper, contact, map pins, dimensions variable. Installation View, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Image Courtesy the artist.
Header Image: Ruth Watson, Exhibition ‘Different Worlds’ 1999, Installation View, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Image Courtesy the artist.
Pillow Songs is a powerful digital sound installation that plays with the tensions between sound and silence, tactility and memory, intimate domestic rituals and public space. Inspired by the suggestive stains left on old pillow casings, Poonkhin Khut transforms the gallery space into a shadowy underworld of atmospheres and aural fragments. Speakers buried inside pillows on three beds combine sounds and textures from a bank of CD players.
Di Wu’s paintings and drawings are a fusion of Tibetan Buddhist concerns and contemporary Western sensibility. His small-scale, meditative works incorporate images of mandalas and windows or doorways. They evoke rites of passage and allude to states of consciousness between life and death, or one world and the next.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Assistant Curator/Curator, Biomorphs: Tiffany Lee-Shoy
Artists, Biomorphs: Dong Wang Fan, Leonie Watson, Manuel Sharrad and Tammy Wong
Biomorphs is an exhibition which explored the interfaced between the ‘natural’ human body and machines and technology.
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Katherine Huang uses everyday materials but instead of leaving these as blank issues of daily detritus, she imbues the mystery of alchemy into each installation. In her exhibition News From Island, ordinary objects take on the poetry of the middle ages; each piece an important part of a bigger and more complicated equation. Using drawings, appropriated stationery and other found objects, Huang’s work weaves a narrative from which many stories can be drawn out and pursued within the installation’s own logic.
Paul Bai’s exhibition New Chinese Paintings is a continuation of his research into the way Chinese culture is often presented in Australia – as exotic and mysterious. Stereotypes Chinese icons and cultural cliches appear in Bai’s works. He employs social realist and satirical strategies to produce a parody of a cultural parody, such as in the work I Like Your Country Too. By confronting the colonial cultural perspective, Bai reveals the often superficial nature of cultural interpretation, and the limitations of current understandings of Chinese culture in Australian society.
Moko Halford’s installation is both and exploration into her own hybrid identity and a personal tribute to her late father. Halford has created images of her family by injecting agar-agar jelly into sheets of bubble-wrapped packaging. This method creates the effect of pixillated drawing. Halford’s use of agar-agar suggests the transition from one cultural environment (Japan) to another (Australia). Her use of packaging materials also alludes to the way in which she keeps in contact with her family – by sending packages through the post.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Assistant Curator: Tiffany Lee-Shoy
Artists: Ah Xian, Maria Cruz, Laurens Tan, Hanh Ngo, Juliana Wong and Hyun-Ju Lee Bilingual: Six Translations catalogue is available in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art library.
Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to announce Bilingual, an exhibition that brings together six Asian Australian artists whose work focuses on different themes of translation. This exhibition features work by Maria Cruz, Laurens Tan, Hyun-Ju Lee, Juliana Wong, Hanh Ngo and Ah Xian.
The idea of translation manifests itself in the work of these artists in a number of different ways, either through the translation between different cultures or translation between otherwise fixed mediums or technology.
Bilingual shows a diversity of practices by different generations of artists and work from a range of disciplines such as painting (Maria Cruz and Hyun-Ju Lee), craft-based practices (Ah Xian and Hanh Ngo) as well as computer imaging or new technology (Laurens Tan and Juliana Wong).
Prompted by the rise of the One Nation Party, Neha Choksi and Nell are collaborating on an installation that transforms the gallery space into their own Nation. The exhibition, Nell Nation/Party Streamers, explodes the propaganda symbols of a patriotic-society-gone-mad, whilst meditating on the personal victories of organised self-reliance. The artists describe their Nation as an ‘optimistic hand-made ploy for Utopia,’ with colourful flags proclaiming ownership of the Self, and party streamers celebrating a global consciousness.
Stephen Birch’s exhibition Civic Minded continues his witty and compelling explorations into the status of the human body in social and psychological space. Birch’s installation features a pair of floor-to-ceiling fibreglass sculpted trees. The tree forms are comfortable and familiar, and yet simultaneously bizarre for they are each equipped with a pair of human feet. As they face each other in deep conversation, their strange bodily rigidness and the promise of mobility collide.
Debra Porch and Harriet Parsons investigate aspects of mortality, using strands of hair to represent traces of their own existence. Parsons’ exquisite insect embroideries are created with her own hair, stitched painstakingly into satin squares, and stretched onto embroidery hoops. Resembling scientific specimens, the works are infused with the investment of time – time taken for her to stitch, to analyse and to investigate the insect captured and frozen in time.
Victoria Lobregat is commenting on our age of change. Continuing her investigation into the power of the symbol, Lobregat juxtaposes images of sacred symbols and the everyday motifs. The multiple signs and symbols of consumer desire, culture and spirituality represent a world of possibilities for co-existence-in-chaos, informed by Lobregat’s own bi-cultural experience (Filipino-Australian). Together, the symbols suggest the inherent presence of the spiritual in the everyday and become the focus of a contemplative memory. The symbols are reinvested with new meaning and hope to become positive indicators of change for the new millennium.
The Twilight Girls Go East!!! is the latest collaborative project by artists Jane Polkinghorne and Helen Hyatt-Johnston. Both artists are featured in a series of photographs taking as their inspiration characters such as Bette Davis as Madame Sin and Shirley Maclaine as a geisha girl. By recreating images of Westerners dressing up as Asians, the Twilight Girls humourously and at times shockingly explore Western representations of the East in film.
Min Woo Bang, a South Korean born Sydney-based artist, presents a series of paintings based upon Western masterpieces by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Instead of directly copying these images he paints himself into them as the main figure. This has the effect of undermining our assumptions that master paintings are Western.
Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] presented two exhibitions by emerging Australian artists.
Mark Hislop’s work conceptually starts with the word ‘prescribe.’ It examines the relationships of medical, scientific and modernist paradigms. The word ‘prescribe’ deploys a purposeful authority, a procedural act, presupposing an intent of future action in addition to reliance on previous histories of proven effect.
Tan Yi Feng’s paintings explore themes of migration based upon his journey from China to Australia. His quirky and at times surreal paintings evoke ideas of cultural difference.
Tan Yi Feng, In and Out no.1-13 (detail) , 1999, acrylic on canvas, 83 x 91cm each. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Tan Yi Feng, In and Out no. 1-13 (detail), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 83 x 91cm each. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Tan Yi Feng, In and Out no. 1-13 (detail), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 83 x 91cm each. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Australian Embassy, Tokyo, Japan, 10 December 1999 – 27 January 2000.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Lindy Lee, Tim Johnson, Victoria Lobregat and Natsuho Takita
The title of this exhibition evokes ideas of clarity and luminosity, but also refers to the way that each of the artists work with light. This idea is further extended by the use of light to represent a spiritual realm beyond the everyday. Victoria Lobregat’s paintings, for instance, feature Buddhist phrases painted on highly reflective, glittering surfaces; while Lindy lee’s random black brushwork over brightly coloured panels is informed by principles of Zen. Tim Johnson’s works also incorporate symbols and icons from a variety of religious and indigenous stories, floating like ethereal visions; while Natsuo Takita’s blurred and distorted images of photographs are contemplative visions of light. It is the constant oscillation and resonance of these concerns between each of the works that structures this exhibition.
Artists: Min-Woo Bang, Graeme Bannerman, Zara Collins, Leonardo Cremonese, Amanda Donohue, Cherine Fahd, Heather Fernon, Peter Fray, Emil Goh, Sue Hajdu, Ellen Hernandez, Satoru Hidaka, Glenys Jackson, Liu Yi, Victoria Lobregat, Garrie Maguire, Dani Marti, Paul McInnes, Gia Nghi Phung, Fernando Octavio Pino, Dick Quan, Vikki Quill, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Lean Im Saunders, Aaron Seeto, Mu Shunjun, Jeanette Siebols, Beverly Southcott, Xu Wang, Lachlan Warner and Ruth Watson.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia) and Rea
Catalogue available in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art library.
Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong and Australian urban Indigenous artist Rea, as the first exhibition and international project to be held at Gallery 4A’s new premises at the Corporation Building.
Poisonous Targets engages with ideas of cultural diversity and multiculturalism from two very different and culturally specific vantages, seeking to complicate and question the common understanding of the term.
Wong Hoy Cheong is one of Malaysia’s most prominent artists, whose practice involves drawing, installation and performance to explore issues central to his cultural identity. In Poisonous Targets, Wong uses botanical materials such as tomato, tobacco, coconut, papaya, tapioca and tea, which are both indigenous and introduced species to Malaysia, to create masks moulded from the faces of different ethnic groups that make up Malaysia to examine ideas of social history and migration.
Rea is a well respected Indigenous artist whose practice has consisted of photographic and digital imaging as a means of exploring her grandmother’s experience as a stolen child. There issues are important not only to her own experience of Aboriginality, but also significant to a wider understanding of the multicultural experience in Australia.
Wong Hoy Cheong, exhibition ‘Poisonous Targets’, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, The Colonies Bite Back, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Wong Hoy Cheong, The Colonies Bite Back, 2000, Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Header Image: Wong Hoy Cheong, exhibition ‘Poisonous Targets’, 2000, Installation viewInstallation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Organiser: The Sydney Zen Centre
Artists: Glenys Jackson, Daniel Bogunovic, My Le Thai, Tim Johnson, Gilly Coote, Brendon Stewart, Sue Murray, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and members of the Sydney Buddhist community
The Mandala Project is a collaborative work in progress organised by the Sydney Zen Centre bringing Zen, Chinese, Laotian, Tibetan and Vietnamese Buddhist communities together with visual artists. As the mandala gradually takes shape on the floor of the gallery, the design is covered with everyday objects such as beads, beans, rice, flowers, leaves, spices, seeds, coffee and tea. The participants in the project have individual artistic freedom to paint with and layer the colourful and aromatic materials, but in a spirit of mindfulness, will work with what has come before. Each day, as different individuals work on sections of the mandala, the design will unfold organically moment by moment.
Following Buddhist principles, the process of creation will include dissolution, making reference to the impermanence of our lives. A closing ceremony celebrating the mandala’s completeness and destruction will be held Saturday 3 February 2001, 3-6pm with a Buddhist blessing by Subhana Barzaghi, Sydney Zen Centre and guest speaker Jackie Menzies, Head Curator of Asian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The Mandala Project is an official event of the Sydney Fringe Festival, 2001.
Header image: The Mandala Project [detail], 2001, installation view
The Mandala Project, 2001, exhibition view
The Mandala Project, 2001, installation view
The Mandala Project [detail], 2001, installation view
This month marks the 20th anniversary of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Over the last two decades 4A has carved a place for Asian-Australian artistic voices and celebrated Australia’s dynamic and diverse engagement with Asia.
Celebrate the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s 20th anniversary and support our future work by bidding on works by the likes of Shaun Gladwell, Guo Jian, Anida Yeou Ali, and Chen Qiulin. Proceeds support our efforts to foster excellence and innovation in contemporary Asian and Australian culture.
Our 4A 2016 Fundraiser Auction is now open. Bidding closes 6PM AEDT, on 6 November 2016.
Image: Guan Wei, The Classic of the Mountains and Seas, 2012. Silkscreen. Courtesy the artist. Available for purchase as part of the 4A 2016 Fundraiser Auction.
Auction powered by Paddle8, the online auction house.
In the age of global capitalisation and urbanisation, it no longer seems appropriate to discuss the sublime in terms of the natural world. For instance the sublime can be readily found in the spectacle of public events, such as rave parties, ticket-tape parades and political rallies. In these forums, feelings of unity, heroism and nationalism are unleashed. The conjunction of mass crowds, technology and enthusiastic fervour prescribes a response that is intrinsically caught up in the profusion of the moment. Swept up in this assembly of masses is an underlying current of tension, an uneasiness that implies potential coercion and threat.
The works in Different Reds allude to propaganda devices such as flag waving, military parades and public displays of power. The protagonists in these scenarios are toys, i.e. mass-produced, blandly generic soldiers, cowboys and fighter planes. In this context the reduced monochromatic silhouettes of the figures become nostalgic tokens that belies the innocence of childhood and impose anxiety on the performance of play. In an exhibition of jest they too become vehicles for spectacle, heroism and confrontation. Through repetition proliferation, saturated colour, paper cutting and large-scale installation based works, the objective of Different Reds is to create a sensory excess in the spirit as these public events.
Header image: Megan Keating, Something in the Air, 2001, installation view
Megan Keating, Different Reds, 2001, exhibition view
Megan Keating, The Great March, 2001, installation view
Megan Keating, Wheel of Fortune [detail], 2001, installation view
Transplantation is a series of paintings by Shen Shao Min which explore the physical and cultural process of migration. The figures in Shen’s monochromatic paintings are created from the forms of flowers, with a rope which encircles and binds these bodies, symbolising the process of migration and living in a new country. The idea of tension and stress are reflected in the work, as different cultures collide, humanity is distorted.
Shen Shao Min has exhibited internationally at the National Gallery of China, Beijing; the Hong Kong University Museum; as well as in Japan and France. His work is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of China, Beijing.
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to present Searching for The Golden Egg, an exhibition by Kate Cotching, a young emerging artist from Melbourne. Exhibiting in Gallery 4A’s [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] ground floor gallery, Cotching’s exhibition features an intricately designed paper-cut which fills the shopfront gallery space as it spirals and curves around the gallery walls.
Images of discarded rubbish and construction rubble are painstakingly carved into a single piece of paper, increasing in detail as it curves and spirals into itself. Intricately are painstakingly cut, the meticulousness of this gigantic paper-cut is juxtaposed against its subject matter which appear as shadows cast onto the gallery walls. Amidst this beautifully crafted landscape which represents a space and time unable to keep up with its rapidly developing environment, a single figure scratches through the debris, she continues to rummage for things worth saving.
To work from the edge in is to trace and place. For Annie Gobel working from the edge in reflects her childhood creative endeavors that always started with a thick, bold outline. Performed as an overture this line crafted a space in which she could experiment and create. Today this line has become an edge; as her work has lifted from the page and into sculpture the emboldened black edge has now become form. In this body of work Gobel presents her wearable sculptures in Sydney for the first time. Bounded by memories they appear in candy coloured enamel and invite recollections of play, of toys and of childhood adventures. It is memories such as these that have been intrinsic to Gobel’s process as she seeks to ensure that the inherent freedom of childhood remains a part of the adult everyday.
Nurfitria S. Gobel (Annie Gobel) (b.1991 Jakarta, Indonesia) is a Melbourne based Jeweller. She recently exhibited at the Japan International Enameling Show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, Hero Worship in Craft, Melbourne and 5×7 at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, 2016. She participated in the show Colourfast Guaranteed with Marcos Guzman at Rubicon Ari Gallery Melbourne and sPin at Australian National Capital Artists Gallery’s 5th Annual Exhibition Of Miniature Wearable Artworks, ANCA Gallery, Canberra. Gobel had a solo show Re-Played at Dia.Lo.Gue Artspace, Jakarta, Indonesia in 2015. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT University, Melbourne in 2013 and was a Fresh! awards finalist at Craft Victoria, Melbourne. Gobel recently completed her Graduate Diploma in Arts and Cultural Management at Melbourne University in 2016.
The exhibition The Boat consists of a 13 metre wooden boat, reconstructed by Dacchi Dang, built within the space of the gallery and is characteristic of the boats many Vietnamese refugees fled Vietnam on. The viewer is invited to enter into this cramped space to explore something of the experiences of Vietnamese boat refugees.
The reality of such journeys can be heard on recordings and interviews with members of the community, which accompany the exhibition. This oral history provides a potent context for the work. Whereas boat refugees were once considered victims of a devastating war, they can now be regarded as survivors of a phenomenal journey. The oral histories testify the strength and self-determination of this vibrant and dynamic community.
The Boat seeks to generate community discussion through the visual arts on the issues of migration, refugees and the identity of Vietnamese-Australians and celebrates 25 years of Vietnamese migration in Australia.
Header image: Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001, installation view
Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001, installation view
Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001, installation view
Dacchi Dang, The Boat [interior], 2001, installation view
The People’s Currency is a new performance work by Melbourne-based artist Eugenia Lim. The work takes its name from Renminbi (China’s currency) and explores the social impacts of globalisation on those who seek their fortunes in the factories of China – or the ‘workshop of the world’. When almost everything is now ‘Made in China’, how are we all implicated as consumers, in the labour conditions of the production line? Dressed as a gold Mao-suited ‘ambassador’, Lim will inhabit a factory printing counterfeit currency of her own design. Presiding over the printing of money, Lim will also act as floor manager to a ‘factory’ of workers. The public is invited to enter into short-term ‘employment’ on the factory floor. In exchange for basic menial work, the ‘employee’ will be remunerated in The People’s Currency. The People’s Currency turns a site in Melbourne’s CBD into ‘Renminconn’, a closed loop ‘special economic zone’. In Lim’s project, mass-production and money-printing become strategies for contemplating the human impact of the ‘long march’ of global capitalism.
Eugenia Lim (b. 1981 Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation. Interested in how nationalism and stereotypes are formed, Lim invents personas to explore the tensions of an individual within society – the alienation and belonging in a globalised world.
Conflations between authenticity, mimicry, natural, man-made, historical and anachronistic are important to the work. To this end, Lim finds inspiration in sites and objects that are both ‘contemporary’ and ‘out of time’, embodied and virtual. Model homes, suburban sprawl, CCTV, online chat rooms, fake food, historical parks and the Australian landscape have all featured in the work. Counterpoint to these sites, Lim has performed the identities of Japanese hikikomori; a Bowie-eyed rock star; the cannibal Issei Sagawa; a suburban beautician; Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock and currently, a gold Mao-suited ‘Ambassador’. This dialogue between place and performance reflects the push-pull between Australian and Asian, the mono and the multi-cultural.
Lim’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Tate Modern, GOMA, ACMI, HUN Gallery NY, and FACT Liverpool. She has received a number of Australia Council for the Arts grants and residencies, including a residency at the Experimental Television Centre NY and exchange at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She is currently an artist-in-residence at Bundanon Trust. Collaboration, artistic community and the intersection between art and society informs her practice: in addition to her solo work, she co-directed the inaugural Channels: the Australian Video Art Festival, is a board member at Next Wave, the founding editor of Assemble Papers and co-founder of interdisciplinary collective Tape Projects.
Performance documentation All images: Document Photography
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Eugenia Lim, The People’s Currency (performance documentation), presented at Federation Square as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Melbourne. Image: Document Photography.
Flying Buck Exchange is a special presentation of an ongoing ‘Bucking’ performance project by Pakistani-Australian artist Abdullah M.I. Syed. Showcased over three days at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA, Syed’s tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase, Bucking, will see him consuming, distributing and exchanging currency, in this case, in the form of the fabled US dollar bills.
With an immediate surface playfulness underneath which lie more complex renderings of the dysfunctions of global market economies, the dissemination of power, and intrinsic neo-colonial concerns, the US dollar bill becomes a powerful instrument of addressing the micro and the macro. Where the body of the artist is in immediate play, occupied in acts of repetition and endurance, so too is the larger body of the audience, which becomes as an unwitting beneficiary of this seemingly innocuous act of engagement. Innocence and familiarity are tropes that draw those present into the field of action, however the medium itself and the progression of the performance into a more sombre and painful reality rapidly bring darker concerns hurtling to the forefront.
Flying Buck Exchange is a fascinating and at times confronting look at the central role that currency plays in economies of consumption and exchange and how money often navigates cultural and political identities.
Artist Bio:
Dr. Abdullah M.I. Syed (b. 1974, Karachi Pakistan) is a contemporary artist and designer working between Sydney, Karachi and New York. Trained in diverse disciplines, his art practice weaves religious, cultural and socio-political narratives of east and west, seamlessly knitting together art historical references and concerns from each. Syed holds a PhD in Art, Media and Design (2016) and a Master of Fine Arts (2009) from University of New South Wales, Sydney. Syed’s works have been featured in nine solo exhibitions and several national and international curated group exhibitions.
Documentation:
All images: Document Photography
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Abdullah M.I. Syed, Flying Buck Exchange (performance documentation), presented at MPavilion as part of the inaugural Asia TOPA.
Venue: Art Central Hong Kong, 9 Lung Wo Road, Central, Hong Kong.
Image by Tania Palmier Gherardi courtesy of Anida Yeou Ali.
4A returns to Art Central Hong Kong with a performance program with a series of diverse and compelling works. These leading performance artists are all working to question and challenge expectations of the norm – they ask you to imagine yourself in a different form, challenge you to rethink your expectations and invite you to speculate on a spectacle. Through the six days of the fair these artists will perform new iterations of some of their most lauded works. Tobais Gutmann’s face-o-mat returns to Asia after adventures in Papua New Guinea and Japan to refigure and redesign your face, Anida Yeou Ali’s Red Chador will weave through the crowds alongside you as you browse the booths and Hahan will invite you to hack the art market. Premiering at Art Central will be new performance works from Enoch Cheng (HK) and Amrita Hepi (AUS).
Works that will be presented as part of Performance x 4A at Art Central are:
Enoch Cheng – Fair Gestures/ 動靜不失其時
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan – Speculative Entertainment No.1 Hong Kong Edition
Tobias Gutmann – Face-o-Mat
Amrita Hepi –This ______________ may not protect you but at times its enough to know it exists.
Anida Yoeu Ali – The Red Chador – Ban Me!
Biographies
Enoch Cheng (1983, Hong Kong.) lives and works in Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Enoch Cheng is an artist, director, performer, writer, independent curator, and founder of art collective Interlocutor. His practice involves the moving image, installation, curating, dance, music events, theatre and performance. Concerned with the everyday subtleties in contemporary urban lives, his works explore recurrent themes of place, travel, fiction, memory, time and destination. He received his MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, London and BA in English Literature and Art History at the University of Hong Kong. His most recent shows in Hong Kong include You Are Not Alone at Oi! Oil Street Art Space and The Memory of Proximity at Hong Kong Museum of Art.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan (1983, Kebumen, Indonesia) lives and works in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Hahan’s art making is concerned with the tussle between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, blurring realism with decoration. Hahan incorporates film, music and street culture into a distinct visual language, creating a sense of movement and spontaneity in what can be described as a topsy-turvy reality steeped in satirical humor. In recent years, he attempts to display an art with the concept that emphasizes on the interaction with the visitors and relate it with the development of art in global as well as its society. He also one of the founders of Ace House Collective, a young artists’ collective and initiative space based in Yogyakarta which trying to capture the culture of Indonesian contemporary society through multidiscipline work process, collaboration, and research.His works have been collected by several art museum including Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Brisbane, Australia and National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Melbourne, Australia.
Tobias Gutmann (1987, Wewak, Papua New Guinea) lives and works in Zurich, Sweden. At the heart of Tobias Gutmann’s artistic practice lies the creation and investigation of encounters – between people, cultures, and environments, but also between what we perceive on the outside and what we feel on the inside. The Swiss artist aims to set up situations where such a dialogue can happen. His works morph between performance, installation, and workshops, and often have relational and participatory aspects to them. His Face-O-Mat, analogue portrait machine, has been traveling the world since 2012 and will feature at Art Central 2017. It can be viewed as a quiet critique of how technology has made us obsessed with assembling and portraying an identity that puts us in the best light. Previous Face-O-Mat projects include: Museum Haus Konstrktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, Supergraph, Melbourne, Australia and Mudam, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
Amrita Hepi (1989, Townsville, Australia) lives and works in New South Wales, Australia. Amrita Hepi is a Bundjulung and Ngapuhi dancer and choreographer working in the field of experimental dance. Her choreography is rooted in creating movement in transitional spaces, interweaving her urgent cultural heritage and contemporary dance training. The barriers of intersectionality, cultural memory and pop cultural references also feature in her work. Amrita has trained at the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) dance college, New South Wales, Australia and Alvin Ailey American Dance School, New York. She has exhibited and performed at Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, the Australian Centre for Contemporary art, Melbourne, Carriageworks, Sydney, TEDX, Sydney and Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada.
Anida Yoeu Ali (1974, Battambang, Cambodia) lives in Seattle, Washington, United States of America and works between the Asia-Pacific and US. Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist, educator and global agitator. Ali’s multi-disciplinary practices include performance, installation, videos, images, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to art-making, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali’s works have been exhibited widely in including installations and performances at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Palais de Tokyo, and the Asia Pacific Triennial 8. In 2014, Ali won the top prize of the Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong. Ali earned her B.F.A. from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and an M.F.A. in from School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington Bothell where she teaches art, performance and global studies courses. Ali resides in Tacoma, Washington and spends much of her time traveling and working between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.
Mohini Chandra is a Fijian-Indian artist currently based in London. Travels in a New World consists of an installation of 100 photographs and work on video. The black and white images are of the ‘backs’ of photographs collected from communities of the Fijian-Indian diaspora scattered throughout the world. In her video work, Chandra uses the photo album as a means to revisit the past, evoking images from childhood and half-remembered generations.
Mohini Chandra has shown internationally including Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool UK, Kampnagel Art Gallery Hamburg, Johannesburg Biennale and Courtauld Institute London. This is her first solo exhibition in Australia.
Raj Kumar, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth and Adeela Suleman.
I don’t want to be there when it happens brings together artists who explore the psychology of contemporary trauma. Recent works by Raj Kumar, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth and Adeela Suleman all confront the larger socio-political realities of Pakistan in the era of contemporary warfare. Through video and installation, the artists address the experience of the individual in the midst of a continuous state of war. By scanning the landscape with nonsensical logic, futilely seeking to document destruction, and questioning the appropriation of religion, the artworks in the exhibition avoid resolution and closure. Instead, they highlight the individual’s inability to comprehend the expansive uncertainty of combat, and the impossibilities of representing the trauma of conflict.
I don’t want to be there when it happens presents truth as a precarious oscillation between fiction and reality. The artists resist literal or documentary approaches to their subjects, relying instead on speculative, symbolic, ambiguous and unstable modes of representation. In doing so, they emphasise how the individual’s attempts to understand and comprehend the reality of contemporary conflict are equally characterised by uncertainty and irresolvability. I don’t want to be there when it happens also seeks to acknowledge and present a multiplicity of perspectives on the ongoing conflicts in Pakistan and its region—perspectives which are all too easily overlooked or obscured by Western media and political interests.
Adeela Suleman’s work to be shown in I don’t want to be there when it happens has been co-commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and The Keir Foundation.
Presented in collaboration with:
About the artists:
Adeela Suleman (b.1970, Karachi, Pakistan, lives and works in Karachi) draws attention to troubled sectarian and gang-led violence in Pakistan. Drawing from the traditions of Islamic art, Suleman moulds hardened steel and co-opts found objects to memorialise the countless killings within her country. With generous support from The Keir Foundation, 4A has co-comissioned Adeela Suleman to create new artworks for I don’t want to be here when it happens.
Suleman studied Sculpture at the Indus Valley School of Art and completed a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Karachi. She is the Coordinator of Vasl Artists’ Collective in Karachi, in addition to being Associate Professor and Head of the Fine Art Department at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Suleman has participated extensively with group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including Phantoms of Asia at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the 2013 Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art; Hanging Fire – Contemporary Art from Pakistan at The Asia Society, New York; Gallery Rohtas 2, Lahore; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Aicon Gallery, New York; and, the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Bologna, Italy.
Raj Kumar (b. 1984, Tando Mohammad Khan, Pakistan, lives and works in Tando Mohammad Khan) examines the religious practices, rituals and beliefs of Islam and its place in the contemporary world. Kumar draws from his own Islamic faith and experiences of living in Pakistan, a nation with where 97% of the population are Muslim. This is Kumar’s first international exhibition and is supported by the 4A Set (Sydney) members.
Raj Kumar graduated from the National College of Arts in Textile Design in 2007 and holds a Masters of Visual Arts (Honours) from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. The 2015 National College of Arts Degree Show in Lahore was Kumar’s first exhibition as an artist.
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth (Sonia Leber b.1959, Melbourne, Australia, David Chesworth b. 1958, Stoke, England, live and work in Melbourne, Australia) have collaborated since 1996, creating multi-channel sound and media installations for a range of arts and public spaces. The have exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions include Zaum Tractor, Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 2014; The Way You Move Me, Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 2012; Space-Shifter, Detached/MONA FOMA, Hobart, 2012, and at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2011. Leber & Chesworth premiere their new work, Earthwork, at 4A as part of this exhibition.
Their work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Borders, Barriers, Walls, Monash University Museum of Art, 2016; Substation Contemporary Art Prize, Melbourne (winner), 2016; The Documentary Take, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2016; 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, 2015, 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013-14; Cooperation Territory, 16thLine Art Gallery and Makaronka Art Center; Spaced: Art Out of Place, Fremantle Art Centre, 2012; Animal/ Human, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 2012; Stealing the Senses, Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, 2011.
Exhibition documentation
Adeela Suleman, I don’t want to be there when it happens (2013/2017), hand-beaten stainless steel, iron and bulb, dimensions
variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. This artwork has been commissioned by
4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Centre: Adeela Suleman, I don’t want to be there when it happens (2013/2017), hand-beaten stainless steel, iron and bulb, dimensions
variable, installation view, detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Dimensions variable. Back: Adeela Suleman, After all
its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view. Courtesy the artist. Both artworks
have been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and generously supported by The Keir Foundation. Image:
Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, I don’t want to be there when it happens (2013/2017), hand-beaten stainless steel, iron and bulb, dimensions
variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. This artwork has
been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, After all its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and generously
supported by The Keir Foundation. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported
by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, After all its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and generously supported by The Keir Foundation. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, After all its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and generously supported by The Keir Foundation. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, After all its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and generously supported by The Keir Foundation. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Adeela Suleman, After all its always someone else who dies, (2017), hanging steel, dimensions variable, installation view: detail,
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney and
generously supported by The Keir Foundation. This artwork has been commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney
and supported by The Keir Foundation. Image: Document Photography.
Front: Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Earthwork, (2017), HD video, stereo audio, 5:00, installation view, 4A Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists. Back: Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm
(each, 9 mats in total), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Earthwork, (2017), HD video, stereo audio, 5:00, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary
Asian Art. Image courtesy the artists.
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Earthwork (video still), (2017), HD video, stereo audio, 5:00, installation view, 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art. Artwork and image courtesy the artists.
Front: Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm (each, 9 mats in total), installation view, 4A
Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Back: Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Earthwork, (2017), HD video,
stero audio, 5:00, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists. Image: Document Photography.
Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm (each, 9 mats in total), installation view, 4A Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm (each, 9 mats in total), installation view: detail, 4A
Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm (each, 9 mats in total), installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Raj Kumar, Meet, Pray and Pay, (2017), playing dice, 66cm x 118cm x 1.2 cm (each, 9 mats in total), installation view: detail, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Artists: Sarah Goffman, Lisa Kelly and Carla Cescon
Plant Room is a collaborative exhibition by Sarah Goffman, Lisa Kelly and Carla Cescon that reinterprets our urban environment through an artistic process. Anti-aesthetic locations within buildings such as air vents, garbage disposal areas and power generators become potential sources to be explored within the space of the gallery. Sarah Goffman, Lisa Kelly and Carla Cescon are young emerging Sydney-based artists who have exhibited at artist-run spaces.
Header image: Sarah Goffman, Consumer Portraits, 2001, exhibition view
Sarah Goffman, Consumer Portraits [detail], 2001, exhibition view
Shilpa Gupta is a young Indian artist based in Mumbai whose work explores the complex issues of femininity within the contemporary cultural and spiritual life of India. Developed specifically for the Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art], her installation incorporates video and mixed media. In voicing what is not spoken of, Gupta presents a potent view of feminine issues through three generations of women in her family. This exhibition of Gupta’s work is her first solo exhibition in Australia. She has exhibited in India including the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lakeeren Art Gallery, and the Nehru Centre Art Gallery in India.
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2000, cloth stained with menstrual blood, video, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2000, cloth stained with menstrual blood, video, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the Artist.
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2000, cloth stained with menstrual blood, video, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the Artist.
Header image: Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2000, cloth stained with menstrual blood, video, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Curator: Emil Goh in association with dLux media arts
Artists: Renaud Bézy* (FRA), Lisa Cheung (CAN), Tiago Carneiro de Cunha (BRA), Volker Eichelmann & Ruth Maclennan (GER/UK), Nayia Frangouli (GRE), Anita Fricek (AUT), Shaun Gladwell & Joshua Raymond (AUS), Emil Goh (MYS), Richard Grayson (UK), Karolyn Hatton* (USA), Ritsuko Hidaka (JPN), Eliza Hutchinson (AUS), Yasu Ichige (JPN), Les Joynes (USA), Ben Judd* (UK), Susan Pui San Lok (UK), Caroline McCarthy* (IRE), Kenny Macleod* (UK), Eline McGeorge* (NOR), Hidenobu Mori (JPN), Helena Oest* (FIN), Jeroen Offerman (NED), Joao Onofre (POR), Raquel Ormella* (AUS), Luke Parker (AUS), Saki Satom* (JPN), Second Planet (JPN), Suzi Triester (UK), Go Watanabe (JPN) and Oliver Zwink (GER)
* on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Presented in association with Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, New Releases, an international survey of original video works orbiting in from over 17 countries curated by Emil Goh. Emil recently returned to Australia from Europe, inspired and armed with works on tape from emerging artists worldwide. Works which encompass animation, non-narrative, narrative, social-documentary, series excerpts and more. New Releases is an association to experience 30 recent works by 33 artists in an off the shelf Video Ezy fashion dLux media arts would like to express its appreciation to Emil Goh for creating a vigorous exhibition of fresh young talent and to Gallery 4A and AGNSW for their generous support of New Releases.
Curator: Ramon E.S. Lerma
Artists: Maria Cruz and Victoria Lobregat
This exhibition brings together the work of two Filipina artists, Maria Cruz and Victoria Lobregat, for the first time. The Philippines has a remarkable ability of placing its women at the forefront. Fifteen years after Cory Aquino harnessed ‘people power’ to force dictator Ferdinand Marcos out of office, history repeated itself last weekend when Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assumed Philippine Presidency after leading a peaceful popular uprising against the discredited Joseph Estrada.
Maria Cruz and Victoria Lobregat were both born in Manila: Lobregat leaving the Philippines at only five years of age, while Cruz completed her tertiary studies prior to migrating to Australia.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Gaye Chan and Karen Coull
Soft Touch is an exhibition which brings together two lesbian artists – Gaye Chan and Karen Coull – from different cultural perspectives.
Both artists address in different ways issues relating to the representation of women from a lesbian perspective. Chan’s interest in migration and her place within Hawaiian society offers alternative multicultural considerations to debate while Karen Coull’s work deconstructs Australian vernacular readings of femininity.
Soft Touch is part of the 2001 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Contributors: City of Sydney Archives, King Fong, Diana Giese, Shirley Fitzgerald, Annette Shun Wah, Emmanuel Arroney, Kenneth Kwok & Sabrina Man, ACCA, Helen Pecheniuk, National Library of Australia, Irene Moss, Henry Tsang & Victor Tsang, Angela Chan, Gladys Lim, Jeffrey Ng, Mary Lee & Carlos Ung, CYL, Helen Fong, Howard Choy, Allen Yip, Eileen Lai & Lance Lai, John & Lois McEvoy, Benjamin Chow, Mark Costello, Capitol Theatre, Ruth Chong, Lily Ma, Jacqui Wong & Jackson Wong, The Mandarin Club, Linda Wong, Norma Oong, Bobby Leedow, William Yang, Chris Wong, Choy Lee Fut, Cyril & Milla Vincenc, Cyril’s Deli, Shen Jiawei, Maria Stark Bryan, OVB Ipoh, Melissa Smythe, Intro International, Teresa Cheng & Dominic Cheng, Chinatown Promotions, Martin Kwok, Goon Yee Tong and Nick Mahone
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre will present My Chinatown, an exhibition showcasing Sydney Chinatown over the last 150 years.
My Chinatown explores Sydney’s Chinatown and the local community from an historical and contemporary perspective. Photographs from the City of Sydney archives, dating from the 1890s, reflect Chinatown in the turn of the century. Other photographs from community members provide personal reflections of what it was like to be Chinese-Australian. Photographs of Quong Tart are also included. Sound recordings of interviews with Chinese Community leaders give an intimate history of growing up in Chinatown in the 1950s and 60s. While contemporary portraits of Chinese Australians by renowned photographer William Yang brings Chinatown into today’s relevance.
Featuring artists: George and Ron Adams, Min-Woo Bang, Lucy Barker, Bronwen Bassett, Damian Brinley, Scott Campbell, Simon Champ, Chris and Simon Chapman, Hong Chen, Kent Chuang, Sally Clarke, Sandra Cross, Simon Cuthbert, Dacchi Dang, Nguyen Dao Hoang, Julia Davis, Adam Dorahy, Noella Eun-Ju Oh, Dong Wang Fan, Ruth Anne Fernon, Juliet Fowler Smith, Trevor Fry, Clinton Garofano, Liu Hao-Ou, Brad Hammond, Virginia Hilyard, Anna Ho, Matt Hoggett, Yew-Sun Hu, Tao Hu, Maylei Hunt, Jenny Ihn, Yawen Jang, Edward Johnson, Nelia Justo, Fiona Kemp, Gail Kenning, Hsiu-Li Kuo, John Lee, Lindy Lee, Owen Leong, Helena Leslie, Victoria Lobregat, Lan Lu, Hongyu May Luo, Garrie Maguire, Sophie Maxwell, Wilde McAlliser, Hu Ming, Vanila Netto, K Ng, Narelle Olmo-Murillo, Monte Packham, Hilary Hollock, Debra Porch, Hal Pratt, Dick Quan, Debra Reich, Marlene Sarroff, Sandy Saxon, Aaron Seeto, Josephine Seyfried, Kijeong Song, Bev Southcott, Astrid Spielman, Laura Stekovic, Ka Lydia Sun, Laurens Tan, Tricia Tang, Adrianne Tasker, Felix Terry, My Le Thi, Bic Tieu, Dr. Kai-Kai Toh, Michael Van Langenberg, Lachlan Warner, Nathan Waters, David Wills, Christina Wilmot, Gang Zhao, Ana Young, Haimeng Zhao, Shigemi, Glen Clarke, Wang Xu, Hayden Fowler.
Andy Davey is a Sydney based artists whose primary artistic medium is gold. Using both 24 carat precious gold leaf, and the discarded wrappers of ‘Golden Rough’ chocolates, Davey invokes the age-old desire for gold as well as our related contemporary desire to consume it. In this Olympic Year, Davey’s installation at Gallery 4A, is timely, making comment on the “Going for Gold” desire for success, sports, winning, and the gold medals of the Olympic Games.
Project Centre for Contemporary Art, Wollongong, NSW, 26 October – 14 November 1999
Gallery 4A, Sydney, 30 August – 23 September 2000
Curator: Laurens Tan
Artists: Tom Dion, Dong Wang Fan, Jiyang Jin, Ying Guo, Tiffany Lee-Shoy, Montri Muenowy, Aaron Seeto, Jiawei Shen, Laurens Tan, Ngoc Tran, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Lan Wang.
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? is a survey exhibition of Asian Australian artists living and working in the Illawarra and southern regions of Sydney. Taking its title from the 60’s classica starring Sydney Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner explores the involvement of Asian Australians in the shaping of our Australian community, while at the same time revealing the diversity of their cultural heritage and experiences.
The twelve artists in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? represent a smorgasbord of established and emerging practitioners, newly migrated and Australian-born Asian Australians, working in the areas of painting, sculpture, installation, multi-media and photography.
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? is a Wollongong City Gallery state-wide touring exhibition initiated by the Project Centre for Contemporary Art, and supported by the Wollongong Image Campaign.
Header image: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, 2000, exhibition view
Ying Guo, Untitled, 1998, watercolour on paper.
Jiyang Jin, Dao-Yi and Huai-Rang, 1997, oil on canvas; Dong Wan Fan, Decendants #2 – Black Shadows, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Courtesy of the University of Wollongong Art Collection; Lan Wang, Chinese Opera Stories No. 5, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on paper; Aaron Seeto, This Little Piggy Went to Market, 1999, Type C photograph; Aaron Seeto, TStill Life with Fishmonger, 1999, Type C photograph.
Jaiwei Shen, Standing on Guard for our great Motherland, 1974, oil on canvas; Laurens Tan, Mars Cafe, 2000, perspex; Laurens Tan, Cafe Curtains, 1999, photograph on perspex in aluminium backlit display.
L-R: Tiffany Lee-Shoy, Untitled, 1999, hand stitched cheong-sam, Chinese embroidered satin, lurex thread, huaniu satin binding, willow pattern china, digitally printed tracing paper and banana lollies; Montri Muenouy, In Remembrance of, 1993, B+W photograph; Ngoc Tran, Untitled, 1999, wax and oil paint on velvet jewellery box; Tom Dion, Barney, 1993, silver gelatin print; Tom Dion, Ernie, 1993, silver gelatin print; Tom Dion, Watches, 1999, wood, glass, velvet, pins, watches, On loan from the Charles Dion Archive; Tom Dion, The Dion Family, photo taken 1919, resin coated print, On loan from the Charles Dion Archive; Tom Dion, Bus Mirror, circa 1940, mirrored glass and wood, On loan from the Charles Dion Archive; Tom Dion, Uncle Tom, 1994, silver gelatin print, On loan from the Charles Dion Archive; Tom Dion, Alma, 1993, silver gelatin print, On loan from the Charles Dion Archive.
Aaron Seeto, This Little Piggy Went to Market, 1999, Type C photograph; Aaron Seeto, TStill Life with Fishmonger, 1999, Type C photograph; Aaron Seeto, Butcher, Undercover Markets, Hong Kong, 1999, Type C photograph.
Jiyang Jin, Dao-Yi and Huai-Rang, 1997, oil on canvas; Jiyang Jin, Lohans, 1999, oil on canvas; Jiyang Jin, Lohans, 1999, oil on canvas; Jiyang Jin, Dan-Xia and Da-Yu, 1997, oil on canvas; Savanhdray Vongpoothorn, Light Kasina, 1995, fibre washers and synthetic polymer paste on canvas; Savanhdray Vongpoothorn, Rain, 1998, synthetic polymer paint on perforated canvas; Tiffany Lee-Shoy, Untitled, 1999, hand stitched cheong-sam, Chinese embroidered satin, lurex thread, huaniu satin binding, willow pattern china, digitally printed tracing paper and banana lollies.
Lan Wang, Chinese Opera Stories No. 5, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on paper; Lan Wang, Chinese Ancient Figures No. 5, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on paper; Lan Wang, Spring Ox (Red Chinese Characters), 1997, synthetic polymer paint on paper.
Laurens Tan, Mars Cafe, 2000, perspex; Laurens Tan, Cafe Curtains, 1999, photograph on perspex in aluminium backlit display.
Savanhdray Vongpoothorn, Light Kasina, 1995, fibre washers and synthetic polymer paste on canvas; Savanhdray Vongpoothorn, Rain, 1998, synthetic polymer paint on perforated canvas.
Mandy Ridley is an artist based in Queensland, whose exhibition Chinatown Souvenirs (On Not Knowing) delicately replicates original handcrafted objects and garments found in the Chinatowns of Brisbane and Sydney. Utilising decorative and found tourist objects, Ridley, as a non-Asian woman, recreates these objects at a greater scale and with greater intensity of colours. These richly crafted objects attempt to understand the complex layers of our multicultural society through an exploration of appropriation and cultural authenticity.
Landscape photographer Felicia Kan’s works reflect the sublime beauty of the Australian and New Zealand landscape. The large-scale photographs are minimal yet sensual: empty fields, calm seas, cloud formations.
Felicia Kan: Different Fields Different Skies is an official satellite exhibition of the 12th Biennale of Sydney: Biennale of Sydney 2000
Header image: Felicia Kan: Different Fields Different Skies, 2000, installation view
Felicia Kan, Different Fields Different Skies, 2000, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Marine Ky explores the recent history of Cambodia and how it relates to her own history of displacement, through an installation which utilises a combination of printmaking techniques and textiles. In her ephemeral installation Prey (Pray), Ky suspends sack-like forms amongst images from the Cambodian Genocide Tuol Sleng Image Database held by the University of New South Wales and Yale University, USA, to create a space which contemplates how memory distorts and refabricates.
Greg Leong Kwok-Keung is an artist based in Tasmania, whose exhibition Remembering Chinese consists of lavishly decorated Chinese costumes and textiles based upon traditional designs and motifs. Utilising the symbolism of the dragon and ‘Double Happiness’, these richly crafted objects and textiles attempt to reclaim and understand the rich layers of Leong’s cultural heritage as well as to recontextualise the traditional within the contemporary.
Cherine Fahd explores the changing face of Australia in a direct and humourous manner. Operation Nose Nose Operation is a quirky performance-based photographic installation which invokes both fashion and identity through the large and quite dominant noses of Arabic and Mediterranean people. In search of noses to cast, Fahd has taken Operation Nose Nose Operation to the local high schools, universities, pubs and bars of Beirut, Lebanon, casting and bandaging unwary participants’ noses with an almost surgical precision.
Operation Nose Nose Operation is part of an international project titled Sydney/Beirut – Beirut/Sydney.
Operation Nose Nose Operation is an official event of the Mercedes Australian Fashion Week Festival.
Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation, installation view, 2000, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation, installation view, 2000, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
L-R: Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Nathalie), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Khalo Maurice Azouri), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Cisi), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Sylvana), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Andre Azouri), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Nathalie’s Friend), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Cherril), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. All images courtesy the artist.
Left to right from top: Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (unknown), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Ziko), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Najib), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Fulvio), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Fuzzy Wuzzy), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Marwan), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Helen), 1999-2000, colour prints, 51 x 60 cm. All images courtesy the artist.
L-R: Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Mireille + Pauline), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Noriko), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (unknown), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. All images courtesy the artist.
Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (Noriko), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation (unknown), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Header image: Cherine Fahd, Operation Nose Nose Operation(Jido + Teta), 1999-2000, colour prints, 74 x 50 cm. Courtesy the Artist.
William Yang is one of Australia’s best known photographers, whose photographs and monologues draw upon his Chinese heritage and Asian-Australian experiences to explore an ever changing Australian Identity. The Australian Chinese is Yang’s first photographic exhibition which explores the lives and stories of Chinese migrants in Australia.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Michael Dagostino and David Griggs
Michael Dagostino and David Griggs’ exhibition Skulls and Solicitors is a collaboration which addresses the question of what happens when the “Australian dream” goes wrong? What becomes of the dreamer? What becomes of the dream? Dagostino and Griggs’ photographic and mixed media installation tells a story of abandonment, survival and economic struggle through images of empty buildings and empty billboards.
Michael Dagostino and David Griggs are both Sydney based artists who have participated in exhibitions at First Draft, 151 Regent Street and were both included in the 1997 Australian Perspecta at the Casula Power House.
David Griggs, Without Knowing Which Way is North, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
David Griggs, Without Knowing Which Way is North, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Header image: David Griggs, The Swarm, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Harriet Parsons is a young Melbourne-based artist whose exhibition Domestic Science: Planework, consists of sensual sculptures constructed from satin, wire and muslin. These beautiful and whimsical objects, based on natural forms such as single cell organisms, are suspended so that they float throughout the gallery space. In previous works, Parsons has embroidered intricate animal and skeleton shapes with the artists’ own hair. This exhibition continues her exploration of the beauty of scientific representations.
David Sequeira’s approach to decoration is informed by an interest in classification and order. Using flower petals, leaves, books, colour and light he organises these materials into intricate patterns which explore wider systems of knowledge.
Kate Mackay’s installation also explores decoration through the manipulation of natural materials. In this work she uses flower petals and other natural materials to explore the possibilities of decoration.
25 October – 16 November, 2002 Curator: Aaron Seeto
Artists: Glen Clarke, Bonita Ely, Gail Joy Kenning, Sud Pedley and Boyd
Huê is a group exhibition bringing together the work of five installation artists Glen Clarke, Bonita Ely, Gail Joy Kenning, Sue Pedley & Boyd and their recent experiences of Vietnam.
In December 1998 these artists participated in the 2nd International Sculpture Symposium in Vietnam. The experiences working in a foreign culture in sometimes cyclonic conditions, engaging with other international artists and using new materials have had a profound affect on these artists’ practices. This exhibition reflects upon the artists’ separate yet integrated experiences in Vietnam from an Australian perspective. The artists have a range of professional and artistic experience, and have exhibited in Australia and overseas in such galleries as Sherman Galleries, Hargrave and Artspace in Sydney, and Oldknows Gallery and the Royal Collage of Art in Britain.
Simple Pleasures is an exhibition of knitted sculptures by emerging Melbourne-based artist Renee So. So began knitting as a hobby in 1996 and has engaged in it professionally ever since. Simple Pleasures continues her exploration of knitting as an artistic medium and visual language.
In this exhibition, So incorporates various hand and machine knitting techniques to create a body of all-knitted sculptural works. The knitted sculptures offer the viewer tactile and emotive pleasures by referencing the sentimental and reassuring evocations of knitting. The sculptures are accessible and playful objects that transform the gallery into a retreat from the complexities that an urban lifestyle can entail.
Renee Sois currently a 200 Gertrude Street studio artist and has exhibited at 200 Gertrude Street, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane as well as a number of artist-run initiatives in Melbourne.
Zai-jian Revolution is Shen Jaiwei’s first major solo exhibition since arriving in Australia in 1989. The title of the exhibition, in Mandarin means “Goodbye Revolution” but also “to see you again”. The exhibition features eight major works including Standing Guard for the Great Motherland (1974) and Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains (1972) painted at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
Standing Guard for the Great Motherland (1974) is perhaps the most famous painting of Shen Jiawei’s during this period that survives. After approval by Jiang Quing, Mao Tse-Tung’s wife and the main cultural policy maker within the Revolution, and after slight modification to the portraits to confirm to party policy, this painting was reproduced in the millions and distributed throughout China.
Shen Jiawei is largely a self-taught artist who, like the other youth of his generation was sent to Northern China as labourers and border guards physically working for and protecting a cause. In Northern Manchuria in the 1970’s within a corps of other Army artists, Shen worked the land and developed artistic skills within the structure of the People’s Liberation Army. It was during this time that paintings such as Tasting Snow and Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland were painted.
His works are in significant international collections including the China Art Gallery and Museum of the Chinese Revolution, both in Beijing. His work is little known outside of China, though he was included in China: 5000 years at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and in Bilbao.
Born in Shanghai in 1948, he migrated to Australia in January 1989 and now lives in Sydney. In Australia Shen has established a reputation for accomplished realistic portraits that have featured in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, and Mary McKillop Art prize. Most recently his work featured in the Federation1901-2001 exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gallery 4A is delighted to announce the opening of Vivien Sung’s art exhibition and book launch Five-fold Happiness. The offical launch of the Five Fold Happiness book and exhibition will take place at 6PM Friday 4 October – 19 October 2002.
The exhibition and book explore symbols, words and imagery related to the elements of five-fold happiness. Sung views the fulfilment of these concepts – luck, prosperity, longevity, happiness and wealth – as a means to enrichen oneself and to find humour and delight in the physical world.
Vivien Sung is a first-generation Australian author born and raised in Sydney with parents from Shanghai. Sung graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney with a degree in visual communication and has studied Mandarin at Beijing Normal University. A frequent traveller to China, Sung has designed books and magazines for Chronicle Books, San Francisco; Rizzoli, New York City; Random House, Australia; Fairfax Publications, Australia; and Conde Nest, Australia. Five-Fold Happiness is Sung’s first book.
Gallery 4A is pleased to present three new exhibitions of photography and site-specific installation by Deborah Paauwe, Juliet Fowler-Smith and Clinton Garofano.
Tuesday’s Child is Deborah Paauwe‘s first solo exhibition in Sydney. The exhibition depicts young girls and women with qualities of beauty, sensuality and lusciousness, but highlighting a sense of imperfection and ambiguity. Paauwe uses fashion and ambiguity to comment on notions of the development of identity, in particular the complexity of interpersonal relationship.
Make Yourself At Home is a site-specific installation by Juliet Fowler-Smith that responds to the formal architectural qualities of Gallery 4A to explore its historical, social and cultural position. It is a richly layered installation that uses materials such as bees wax, brightly coloured wrapping paper and chairs to examine how we respond to and experience place.
Motorhead by Clinton Garofano is a series of new photographs that brings speed obsessed, streetcar culture within the confines of the Gallery. Garofano’s photographs of leopard skin-clad car interiors and skull encrusted gear sticks focus on imagining the extremes of existence and mortality to explore contemporary identities.
Deborah Paauwe was born in the USA, and is now based in Adelaide, and is of Dutch and Chinese heritage. In 1999, Deborah Paauwe was a finalist for the Moet & Chandon Fellowship; she has been included in group exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, and the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 2001 she was the only Australian representative at Fotonoviembre photographic biennial, Centro de Fotografia, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain,
Juliet Fowler-Smith is a Sydney-based artist whose installation practice includes artworks created both within galleries and the outdoors in Australia, at Mangrove Mountain, NSW. More recently in 200 she was invited to be a participant at the International Environment Art Symposoum at the Taejong Lake and Royal Tomb Park, Ara Gaya, South Korea.
Clinton Garofano is a Sydney based artist who has exhibited extensively throughout Sydney and Melbourne. He has exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Orange Regional Gallery, Artspace Sydney as well as Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney, Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Melbourne and internationally in New York and Japan.
Dialogue – Multi Polar is an exhibition of video art and video documentation of underground performance art from China.
This video project is curated by Zhao Shulin and features some of China’s most exciting experimental artists using the medium of video to explore aspects of a changing identity, economy and the effects of globalisation occurring in China.
Gallery 4a is delighted to present three exhibitions that explore culture, identity and ethnicity through sound, installation, photography and portraiture.
Exit/Salida is an exhibition by Bronia Iwanczak that incorporates photography and sculptural installation to explore identity in its various forms. Iwanczak is concerned with the formation and embodiment of identity, its organic source in land and place, and the relationships between individual and collective identity.
Chinoiseries (Lost in Translation) is a sound installation by George Poonkhin Khut that explores cultural authenticity, ethnicity and ambiguity between Anglo-Australian and Chinese-Malaysian cultures. Khut creates a sound installation where he takes recordings of spoken Mandarin, splices these sounds and rearranges them into a jumbled sonic collage. Through this, he humorously questions his own identity as a Chinese man who cannot speak Chinese.
Nine Contemporary Australians by Richard Butler-Bowdon is an exhibition of portraits that deal with cultural exchange and Asian identity in contemporary Australian urban life. He depicts individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds such as Samoa, Japan and Vietnam who represent the complexity of Asian-Australian identities in Australia.
Bronia Iwanczak is a Sydney-based artist who has been exhibiting since 1988 both overseas and throughout Australia, including the Contemporary Art Centre in Adelaide and Ian Potter Gallery in Melbourne.
George Poonkhin Khut has been working since 1987 in a variety of media including sound, video, design, installation and performance. He has exhibited widely in Australia including the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Art Space in Sydney.
Richard Butler-Bowdon is a painter and installation artist who has been exhibiting since 1993 in a number of solo and group exhibitions including Nexus Multicultural Gallery-Lion Arts Centre Adelaide South Australia, Spencer Street Gallery in West Melbourne and BUS Gallery in Melbourne.
Gallery 4A is pleased to present three exhibitions exploring ideas of seduction and desire through photography and fashion.
In Untitled, Michael Thomson assembles fur and fake fur coats into forms that allude to the feminine form. Essentially these fur assemblages are a formalist project that deals with texture, colour and shape, but also invite multiple readings through the luxury of the fur coats and the kitsch through their synthetic counterparts.
Musing by Eloise de Hautecloclque and Cherine Fahd explores ideas of collaboration and the body through photography and fashion. Using found garments, de Hauteclocque creates sensual sculptural objects, often stitched together by poetic texts describing both desire and absence. Fahd’s photographs of her muse, also reveals the body by trying to conceal it. In these small intimate photographs de Hautecloclque appears, documenting performance like moments within domestic spaces.
Desiderata is an exhibition by Debra Reich, a young and emerging artists based in Sydney. Reich’s work explores notions of beneath and above ground as a poetic parallel to physical and emotional states. In this work, Reich has photographed and digitally manipulated seedpods and other organic forms to a point of abstraction. Reich speaks of the seed and seed pod within these digitally constructed landscapes as carrying a symbolic richness and playing an integral role in communicating the irony of a constructed landscape which holds no life.
Michael Thomson is an artist based in regional NSW (Bathurst). His most recent project was the Canberra Contemporary Art Space earlier this year.
Eloise de Hauteclocque combines clothing and photography within her artistic practice. She has exhibited as part of Mercedes Australian Fashion Week, at Rubyayre Gallery, Sydney as well as at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Cherine Fahd is an artist based in Sydney who has exhibited at Artspace Sydney, Gold Coast City Gallery and Casula Powerhouse. She is represented by Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney.
Debra Reich is a recent graduate of the National Art School. She was recently included in Momento Flori at the Australian Centre for Photography. This will be her first solo exhibition.
Exhibition Documentation
Eloise de Hauteclocque, Kiss Me (Kiss me here, and here and here…), 2002, cotton lace dress, silk thread, exhibition view Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art].
Cherine Fahd and Eloise de Hauteclocque, Musing exhibition view, 2002, Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art]
Cherine Fahd and Eloise de Hauteclocque, Musing exhibition view, 2002, Asia-Australia Arts Centre [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art]
Gallery 4A is pleased to present three exhibitions by emerging artists from Sydney and Queensland which explore ideas of decoration, memory and domesticity.
In Celebration by Mandy Ridley replicates the celebratory papercraft and objects found in the Chinatowns of Brisbane and Sydney. Utilising these decorative found tourist objects, Ridley, recreates these objects at a greater scale and with a greater intensity of colours. As a non-Asian woman, Ridley’s richly crafted objects attempt to understand the complex layers of our multicultural society through an exploration of appropriation and cultural authenticity.
Untitled (another study between focal tension and all things pleasant), explores the ideas of domesticity, beauty and desire. Adam Dorahy presents a single large wall painting, based upon a floral motif, delicately painted using slightly reflective white and house paints. These paintings appear and disappear into the white walls of the gallery as the viewer moves around the gallery.
Anchaini an ghra (requests of love) is an exhibition by Angharad Rixon, a young artist based in Sydney who creates incredibly beautiful objects through a structural and conceptual exploration of lace. “Lace,” Rixon says, “is about holes. I am fascinated by the spaces between things…the breath between words, rests within music and the space that remains when something is gone.” Rixon uses this traditional craft practice to create networks of spaces, these small fragments of lace are then soaked in slip porcelain, which are later fired, to reveal a network of empty holes.
Mandy Ridley lives and works in Brisbane and has had exhibitions at various artist run spaces in Queensland including Soapbox, Smith + Stonely and Palace Gallery, she has also exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery.
Adam Dorahy is a recent graduate of the University of Western Sydney. Dorahy has exhibited at Artspace, Sydney, Kudos Gallery, Sydney as well as at the University of Western Sydney.
Angharad Rixon is a recent graduate from the University of Wollongong, she has exhibited in exhibitions at The Long Gallery, Wollongong; Kudos Gallery, Paddington, in 2000 she was included in the National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary.
Over one hundred works by one hundred Asian-Australian Arts Association members will be exhibited at this year’s Annual Members’ Exhibition. The opening night will include toasts by guest speakers as well as raffles with prizes sponsored by Sydney businesses. Everyone is welcome and all profits will go back into bringing more contemporary Asian art to Sydney as well as supporting local and emerging artists, and community and education programs.
In Misformers, Scott Campbell destroys and reassembles collected Transformer toys from his youth. Out of these machines, Campbell creates fantastic and unruly objects with uncertain uses as an exploration of communication and dysfunction.
Brisbane-based artist Debra Porch presents an exhibition Angels and Creeps. Viewable 24 hours a day from the street, Debra Porch explores the convergence between memory and visibility through a sensuous installation of fabric constructions and video projections. Following her previous work, Angels and Creeps questions the link between the ‘visible’ (objects), to the ‘invisible’ space that connects an individual’s memory and experience.
Debra Porch is based in Queensland. She has exhibited widely including Silpakorn Art Centre, Thailand; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; Goldcoast Regional Gallery as well as the Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane and Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts.
Simon Cuthbert‘s exhibition of photo media works, Persistant Nature is based on Cuthbert’s recent travels around the world, including Japan. Where he has been transfixed by the construction and representation of the natural world within the built environment and public spaces.
Simon Cuthbert is an artist based in Tasmania who has exhibited at the Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum, Queensland, CAST Gallery, Tasmania Gold Coast City Gallery as well as artist run spaces in Melbourne and Brisbane.
A two person exhibition that brings together two innovative innovative bodies of work by young and emerging artists KokySaly and Kijeong Song. Their strange photographs are inspired by the relationships that have evolved around them and raise awareness of the culturally complex societies in which they live.
Koky Saly is an artist based in Melbourne, he has exhibited in artist run initiatives in Melbourne, as well as at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney.
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre presents three concurrent exhibitions across the gallery.
In the ground floor gallery we have Adam Geczy’s Origami: World Without Elements, a new installation of folded origami pieces connected by cotton thread, commemorating the story of Sadako Sasaki.
Mel O’Callaghan’s In The Halflight, an exhibition of photographic works and laser cut stainless steel sculptures. In The Halflight is generously supported by Photo Technica. Showing alongside O’Callaghan on level 1 is Dress Codes by Annabelle Collett, a series of dressmaker’s patterns and fashion design installations.
Adrienne Tasker presents a series of digital print on fabric works in the Project Space.
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre presents three exhibitions.
Huang Rui Gang’s Windows and Doors is a series of seven watercolour on paper works. Exhibiting alongside on level 1 is Anie Nheu’s Stitched, Naked, a salon hang installation of 21 graphite on paper works.
Antonia Radich’s striking installation One Thousand Pieces fills out the ground floor gallery.
Erna Lilje’s Specimens No 1 is presented in the vitrine.
Documentation
Antonia Radich, One Thousand Pieces, 2003, paper bags, red-dyed paper, 434 x 276.5cm
Antonia Radich, One Thousand Pieces, 2003, paper bags, red-dyed paper, 434 x 276.5cm
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre presents the group exhibition Talechaser, featuring works from Luke Butterworth, Hayden Fowler, Huseyin Sami and Sangeeta Sandrasegar. Talechaser is curated by Aaron Seeto.
Exhibiting alongside this major group exhibition is Nuha Saad’s Ripples with Stripes (The White Room), a series of 10 acrylic paint on MDF works.
Documentation
Luke Butterworth, Proposal Sublime Ecotourist / Land Art Monument, 2003, cardboard and wood
Hayden Fowler, The Nature Machine, 2003, timber, A4 colour prints, TV monitors, electrical, accessories, VHS, floorlamps, hessian, earth, grass
Sangeeta Sandrasegar, The Gathering and Gossiping of Various Tools, 2003, paper cuts
The Asia-Australia Arts Centre presents three concurrent exhibitions from emerging artists.
Exhibiting on the first floor are Sandy Saxon, presenting Trade and Transcendence: Paying the Ferryman, a series of mixed media plaques, and glassworks alongside two etchings on paper; and Neal Smith’s mobilefortune containing four acrylic on MDF works. Neal Smith is represented by Damien Minton Gallery.
The ground floor gallery houses Sandra Cross’ Insideoutside, an installation of 41 scrolls.
Craig Loxley presents a nine naturalistic works in the vitrine space.
Artists: Fiona Foley, Jitish Kallat, Michael Parekowhai, Gigi Scaria, Ronnie van Hout and Shez Dawood.
Indians & Cowboys is a major group exhibition that brings together the work of six internationally recognised artists whose works share a slyly humorous approach to serious issues of cultural politics, nationality, and personal identities.
The myth of the Cowboy and the Indian has been a part of childhood play for the West. Set into conflict, the myth of the ‘Indian’ and ‘Cowboy’ has formed images of stereotypical force. Indians & Cowboys seeks to echo the irreverent tone found within the exhibition title and the artwork in the exhibition – turning around the easy dualisms we encounter within our negotiations of difference.
The Indians & Cowboys project has been supported by the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, the Migration Heritage Centre, the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and the Asian Australian Artists Association Inc..
Exhibition Documentation
Indians & Cowboys, 2003, exhibition view
Indians & Cowboys, 2003, exhibition view
Indians & Cowboys, 2003, exhibition view
Jitish Kallat, Quaratine Day, 2003, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, exhibition view.
Michael Parekowhai, Clayton Moore and Harold Smith, 2003, rabbit and mixed media, installation view
Ronnie van Hout, I guess, I lose [detail], 2003, mixed media, installation view
Gigi Scaria, Untitled dawring, 2001, mixed media on paper, installation view
Fiona Foley, Indian Heads, 2003, postcards on paper, installation view
For Emily by Yang Jiechang showcases a multi-media installation which pays homage to artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye whose art Yang believed, represented the Australian culture.
“Beating Drums in Criticism of Cao” is a story that uses the figure of Cao Cao to portray a classic example of a treacherous court official. The story is based on three different literary texts whose time of writing span over 1000 years: History of Eastern Han, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the traditional play called “Kuang Gu Shi Yu Yang San Nong”. The writers and styles of these sources vary greatly: the first text is a court historian’s annals, the second text is an oral narrative passed down and collected among the common people, and the third text is a traditional dramatic play.
The exhibition entitled Ceremony is founded on the historical process of the creation of these three literary texts, and it uses a personal story to analyze a historical event . During this ceremony, everybody participates both as a speaker and as a performer, and the stage turns into a place where history and the present come together. In doing so, the audience plays a role in furthering the relationship between drama and history.
Wang Jianwei was born in China’s Sichuan province in 1958 and obtained a masters degree in 1987 from China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou where he studied in the oil painting department.
My Chinatown: Restaurant Kids is an Asia-Australia Arts Centre project which explores the dynamic social history of the Chinese-Australian community in Sydney many of whom have lived here for five generations. The exhibition showcases their experiences through their personal photographs and objects.
The exhibition explores the phenomenon of Chinese Restaurants in Sydney’s Chinatown and surrounds through four generations of kids who grew up within a Chinese restaurant environment. It features Quong Tart’s Tea House in the late nineteenth century through to the popular restaurants, cafes and nightclubs of the 40s, 50s and 60s including the famous Chequers Nightclub.
This exhibition is an official event of the City of Sydney Chinese New Year festival program and will be launched at 6pm on Thursday 30 January 2003 at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Haymarket.
My Chinatown: Restaurant Kids is sponsored by the City of Sydney, Star City Hotel and Casino, Big Colour Imaging Artarmon, Martell Cognac and Penfolds Wines.
Artists: Liu Xiao Xan, Li Baohua, Lindy Lee, Su Xing Ping, David Griggs, David Clarke, Di Wu, Shen Shaomin, William Yang, Hu Ming, Suzann Victor, Fan Dong Wang, Owen Leong, Guan Wei, Gary Carsley, Aaron Seeto, Kijeong Song, Dacchi Dang, Selina Ou, Vienna Parreno & Krystof Osinski, Adam Geczy, Koky Saly, NELL, John Young, Renee So, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Sue Pedley, Sally Smart, Binghui Huangfu, Min Woo Bang, Wang Jianwei, KYV, Wang Xu, Ruth Watson, Jae Hoon Lee, Li Ching Wong, Yoko Kaijo, Lachlan Warner, Shoufay Derz, Jiang Jie.
Asian Traffic is an international project presenting the work of influential Asian artists, mapping out some of the important cultural and social shifts occurring in the Asia-Pacific region. Curated by Binghui Huangfu, this multi-chapter exhibition marked out some of the shifting concerns of artists at the beginning of this century. The exhibition had a geographic reach that spread throughout Asia, and was subsequently developed into a major international touring project. It was loosely organised around 6 different phases of exhibitions. As the exhibition toured, local curators were invited to contribute to the project through exhibition and texts.
Phase 1 (4 – 19 June)
Artists: Shen Shaomin, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Mella Jaarsma and Renee So
Shen Shaomin and Manit Sriwanichpoom consider the disadvantages of technological advances in Asia and the dislocating effect this can have on society. Both artists are also influenced by the devastating manifestations that religious conflicts can have. Their work expresses how unnecessary it is to abide by religious prejudice or other discrimination when physically and emotionally we are all humanly similar.
Mella Jaarsma and Renee So address the question of identity and the categorisation that race provides. Renee So looks at “Asian-ness” as a style, a stereotype determined by people outside Asia, which she replicated and expressed in her iconic tapestries. Mella Jaarsma tried to break the links between origin and identity to express identity as a transient thing that is renewable and changeable.
Phase 2 (22 June – 10 July)
Artists: Arahmaiani, Wong Hoy Cheong, Sean Cordeiro, Jiang Jie, Leung Mee Ping and Vasa Sitthike
Mella Jaarsma and Manit Sriwanichpoom exhibited in both Phase 1 and Pase 2. Having their work appear adjacent to the other artists in Phase 2 was conducive to changing their curatorial context so as to further encourage the exploration of Asian identity, not only on an individual level but also in a racial and global domain. Furthermore, their dual showing expresses the new relationships that curator Binghui Huangfu wished to display between different artworks so as to elucidate the shifting contexts of art in Asia and Western society. This expresses the cultural jam that is Asian Traffic.
Arahmaiani and Wong Hoy Cheong examine hybridity of Asia with its many religious and cultural influences. This diversity in Asian society entails political conflict. They consider the abuses of military and corporate authoritarianism intrinsic to this conflict. Both artists also look at fakery and social facades. Arahmaiani considers how a society can be simultaneously pleasant and violent. Cheong observes that information sources such as documentary and websites are assumed to be factual authorities, when they are actually fictive rhetorical sources of informations.
Adoption into another culture reactively sets forth changes that form the hybridised culture that Arahmaiani and Wong Hoy Cheong observes, but it also may have a dislocating effect on a person’s understanding of their original culture. Jiang Jie looks at ethical, moral and political issues involved in Westerners adopting Asian children. Leung Mee Ping, provides and alternative perspective on issues of globalisation through the eyes of a blind girl.
Phase 3 (16 – 31 July)
Artists: Ken Yonetani, Kijeong Song and Jae Hoon Lee
Through his interactive installations, Ken Yonetani demonstrates a heightened sensitivity to environmental concerns. Developed from research undertaken with CSIRO, Yonetani presented an installation of over 300 ceramic tiles, featuring ten endangered species of butterfly in Fumie – Butterfly Mandala, 2004. On opening night, these fragile tiles lined the floors and walls of the Gallery 4A, and in navigating the gallery to make their way through the exhibition, guests were forced to crush, trample and destroy the files underfoot. in this spectacular and ephemeral installation, the audience is acknowledged as complicit in the destruction and disappearance of the natural world.
Kijeong Song has been photographing the dissolution of cultural barriers through the documentation of cross-cultural relationships. In the series of photographs, Couples, 2004, Song documents couples in the intimate environment of their homes, where geographical and cultural boundaries dissolve. She highlights the banal and everyday family environment which people easily pass by in their day-to0-day life.
Jae Hoon Lee is a New Zealand based artist whose work attempts to open up new possibilities between cultures. Through the use of dual projections, he created a virtual Korean train station within the gallery space of Gallery 4A in Virtual Train Station, 2004. With trains loudly arriving and departing at regular intervals, and masses of passengers boarding and disembarking, there is a sense of disorientation and dislocation in the collapse of conventional spatial parameters. The work reflects a journey that traverses identity, space and time.
Phase 4 (6 August – 21 August)
Artists: Shilpa Gupta, Katherine Huang, Mahmoud Yekta and David Clarke.
Phase Four explores the shadowy ground of money, influence, spiritual intervention and memory. Shilpa Gupta explores notions of religious identity and spiritual intervention, suggesting the role of artists is to question belief at a time when there is a clash of civilisations and political alignments both at home, on the border and beyond. Her work in Asian Traffic, Untitled (2001) explores the role of the artist as a narrator of her time, as an observer and mediator between conflict and belief.
Filmmaker Mahmoud Yekta arrived in Australia from the Middle East in 1998, and also responds to momentous events of the last few years using film and shadows to unearth the hidden racial, gender and class injustices that continue to govern our lives. His video installation, Fled (2004) is presented in the gallery in a way that makes viewing uncomfortable: presented in a narrow corridor, the audience negotiates this space as their shadows are also projected onto the filmic surface.
This phase also includes Hong Kong-based David Clarke and Melbourne-based artist Katherine Huang, who both present highly personal views of the world, shifting between both private and public, biography and social engagement. David Clarke presents images of cities and its transformations through photography, collection and observation visualised within a personal trajectory through the metropolitan sprawl.
Huang playfully explores everyday city environments and experiences through a process of collection, arrangement and assemblage of ephemeral materials including plastics, drawing and photographs, collected through her travels in Melbourne, and major metropolitan centres in Asia and America, Huang uncovers memories and hints at the way in which we construct meaning and narrative of our experiences. Huang is interested in the ways in which memory, like rambling architecture of cities, grafts and builds upon itself.
Phase 5 (27 August – 11 September)
Artists: Song Dong, George Poonkhin Khut, Owen Leong, Koky Saly, Suzann Victor and Keith Wong
Phase Five asks viewers to reconsider their spatial bodily relationship to the urban, social and political environment. Song Dong, one of China’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, has created a sumptuous four-channel video installation, Floating City (2004) especially for Gallery 4A. An enveloping meditation on the metropolis, urbanisation and the city, Song Dong’s practice explores notions of perception, transience and the ephemeral nature of existence. Sydney based new-media artist George Poonkhin Khut created an intimate and meditative interactive sound sculpture, Drawing Breath v. 1 (2004) which enables individual participants to observe and interact with aspects of their own breath patterns, using vivid sound and video animations controlled by changes in the depth and rate of breathing and the principles of biofeedback behavioural training.
Australian artists Owen Leong and Koky Saly both explore new representations of Asian male bodies in their individual art practices. In his double video installation, Second Skin (2004), Leong uses exquisite substances such as honey, milk, prosthetic wounds and sugar antlers in combination with simple performative gestures to make visible the concealed socio-political structures that mark our bodies through race, gender and colour. Saly has produced a lush new photographic series exploring the gay community as a potent site of cultural and racial displacement, questioning the notion of community within the last two decades and how these may impact on the future of gay Asian men within the Australian gay community.
Permeable and transient forms are reflected in the work of Keith Wong. Wong’s beautiful large-scale balsa wood installations of disassembles grids touch upon human experience and immersion in the world to heighten out consideration of the dynamic exchanges between our bodies and the space of the world that folds back upon us.
Phase 6 (16 September – 2 October)
Artists: Yoko Kajio, Shoufay derz, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Michael Shaowanasai, Peng Yu + Sun Yuan and Shigeyuki Kihara
The sixth and final Phase of Asian Traffic presents a diverse mix of local and international artists. Michael Shaowanasai is one of Thailand’s most recognised artists and will be presenting one of his latests series of photographs of Redguards (2004). Having lived and worked in both Germany and Japan, his work is informed by the condition of global politics. The artists uses a cheeky and humorous approach to assume the roles of young men and women of the Chinese Youth League, with an underlying political agenda that deals with themes of sexuality, gender and identity.
Suzann Victor has created a work dealing with the problematics of language. The artist presents large-scale scroll pieces on which she has written Chinese characters in human hair. For the duration of the exhibition, visitors to the gallery will be invited to teach her the Chinese characters they know, and in an ongoing process of exchange and growth between the artist and the public, these new Chinese characters will be added to the artwork as the exhibition unfolds.
South Australian artist Yoko Kajio explores her immediate environment with an intense childlike wonder that is both surprising and magical. For this Phase of Asian Traffic, Kajio constructed a multi-media environment in Gnidrocer – Nothing is Permanent (2004) in which viewers can immerse themselves and contemplate complex and ever-changing alternative realities to explore the space between representation and imagination.
Throughout her art practice, Shoufay Derz has sought to grapple with and to reflect some of the more fundamental questions in life. The result is photographic, video and installation-based work that explores issues of selfhood and the metaphysical within a contemporary context.
Collaborative Chinese artists Peng Yu + Sun Yuan are internationally renowned for their highly provocative and controversial installations. For Asian Traffic, the artists presented a thoughtful and ephemeral installation, Corner of Ice Mountain (2004), where a cubic metre block of dry ice was placed in the upstair gallery and allowed to melt, to delight and elude visitors by filling the gallery with a layer of mist, only to disappear completely by the next morning. Peng and Sun have described this work as being the corner of a mountain, inviting visitors to contemplate the true depth and breadth of contemporary Asian art being produced today.
Exhibition Documentation
Phase One
Renee So, The Palace Walls are Strewn with Tapestries, 2004, installation view
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2001, process based installation, video, 40 canvases, television, lights, carpet, installation view
Katherine Huang, Milk, 2004, Pixel blocks and plastic tapestry on orange mesh, installation view
David Clarke, Photo Diary: 31 Dec 1994 – 1 Jan 2000, 2004, installation view
Phase 5
Owen Leong, Second Skin, 2004, installation view
Koky Saly, Look The Other Way, 2004, Lambda print, installation view
Keith Wong, A-Z, 2004, balsa wood construction, installation view
George Poonkhin Khut, Drawing Breath v.1, 2004, interactive sound and video installation, installation view
Song Dong, Floating City, 2004, 4-channel digital video installation, installation view
Suzann Vicrtor, All I Know, 2004, human and artificial hair on felt, installation view
Phase 6
Shoufay Derz, Dreamboat, 2003, plywood, 90 x 110 x 315cm, installation view
Sangeeta Sandrasegar, I’m Half Sick of Shadows, 2004, paper cut-out panels, glitter, glass beads, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Mori Gallery, Sydney.
Michael Shaowanasai, Redguard, 2004, C-type photograph, installation view
Artists: Cai Menxia, Ge Gan, Bu Lieping, Qui Zhenzhong, Qui Zhijie, Shao Yan, Wang Dongling, Wang Nanming, Wei Ligang, Yan Binghui, Zeng Laide, Zhang Dawo, Zhang Qiang and Zhu Quingsheng.
To celebrate the festivities of the Chinese New Year, Gallery 4a is presenting a highly anticipated exhibition on the art of calligraphy. It will include the work of fourteen artists that have travelled all the way from China to hold performances and workshops for the general public, as well as exhibit their new school of calligraphy work.
Modern calligraphy reveals the unique encounter between modernity and tradition and how it merges together in a range of styles and media’s. Many artists are finding new inspiration from traditional Chinese calligraphy for their artwork, as well as showing influence of abstract expressionism. From this, they continue to enhance the modernisation an internalisation of this new art movement. Some of these artists have also been exploring links between Chinese artists practicing modern calligraphy while in Australia.
The artists presented in this exhibition were all born and raised in China. Many of them were among the first to be exhibited using modern calligraphy in 1985, and have since continued on to exhibitions abroad.
Artists: Susan Norrie, Laurens Tan, Anita Larkin, John Massingham, Luis Trujillo, Jade Pegler, Joanne Handley, Iain Whittaker, Megan Sproats, Aaron Hull and May Barrie.
Loosely translating as “threshold people”, Liminal Personae is an exhibition of and about artists who challenge the stereotypes about artists living outside the metropolitan centres and who walk the fine threshold of acceptance. Most of the artists featured reside, or have had regular interaction with Wollongong and the Illawarra, and this exhibition aims to gather them all together, without them having to squeeze themselves into a theme or exhibition brief.
This exhibition celebrates the idiosyncrasies of these artists – their particular practices, ideas, concepts, materials, living arrangements, physical or mental circumstances, histories or lack thereof. The artists involved span a range of disciplines and experience: the curators have rejected the usual practice of showing work by only emerging artists, or only those who have been artists for 20 years or more.
This project was kindly supported by a cultural grant from Arts NSW, a Visual Arts and Craft Grant from the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and through the support of the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Proudly presented by Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong.
In Liminal, artist Dacchi Dang explores the binaries and dualities of the East and West. His evocative new body of photographic work -emanates from an artist’s residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, and compares the landscape, society and architecture of France and Vietnam. Liminal explores notions of disparity between Eastern traditions of representation and those of the West, it celebrates the similarities and relationships between the two cultural landscapes, with the added layer of Dacchi’s Australian identity.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, L&P photographic Ltd., and Fujifilm Australia Pty. Ltd.
Dacchi Dang was born and raised in Saigon and came to Australia as a teenager in 1983.
Keluar 90 Hari is ISE’s response to his ’90 day outing’ to Sydney from Kuala Lumpur, courtesy of the Australian High Commission visual arts residency award at Artspace.
For this show ISE has created mural and collage in response to the street-exposed space and his time in Sydney, away from the restrictions of the familiar working environment back home in Malaysia. ISE’s characters – his robot man, his haloed demon with unsheathed sword – are deeply personal, yet utterly universal at the same time.
This exhibition has been made possible by the generous patronage of Casey Khik, of Chee Soon and Fitzgerald, interior furnishers.
Artists: Lionel Bawden, Cherine Fahd, Alex Kershaw, Mel O’Callaghan, Todd Robinson, Pat Sae-Loy, Evan Salmon and Prateep Suthathongthai.
Ghosts of the Coast brings together works which use the forms, equipment and spaces of the maritime to explore the uncanny connections and presences found at the coastline. The artists in this show approach the concept of the coast both literally – in terms of the detritus and ghostly traces found at the water’s edge and under the sea – and figuratively, as a limit, a point of facing – off between the known world and the unknown possibilities of the expansive otherness of the ocean. This otherness is ingrained in the psyche of Australasians who gather at the rim of waterbound lands. In this show, the coast serves as a metaphor for the liminal points of form and content, lines crucial to our marking out of Self and Other and of fantasy and reality.
The Asia Australia Arts Centre is delighted to hold a one-day exhibition on Thursday 23rd November 2006, of seven Chinese ink paintings by 2000 Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian – including a 300 cm long painting Goût de l’encre – to celebrate the new HarperCollins publication of his book The Case for Literature.
The essays in Gao Xingjian’s The Case for Literature provide insights into the enormous obstacles he has had to overcome as a writer who expresses himself mainly in the Chinese language. His wide knowledge of Chinese and Western literature, his powerful intellect, and his uncompromising attitude towards the pressures of political or religious ideologies, the collective or market forces informs these essays, and argue for literature that is “without isms”, that is “cold literature” or literature that is driven only by literary concerns and is uncontaminated by the need to promote political or any other causes. His observations and insights derive from one whose instinct to self-expression through writing was severely repressed for over twenty years of his adult life. These essays provide a key to understanding his great novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible as autobiographical works that he was driven to write.
Best known internationally as a novelist and playwright, Gao Xingjian’s paintings grace the covers of the HarperCollins editions of his books Soul Mountain (2000), One Man’s Bible (2002), Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2004), and The Case for Literature (2006).
Gao Xingjian’s first solo exhibitions were held in 1985, in Beijing, Berlin and Vienna. He has since held more than forty solo exhibitions in France, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, USA, Spain and Belgium. In 2005 a major retrospective exhibition of sixty works was held at the Singapore Art Museum, and in 2007 he will hold a solo exhibition at Notre Dame University in Chicago.
Born 1940 in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, China, Gao Xingjian graduated with a major in French literature in 1962. He enjoyed celebrity status in China when his plays Alarm Signal (1982) Bus Stop (1983) were staged in Beijing. This was soon after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when writers were singled out for harassment and criticism. In 1983 Bus Stop was banned, and he was barred from publishing until the Eradicate Spiritual Pollution petered out at the end of the year. But he continued to be harassed for his writings, and in 1987 he relocated to Paris, where he was able to fully explore his creative potential as a writer and artist. He has stamped his credentials internationally as playwright, novelist, artist and public intellectual.
Artists: Angelo Filomeno, Shaun Gladwell, Wang Gunag-Yi, Peter Graham, Ken Kagami and Kate Rhode.
4αXY is an exhibition developed from the collection of Dr Dick Quan, a noted collector of contemporary art and philanthropist-based in Sydney. Developed for the tenth year anniversary of Gallery 4A, the Asia-Australia Arts Centre.
4αXY is a subversively forward-thinking project featuring a mixture of work, genres, styles and meanings, from Ken Kagami’s irreverent and small sculpture to Shaun Gladwell’s beautifully hypnotic video.
The choice of work in the exhibition reflects Dr Quan’s interest in art. His interests in generational change, challenging accepted aesthetics and the boundaries of art combine in 4αXY. The title of the exhibition is equally multilayered, with Dr. Dick Quan noting that 4αXY stands for ‘Gallery 4A’ with XY being representative of ‘generation X’ and ‘generation Y’. Additionally, the XY can also read as the tenth year, a reminder of the gallery’s anniversary.
The multilayered meanings in the exhibition also reflect the importance of art organisations like Gallery 4A in presenting new artists, new ideas and new dialogues within the art world and community alike. Dr Quan has been a long time supporter of Gallery 4A, and has supported some of the earliest exhibitions at the Gallery in 1997. He has seen the gallery develop from a small operation in a shoebox size space on Sussex Street to its larger incarnation on Hay Street in the middle of Chinatown.
As 2007 marks the ten year anniversary of Gallery 4A, the exhibition 4αXY is a way of recognising the importance of the gallery in ushering in new ways of thinking about our place in the world.
Artists: Fergus Tam, Jeffrey Samuels, Karla Dickens, Aarone Meeks, Christine Christophersen, Harry Wedge, Andrew Lo, Adam Hill, Jenny Fraser, Gordon Hookey, Joe Hurst, Jason Wing, Alfira O’Sullivan with guest artist Louise So of Sydney Girls High School
Curators: Chris Pang (Gallery 4A) and Matt Poll (Boomalli)
Produced and presented in collaboration with Boomalli Urban Aboriginal Arts Co-Operative.
Boomalli Re-inscriptions brings a new perspective into the study of Asian Australians and Aboriginals through the common language of art. Aboriginal and Asian cultural experiences of living in Australia provide new perspectives about the potential of Australian culture. In this exhibition a variety of artists’ voices present observational, personal and political knowledge of culture and community. These artists represent the viewpoint of a minority within the Australian population and their artworks uncover personal experiences and perspectives, whilst also relating to the richness of Australia’s minority communities themselves. This exhibition explores the numerous parallels of community responsibility and challenging dominant orthodoxies within the arts establishment.
Header Image: Jason Wing, Untitled, 2007, acrylic and stencil, installation view
As You Take Time is an Australian-Japanese collaboration created by choreographer & film-maker Sue Healey. Inspired by time working in Japan, Healey draws on the surreal shift in perception when immersed in a new culture.
Using projected imagery and live dance As You Take Time creates a contemplative and sensual space for all to enter – to take time.
The central concern is an articulation of time through sensitivity to rhythms and rituals that mark our experience of its passage. Time is a critical factor in our lives and although it is a fleeting, slippery subject to render, it has undeniable consequences for us. Our reality is such that we live in a speed-obsessed age. How do the Japanese think about time? Do we Australians have a different way of thinking and living with time?
Noted for her richly textured and sensuous work, Sue Healey brings complex, subtle rhythms of movement and film into compelling spatial arrangements that provide multiple perspectives to the nuances of time, through both cultural lenses.
Artists: Wong Hoy Cheong, Jalaini Abu Hassan, Emil Goh, Anurendra Jegadeva, Nadiah Bamadhajm, Yee I-Lann, Sharmiza Abu Hassan, Roslisham Ismail aka ISE, Vincent Leong and Sharon Chin.
Selamat Datang ke Malaysia is the first Malaysian contemporary art exhibition to have travelled to Australia.
Drawing together this group of prominent Malaysian artists, all born after Malaysia’s Independence, Selamat Datang ke Malaysia offers their insight into the nation – its success and failures, its contradictions and eccentricities, its growing pains. From photography and video, to charcoal drawing and sculptural installations, this exhibition presents the exciting range of approaches being used by Malaysian artists today.
The artists selected come from diverse backgrounds, many have studied abroad and returned to Malaysia to practice. A number have studied in Australia, like generations of fellow Malaysians. Each has been both a participant and keen observer of the unfolding drama of our developing nation.
Internationally-recognised artist Wong Hoy Cheong, first made his mark charting the migrant history of Malaysia, in this exhibition, he takes us on a tour of our suburban dreams.
Yee I-Lann, who represented Malaysia in Contemporary Commonwealth exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2006, gives us a history in studio photographs of a generation of Malaysians growing up.
Anurendra Jegadeva‘s Family Album Thesaurus offers a potted guide to our different communities and their social and culinary customs.
Leading painter, Jalaini Abu Hassan explores the mysteries of the Malay world and its resonance in the cultural imagination.
Itinerant urban artist, Emil Goh celebrates the cultural binding power of “Mangllish” (Malaysian English).
Nadiah Bamadhaj looks at our architecture and what it symbolizes in terms of national development.
Sculptor Sharmiza Abu Hassan explores the resonance of the notion of our homeland.
Younger artists Ise, Vincent Leong and Sharon Chin draw from their personal experience of negotiating their way in today’s Malaysia, its popular culture, its changing social fabric.
Selamat Datang ke Malaysia opens to the public in Kuala Lumpur for three weeks from August 23, at Valentine Willie Fine Art in Bangsar.
Header Image: Roslisham Ismail aka ISE, The Est, 2007, collage
Artists: Shane Dunn, Biljana Jancic, Belinda Lai, Owen Leong, Tim Richardson, Todd Robinson, Alice Wesley-Smith and Monika Tichacek.
synthetic/aesthetic is a exhibition which explores the intersection of the body, fashion, photography and art. Timed to coincide with Rosemount Australia Fashion Week 30 April – 4 May 2007 (formerly Mercedes Australian Fashion Week) the exhibition will provide a counterpoint to the mainstream event, challenging existing notions of beauty and physical identity in Australian society. The works in this exhibition explore serious personal and conceptual concerns and are beautiful and alluring, but in unexpected and sometimes confronting ways.
Shane Dunn’s work Fripe, a Dior-style ball gown, is constructed entirely of shopping bags from high-end labels such as Hermes, Chanel and Prada. Dunn’s theatrical and humorous work comments on how labels construct the temporal and fragile identity we present to other people.
Sydney based artist Biljana Jancic has created a giant wearable capsule made from freezer bags. In this work she literally tosses between the function of the material and its materiality in relation to her body. The light penetrating the capsule captures the aesthetics of the artist’s work, whilst giving us tantalising glimpses of the artist’s own body.
Artist Belinda Lai’s work reveals stages and events of a woman’s life through her elongated four-part garment. The work builds on the conceptual pattern of layering fabric embodying the notions of Beauty, Innocence, Experience and Grace. The notion of female experience is made a process much like the act of making a garment.
Sydney based artist Owen Leong’s work challenges our understanding of self-representation in photography that is strange and eye-catching. He continues to explore the layers of his identity as an Australian with Chinese heritage.
Photographer Tim Richardson’s work comments on the commercial tradition of fashion photography – the female figure. His work draws reference from Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase.
Former fashion designer turned artist Todd Robinson presents to us works that are concerned with the fundamentals of a material – its tactility and sensuousness. His work acknowledges the inherent beauty and simplicity of material with stark honesty.
Photographer Alice Wesley-Smith’s work converses with Belinda Lai’s through it’s concern with layers as well. However, Wesley-Smith’s work rather than building upon layers, deconstructs them. Her photographic series is a poetic take on female identity concealed and revealed.
Artist Monika Tichacek’s self-portrait first draws attention with the strength and beauty of her physical presence and perseverance, her work explores and exposes constructs of femininity and its inextricable link to body.
Artists: Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, Anthea Behm, Tim Gregory, Suzan Liu, Laurel Nakadate and Patrick Swann
Identity Thieves brings together work by Asian-Australian, Australian, Asian and Asian-American artists who imagine and construct complicated identities for themselves and investigate the slippages and uncanny dimensions of these identities through performance, video and installation. It also considers the role of giving, borrowing and stealing in the economy of contemporary identity. In this exhibition the artists work across mediums to reveal the play between who we are and who we can be in a hyper-mediated cultural context.
Thai artist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon in his work The Perfect English Gentleman examines the global dominance of English speaking culture. Rather than exoticise his Thai identity, Angkrit prefers to parody colonial models that persist to this day. Angkrit’s work addresses the soft colonialism of the art world, the behavioural and social coercion by which the dominant, English-speaking culture quietly and politely takes over the world.
Laurel Nakadate is half-Japanese American born artist. Her video work explores the negotiation of identity in both natural and urban scenes. This dichotomous nature of identity, landscapes, gender and age all combine as Nakadate investigates the multidimensional facets of contemporary identities.
Australian born artist Anthea Behm explores idealised notions of female identity. She utilises her own body as the vehicle for expression her video work The Chrissy Diaries aims to explore and implicitly critique the plethora of stereotypes in mass media.
Sydney based artist, Suzan Liu’s installation Inborn Fantasies addresses Liu’s sense of shifting identity and cultural sense of self. The installation uses romantic notions of Chinese martial arts that are ‘inborn’ and constructed within Australia and the misappropriation of Chinese mountains and the Australian bush to explore Liu’s understanding of her own shifting identities.
Tim Gregory’s video work Gregorian (999) directly engages with the idea of cultural and identity theft. The work shows the artist cutting his hair in front of 999 paper cranes, the black hair ‘polluting’ the white cranes and the artist chanting a Gregorian monastic chant. Gregory uses the cranes and chanting to explore how borrowing or theft from a cultural ‘Other’ is a primary way in which individuals form identity. This work leaves the identities unresolved and incomplete, as stolen identities are. There are 999 cranes, not 100 the act of chanting is unresolved and a clear identity has failed to be achieved.
Patrick Swann‘s Like A Rat With Phar Lap’s Heart (Patrick Swann’s Hypotheticals) is a set of effigies and an ongoing, interminable competition – and yet, it also deals with good guys and good times. The work asks a series of important questions: What happens when said good guys are robots? What happens when said robots are rodents? What happens when said robot rodents engage in pugilism? What happens when said robot rodents win hearts and minds? The answer? Good luck – better luck next time.
Hailing from Yangjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong Province, Yangjiang Group was formed by the artist Zheng Guogu in 2002 with members Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin. With a focus on social action, their work spans installation, painting, performance and calligraphy. Yangjiang Group has a belief that culture can be practiced by anyone, and possess a desire to break the hierarchies and social privileges that inform traditions like calligraphy. Yangjiang Group imbue its work with a sincere anti-authoritative streak.
In developing this exhibition 4A’s invitation to Yangjiang Group was to engage with the gallery and administration areas of the organisation. Yangjiang Group has responded by devising a daily action for 4A staff called Tea Office (2015). Each morning staff will prepare and drink a cycle of Chinese teas for the duration of the exhibition. The artists have chosen these teas for their therapeutic qualities and the effects they have on the mind and body, which is a particular process valued by the artists. By encouraging a daily ritual, the artists offer an activity to observe shifts in sensory and spiritual perception and to consider the organisation’s administrative and cultural functions.
Yangjiang Group are Zheng Guogu (b. 1970, Yangjiang, China), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971, Yangchun, China) and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974, Yangjiang, China). Founded in 2002 the group name themselves after their home town, a city in Guangdong province, where their principle studio is located. Their work is dedicated to reaching the widest possible audience often through creating ephemeral works. Yangjiang Group have been widely exhibited at prestigious galleries and museums such as the San Diego Museum of Art, USA; Tate Liverpool, UK; Kunthaus Graz, Austria; Mori Art Museum, Japan; and Guangdong Museum of Art and He Xiangning Museum of Art, China. They also participated in Art Basel in 2008, 2010 and 2012; the Venice Biennale in 2003; and the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.
This exhibition is the first exhibition component of MASS GROUP INCIDENT, an ambitious 5-month multi-stage project which brings together artists from Asia, Australia and Europe to present new and existing works over a range of platforms and venues including exhibitions, performances, film screenings and site-specific interventions. MASS GROUP INCIDENT will explore ideas of social engagement, collective action and the ever-shifting and complex position of the individual in relation to the group.
Artists: Sophie Blackall, Joy Lai, Aris Prabwawa, Jason Wing, Meng-Shu You, Xu Bing and The Tissue Culture and Arts Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr)
This Year of the Pig at Gallery 4A, artists explore the wide ranging nature of our snout nosed, bristly haired friend. They take up various mythological and cultural associations with the favourable, the detestable, the fantastical and the downright absurd, to challenge our thinking on themes of astrology, cultural imperialism, genetic modification and the sometimes awkward but potentially fruitful communication between East and West.
Through history the pig is much maligned as well as associated with ‘the forbidden’ in Jewish and Islamic cultural traditions. However, in the Chinese imagination, the pig embodies the honourable qualities of diligence, honesty, patience and fertility. For many Chinese it also means eating well.
Sophie Blackall is an Australian born artist whose work Ancestors comprises a set of “Cabinet Cards” that invite an intimate viewing of their sitters, the work draws upon the close physical and intellectual relationship between humans and pigs to gently explore the Victorian obsession with civilisation and the darkly animalistic dimensions of family relationships.
Joy Lai is a multimedia Sydney based artist. Her series Cho Sun is concerned with the tenderness, nostalgia and intimacy of a mother’s relationship with her babe. Dewy soft surfaces and luminous colour create hypnotic folds and textures resembling a young piglet’s skin.
Jason Wing is a Sydney based artist with Chinese-Aboriginal heritage. Wing’s murals at Gallery 4A, his stencil work in Fire Pig and paper collage, Anything is Possible are born of the oppositional dynamics inherent in the artist’s upbringing. Wing uses the pig as a symbol of an ultimate model of honour, selflessness and sincerity; as well as self-indulgence and obsession, dominance and emotional highs and lows.
You Meng-Shu is a Sydney based Taiwan-born artist, You is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney’s College of the Arts working with ceramics and mixed media in installations of porcelain, concrete and wood. Her cast concrete soccer boots in Chinese New Year Sale suggest the grave weight of pig-like corporate gluttony on the weary shoulders of workers.
Chinese born artist, Xu Bing examines cross-cultural communication in his work A Case Study of Transference. Xu personifies his mating pigs with nonsensical words in both Chinese and English, citing the awkwardness of cross-cultural communication.
Artists at 4A: Daniel Boyd, Hito Steyerl, Oliver Ressler, Dario Azzellini, Dmitry Vilensky, David Griggs, Tarding Padi and Zanny Begg.
If You See Something, Say Something is a multi venue exhibition and arts project that questions notions of dissidence, suspicion and fear. This exhibition brings together works by Daniel Boyd, Contra File, Etcetera, Dmitry Vilenksy, Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini, Richard DeDominici, Al Fadhil, Hito Steyerl, David Griggs, Taring Padi, pvi collective, SquatSpace, Astra Howard, Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg to actively examine the realities of agency and fear in the climate produced by the rhetoric of the War on Terror.
“If you see something, say something” was pasted on bus shelters and train stations around the world in the wake of the 9/11 bombings asking us to view those around us with fear and suspicion. But do we see this government sponsored vision of the world or do these advertisements move us to say something very different? In the state of exception produced by the war on terror we are asked to accept a consensual vision of fear, scapegoating and state sponsored violent. Yet many are moved to dissent from this.
Also Opening at Mori Gallery on 7 February, 6-8pm and Christie Cotter Gallery on 5 February 6-8pm
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Tell Me My Truth seeks to address persistent and often contentious relationships that frame the individual within the group. Exploring the motivations of artists for whom a questioning of the veracity of the status quo is a defining aspect of their practice, Tell Me My Truth presents works that give form to alternative narratives. Contrasting fiction with the documentary, remembrance with negation, responsibility with impunity, and privacy with surveillance within the public realm, Tell Me My Truth is at once a provocative demand and an admission of the futility of splendid isolation in a world that more than ever is defined by our connectedness.
This is the second exhibition instalment of MASS GROUP INCIDENT, a major five-month multi-stage project curated and produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Comprising a series of exhibitions, site-specific projects, performances, film screenings and public programs, this broader project’s central theme is the power and limits of social engagement and collective action as experienced by the individual. Within this construct, Tell Me My Truth takes a more analytical and meditative approach in its investigation of the causes of social friction and mutual understanding.
Bringing together artists from Australia, Asia and abroad, new works have been commissioned by 4A especially for this exhibition, complemented by significant existing works presented in Australia for the first time. Taking longer historical views are works that seek to reveal the hidden or otherwise suppressed aspects of identities and geographies, for instance, those that relate to Sydney’s Chinatown and Indonesia’s persecuted Chinese minority. Underscoring history’s immense role in shaping individual lives are deeply personal studies, as in an artist’s attempt to re-stage a moment from his mother’s past, contrasted with investigations into the spatial dynamics of public space in which mass demonstrations are contained. Whilst Tell Me My Truth focuses on the use of digital technologies in recording and relaying often abstract and de-personalised experiences, more traditional methods of representation are also utilised to articulate marginalised perspectives.
Tell Me My Truth holds a mirror up to audiences, one in which we might recognise the embodiment of dissent and the dangers of expediency in the age of perpetual revolutions.
Simon Fujiwara (b.1982, London, UK) spent his childhood between Japan, England, Spain and Africa. In dense dramas about personal relationships, family relations, politics, architecture and history, Fujiwara’s work explores biographies and ‘real-life’ narratives through a combination of performance, video, installation and short stories.In linking fictional and real people, locations and events he explores the boundary between the real and the imagined, often revealing the very fiction of such distinction. Fujiwara’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Contemporary Art Society, UK, 2014; Tate Liverpool, UK, 2012; Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2012; 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009; and the Schindler House/MAK Center for Contemporary Art, USA, 2009. In 2010, Fujiwara completed the Iaspis Residency in Gothenburg, Sweden and was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship Award in the UK in 2009.
Helen Grace (b. Warrnambool, Australia) is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic whose work has played an active role in the development of art, cinema, photography, cultural studies and education in Australia and regionally for 30 years. Elements of art and politics intertwine in her work as she draws on the past to reflect on the present. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and has been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, the US, the UK, France, Spain and Finland. Grace’s latest book, Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image, was published by Routledge in 2014. She was Founding Director of the MA Programme in Visual Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; an associate (Department of Gender & Cultural Studies) and research affiliate (Sydney College of the Arts), at the University of Sydney; and is currently Co-Investigator on a study on the measurement of community benefit in public space transformation in Hong Kong; and a member of the Film Advisory Board of Sydney International Film Festival, where she focuses on Asian and independent cinema.
Amala Groom (b. 1979, Casino, Australia) is a conceptual artist whose practice is informed by Indigenous methodologies and whose work, as a form of passionate activism, reads as a social and political commentary on contemporary politics and race relations. Since the beginning of her art practice in 2012 Groom has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2013 and 2014 Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize where her works were highly commended. Groom’s first solo exhibition, The Cider Series, took place at Kings Cross Library in 2014. Recent and upcoming shows include: Lawful & Permissible: Amala Groom & Blak Douglas (aka Adam Hill) at Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney; Bungaree’s Farm, curated by Djon Mundine OAM for Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney; (in)visible: the First Peoples and War at Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. She is currently undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design.
FX Harsono (b. 1949, Blitar, Indonesia) is a seminal figure in Indonesia’s contemporary art scene. Since his student days he has been an active critic of Indonesian politics, society and culture, always updating his artistic language to the current social and cultural contexts. Harsono’s own biography and family history are often the basis of his art. He has exhibitied solo work and participated in group exhibitions in and outside Indonesia, including at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, 2014; Arter Space for Art, Istanbul, 2014; Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, 2013; Bangkok Art And Cultural Center, Thailand, 2013; Tyler Rollins, New York, 2012; and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2010. Harsono’s work has been presented at 4A as part of the major multiyear community-engaged project Edge of Elsewhere in 2011 and 2012. In 2014 Harsono was the recipient of the Prince Clause Fund award. He currently lectures at the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Pelita Harapan, Tangerang, Indonesia.
He Xiangyu (b. 1986, Liaoning Province, China) is part of a new generation of conceptual artists in China. Using various media, his work is a commentary on society and culture. He has held solo exhibitions at The Bathhouse, Tokyo, 2013; White Space, Beijing, 2012; Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany, 2011; Loft Art Gallery, Paris, 2011; and Wall Art Museum, Beijing, 2010. His work has been included in group exhibitions in Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, 2013; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013; Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2012; and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, 2011. Xiangyu graduated from the Shenyang Normal University and lives and works in Beijing. He Xiangyu is represented by WHITE SPACE, Beijing.
James Newitt (b. 1981, Hobart, Tasmania) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal and Hobart, Tasmania. His work engages with specific social and cultural relations, often embracing mutability and paradox in order to investigate the spaces between individual and collective identity, memory, history, fact and fiction through personal, observational and performative approaches. Newitt’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and Europe, including Lumiar Cite, Lisbon, 2013; the 2013 Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts, Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, 2012; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2009 and 2011; Rosalux, Berlin, 2009 and 2010; The Gallery of Fine Arts, Split, Croatia, 2010; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2010. In 2012 James was awarded the prestigious Samstag Scholarship to participate in the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon. James is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, College of the Arts.
Tony Schwensen (b. 1970, Sydney, Australia) explores the human condition through performance, video, installation and sculpture. He has maintained an active participation in contemporary art practice since 1988, including establishing and running artist run initiatives, hosting international artists, providing exhibition and performance opportunities and regularly exhibiting nationally and internationally. Schwensen completed a PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, researching the influence and adaptation of the discipline specific investigations of Samuel Beckett on and into historic and contemporary video performance practice. Schwensen was awarded the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 1998, enabling him to live and work in Rotterdam, The Netherlands from 1999–2001. Schwensen’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions, including Perform! Cooperate! Now! Burgtheater, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany, 2014; How Xenophobia Affects Aliens, Mobius, Cambridge, USA, 2013; Monaism, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, 2011; BIG PINKO (with Andre Stitt), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown, 2009; Complain about Australia to an Australia, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006; Border Protection Assistance, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Casula, 2002; Revolutions: Forms that Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008; and ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland, 2006. He currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
John von Sturmer (b. 1943, Lismore, Australia) is a social anthropologist with a long and distinguished career in Aboriginal studies. He has been a central participant in many key events and issues including uranium mining in Western Arnhem Land, the Aboriginal Customary Law Reference, and the Wik Native Title Claim. Research director/senior adviser to the Agreement Implementation Committee and First Nations Joint Company, PNG-Gladstone Pipeline Project. Long involvement in Aboriginal art and performance. Since the mid-1990s, increasing creative involvement – painting, installation and performance; collaborations with Slawek Janicki, Cigdem Aydemir, Djon and Roy Mundine; critical writing and textual production. Senior Fellow, Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne. Based in Sydney since 1984.
Artists James Newitt and FX Harsono, as well as co-curator of Tell Me My Truth, Toby Chapman appeared on 2ser 107.3 (radio and online) March 26 2015.
Tell Me My Truth is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; and supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program.
Action v. Action is a ten-day painting project involving local Sydney artists. Gallery 4A’s ground floor, turns into an experimental laboratory for the creation of spontaneous artworks.
For ten days over the summer holiday period, some of the busiest times in Chinatown, artists will engage with the idea of action painting. Given a half-hour time frame, the artists will be asked to create an artwork on the spot, in full view of the public. The artists will be painting on large sheets of Chinese rice paper, and supplied with paintbrushes and ink. The finished works will be hung on the First Floor of the gallery, in the style of washing on a line.
Gallery 4A is pleased to present a major new initiative Cinema Alley. For one night in January and February, Gallery 4A will transform Parker Street, Haymarket (adjacent to Gallery 4A) into a venue for two major video art projects presenting video art from contemporary Asian artists.
Cinema Alley is based on the history of old-fashioned, temporary street-cinemas. These cinemas were often located in the middle of small communities bringing old and young together. Timed to occur during the summer holiday period and the City of Sydney Chinese New Year Festival and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, these intimate, community screenings, bring the cutting edge of contemporary Asian art to Sydney audiences. The Cinema Alley projects forms a major part of Gallery 4A’s offsite exhibition program for 2009 and reflects Gallery 4A’s mission to promote contemporary Asian-Australian culture and dialogue within the region.
Each year 4A presents the work of our Members to bring diverse practices together, and celebrate their support of 4A throughout the year. It is a unique opportunity for Members to share their talents with 4A’s creative community, and have their work seen by artists, curators, and other industry professionals.
This year, the exhibition was launched by special guest Nicholas Jose, Chair in Writing UWS, Harvard Chair of Australian Studies 2009 – 2010.
The Braille Window Project is Stage 1 of a research and development project resulting in an innovative hybrid artwork. The video projection on Gallery 4A’s shopfront window incorporated braille alongside sound and audio installations conducted in a public domain. The project created a new public social space for exchanges to occur between sighted people and people who are blind or vision-impaired, combatting social exclusion and isolation.
The Braille Window Project has been made possible with the generous assistance of the City of Sydney.
Running over 48 continuous hours at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 48HR Incident is a program of performance art and live actions initiated or performed by artists from Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
Challenging conceptual and social frameworks that surround the position of the individual in relation to the group, 48HR Incident presents a series of works ranging from artistic interventions through to longer
durational performances. Participating artists have drawn upon contested historical narratives, political provocations and social situations to conceive and present works specifically for the context of 4A, taking
into account dynamics of space, geography and social relations in and outside of the gallery. 48HR Incident considers the impact of these actions on the decisions that individuals and groups make, avoid or otherwise
oppose in the daily act of living.
Conceived as the third and final component of MASS GROUP INCIDENT, 48HR Incident is in many ways a culmination of the discussion that occurred during the development of this broader curatorial project, in
particular how ephemeral, interdisciplinary and performative artforms embody real social conditions or frictions. Equally, 48HR Incident is an opportunity to continue 4A’s commitment to performance art from
the region, including Dadang Christanto’s Survivor performance and touring program (2012-2013); Eunhye Huang’s It Without A Blink (2011); Tatsumi Orimoto’s Oil Can (2010); Young Sun Han’s 24HR Embrace (2011); and Shigeyuki Kihara’s Talanoa: Walk The Walk #V (2010).
48HR Incident is a call to action, a test of audiences’ will and commitment to meet the challenges that artists present them, and an admission that at the irreducible core of any collective actions or movement is the latent power of the individual.
Frances Barrett (b. 1983, Sydney, Australia) is an artist whose practice of live actions, endurance performance and sonic experimentation is informed by feminist and queer methodologies. She is currently Curator of Contemporary Performance, Campbelltown Arts Centre and is part of the artist collective Brown Council. The Wrestle (2015) is a new performance between Barrett and 48HR Incident curator, Toby Chapman. Barrett will compete to double her artist fee in a freestyle wrestle in the gallery space. Both curator and artist have trained with Commonwealth Wrestling Athlete Carissa Holland, who will also adjudicate the performance.
Dadang Christanto (b. 1957, Jakarta, Indonesia) is a prominent interdisciplinary artist working with the recurring theme of the mass disappearance of political dissidents during the 1960s in Indonesia. He has exhibited extensively in Indonesia and internationally including at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); Biennale Jogja (2003 and 2007); and the 3rd Gwangju Biennale (2000). For 48HR Incident Christanto will present seminal performances from the last 30 years of his career; Tooth Brushing (1979), For Those Who Have Been Lost (1993) and Litsus (2004).
BLAK DOUGLAS (b. 1970, Blacktown, Australia) was born and raised on Booreberongal (Dharuk) Country but with a Dhungatti Aboriginal bloodline traceable to the mid-north coast of New South Wales. He was the first Koori artist to hold major solo exhibitions in Penrith, 1998-1999. His works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia. National Maritime Museum, Taipei Museum and the Aboriginal Art Museum of Utrecht. Timing is Everything (2015) draws on traditional forms such as smoking / cleansing ceremonies and the changing walking pace of society via the rhythms of clap sticks. The sound intervening into both the gallery and 4A’s street frontage proposes alternate experiences in time, coupled with an LED sign displaying pertinent phrases from the artist.
Salote Tawale (b. Suva, Fiji) explores the identity of the individual in collective systems through ‘performances of the self’, drawing on personal experiences of race, ethnicity and gender. Tawale works across the mediums of photography, video, installation and live performance. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at WestSpace, Melbourne (2014); the Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Yogyakarta (2014); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (2013); and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney (2007). For 48HR Incident Tawale will perform Celebrations and Sympathies, Studies in Culture Part 3, drawing links between the narratives and cultural expressions found within traditional Fijian Lali (wooden drums), popular musicals and Hip Hop culture.
Latai Taumoepeau (b. Sydney, Australia) is a Punake – body-centred performance artist – whose practice tells the stories of her homelands: the Island Kingdom of Tonga, and her birthplace, the Eora Nation. Her work explores race, class and the female body politic. Dark Continent (2015) is a new performance by Taumoepeau which involves the artist inhabiting the ground floor gallery for the duration of the program and employing spray tanning techniques as an exploration of ritualistic dark skin practices and markings of nationalism in Australia.
Tony Schwensen (b. 1970, Sydney, Australia) is one of Australia’s foremost performance artists. His work examines contemporary culture through the use of his own body as a performative object, often reflecting on themes such as masculinity, the working class and Australian identity. SCABLAND (2015), conceived especially for 48HR Incident, continues Schwensen’s interest in the history of the labour movement and its correlation to the emergence of a leisure class in Australian history, through a 12-hour durational performance.
Abdullah M.I. Syed(b. 1974, Karachi, Pakistan) is a contemporary artist and designer, working between Sydney, Karachi and New York. His art practice weaves the narratives of East and West, seamlessly knitting together art historical references and concerns from each. The performance work, Bucking and Laundering(2015) situates the artist in a major global metropolis, his dapper appearance countering preconceived notions of the artistic persona, as Syed attempts to eat and stuff his mouth with a stack of dollar bills, slowly at first and then forcibly as his body attempts to reject the material, gagging, coughing, but persevering nonetheless.
JD Reforma (b. 1988, Sydney, Australia) is an artist interested in the relationship between art and leisure, creating sculptures and installations as a social critique of material creation and product consumption. His works are primarily created from everyday materials and reflect upon the perceived value of art, challenging the physical act of viewing and consuming art.A Novel Merchant(2015) is an exploration of the role of distribution in sustaining an economy in which it is increasingly difficult to determine the complicity of artists in so-called ‘pretend activism’.
Wok The Rock & Lara Thoms (b. 1975, Madiun, Indonesia; and b. 1983 Sydney, Australia) are artists interested in experimentation within collective space and social environments who are collaborating for the first time for 48HR Incident. Wok The Rock lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and held his first solo exhibition in 2003 at Ruang MES 56, a non-profit institution he co-founded in 2002 and is now the director of. Lara Thoms is a Melbourne-based artist creating engaging site-specific art and is an Artistic Associate of Aphids, a contemporary art collective with an interest in performance, social engagement and site specificity.
Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo is considered a ‘metalhead’ and owns every album by Metallica. In 1993 heavy metal concerts were banned in Java, following a riot at a Metallica concert at Lebuk Bulus stadium in Jakarta. Many fans considered the concert ticket price too high and set cars and a shopping mall on fire until the stadium was opened to everyone. Their new work, Jakarta Whiplash ’93 (re -revisited)(2015) questions the political views of Indonesian ‘metalheads’ and Metallica fans worldwide through both performance and the creation of a line of contemporary ‘merchandise’. The merch commemorates the ’93 riot, and has a dual purpose of being both a sentimental souvenir and useful in a current riot situation. These items will be available for sale throughout the show as well as through Metallica fan sites and Indonesian music distribution.
Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong) is an artist-composer who, after completing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Princeton University, creates art that breaches disciplinary divides. His work ranges from audio-visual projects to live performance yet is anchored in a practice of sound art. For Nocturne (2015), Young has collected and edited together a series of YouTube clips of night bombings (Gaza Strip, ISIS, Gulf War) and removed the audio track. The artist then performs a live soundtrack using domestic devices and ‘foley’ techniques, with the audience experiencing the performance through a broadcasted FM radio signal, accessible throughout the building.
48HR Incident is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; and supported by Museums & Galleries NSW and Gordon Darling Foundation. Lara Thoms and Wok The Rock’s project ‘Jakarta Whiplash ’93 Re-Revisited’ was developed during a residency in Yogyakarta as part of Gertrude Contemporary’s Indonesia/Australia exchange project #banyakbanyak.
4A is pleased to present dual solo exhibitions featuring new and commissioned work by two exciting artists, Indonesian-Australian Tintin Wulia and Iranian-born Nasim Nasr.
Untold Movements by acclaimed Indonesian-Australian artist Tintin Wulia is a dynamic new singleI work exhibition, developed over 18 months through a commission by 4A with the support of the Keir Foundation. The exhibition is her most ambitious sound installation to date, and first solo exhibition in Australia. The project is a development of earlier research that Tintin Wulia undertook while in United Arab Emirates participating in the Sharjah Bienniale in 2013.
The installation comprises 32 channels of sound played through 96 speakers, with narrations performed by 5 different collaborators. Continuing the artist’s interest in the use of language as a signifier for global migration, Untold Movements incorporates first hand interviews, personal anecdotes and historical research to weave together a poetic and abstract narrative of the obscured networks of global nomadism.
Tintin Wulia’s own experience of being deported from Germany after being accused of attempted illegal entry sets Untold Movements in motion. The work shifts across countries and continents, exploring traditions of oral storytelling and poetry.
Only For My Shadow is the first solo exhibition in Australia by Iranian-born and Adelaide-based emerging artist Nasim Nasr. The exhibition combines photography, video and sculptural works to address biographical and social concerns in contemporary society. The works engage with issues of censorship, the transience of identity, and civil and social turbulences.
Only For My Shadow brings together a selection of Nasr’s recent works as well as a new video work, Ashob: Unrest (2015) produced by 4A, which takes as its focus the recital of a passage from twentieth century Persian author Sadegh Hedayat’s seminal text, The Blind Owl (19437). Nasr will also present the photographic series, Muteness (2011), sculptural works Slow Burn (2013), and the video What To Do? (2012) which continues the artist’s study of traditional cultural forms from the Middle East.
Untold Movements and Only For My Shadow are curated by Toby Chapman.
Exit Strategies is a new exhibition by Vietnamese-Australian artist James Nguyen that reflects upon the artist’s experience of living in a factory in south-west Sydney with his family during the 1990s in a effort to save a failing textiles business. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Nguyen’s new body of work explores the complexities of familial relationships between himself, his brother and parents as migrants in an adopted country.
Working in a semidocumentary mode of construction, whereby the artist presents a fictional story that incorporates many factual details or actual events, Exit Strategies sees Nguyen collaborate with his family as key characters in a fragmented narrative. Adopting the roles of both the artist and his brother during moments of their upbringing within a place of work, Nguyen’s parents interpret scenes from the family’s history that saw the children passing time while they laboured to earn a living in the floundering Australian textiles industry. As a final attempt to sustain both family life and livelihood under a single roof, this act reflects the challenges experienced by many migrant families seeking stability and opportunity.
Exit Strategies includes on a newly-commissioned 4-channel video work that focuses on the artist’s parents. Dressed in matching white t-shirts and shorts, the couple re-enact and narrate the experiences of their children through split scene sequences. In doing so, Nguyen re-visits a family’s personal reflections on the idiosyncrasies of parenthood. By reversing the roles of the parent, Nguyen re-imagines his childhood as a psychological reference for the responsibility that children of refugee or migrants often assume. Also included in the exhibition are a number of sculptural components, video vignettes and installations that further address the economic transformation and social implications of the decline of the textiles industry on Australian society from the 1980s onwards.
As the artist’s first significant solo exhibition, Exit Strategies marks an important contribution by a member of a younger generation of Vietnamese-Australian artist, of which a critical mass share an upbringing in western Sydney, and are likewise exploring concerns relating to the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. Through re-staging and framing intimate familial gestures in the face of financial ruin, Exit Strategies draws human and personal connections alongside broader geopolitics of war, economic reform and nationhood.
James Nguyen (b.1982, Vietnam) is a Sydney-based artist whose output ranges from drawing, installation, video and performance. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2012 and is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of Arts (SCA), University of Sydney. He has been the recipient of the Clitheroe Foundation Scholarship and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Since 2012 Nguyen has participated in several group exhibitions including at Articulate Project Space, Sydney; YOLK Collective, Sydney; William Wright’s Artists Projects, Sydney; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. His first solo exhibition was at Bradfield College, North Sydney, in 2013 titled EXIT Strategy, and his recent solo exhibition, The Man With the Movie Camera, was presented at both SCA Gallery and FELTspace, Adelaide in 2014.
Journal of Duskis a new performance by Indonesian-Australian artist Jumaadi which has been commissioned especially for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Featuring a series of new shadow puppets created by the artist and accompanied by musical performances, Journal of Dusk draws on a form of traditional Indonesian theatre called wayang kulit to weave poetic narratives based on historical connections between Australia and South-East Asia. Beginning with depictions of agrarian life, Jumaadi presents a montage of imagery from Australia and Indonesia including animals and plants, through to more abstract scenes of landscapes and places.
Journal of Dusk continues Jumaadi’s interest in the history of migration and exchange between Australia and Indonesia during the twentieth century through a creative reinterpretation of the story of the construction of Australia’s first gamelan, an Indonesian percussion instrument. Jumaadi has been investigating historical moments from the period 1927-1949, a time of significant movement of people between Indonesia and Australia, particularly Indonesians held as prisoners in exile some of whom were moved by the Dutch colonial government to Australia during the Second World War. This work is inspired by the story of a Javanese man who produced a gamelan ensemble using scrap metal during his exile in Dutch New Guinea (now a district within the Indonesian province of Papua). The gamelan came to Cowra, NSW, in 1942 and is now held by the University of Melbourne.
Jumaadi is accompanied by co-performers and musicians Margaret Bradley, Cameron Ferguson, Aris Setyo and Kyati Suharto.
Jumaadi (b. 1973, Indonesia) has an artistic practice that encompasses drawing, painting, performance, weaving and installation that tells tories based personal memory and folkloric traditions. His work has been presented extensively worldwide, including in Asia, Europe, USA and Australia. In 2013 Jumaadi represented Australia at the Moscow Biennale Of Contemporary Art in Russia for which he was supported by the Australia Council through its New Work Grant for Mid Career Artist. Solo and group exhibitions include David Roberts Art Foundation, UK, 2014; Watters Gallery, Australia, 2014; National Gallery of Indonesia, Indonesia, 2011; and the French Cultural Centre, Indonesia, 2010. Jumaadi holds a Master in Fine Art from the National Art School in Sydney and divides his time between Australia and the Netherlands. He is represented by Watters Gallery, Sydney, and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane.
Margaret Bradley is an artist and educator who currently works in Early Learning and Primary Education, Learning and Teaching for the NSW Department of Education. Margaret’s professional practice is underpinned by her passion for Indonesian arts and culture, particularly the Sundanese music of West Java. She has studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and with leading musicians. Margaret has been exploring Indonesian music and culture for over thirty years while performing in Indonesia and Australia as a soloist and with Songket, Bodiswara, Sirkus Barock, Alan Dargin, Djaelani, Dody Satya Ekagustdiman, Ismet Ruchimat, Robert Lloyd, Mandiri, Balai, Meritja and Arafura.
Cameron Ferguson is a visual artist, musician and performer. Cameron’s practice is broadly based within the still life genre and object-based art, and involves creating illustrations and installations that form associations between objects, place and memory. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Art (Research) at the National Art School, Sydney. His work is held in numerous private collections.
Aris Setyo graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts SOLO Central Java in 2015 with a Masters of Music with a major in Traditional Javanese Gamelan Music. He has been an employee of the Consulate of the Republic of Indonesia since 2015, and prior to this worked extensively throughout Indonesia with a number of traditional music ensembles. His compositions are inspired by the main characters of famous Javanese shadow puppet plays, making an aural connection between the imagery, narrative and themes of the performance.
Kyati Suharto graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School and studied illustration at Enmore Design Centre. This education has given her a rich knowledge of the interplay between visual culture and music. She is a multi-instrumentalist who specialises in trombone. Kyati grew up in Java and her music is influenced by her experiences as an artist who is inspired by the sounds and sights of her hometown.
Coinciding with the City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival, Cinema Alley celebrates contemporary Chinese video art with the screening of five significant short video artworks by Asian artists and filmmakers in an open-air street cinema located on Parket Street, Haymarket in the heart of the Chinatown district.
Curated by Aaron Seeto, Cinema Alley features a selection of short film and video-based art works by five leading contemporary Asian artists: Chen Cheih-Jen; Jun Yang; Ou Ning and Cao Fei; Wang Qingsong; and Yuan Goang-ming. The films explore the artists’ different perceptions of their cities, transformation, experiences of alienation and the effects that history and tradition place on the individual.
Globalisation, labour, consumerism and migration are key themes in the films with the content touching on the harrowing experience of a man adrift on a small boat at sea, the hardship faced by factory workers, teams of skyscraper construction workers and the fate of once rural Chinese regions experiencing the rapid onset of real estate development.
Friday 7 February 2014
Golden Age Cinema & Bar, 80 Commonwealth St, Surry Hills
Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar is a night of Chinese cinematic wonder and cutting-edge video art presented in the architectural grandeur of the art deco Paramount Pictures building in the ‘Hollywood Quarter’ of Sydney’s Surry Hills.
Curated by 4A in response to the unique setting of Golden Age Cinema, Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar presents two feature films and two installations of video art that explore the significant changes that have occurred to the physical and cultural landscape of China over recent decades.
Offering ticketed cinema screenings in addition to free contemporary video art installations, dapper attired wait staff, specially curated cocktails and tempting bites, 4A invites audiences to bring in the Chinese Year of the Horse in the elegant surrounds of a ‘golden age’.
Curator Toby Chapman says, ‘Cinema Alley presents a suite of feature lms and video installations from China that engage with ideas of nostalgia and the important role that the moving image has played in China’s collective imagination.’
The evening will feature the Sydney premiere screening of leading Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s (贾樟柯) A Touch of Sin (天注定) (2013), the critically acclaimed Tarantino-esque thriller that earned Best Screenplay at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Also showing is Jia Zhangke’s haunting minimalist drama Still Life (三峡好人) (2006), awarded Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006.
In the foyer and bar areas, the free video art installations by contemporary Chinese artist Chen Qiulin (陈秋林), and Hong Kong based video, installation and performance artist Adrian Wong, will provide multi-sensory experiences with bespoke costumes, cocktails and dining menu to complete the evening.
Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Golden Age Cinema & Bar and is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Future Archaeology presents work by a group of artists currently based in Australia who conceptually engage with notions of tradition through contemporary cultural artefacts. Through an appropriation of the discipline of archaeology, the exhibition presents artworks that excavate cultural artefacts as sites for the interrogation and unpacking of the social and political forces within Asia-Pacific that have led to mass migration, cultural displacement and environmental destruction. The exhibition also draws on a leading theme of multiplicity – of numerous geo-historical trajectories borne of moments of disruption, rather than continuity – as a means to consider both historical moments and contemporary developments that have shaped the cultural landscape.
Join 4A staff (past and present), exhibiting artists and supporters for a birthday party you wont forget – hosted at the fantastic Ching Yip Coffee Lounge with a curated set of classics fromChun Yin Rainbow Chan. First release of tickets available here.
Just $20 gets you access to the party, inclusive of unlimited drinks, a selection of Ching Yip snacks and a whole lot of fun.
Join us before the party at 4A for the opening of Jogja Calling.
Join 4A partner un Magazine for the launch of issue 10.2.
RSVPs required, and drinks available by donation.
Join us to celebrate the launch of un Magazine issue 10.2, and the launch of the special-edition un Anthology: Melbourne Art & Writing (2004 – 2014), a 10-year retrospective of un Magazine.
UN MAGAZINE ISSUE 10.2
Edited by Shelley McSpedden, with Sub-Editor Alana Hunt, issue 10.2 explores configurations of contemporary coexistence, social connections, and community.
Featured artists and writers: Nikos Pantazopoulos, Virginia Fraser, Elvis Richardson, Raafat Ishak, Ross Coulter, Tom Civil, Sam Wallman, Phuong Ngo, Laura Castgnini, Rose Gibbs, Tristen Harwood, Tiarney Miekus, Zanny Begg, Pedro de Almeida, Sumugan Sivanesan, Elise Routledge, Luke Letourneau, Anusha Kenny, Michelle James, Lauren Burrow, Georgina Griddle, Matthew Taft, Julian R. Murphy, Georgia Robenstone, Anna Dunnill, Nick Terrell, Nathan Gray, Nick Modrzewski.
UN ANTHOLOGY: MELBOURNE ART & WRITING (2004 – 2014)
un Anthology is a critical and celebratory review of Australia’s popular free bi-annual contemporary art magazine, with articles, essays, artist pages, and reviews selected from a decade of publishing, as well as special commissions from Kelly Fliedner, Anthony Gardner, Justin Clemens, Bianca Hester and Lisa Radford.
Brian Fuata, Untitled (ghost machinery refit / letting go of the sheet – a possible addition to a program of events), Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2015. Photo: courtesy the artist.
To mark the launch of un Magazine 10.2, un Projects and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art present a performance by Brian Fuata, Hot Topic.
Taking in the architectural spaces of 4A’s unique nineteenth-century heritage building, Brian Fuata’s site-responsive work centres on formal and conceptual frames for the act of writing, specifically the object of the white page. Long used as the ultimate visual metaphor – at once signaling the birth of creation and the death of ideas, and indeed the author – the white page is pulled apart by Fuata in an embodied testing and teasing of its historical and cultural significance as both site and object for the production of narratives.
Through a soft queer and post-colonial lens, Hot Topic demonstrates how the dominant culture of this particular object, commonly valued over the ephemeral and intangible acts of the reading and speaking of words, is articulated upon the body and in space. In a series of structured 20-minute improvisations, Fuata comically employs the image of the ghost in a conjuring of open discussion with audiences in the round that implicitly and explicity demonstrates the structure and content of the artist’s improvising. Experienced and embodied Hot Topic is an act of inscription that record the utterances and gestural fabrication of the performance itself.
The artist will enter and re-enter the space with the following items:
a pile of A1 or A2 white sheets of paper
white tape
his laptop
a microphone
some kind of light source
his phone to record sound and moving image
a notebook and pencil
a queen sized white bed sheet.
Brian Fuata’s (b. 1978, Wellington, NZ) practice is characterised by an improvisational and interdisciplinary approach to performance. He uses a range of sites for his work including theatres, galleries, mobile phone text messages and email. Fuata has been curated in exhibitions and is a recipient of new work commissions that include: Tarrawarra Biennial (2016); The Physics Room, Christchurch (2016); Performa, New York (2015); The Poetry Project, New York (2015); UnionDocs, New York (2015); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015), Carriageworks, Sydney (2015); ACCA, Melbourne (2014) and MCA, Sydney (2013). He is also part of Wrong Solo with Agatha Gothe-Snape formed in 2009.
Brian Fuata, Untitled (ghost machinery refit / letting go of the sheet – a possible addition to a program of events), Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2015. Photo: courtesy the artist.
On Friday 4 November, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art together with The Power Institute, The University of Sydney will stage a major symposium event, Twenty Years, with support from the Power Institute, Sydney University, the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and the China Studies Centre.
This day-long symposium celebrated 4A’s twenty-year anniversary. Twenty Years brought together those who have played a role in the development of 4A as a leader in Asian contemporary art in Australia since 1996 and those that will shape the next twenty years. A keynote presentation by Sara Raza, Guggenheim UBS Map Curator, Middle East and North Africa, was followed by an in-conversation between Raza and Edmund Capon, OBE AM, Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Twenty Years Symposium:
Friday 4 November, 2016.
9.30AM – 7.30PM
The Foyer, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, City Road, Camperdown, Sydney.
Watch the Symposium sessions below, recorded by Matthew Venables and thanks to our wonderful partners at The Power Institute:
4A would like to thank the Power Institute, Sydney University, the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and the China Studies Centre, and, of course, all the wonderful speakers, attendees and staff who participated in this important event.
Twenty Years – Symposium Schedule
9.30 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome
| Prof. Mark LEDBURY, Director of the Power Institute
| Dr. Mikala TAI, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
10.15 – 10.30 Opening Remarks
| Edmund CAPON, OBE AM, Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
10.30 – 12.00 Session one – The Last Twenty
| Chair: Aaron SEETO
| Speakers: Lindy LEE, Prof. Ien ANG, Dacchi DANG and Victoria LOBREGAT.
Session supported by the China Studies Centre, The University of Sydney.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is a creation of the Asian Australian Artist’s Association that was founded in 1996 in the midst of socio-political debates about multiculturalism and Australian identity. This session brings together some of the early members of the organisation to reflect on the context that framed the inception of 4A.
12.00 – 1.00 Lunch
1.00 – 2.30 Session two – The Asian Australian Artist
| Chair: Prof. Jacqueline LO
| Speakers: Abdul ABDULLAH, Mayu KANAMORI, Owen LEONG and John YOUNG
Session convened with the Asian Australian Research Network.
Reflecting on 4A’s foundation as an artist association this session focuses on the cultural politics of Asian Australian art and identity from the perspective of artists. The artist panelists will all reflect on how their diverse histories inform their practice and politics.
2.30 – 3.15 Afternoon Tea & Launch of The 4A Papers
3.15 – 4.45 Session three – The Next Twenty
| Chair: Dr. Mikala TAI
| Speakers: Alex BOWEN, Pedro DE ALMEIDA, Dr. Abdullah M.I. SYED and Dr. Stephen WHITEMAN
Session convened and supported by the Power Institute, The University of Sydney
The next era for 4A will see expanded areas of focus, new questions and new challenges. This session brings together a diverse panel of 4A collaborators who are working with the organisation to navigate the future of one of Australia’s most unique and important contemporary art spaces.
4.45 – 5.00 Closing Remarks
| Dr Mikala TAI, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
5.00 – 6.00 – Evening Break
Join us across the grass at Taste Baguette for a quick pre-keynote break. Nibbles provided!
6.00 – 7.30 Keynote
| Speaker: Sara RAZA
| In Conversation with: Edmund CAPON, OBE AM, Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Sara Raza will present a keynote on her curatorial research exploring questions concerning the critical role of curating and the importance of site specificity in new emerging centers in Central Asia, Caucasus and the Gulf. Correspondingly, Raza will highlight the global stage of the exhibition as a site where the cross circularity of several overlapping and urgent topics concerning the migration of people and ideas and the prohibition of civil liberties converge to create an urgent yet fluid forum for activating ideas through visual culture.
SPEAKERS
Abdul Abdullah is an artist from Perth, currently based in Sydney, who works across painting, photography, video, installation and performance. As a self described ‘outsider amongst outsiders’, his practice is primarily concerned with the experience of the ‘other’ in society. Abdullah’s projects have engaged with different marginalized minority groups and he is particularly interested in the experience of young Muslims in the contemporary multicultural Australian context. Through these processes and explorations Abdullah extrapolates this outlook to an examination of universal aspects of human nature.
Artist Abdullah M.I. Syed was born in Karachi, Pakistan and presently works between Karachi and Sydney, Australia. Syed’s artwork utilizes a variety of mediums and techniques to communicate complex political ideas. This includes print screening and the shadow play produced with dollar bills and razorblades. His political commentary tackles controversial topics such as the War on Terror, immigration, and Western attitudes towards the East. He participated in the Britto artists’ workshop and an artist residency at Cicada Press. He has also co-curated exhibitions, notably Michael Esson: A Survey of Drawing, Michael Kempson: A Survey of Prints, Aboriginal Dreams and Let’s Draw the Line in Karachi, Pakistan. As a designer he co-coordinated the Design Department at the University of Karachi as well as lectured there and at UCO in the United States. He is currently completing his Ph. D at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, Australia.
Distinguished Professor Ien Ang is a Professor of Cultural Studies and was the founding Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. She is one of the leaders in cultural studies worldwide, with interdisciplinary work spanning many areas of the humanities and social sciences. Her books, including Watching Dallas, Desperately seeking the audience and On not speaking Chinese, are recognised as classics in the field and her work has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Turkish, German, Korean, and Spanish. Her most recent book, co-edited with E Lally and K Anderson, is The art of engagement: culture, collaboration, innovation (University of Western Australia Press, 2011).
Her current ARC research project is entitled Sydney’s Chinatown in the Asian Century: from Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub (with Donald McNeill and Kay Anderson in collaboration with the City of Sydney). She currently chairs an Expert Working Group on Asia Literacy: Language and Beyond, for the Australian Council of Learned Academies’ Securing Australia’s Future program.
As a prominent public speaker and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she is frequently called on for keynote addresses in Australia and internationally. As an ARC Professorial Fellow, Professor Ang aims to explore the theoretical and practical implications of notions of ‘cultural complexity’, in a research program entitled ‘Cultural Research for the 21st Century: Building Cultural Intelligence for a Complex World’. She is a champion of collaborative cultural research and has worked extensively with partner organisations such as the NSW Migration Heritage Centre, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Special Broadcasting Service and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Professor Ang has had the title of Distinguished Professor conferred on her by Western Sydney University in recognition of her outstanding research record and eminence. She is the first person at the University to be conferred with this honour.
Alex Bowen heads up the cultural and creative programs at the City of Sydney, encompassing the city’s network of nine libraries, Customs House, Pine Street Creative Arts Centre, cultural development, business development and sponsorship, and major events including New Year’s Eve, Art & About and Lunar New Year celebrations.
Alex has over twenty-five years experience in the arts and cultural sector: including in State and Federal funding bodies, regional galleries, contemporary art spaces, festivals, as an educator and practitioner. Alex’s deep passion is being able to help artists, arts workers and arts organisations do what they do best in a global city.
Mr Capon took up his appointment as Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in November 1978 following his arrival from London where, for the previous five years, he held the position of Assistant Keeper, Far Eastern Section, Victoria and Albert Museum. He stepped down as director on 23 December 2011.
Mr Capon attained a Master of Philosophy Degree in Chinese Art and Archaeology (including language) from London University’s Department of Oriental and African Studies with his thesis entitled: The Inter-dependence of Chinese Buddhist Sculpture in Bronze and Stone from AD386 to 581, and is a recognised world expert in his particular field.
In October 2003 Mr Capon opened the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ newly rebuilt Asian galleries. This major building project has created two levels of greatly enhanced and expanded exhibition space for the Gallery’s Asian collection, as well as space for touring exhibitions of Asian art. In May 2011 Mr Capon opened 3,300 square metres of new and refurbished modern and contemporary galleries, which includes dedicated display space for the Kaldor Family Collection.
Mr Capon is a Visiting Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of New South Wales; is on the Board of the St James Ethics Committee; has written extensively on the arts of China; written and presented a 3-part ABC TV-China Central Television co-produced documentary entitled Meishu: Travels in Chinese Art which has been distributed worldwide; developed the AGNSW as a centre for Asian art display and education; created the Gallery’s highly successful Foundation, a Capital fund, to acquire works for the Collection; has curated exhibitions encompassing Asian, European and Australian art; has written extensively on Chinese art & archaeology and on the work of artists such as Jeffrey Smart, Caravaggio and Giacometti.
Mr Capon’s most recent non-Gallery publication is a collection of essays entitled I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s Adventures in Art which was published in November 2009 by Penguin Australia. He was awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of NSW in 2000 and from Macquarie University in 2010. He has been honoured by the governments of Britain, France, Italy and Australia for his contribution to art and culture.
Dacchi Dang was born in 1966 in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently lives and works in Brisbane. His personal experience as a refugee generates difference in how he sees the multiple geographical and social landscapes of Australia and Vietnam. This provides new knowledge and understanding of the physical and cultural landscape of both countries. With this approach he creates or reinvents layered landscapes through his personal experiences and memories in order to focus his gaze and reflect on his ‘self’ in relation to the location of home.
Dang has a Graduate Certificate of Applied Science in Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Canberra (2003); an MA and BFA, College of Fine Arts, University of NSW (1996, 1991); and is currently a confirmed candidature of Doctor of Philosophy at the Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University.
Dang has exhibited his work since the early 1990s. Recent solo exhibitions includeLiminal, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2007) and Gallery 4A, Sydney (2006); The Boat, Gallery 4A, Sydney (2001); and Phantasmagorie, Phyllis Palmer Gallery, Melbourne (2001) and Horsham Regional Arts Gallery, Melbourne (2001). Recent group exhibitions include Hashi Hashi, The Galleria, Brisbane (2009);Planet Ueno, Taito Community Museum, Ueno, Tokyo, Japan (2008); Re-StArt, 733 Art Factory, Chengdu, China (2008); The Revenge of Genres: Contemporary Art from Australia, Cité International des Arts, Paris, France (2008) and Les Brasseurs, Liege, Belgium (2007); and News From Islands, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney (2007).
Pedro de Almeida is Sydney-based curator, programmer, arts manager and writer. Over the past decade he has developed and delivered artistic and cultural programs that have been distinguished by their engagement of culturally and socially diverse artists, communities and audiences. Since 2012 Pedro has been Program Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Curatorial projects for 4A include Sea Pearl White Cloud 海珠白雲 (2016, co-curated with Anthony Yung), presented in collaboration with Observation Society, Guangzhou, and MASS GROUP INCIDENT (2015, co-curated with Toby Chapman and Aaron Seeto), a multi-stage program of exhibitions, performances and site-specific projects that explored ideas of collective action through the complex position of the individual in relation to the group. Pedro also curated Beijing Silvermine (2014), a presentation of French Beijing-based photography collector Thomas Sauvin’s archive of found 35mm snapshots that reveal an intimate perspective of the lives of ordinary Chinese in the decades following the Cultural Revolution, and Ways: Omar Chowdhury (2014). Independent curatorial projects include Ian North – Felicia: South Australia 1973-1978(2013) for the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, with accompanying artist monograph; and EXCAVATION: The Armory Exhibition (2012), Sydney Olympic Park.
Pedro previously held the position of Program Coordinator at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2008-2011) in Sydney’s western suburbs where he worked across a multidisciplinary artistic program. This included the large-scale exhibitionsNgadhu, Ngulili, Ngeaninyagu: A Personal History of Aboriginal Art in the Premier State (2008, curated by Djon Mundine OAM) and Gallery A Sydney 1964-1983 (2009, curated by John Murphy), both with accompanying catalogues. He was Associate Curator and Project Manager of the major three-year project Edge of Elsewhere (2010-2012, curated by Thomas J. Berghuis, Lisa Havilah and Aaron Seeto), which commissioned artists from Australia, Asia and the Pacific—Newell Harry, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Shigeyuki Kihara and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, among others—to produce new works in partnership with a diverse range of communities as part of the Sydney Festival. Other professional roles include developing public programs for Sydney Living Museums (2011-2012), and Publisher’s Assistant at Allen & Unwin (2006-2008), Australia’s largest independent publisher.
Pedro’s writing on art is published regularly and has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australasia, American Suburb X, Broadsheet Journal, Photofile and un Magazine among others. He has authored and contributed to several exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs including, most recently, TV Moore: With Love & Squalor (2015). He is Editor of The 4A Papers, a newly established online platform for writing on contemporary art and culture in the Asia Pacific region, and is a member of Broadsheet Journal’s international Editorial Advisory Board (since 2016). Pedro graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (2003). In 2014 he undertook a secondment at Delfina Foundation, London, and is currently undertaking a Master of Philosophy at University of New South Wales Art & Design with research around the politics art and public housing.
Born in Tokyo, based in Sydney and often between places on planes, cars, foot, trains and subways.
Story telling is Mayu’s art and craft. She often work site specifically with communities, and collaborate with artists and creators from all genres. Mayu writes plays, blogs and poetry; creates installations, performances, documentaries and radio programs; produces art projects, oral history programs and seminars; facilitates community workshops and arts projects; takes photographs, makes video and audio installations; researches, interviews and assists others to tell their stories. She draws during my spare time.
Some of her activities include being a board member of The Koto Music Institute of Australia, on the management committee of Living with Our Dead, and a founding member of Nikkei Australia.
Mayu likes to expand her mind and horizons, swim, listen, play and laugh; endeavour to be receptive and open; listen mindfully and with humility; and would like to be of service for the betterment of humanity and for world peace.
Professor Ledbury took his degrees at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex, and his first academic post was as lecturer in Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. He then moved to the University of Manchester where he was lecturer in Art History, until he joined the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, in 2003. As Associate Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, he oversaw the expansion of the research program’s ambition and reach. He devised, planned and ran workshops, conferences and partnerships and worked to develop and oversee a lively residential scholars’ program. As Director of the Power Institute, Professor Ledbury ensures that the Power furthers its research and public engagement mission through talks, conferences and the support of research and publications.
Professor Ledbury’s research interests are in the history of European art, particularly French Art, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and he is specifically interested in the relationships between theatre and visual art and in concepts of genre in Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics. He is committed to historically and archivally informed scholarship, has published widely on Boucher, Greuze, David, and on inter-arts networks and relationships.
Lindy Lee is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, with a career spanning three decades in Australia and internationally. Born in Brisbane, Lee’s works from the 1980s began an ongoing investigation into issues of selfhood, identity and authenticity via concepts of the copy and the original. Lee studied at The Chelsea School of Art, London in 1979–80, at SCA from 1981 to 1984 and later at UNSW. In 2001, a monograph on her work by Benjamin Gennochio and Melissa Chiu was published by Fine Arts Press and Craftsman House, Sydney. In 2008 Lee was the subject of an ABC TV documentary for the Artists at Work series.
Solo exhibitions include: Flowers Fall, 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong; Birth & Death, Artspace, Sydney; Narrow Road to the Interior, Atrium Space, MITA, Australian High Commission, Singapore; No Up, No Down, I am the Ten Thousand Things, AGNSW, Sydney.
Group exhibitions include: Post Eden, Today Art Museum, Beijing 2010; Process/Journey, Australian Embasssy, Redgate Gallery, Beijing 2008; OPEN07, Venice, Italy 2007; Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005: Image & Imagination, Montréal, Quebec, Canada 2005; Buddha: Radiant Awakening, AGBSW, Sydney 2002; Three Views of Emptiness: Buddhism and the art of Tim Johnson, Lindy Lee and Peter Tyndall, Monash University Museum of Art, Victoria 2001; Spirit + Place, MCA, Sydney 1997; and Photography is Dead, Long Live Photography, MCA, Sydney.
Owen Leong was born in Sydney. He is a contemporary artist exploring identity, abjection and transformation. Working with photography, video, and installation his art blurs the boundaries between real and fictional selves to explore how the body is physically, socially and culturally framed.
His artwork visualises the structures that mark our bodies through race, gender and colour. His artistic practice explores corporeal encoding and the disruption of hierarchical systems to elicit the diffuse, and often invisible, power of white hegemony in post-colonial Australia. His work evolves from the premise that identities are fluid and constantly changing, and uses the body and skin as a surface across which social and cultural forces are transmitted.
Owen Leong completed a Master of Fine Arts at College of Fine Arts UNSW in 2005, where he was the recipient of a prestigious Australian Postgraduate Award. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Tidal Skin at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne; Infiltrator at Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; and White Amnesia at Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
His work has been included in major international group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool; Magic Spaces at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Soft Power at Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Asian Attitude: Transit Forces at the National Museum of Poznan, Poland.
Leong was awarded the Visual Arts Centre Facade Project Public Art Commission by La Trobe University and the City of Greater Bendigo in 2012. He received the people’s choice award in the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize in 2009. A three-time finalist in the Helen Lemprière Traveling Art Scholarship, he has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Art Gallery of NSW and Asialink. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan. Leong’s work is held in numerous private collections across Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Professor Jacqueline Lo is Associate Dean (International) for the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and Executive Director of the Australian National University’s Centre for European Studies. She is also the Chair of Academic Board (2016-2018).
Jacqueline is an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University of Berlin. Her research focuses on issues of race, colonialism, diaspora and the interaction of cultures and communities across ethnic, national and regional borders. Publications include Staging Nation(HKUP 2002), Performance and Cosmopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan 2007, with Helen Gilbert). Her latest publications include editing a special issue of the Asia Europe Journal (2014) and contributing to a volume of essays on the concept of empathy and memory studies (2016).
Jacqueline has considerable experience in the areas of education and cultural policy, cultural diplomacy and management in the tertiary sector. She is presently serving on the reference group for the ACT Arts Framework Policy Review and regularly conducts briefings for govenrment and the diplomatic corps. She has been Visiting Fellow at UCLA, NYU, the Free University of Berlin and Konstanz University, and DAAD Guest Professor at the University of Cologne. She is the Founding Chair of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and a member of the NYU Global Arts Exchange Program. She was awarded the Chevalier Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2014.
Victoria continues to draw inspiration from uniquely Australian sunlight, mid-century houses and a sense of place.
Her latest painted work renders sometimes minutely observed gardens and vistas beyond the outskirts of the city. Most of the houses she renders are from regional locations which are only now reacting to the pressure of expansion which radiates from heavily populated urban areas. One of Victoria’s chief aims is to document the passing of a distinctive era, a pre-digital age, (which is done by a diary of photographs over 25 years) and to record that transition in her work.
Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa
Sara Raza was selected by a committee of esteemed experts in the region as Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa. As a part of her two-year residency at the Guggenheim in New York, Raza is curating the third phase of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative.
Born in London in 1979, Raza earned a BA in English Literature and History of Art and an MA in Art History and Theory, both from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She also pursued studies towards her Ph.D. at the Royal College of Art.
Raza has curated exhibitions and projects for several international biennials and festivals, including the Tashkent Biennial: Quotations from Daily Life, Art Gallery of Uzbekistan (2011); Rhizoma (generation in waiting), Collateral Event, Venice Biennale (2013); and Baku Public Art Festival: A Drop of Sky, Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2015). She also co-curated the Bishkek International: In the Shadow of Fallen Heroes at the Bishkek Historical Museum and Alto Square, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in 2005.
In 2008, Raza curated the group exhibitions Cult of Personality and New Image Making, which featured projects by artists including Yael Bartana, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, and Erbossyn Meldibekov, for ShContemporary, Shanghai. She has organized a number of exhibitions for Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, including solo presentations of the work of Adel Abidin, Wafaa Bilal, and Mohamed Kazem, and the group exhibitions Migrasophia (migration + philosophy) (2012) and The Beginning of Thinking is Geometric(2013). She co-curated Shezad Dawood’s North American debut at the Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Canada, in 2010, and organized Ergin Cavusoglu’s UAE debut at The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai, in 2011.
Raza has lectured and participated in panels at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Germany (2004); Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; San Jose State University; and Bishkek Historical Museum, Kyrgyzstan (all 2005); Queen Mary University and Westminster University (both London, 2006); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2009); Intelligence Squared, United Kingdom, London (2010); the State Museum of History of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan (both 2011); Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London (2011–13); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012); Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and American University of Sharjah (both 2013); Casa Árabe, Madrid (2014); Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Boston; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (both 2015).
Formerly, Raza was the head of education at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan, founding head of curatorial programs at Alaan Art Space, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and curator of public programs at Tate Modern, London (2006–8). She was an educational advisor to Edge of Arabia’s CULTURUNNERS US tour (2013–14) and a jury member for the 2014 Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize, for which she also curated the shortlist exhibition (2014). She was a nominator for the Jameel Prize of the Victoria and Albert Museum (2012 and 2015) and Future Generation Art Prize of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation (2014). She was the winner of the United Kingdom Arts Council’s Emerging Curator’s Award at the South London Gallery (2004), and a finalist for the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement (2015).
Sara Raza writes for numerous art publications and is the West and Central Asia desk editor of ArtAsiaPacific. She is the author of Punk Orientalism: Central Asia’s Contemporary Art Revolution, which will be published in winter 2016 by Black Dog Publishing, London.
Aaron Seeto is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. He was formerly Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, a non-profit art organisation with a long established reputation for supporting Asian and Australian cultural dialogue. Aaron’s curatorial work revolves around the Asia-Pacific region and the impact and experience of migration and globalisation on contemporary art practice, working with artists to create projects that approach migrant and diasporic communities in critical ways.
He was on the curatorial team that delivered the Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8) in 2015. Recent curated projects include Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow (2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and offsite venues); Edge of Elsewhere (as co-curator 2010-2012 , Campbelltown Art Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art); and News from Islands (2007, Campbelltown Arts Centre), a survey of contemporary practice from Asia and the Pacific. He has also assisted in bringing major exhibitions of key artists to Australia including He Xiangyu, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Song Dong among others.
Mikala is a curator, researcher and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art and Australian design, who over the past decade has collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Curatorial projects include Closing The Gap: Contemporary Indonesian Art (2011) at Melbourne International Fine Art (MIFA) when she was director; Yang Yongliang (2009) at 45 Downstairs, Melbourne; public programs for Swimming in Sand; Growing Rice under an Umbrella (2014) at No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne; project managing Common Threads (2015), a project initiated by the Council of Textile and Fashion Industries of Australia (TFIA) to strengthen the relationship between Australian fashion and textiles and Hong Kong; and leading VIP Tours to Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Dubai and Sharjah Biennale. As an academic Mikala has taught at both RMIT and the University of Melbourne in both undergraduate and graduate programs in Contemporary Art, Modernism and Exhibition Management, in addition to having devised and delivered the inaugural Contemporary Asian Art syllabus at RMIT (2012 – ) and the first China Fieldwork Course (2015 – )with Rebecca Coates and Kate McNeill at the University of Melbourne. More recently Mikala was the founder and director of Supergraph – Australia’s Contemporary Graphic Art Fair, which has been held twice at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and exhibited at Somerset House, London (2015). She was also part of the public programs team for Melbourne Now (2013) at the National Gallery of Victoria, and previously the Cultural Program Manager for the Melbourne Fashion Festival (2009-2013). Mikala currently sits on the board of BUS Projects, Melbourne. In 2006 Mikala completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Melbourne and in early 2015 submitted her PhD at UNSW Art & Design examining the influence of the Global City on China’s local art infrastructure.
Stephen Whiteman holds degrees in art history and East Asian Studies from Brown University, where he earned his AB, and Stanford University, from which he received his MA and PhD. Before joining the faculty at The University of Sydney, Stephen taught art and architectural history of Asia at the University of Pennsylvania, Middlebury College and the University of Colorado. He has been a research fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and was most recently the A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, also in Washington. His research has also received support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts and the Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.
His current research focuses on the visual culture and built environment of the Qing imperial court during the early 18th century, with a particular interest in the role of gardens and landscape in imperial discourse. Stephen’s teaching, which ranges from surveys of Chinese art and East Asian architecture to the diverse artistic production of modern and contemporary Asia, emphasises close engagement with objects, including frequent visits to exhibitions and museum storage, as well as exhibition and research-based courses.
John Young Zerunge was born in Hong Kong in 1956 and moved to Australia in 1967. He read philosophy of science and aesthetics at the University of Sydney and then studied painting and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, specifically with the conceptual artist Imants Tillers and musical prodigy (the late) David Ahern. His investigation of Western late modernism prompted significant phases of work from a bi-cultural viewpoint, including series of paintings in the last four decades – the Silhouette Paintings, The Polychrome Paintings, the Double Ground Paintings and the Abstract Paintings.
Recently Young’s work has focused on transcultural humanitarianism with two projects entitled Bonhoeffer in Harlem and Safety Zone. Bonhoeffer in Harlem, a tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was installed at St. Matthaus Church, Kulturforum in Berlin in 2009, whilst Safety Zone, a tribute to 21 foreigners who saved the lives of 300,000 citizens during the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ in 1937, was shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne in 2010 and at the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2011.
Since his first exhibition in 1979, Young has had more than 60 solo exhibitions and over 160 group exhibitions. One of his first major projects was held at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 1984. His works have been shown in major exhibitions both in Australia and abroad, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has devoted a large part of his four-decade career towards regional development in Asia, and has participated in many regional group travelling exhibitions including Asialink’s Art from Australia: Eight Contemporary Views, (1991, South East Asian Museums), Transcultural Painting (1994-5, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong), AGWA’s Confess and Conceal (1993, all South East Asian Museums), as well as Systems End (1996, Japan and Korea) and The Rose Crossing (1999-2001, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia). He was also seminal in establishing in 1995 the Asian Australian Artists’ Association (Gallery 4A), now the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, a centre for the promotion of Asian philanthropy and the nurturing of Australasian artists and curators. Young has regular solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, Australia, and also shows in Berlin, Beijing and Hong Kong.
In 2005-06, a survey exhibition covering 27 years of works was held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, curated by Maudie Palmer and a monograph by Carolyn Barnes was published by Craftsman House, Thames and Hudson to coincide with this show. A second survey covering works from 2006-2012 was exhibited in February-March 2013 at Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra. Young currently resides in Melbourne with his partner Kate Mizrahi and children Jasper and Charlotte-Persia.
Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Chair of the Board of 4A, and
Mikala Tai, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
invite you to join us at the opening of:
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿.
Exhibition opening: 4-6PM, Saturday 19 January
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿. is the first retrospective of leading contemporary Chinese artist Xiao Lu. The exhibition is anchored by Xiao Lu’s performance work Dialogue from the landmark China/Avant-Gardeexhibition at the National Art Gallery, Beijing, in February 1989. This work, in which the artist fires a gun at her own art installation, is a milestone in the development of contemporary art in China. It has also has been read as a critical turning point in China’s recent history. While Dialogue remains an iconic work of that era, it is also one of the most misunderstood pieces of contemporary Chinese art. Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 examines Xiao Lu’s creative interest in deep emotion, extreme action, and chance. Spanning a period of 30 years, the exhibition presents significant performance works by Xiao Lu including a new commission that explores the artist’s ongoing connection to Australia.
Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou) works with performance and installation. She is a graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989 and became famous after she fired a gun at it, which led to her temporary arrest and an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue《对话》, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate, London (2018) and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikang Insurance Group Art Collection, Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and Australia.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Prominent Chinese artist Xiao Lu appears in conversation with Sydney Festival Director Wesley Enoch to discuss her solo exhibition Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿 . This talk focuses on how art can be a platform for championing important debate – ultimately, reframing conversation and changing minds. This event is part of the Sydney Festival program for 2019.
Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou) works with performance and installation. She is a graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989 and became famous after she fired a gun at it, which led to her temporary arrest and an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue《对话》, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate, London (2018) and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikang Insurance Group Art Collection, Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and Australia.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Presented by Buxton Contemporary and the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne in association with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and the exhibition Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿.
This international workshop moderated by Claire Roberts coincides with the exhibition Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue (4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney). It brings together artists, art critics and art historians to discuss the question of gender and art in China, as well as in Indonesia and Singapore. The workshop will begin with short presentations and the viewing videos and slides of performance art works by Xiao Lu, Arahmaiani, and Suzann Victor, followed by group discussion. Conversation will focus on the practice of these artists and their choice of medium as well as the reception of their work in local, regional and global contexts. Speakers will include Wulan Dirgantoro, Chloe Ho, Shao Yiyang, Xiao Lu and Xu Hong. People who wish to actively contribute to the workshop discussion or just be present are all welcome.
Moderator:
Claire Roberts is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her current ARC research project ‘Reconfiguring the World. China. Art. Agency 1900s to Now’ focuses on the international context of modern and contemporary Chinese art.
Speakers:
Wulan Dirgantoro is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are gender and feminism, and trauma and memory in Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Her publications including Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: Defining Experiences (2017) and ‘Aesthetics of Silence: Exploring Trauma in Indonesian Painting 1970-1980’ in Ambitious Alignment: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art (2018). Prior to her current role she was a lecturer at the MA Asian Art Histories program at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2014-2016) and research fellow of Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices 2016/2017 program (Forum Transregionale Studien) and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin.
Chloe Ho is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her interest is in twentieth and twenty-first century Singapore art, specifically in relation to performance, performance art, and art historiography. She investigates the place of performance in the transmission of art and the art historical in the Singapore context, looking at both artistic works and social phenomena and its relation to society. Her current research project attempts to contextualise the absence of university-level art historical studies in Singaporean universities and the absence of a formal canon for Singaporean art as a resistance toward Western structures of knowledge with artwork and events in Singapore from the late 1980s to the present.
SHAO Yiyang is a professor of Art history and Theory, deputy chair of School of Humanities at Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She received her Ph.D in 2003 from the Department of Art history and Theory at the University of Sydney. She has published widely in Chinese and English on modern and contemporary art and theory including most recently Modern and Contemporary Art in the 20th Century (2018), as well as “Whither Art History?”, Art Bulletin (June 2016), and “The International Identity of Chinese Art Theoretical Debates on Chinese Contemporary Art in the 1990s” in Jason C. Kuo ed，Contemporary Chinese Art and Film： Theory Applied and Resisted (2013).
XIAO Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou) works with performance and installation. She is a graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989 and became famous after she fired a gun at it, which led to her temporary arrest and an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue《对话, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate London (2018) and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikang Insurance Group Art Collection, Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and Australia.
XU Hong is a graduate of the Department of Art, Shanghai Normal University (1985) and the graduate art history program of the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing (1992). She was Associate Researcher at the Shanghai Art Museum (1985-2000) where she was involved in editorial work, theoretical research, curatorial projects and artistic practice, and then Deputy Head of Research and Head of the No. 1 Academic Department at the National Art Museum of China (2001-2013). In 2005 she became a Senior Research Fellow and was named an ‘Outstanding Expert’. She was a visiting Professor at Tainan National University of the Arts, and is currently an expert advisor for the Tsinghua University Art Museum. She is a leading curator, art historian and critic. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Chinese women’s art.
Acknowledgements:
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Header Image: Xiao Lu, One, performance, 5 September 2015, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Photograph by Lin Qijian, courtesy Xiao Lu.
Thirty years on, what is the significance of the China/ Avant-Garde exhibition which opened at the China National Art Gallery (National Art Museum of China), Beijing on 5 February 1989? Since the forced closure of the exhibition, after Xiao Lu fired a gun at her installation Dialogue and a subsequent ‘bomb threat’, no comparable exhibitions of Chinese experimental art have been held at China’s premier art gallery. What impact did the exhibition have on artists, the art scene in China generally, and the writing of art history within China and beyond? This day-long international workshop, coinciding with the exhibition Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿, brings together a diverse group of speakers, including participating artists and individuals who viewed the exhibition, as well as art historians and informed commentators, to reflect on the exhibition and its legacy and the work of Xiao Lu during the period from 1989 to 2019.
Featuring speakers: John Clark, Paul Gladston, Nicholas Jose, Olivier Krischer, Li Yu-Chieh, Archibald McKenzie, Claire Roberts, Sang Ye, Shao Yiyang, Mikala Tai, Xu Hong.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
The first Please Explain panel for 2019 reflects on Xiao Lu’s practice and examines the representation and misrepresentation of gender in contemporary Chinese art. Considering exhibition histories both nationally within China and internationally as part of the wider art community the panel will debate and dissect how museological and curatorial structures have contributed to how gender has been portrayed in contemporary art from China. This event is part of our public programming for Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿, part of Sydney Festival 2019.
Speakers: Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Kelly Doley (moderator), Luise Guest, Shao Yiyang and Xiao Lu.
Join us from 1.30PM at 4A for a special pre-exhibition tour conducted by visiting Beijing-based curator Alia Lin.
Speaker Profiles:
| Moderator: Kelly DOLEY
| Kelly Doley is a Scottish-Australian artist and curator living and working on Gadigal land (Sydney). She is currently Deputy Director, UNSW Galleries and member of artist collective Barbara Cleveland.
| Chun Yin Rainbow CHAN
| Chun Yin Rainbow Chan works across music, performance and installation. Born in
Hong Kong and raised in Sydney, Rainbow is interested in mistranslations, diaspora
and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society. Her research engages with
the authentic and the copy, exploring sites of exchange and desire which complicate
Western notions of originality and appropriate consumption. Central to
Rainbow’s work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global
media. Her work positions the fake as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values
and contemporary commodity production.
Tying together her works across installation and pop music is the relationship
between nostalgia, migration and identity. She released her debut record Spacings
(Silo Arts & Records) in 2016, which was feature album on FBi Radio, Radio Adelaide & RTRFM. She’s been nominated for numerous awards including FBi SMAC 2016 for
Best Live Act, Record of the Year, and AIR 2017 Best Dance/Electronica Album. Her
stunning single “Let Me” won SMAC Best Song of 2017.
Rainbow has performed extensively including live appearances at Sydney Opera
House, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Museum of Old and New Art, Iceland Airwaves and National Taiwan Museum of
Fine Arts. Her installations have been exhibited with Firstdraft Gallery, Liquid
Architecture, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Longli International New
Media Arts Festival, China.
| Luise GUEST
| Luise Guest is the Manager of Research for the White Rabbit Collection, currently the
largest ongoing collection of contemporary Chinese art internationally. A writer,
researcher and art educator – and a very bad student of Chinese – Luise writes
regularly about Chinese art for The Art Life. Her book Half the Sky: Conversations
with Women Artists in China was published by Piper Press in 2016. Luise’s current
research project examines Chinese women artists whose work subverts and reinvents
traditions of ink painting.
| SHAO Yiyang
| SHAO Yiyang is a professor of Art history and theory, deputy chair of School of
Humanities at Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She received her Ph.D in 2003
from the Department of Art history and Theory at the University of Sydney. She has
published widely on modern and contemporary art and theory including most
recently in Chinese, Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art (2019), Modern and
Contemporary Art in the 20th Century (2018), as well as ‘Whither Art History?’. Art
Bulletin (June 2016), and ‘The Inernational Identity of Chinese Art Theoretical
Debates on Chinese Contemporary Art in the 1990s’ in Jason C. Kuo
ed, Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted (2013).
| Alia LIN
Alia Lin was born in Hohhot, China in 1990. She graduated from Parsons the New School for Design in 2015 with a BFA in Architectural Design. From 2015 to 2016, Lin interned at the Design Department of the Metropolitan Museum, where she worked on the exhibition design of many projects. In 2017, she graduated from University College London with a master’s degree in History of Art. In 2018, Lin worked as a curator at Zhuzhong Art Museum in Beijing. She curated and designed the exhibition “Her Kind 创” (2018) which included Xiao Lu, Zhao Yin’ou and Cao Yu.
| XIAO Lu
| XIAO Lu (Born 1962, Hangxhou) works with performance and installation. She is a
graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and
Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation
work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989
and became famous after she fired a guna t it, which led her to temporary arrest and
an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue 《对
话, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting
women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important
international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate London (2018)
and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New york
(2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate,
London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikand Insurance Group Art Collection,
Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and
Australia.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Join curator Mikala Tai and academic Paul Gladston for a tour of Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿 followed by a congee breakfast at a local Haymarket restaurant.
This event is part of our public programming for Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue肖鲁:语嘿, part of Sydney Festival 2019.
Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue is produced and presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This exhibition and associated programming are supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship project led by Dr Claire Roberts Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency. 1900s to Now (FT140100743), and the Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.
Artists: Rathin Barman, Jessica Bradford, Erika Tan and Moses Tan
Taking Singapore as a locus of multiple regional identities, By All Estimates brings together works by artists that give form to narratives obscured by the city-state’s rapid urban and social development and the coexistence of competing projections of cultural inheritance and recognition. Over the past decade especially, Singapore’s investment in cultural institutions has been seen as an attempt to position the nation as a beacon of cultural capital in Southeast Asia. Underpinning this expansion lies an ever evolving matrix of received and contested narratives that within certain contemporary public realms—from the streets of the city to the corridors of the museum—jostle, overlap or otherwise mingle in approximations of the influence of multiple ethnic representations and economic imperatives. This exhibition presents works by Singapore-born Sydney-based artist Jessica Bradford alongside Singaporean London-based artist Erika Tan, among others.
Jessica Bradford’s ongoing historical and present-day research around Singapore’s Haw Par Villa underpins her most recent body of work spanning painting, ceramics, video and installation. Formerly known as Tiger Balm Garden, Haw Par Villa’s website describes the site as ‘an 8.5-hectare Asian cultural park, the last of its kind in the world … The eclectic park is a treasure trove of Asian culture, history, philosophy and religion—quirky yet enlightening, at the same time.’ Established in 1937 by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, the developers of the famous Tiger Balm medicinal ointment, the park has was intended as a both an educational and entertaining experience that offered hundreds of statues and giant dioramas based on Chinese folk history, mythology and morality. In the 1980s, a period coinciding with Bradford’s early memories of visiting with her family as a child, the park was acquired by the Singaporean Government during a period of concentrated governmental debate around national identity marked by a renewed focus on ‘Asian values’. Over the years, sculptures have been added or removed, modified or relocated by various involved parties, often altering the intended symbolism or meaning of the statues, dioramas and the park itself. In her work, Bradford seeks to simultaneously excavate and further obfuscate Haw Par Villa’s layered representations of the intertwined projections of cultural and national identities and the forms they take within changing regional and global ideological and economic contexts alongside competing ideas around tradition and its processes of inheritance.
Erika Tan’s Repatriating The Object With No Shadow: Along, Against, Within and Through (2013–14) takes the structure of an A to Z (a ‘gesture’ towards the encyclopaedic or comprehensive), to approach a glossary of terms, events, artefacts and personal accounts which connect us to the historical through the specifics and the context of the colonial museum in Malaya. Beginning with ‘A is for adventure, advantage and advocate’, Tan’s video work employs archival anthropological films of indigenous tribes of the Malay peninsula, tracking shots of museum displays, animations of collection objects backed by green screens, and a voiceover narration that hovers between pedagogical lecture and fictional fable, among other audio-visual material, to create a mesmeric filmic montage that challenges past paradigms of ethnographic commission and omission, inclusion and exclusion, with broader contemporary resonances and implications.
Artists:
Rathin Barman (b. 1981, Tripura, India) is an artist based in Kolkata, India, who is interested in interventions in urban spaces. His sculptures, drawings and installations seek to redefine space and investigate the city as a spatial and political phenomenon, reflecting many ideologies and different socio-political points of view. Recent solo exhibitions include I Wish to Let You Fall Out of My Hands (Chapter II) (2017) and No…I Remember It Well (2015), Experimenter, Kolkata, and A Goldfish Bowl (2014), GALLERYSKE, Bangalore. Group exhibitions include Art Basel 2018, Basel; Rendez-vous/13 Biennale de Lyon (2015), Institut de’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Land of No Horizon(2014), Nature Morte, New Delhi; Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Edge Effect, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, Kochi; Midnight’s Grandchildren, Studio X (2014), Mumbai; Art Dubai (2013); India Art Fair, New Delhi (2012–2014); nd Frieze New York Sculpture Park (2012); Barman’s work is in the collections of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Coimbatore Center for Contemporary Art (CoCCA), Coimbatore, among other important collections. He is represented by Experimenter, Kolkata.
Jessica Bradford (b. 1987, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney. Her work explores her mixed race heritage by questioning stereotypical representations of cultural or national identity. She has held solo exhibitions at Firstdraft, MOP Projects and Galerie Pompom, and is a 2018 Parramatta Artists Studios resident. Bradford’s work has been included in curated group shows at Delmar Gallery (2017), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2015), Fairfield Museum & Gallery (2014) and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest (2013). Bradford holds an MFA by Research from Sydney College of the Arts, and was a recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been a finalist in the John Fries Memorial Prize, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and the Jenny Birt Award.
Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) is an artist and curator based in London. Her work evolves from an extensive process of research focused on interests in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movements of ideas, people and things. Solo exhibitions include APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma, National Gallery Singapore ‘Uncommissioned’ tablet platform (2017-2020); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? (Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak?), a major exhibition, symposium and artist book project presented at NUS Museum, Singapore, and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (2014-2016), and Persistent Visions, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005), NUS Museum, Singapore (2010) and Vargas Museum, Manila (2010). Group exhibitions include Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); On Attachments and Unknowns, SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh (2017); Double Visions, He Xiangning Museum of Art, Shenzen (2014); Camping and Tramping Through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, NUS Museum, Singapore (2011–2013); Thermocline of Art, ZKM, Germany (2007); Around The World in Eighty Days, South London Gallery/ICA (2007); the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move, Hayward Gallery, London (1999). Tan studied Social Anthropology and Archaeology at Kings College, Cambridge; Film Directing at The Beijing Film Academy, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. She currently teaches Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, was awarded the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship 2018-2020, and is a founding member of Asia-Art-Activism, Raven Row, London.
Moses Tan (b. 1986, Singapore) is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores histories that intersect with queer theory and politics while looking at melancholia and shame as points of departure. Working with drawing, video and installation, his interest lies in the use of subtlety and codes in the articulation of narratives. He graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA(Hons) in Fine Arts and a BA(Hons) in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University. He was awarded the Noise Singapore Award for Art and Design in 2014, Winston Oh Travel Research Grant in 2016, and the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence in 2016. He has shown in Grey Projects (SG), Hidden Space (HK), Indiana University (US), Sabanci University (TR), Kunst Im Dialog (DE) and also recently completed a residency in Santa Fe Art Institute (US).
Header image: Jessica Bradford, Haw Par Villa #4 (Swans), 2016, pastel and liquid pencil on primed aluminium sheet on top of underglazed earthenware. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Feature image: Jessica Bradford, Haw Par Villa Rock Study #22, 2018,bisque fired underglazed porcelain, approx. 11.5x20x7.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
By All Estimates is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the British Council and Singapore Tourism Board.
Erika Tan’s work and participation in public programs has been supported by the British Council.
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts, academia, journalism and related fields. Responding to By All Estimates presented at 4A, an exhibition that brings together works by artists that give form to narratives often obscured by the Singapore’s rapid urban and social development, this edition of Please Explain will feature exhibiting artists Erika Tan (UK) and Moses Tan (Singapore) alongside academic Dr Yvonne Low (Power Institute, The University of Sydney) and Ursula Sullivan, co-owner of Sullivan+Strumpf, the first Australian gallery to establish a presence in Singapore at Gillman Barracks.
Taking the seminal essay Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Spectacle; or, The Rise of New Asia is Not the End of the World (2004) by prominent Singaporean art critic and curator Lee Weng Choy as a key reference for discussion, speakers will explore a range of ideas and relate their own experiences concerning Lee’s central premise that “Singapore imagines itself not just as taking the best from the East and the West—as the inheritor of the great traditions and the latest technologies—but, by offering itself as the paradigm of New Asia, Singapore also stakes a claim as part of the avant-garde of the next stage of global capitalism.” This Please Explain will ask: How has his contention may have further evolved over the past fifteen years? How does the construct of ‘New Asia’ play out in the contemporary arts scene and global imagination? How have past and present institutional and national agendas influenced the way local artists and art markets operate? What is the democratic role of the arts in public discourse? And what role do artists play within Singapore’s investment in its rise as a global knowledge-based economy in the twenty-first century?
Missed the event? Listen to the audio recording below:
Speakers:
Dr Yvonne Low, Erika Tan, Moses Tan, Ursula Sullivan
Moderator: Pedro de Almeida, 4A
Speaker Profiles:
| Dr Yvonne Low
Dr Yvonne Low specialises in the modern and contemporary arts of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Her research interests include colonial histories, cultural politics of art development, women artists and feminist art history, and digital art history. Yvonne has published widely, and is on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art. She holds degrees majoring in Art History from the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne and has taught part-time at Nanyang Technological University, the University of New South Wales, and is currently a Lecturer in Asian Art at the University’s Power Institute. She is also the project coordinator for Site and Space in Southeast Asia, and co-convenor of Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories 2019.
| Ursula Sullivan
Ursula Sullivan is co-owner of Sullivan+Strumpf. Established in 2005, Sullivan+Strumpf presents the work of established and emerging artists at the forefront of contemporary art in the Asia-Pacific region. The gallery has spaces in Sydney’s Zetland and Singapore’s Gillman Barracks. Alongside co-owner Joanna Strumpf, Ursula has helped foster the careers of some of the most exciting artists working in the region today.
| June Yap
Dr June Yap is Curatorial Director at Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. Dr Yap previously served as a curator at SAM, in 2003 and 2004. She has also served as curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore and at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum under the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, where she presented the well-received exhibition on South and Southeast Asian Art titled No Country. In 2011, she served as the curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
| Erika Tan
Erika Tan is an artist and curator based in London. Her work evolves from an extensive process of research focused on interests in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movements of ideas, people and things. Solo exhibitions include APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma, National Gallery Singapore ‘Uncommissioned’ tablet platform (2017-2020); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? (Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak?), a major exhibition, symposium and artist book project presented at NUS Museum, Singapore, and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (2014-2016), and Persistent Visions, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005), NUS Museum, Singapore (2010) and Vargas Museum, Manila (2010). Group exhibitions include Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); On Attachments and Unknowns, SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh (2017); Double Visions, He Xiangning Museum of Art, Shenzen (2014); Camping and Tramping Through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, NUS Museum, Singapore (2011–2013); Thermocline of Art, ZKM, Germany (2007); Around The World in Eighty Days, South London Gallery/ICA (2007); the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move, Hayward Gallery, London (1999). Tan studied Social Anthropology and Archaeology at Kings College, Cambridge; Film Directing at The Beijing Film Academy, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. She currently teaches Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, was awarded the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship 2018-2020, and is a founding member of Asia-Art-Activism, Raven Row, London.
| Moses Tan
Moses Tan is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores histories that intersect with queer theory and politics while looking at melancholia and shame as points of departure. Working with drawing, video and installation, his interest lies in the use of subtlety and codes in the articulation of narratives. He graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA(Hons) in Fine Arts and a BA(Hons) in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University. He was awarded the Noise Singapore Award for Art and Design in 2014, Winston Oh Travel Research Grant in 2016, and the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence in 2016. He has shown in Grey Projects (SG), Hidden Space (HK), Indiana University (US), Sabanci University (TR), Kunst Im Dialog (DE) and also recently completed a residency in Santa Fe Art Institute (US).
| Moderator: Pedro de Almeida
Pedro is Business Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and exhibition curator of By All Estimates.
By All Estimates is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the British Council and the Singapore Tourism Board.
Erika Tan’s work and participation in public programs has been supported by the British Council.
Image above: Jessica Bradford, Haw Par Villa #4 (Swans), 2016. Image courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Exhibition curator: Pedro de Almeida
Assistant curator: Janet Jin, who has assisted on development of this Please Explain discussion.
For the April School Holidays at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, join Sydney artist Chris Yee for a special series of free illustration workshops.
Chris Yee (b. 1989, Sydney) is an East Ryde (Sydney) based artist, illustrator and designer who specialises in traditional “pen and paper” methodologies. Chris’ main influences stem and vary from manga, to rap and punk aesthetics, while also expressing a traditional graphic sensibility that echoes that architectural forms and decorative embellishments of the Chinese Garden of Friendship.
Following from Chris’ recent exhibition at the Gardens, Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA!, which presented twelve bespoke tapestries that took visitors to the Chinese Garden of Friendship during Lunar New Year 2019 on a journey through the Gardens, discovering detailed, beautiful and humorous images at every turn.
In this workshop, small groups of participants will work with ink and marker pens to learn how to create their own motifs that reflect their interests and the imagery of the Gardens, working with templates and techniques to create their own take-home wall hanging.
For participants aged between 6-15 years, accompanied by a responsible adult.
Each workshop is free, and has all materials provided, with bookings online encouraged to ensure all participants get to complete their take-home artwork.
Artist Biography:
Chris Yee (b. 1989, Sydney) is an East Ryde (Sydney) based artist, illustrator and designer who specialises in traditional “pen and paper” methodologies. Chris’ main influences stem and vary from 90’s post- apocalyptic manga, rap and punk aesthet- ics. Through his imagery he constructs narratives ranging from the humorous to the monstrous and macabre. Chris’ solo exhibitions include Mad Love, 2015, Japan Foundation, Sydney; Panorama, 2015, Kind Of- Gallery, Sydney; and has participated in group and collaborative exhibitions including No Más (with Andrew Yee), 2018, Wedge Gallery, Sydney; SOFT, 2016, Superchief Gallery, Los Angeles; and Goliath Ballroom (with James Jirat Patradoon), 2015, Goodspace, Sydney. Outside his art practice, Chris is a designer who has produced work for some of Australia’s best-known brands, including VIVID Festival Sydney, Sony Australia, Samsung – Opera House, Vans, Red Bull and Gelato Messina.
Chris Yee: HI MEDUSA! was commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia, curated by Con Gerakaris, and produced for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour for Lunar New Year 2019.
This workshop has been produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
PLEASE NOTE THE LOCATION FOR THIS TALK HAS BEEN UPDATED:
Lecture Theatre EG02
UNSW | Art & Design
UNSW Sydney
Paddington campus
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd,
Paddington, NSW 2021
SYDNEY. 2 MAY 2019. 6-8PM
Dr. Jow-Jiun Gong, Associate Professor and Director Doctoral Program, Art Theory and Practice, Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), Tainan City, Taiwan
Moderator: Dr Veronica Tello (UNSW Art & Design)
In this discussion, Dr. Jow-Jiun Gong will analyse the ruptures in contemporary Taiwanese art among the paradigms of European, Japanese and Chinese art histories:
“Using artworks I selected for the 2018 Taiwan Biennale as examples, I argue that the works not only reflect the logic of post-colonial thoughts in Taiwan, but they form a phenomenon which I call ‘wild rhizome’: a self-initiated, grass-root approach of the artist community to build and connect their practices outside institutions. The transformations of artists’ organizations and their diverse types of mimicry parallel the natural environment and complex historical context where these works emerge. In addition, the numerous high mountains which are the backbone of the island, as well as the oceans surrounding it, fostered the cultural diversity and possible ways of amending the colonial ruptures and trauma.”
Presented by UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Series organisers: Prof. Paul Gladston and Dr Yu-Chieh Li.
Image: Jun-Honn KAO, Apparatus of Topa, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Artists: Baden Pailthorpe, Exonemo, Simon Denny, Sunwoo Hoon, Mijoon Pak
The Invisible Hand considers how digital platform technologies are exploiting technological convenience to co-opt personal data in an uncertain zero-sum game. With work from Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan, this exhibition explores current and projected complications and contradictions in the digital realm that increasingly oscillate between technological evangelism and scepticism.
In 1991, the World Wide Web creator, Tim Berners-Lee, developed the first website at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, over one billion websites have proliferated across the globe, with 2.5 trillion Internet searches made every year. Everyday our connected devices generate some 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, creating a rapidly expanding field of human communication and providing unparalleled insights into our lives. The rise of global platform companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Rakuten, Tencent and Naver among others—are largely underpinning this mass connectivity, with Facebook alone weaving together over 700 billion friendships across the globe.
However, from search results to self-publishing platforms, these global corporate powers are logging every digital click, like, share and scroll made on these supposedly free services—selling on this consumer information to third parties and advertisers. While this business model has produced mass convenience, connectivity and information sharing, a closer examination reveals a vast information inequity between users and these providers. Nowhere are these invisible computing forces more present than in the hyper connected East Asia region, where household internet penetration and use is at its global highest. In this region, platform technology companies have the power to alter the course of history, in the same way recent technologically-led scandals like Cambridge Analytica have manipulated contemporary politics in America, Thailand and India, and the coordinated cyber-attacks of public health records loom over Singapore.
Against this dystopic information landscape, The Invisible Hand examines our ever evolving digital realm with careful focus on the East Asia region, a place at the bleeding edge of this technological frontier. Exploring the existential threat of Big Tech through a series of commissioned and recent works the artists each untangle the networked rhythms of our age, with careful allusion to science, public policy, economics and share price. Through these meditations The Invisible Hand presents artistic agitation to the arena of public debate—providing new perspectives, understandings and predications that enable us to better understand our place in this newly formed digital battleground.
Artists:
Simon Denny: Born 1982, Auckland, New Zealand, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Drawing upon research into the practices and aesthetics of technology companies, Simon Denny creates artworks that interrogate the implications of big data in our contemporary age. Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). His work was included in Manifesta 11 (2016), 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), 6th Moscow Biennale (2015), 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), La Biennale de Montreal (2014), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), 1st Brussels Biennial (2008), and the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008). His work has been included in exhibitions at museums and institutions throughout Europe and the United States, and has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); BOZAR, Brussels (2017); the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2016); Wiels, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015-2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig MUMOK, Vienna (2013); and Kunstverein München, Munich (2013).
Exonemo:Formed 1996, Tokyo, Japan. The artists live and work in New York, New York, United States of America.
Artist unit, Exonemo formed in 1996 with key members Sembo Kensuke and Akaiwa Yae. Exonemo create experiments that explore the boundaries of the internet and internet culture. Critical to this examination are the exploration of digital paradoxes and the divide between analog, digital and real life. Exonemo’s exhibitions include: Baruch College Library, New York, U.S.A 2018; Plg.in, Basel, Switzerland, 2008, Whitney Museum, New York, 2019; Jogja National Museum, Jog Jakarta, Indonesia, 2018, New Museum, New York, USA; Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan, 2018. Since 2012 they have organized the ‘Internet Yami-Ichi’, a large flea market that has taken place in Tokyo and New York and which makes the often immaterial flotsam of cyberspace tangible in online-themed objects.
Sunwoo Hoon:Born 1989, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Sunwoo Hoon translates key socio-political moments from history into isometric 8 bit ‘digital drawings’ loaded with intense meaning and narrative. His key exhibitions include the Daum, online web-portal, 2015 – 2017, Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2017 and Gwangju Biennale, 2018. His work is collected by Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and in 2015, he won the Emerging Artist
Award from the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF). From 2016 – 2017, he was Editor-in-chief of Yourmana.
Mijoon Pak:Born 1978, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Mijoon Pak is long-term collaborator with Sunwoo Hoon. Since meeting fellow artist Sunwoo Hoon, she has been critical to the development of their collaborative practice as a storyteller. Prior to this, Mijoon has had a corporate career at large multinational firms including Google, Bloomberg, Oracle, SAP, and Samsung.
BadenPailthorpe:Born 1984 Canberra, Australia. Baden Pailthorpe lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Baden Pailthorpe’s work explores the spatiality of power, politics and the cultures of late Capitalism through hyper-real animation, video and sculpture. His key exhibitions include UTS Art Gallery, Sydney (2018); Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore (2017); 21st Triennale di Milano, Milan (2016); Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015); Casula Powerhouse, Sydney (2015); Artspace, Sydney (2014) & CACSA, Adelaide (2015); Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); Westspace (2014); La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (2013); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).
Header image: BadenPailthorpe (with GGF LAN Party), Pitch Deck (detail), 2017 (custom dual PC): ASRock X299 Taichi; Intel i9 7900X; 64GB G.Skill Trident Z RGB; Zotac GTX 1080 10th Anniversary Edition; Intel 600P 512GB M.2 SSD; Thermaltake 1000W RGB Toughpower PSU; Thermaltake LCS; CableMod Sleeved Cables. Build: Stuart Tonks, GGF LAN Party. Image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.
Dr. Justine Poplin (Victoria University Melbourne)
Moderator: Dr. Yu-Chieh Li (UNSW Art & Design)
With the expansion of our social networks and access to information through freely available online sources, the internet can provide an inspiring and highly educational method of working, communicating and researching. Yet not all people have unfettered connection to the global community as mediated through online sources, but instead are constrained by online and offline environments created by political entities.
This presentation outlines the background surrounding internet censorship in mainland China and explores significant expressions of identity through visual culture that proliferate despite censorship. Notwithstanding the restrictions on speech and expression of ideas that are divergent to the harmonious society, the online ecology lends itself to creative pathways to circumnavigate and attain information. The practice of using online visual metaphors is an alternative way to communicate to a like-minded community, simultaneously connecting to the subculture through codes, that were initially created to be read by people in that community. Focussing on the emergence of the Grass Mud Horse phenomenon in 2009, this particular symbol is used to explain how the internet can be driver for new forms of visual culture; outlining how, through online communities new heroic icons emerge. Poplin further claims that due to internet censorship, symbols are created by anonymous online users to circumnavigate the restrictions of internet censorship.
The discussion explores the capacity for understanding this contemporary and unique online visual phenomenon, also demonstrating how it manifests, drives and creates new forms of visual culture with a world spirit in mainland China and beyond. By giving examples of how creativity and online identities manifest and thrive through online communities using coded visual metaphors, the creation and use of the symbolism signifies an ideological departure from accepted and acknowledged Chinese values and belief systems through mimetic usage in art and design.
Presented by UNSW | Art & Design in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Series organisers: Prof. Paul Gladston and Dr Yu-Chieh Li
Nusra Latif Qureshi’s first solo Australian institutional exhibition presents her ongoing investigation into the symbolism and assumptions embedded in art history. Reflecting on almost two decades of practice Qureshi’s attempts to undermine, shift and negate historical imagery reads as a warning for the contemporary age, where assumed realities can be little more than constructed visions.
Qureshi’s practice is characterised by meticulous layering, fragmentation, erasure and juxtaposition of visual material. Through such intervention, she investigates little known histories of colonial eras, questions established narratives and engages with the politics of representation. Through an examination of the visual histories of the South Asian region Qureshi has developed a new visual vernacular in which to examine and interrogate the act of historicisation.
Strategies of Intent brings together key works from Qureshi’s oeuvre as well as a series of new commissions by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. These commissions are Qureshi’s most ambitious to date and include a series of installations that draw on key colonial imagery, engage with the reverence of weaponry and critique the museological convention of collecting and ownership.
About the artist: Nusra Latif Qureshi (b. Lahore, Pakistan, lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) attended the National College of Arts, Lahore and completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Qureshi’s practices engages with the visual histories of the South Asian region and Australian culture, questioning conventional interpretations, pulling apart and reconfiguring the found patterns to construct new narratives. Her work has been exhibited widely in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Afghanistan, Italy, India, Japan, France, Switzerland, Finland and her home countries of Pakistan and Australia. Most recently she was exhibited at the Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, Austria as well as Brisbane’s QAG/GOMA. Her work has been collected widely including the British Museum, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Qureshi is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and is currently the artist in residence at the Lyceum Club, Melbourne.
About our opening speaker: Helen Grace is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic interested in the nexus between art & politics, memory and history. Her work has played an active role in the development of art, cinema, photography, cultural studies and education in Australia and regionally for 30 years. Grace’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and has been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, the US, the UK, France, Spain and Finland. She recently completed a major new video installation, entitled The Housing Question in collaboration with Narelle Jubelin. The work is currently exhibited at Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest.
Grace is the author of Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image, (Routledge, 2014) and she co-edited (with Amy Chan Kit-Sze and Wong Kin Yuen) Technovisuality: Cultural Re-Enchantment and the Experience of Technology (IB Tauris, 2016). She was Founding Director of the MA Programme in Visual Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now Adjunct Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at CUHK and an associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, at the University of Sydney. She is a member of the Film Advisory Panel of Sydney International Film Festival, where she focuses on Asian and independent cinema.
Join us for an evening with this most ubiquitous of grains.
Building on his recent visit to a rice farming enterprise in Guangdong province, Lucas Ihlein hosts a conversation with artist Vic McEwan, recipient of the Arts NSW Regional Fellowship 2014-15 (NarranderaNSW), and rice farmer Tim Randall (Griffith NSW). Discussion will focus on asking what social, environmental and economic factors affect rice farming communities in Australia and China today?
Several varieties of Randall Organic Rice will be sampled on the night!
This 4A Centre for Contemporay Asian Art public program is a co-production with the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) and the Material Ecologies Research Network (MECO) at University of Wollongong.
Presented as part of Sea Pearl White Cloud海珠白雲, an exhibition of new work by Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society, Gaunzghou, and supported by the City of Sydney.
盧卡斯艾靈Lucas Ihlein (b. 1975, Sydney, Australia) is a Wollongong-based artist whose current work explores the relationship between socially engaged art, agriculture and ecological management. He is a founding member of artists’ collectives SquatSpace, Big Fag Press, and Teaching and Learning Cinema. Exhibitions include The Yeomans Project (with Ian Milliss), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2013-14); Green Bans Art Walk, The Cross Arts Projects & Big Fag Press, Sydney (2011); In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); There Goes the Neighbourhood, Performance Space, Sydney (2009); and TheBon Scott Project, Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth (2008). Ihlein completed a PhD at Deakin University, Melbourne, in 2008 entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art, which was awarded the Alfred Deakin Medal for best Doctoral Thesis in Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2015 Ihlein was awarded a prestigious Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Arts. He is currently an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at University of Wollongong, Australia. http://guangzhou-delta-haiku.net
Image caption: Linda Tan 谭静远 tending her rice field, Xiangyang Village, Guangdong, China, May 2016. Photo: Lucas Ihlein.
Sea Pearl White Cloud is a project realised through a collaboration between 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, located in the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown, and Guanzghou’s Observation Society, one of China’s most exciting contemporary art project spaces. Bringing together Sydney-based artist Lucas Ihlein and Guangdong-born, Hong Kong-based artist Trevor Yeung, Sea Pearl White Cloud presents new works informed by questions of temporality, exchange and poetics that reflect on the urban condition in the twenty-first century.
This exhibition, presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art from 30 July – 24 September 2016, is the second iteration of a two-stage project that saw an exhibition of works by Ihlein and Yeung presented at Observation Society in Guangzhou from 2 June – 24 July 2016. Sea Pearl White Cloud at 4A will unveil the works produced by the artists in Guangzhou alongside new works produced in Sydney that extend the themes and ideas underpinning the artists’ practice and collaboration.
Following fieldwork within the distinctive spatial and social setting of the residential community in which Observation Society is situated in Guangzhou’s district of Haizhu, as well as further afield throughout the Pearl River Delta, this project has arisen from conversations and research undertaken by the artists over nine months. Ihlein and Yeung’s conceptual approaches are informed by quasi-scientific methodologies of tracking and testing various dynamic systems of movement and stasis, control and disorder. Their aims as artists have little to do with producing knowledge in the traditional sense, but rather serve to propose poetic visual and gestural allegories that seek to illuminate everyday occurrences of material and spiritual transformations.
Trevor Yeung’s works are particularly concerned with manipulations of nature – as in his use of UV lighting, dehumidifying units and aquariums – to poetically propose connections between nature, the material world and their emotional import. Complementing this, Lucas Ihlein has extended his ongoing interest in Sydney’s more hidden and neglected natural waterways to that of Guanzghou. Ihlein’s series of screen prints expose a topography of the precarious projections of sea level rise as it might affect Haizhu and the broader Pearl River Delta as the most densely urbanised landscape in the world. This artistic collaboration across themes and context is signaled by the project’s title: Haizhu (海珠) or ‘Sea Pearl,’ signaling a process of materiality – and even beauty – being forged through time; and Baiyun (白雲) or ‘White Cloud’, suggestive of interminable transience, while in a more practical sense being the name of the district in which Guangzhou’s international airport is located and where Trevor Yeung originally sourced live fish and water for his work.
This project is supported by the City of Sydney with Observation Society’s exhibition opening in June being part of the official program of the City of Sydney and Guangzhou Municipality’s civic celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of their sister-city relationship. Having artistic collaboration at its heart – between individuals, organisations and cities – this exhibition builds on the links between cities while forging new modes of dialogue that reflect on our shared local, regional and global experiences.
Complementing the two-stage exhibition project 4A, with the support of the City of Sydney and Art Monthly Australasia, appointed Minerva Inwald as the recipient of the inaugural 4A Emerging Writer’s Project. Selected by a panel comprising Michael Fitzgerald, Editor, Art Monthly Australasia; Luise Guest, Director of Education & Research, White Rabbit Collection; and Pedro de Almeida, 4A Program Manager and Editor of The 4A Papers, Minerva is an integral part of the project team, having undertaken her own fieldwork as Observation Society’s exhibition unfolded in June, and more recently extended to Sydney. Her research will see texts published The 4A Papers and other titles, documenting the development, realisation and reception of the exhibitions along with interviews with the artists.
Join us for an evening with this most ubiquitous of grains.
Building on his recent visit to a rice farming enterprise in Guangdong province, Lucas Ihlein hosts a conversation with artist Vic McEwan, recipient of the Arts NSW Regional Fellowship 2014-15 (NarranderaNSW), and rice farmer Tim Randall (Griffith NSW). Discussion will focus on asking what social, environmental and economic factors affect rice farming communities in Australia and China today?
Several varieties of Randall Organic Rice will be sampled on the night!
This 4A Centre for Contemporay Asian Art public program is a co-production with the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) and the Material Ecologies Research Network (MECO) at University of Wollongong.
Artists:
Lucas Ihlein (b. 1975, Sydney, Australia) is a Wollongong-based artist whose current work explores the relationship between socially engaged art, agriculture and ecological management. He is a founding member of artists’ collectives SquatSpace, Big Fag Press, and Teaching and Learning Cinema.Exhibitions include The Yeomans Project (with Ian Milliss), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2013-14); Green Bans Art Walk, The Cross Arts Projects & Big Fag Press, Sydney (2011); In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); There Goes the Neighbourhood, Performance Space, Sydney (2009); TheBon Scott Project, Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth (2008); and Bilateral, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (2002). He completed a PhD at Deakin University, Melbourne, in 2008 entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art, which won the Alfred Deakin Medal for best Doctoral Thesis in Humanities and Social Sciences. A recipient of numerous awards and artist residencies, in 2015 Ihlein was awarded a prestigious Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Arts. He is currently an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at University of Wollongong, Australia.
Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, Guangdong Province, China) lives and works in Hong Kong. He graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Yeung’s practice uses botanic ecology, horticulture, photography and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations toward human relationships. Solo exhibitions include No Pressure, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich (2015); Garden Cruising: It’s Not That Easy Being Green, Blindspot Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong (2015); That Dog at the Party, Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong (2014); and Trevor Yeung’s Encyclopedia, Observation Society, Guangzhou (2013). Group exhibitions include Adrift, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2016); Peep Show, Long March Space, Beijing (2015); A Hundred Years of Sham – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); and Social Factory, 10th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2014).
Writer:
Minerva Inwald is a current PhD candidate in the Department of History, University of Sydney, whose research focuses on the history of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) between 1958 and 1989. Using Chinese-language primary sources to examine how exhibitions as this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in China in relation to conceptions of ‘the people,’ her research seeks to investigate broader questions of how art objects circulate in museum contexts, as well as outside museums such as in domestic, work and public spheres. Minerva graduated with Bachelor of Arts (Languages) Honours degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and in the same year was awarded the Francis Stuart Prize for Asian Art History form the Department of Art History. She has contributed a number of papers at academic conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and recently undertook an 8-month postgraduate exchange program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Exhibition documentation All images: Document Photography
Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung, 海珠白雲 Sea Pearl White Cloud (2016), exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lucas Ihlein, 廣州三角洲 俳句(珠江三角洲洪水地圖 ) Guangzhou Delta Hiaku (Pearl River Delta Flood Maps) (detail) (2016), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung, 海珠白雲 Sea Pearl White Cloud (2016), exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Trevor Yeung, 馬纓丹切花 Fresh Cut Lantana (2016), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art/ Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Trevor Yeung, 海珠白雲 Sea Pearl White Cloud (2016), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lucas Ihlein, 吃飯時說 Talking About Rice While Eating Rice (detail) (2016), installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lucas Ihlein, 海珠白雲 Sea Pearl White Cloud (2016), exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Lucas Ihlein and Trevor Yeung, 海珠白雲 Sea Pearl White Cloud (2016), exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Observation Society and supported by the City of Sydney. Image: Document Photography.
Jogja Calling examines the long-standing links between the artistic communities of Australia and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Over the past few decades Yogyakarta has become a leading destination for Australian artists looking to expand their practice and undertake residencies in Indonesia’s leading contemporary art city. Abdul Abdullah, Briony Galligan and Reko Rennie have all completed residencies in the last ten years where they have developed networks, collaborative partners and friendships. For these artists’ their approach to art making has been markedly influenced by their time in Jogja and, in particular, by the work of Leonardiansyah Allenda, Arwin Hidayat and Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan. These artists’ provided entrée into the tight-knit local art community enabling them to meet artists and artisans, participate in late-night artistic debates and venture on back-seat moto rides where long-term working relationships and friendships were formed. Jogja Calling brings these six artists together framing their works as extensions of their friendships.
Jogja Calling places the work of these artists in conversation where their somewhat disparate practices are encouraged to converge. Within this framework Rennie and Hahan’s playful but critical examinations of Australian and Indonesian culture reveal landscape to still be a defining influence. While not natural companion pieces the kinetic sculptures of both Allenda and Galligan appear as echoes of each other inviting viewers to consider the precarious balance and imbalance of relationships. The final duo of Abdullah and Hidayat reveal a return to collaborative work with artisans – where traditional techniques of embroidery and batik can support critical contemporary commentary.
Biographies:
Abdul Abdullah (b. 1986 Perth, Australia) is an artist from Perth, currently based in Sydney who works across painting, photography, video, installation and performance. As a self-described ‘outsider amongst outsiders’, his practice is primarily concerned with the experience of the ‘other’ in society. Abdullah’s projects have engaged with different marginalized minority groups and he is particularly interested in the experience of young Muslims in the contemporary multicultural Australian context. Since 2009 Abdul received numerous awards across Australia. He has been selected as a finalist in the 2016 Basil Sellers Prize and the 2016 Sulman Prize. He was an Archibald Prize finalist in 2016, 2014, 2013 and 2011, and has been a finalist for the Western Australian of the Year Youth Award, the Blake Prize and a Sovereign Art Prize amongst many others. Abdullah has works in the collections of National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Gallery of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Artbank, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Murdoch University, Islamic Museum of Australia, Bendigo Art Gallery, Campbelltown Art Centre and the Town of Victoria Park. Recent exhibitions include HERE&NOW16/GenYM at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and Coming to Terms at Mossgreen Sydney, Painting, more painting at ACCA, and Public Body 1.0 at Artspace. Abdul completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University of Technology and is currently completing a Masters entitled Terms of engagement: examining the rhetoric of radicalisation at UNSW Art and Design.
Leonardiansyah “Leo” Allenda (b. 1984 Banyuwangi, Indonesia) is an artist whose research spectrum focuses on the identification of material’s value in relation to space. His installation Private Number explores the complex exchange of cultural values through hybrid aesthetics that questions traditions and the collective and personal myths that evolve with society-binding values. Solo exhibitions of his work were presented at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2014); Inkubator Asia, Jakarta, Indonesia (2012). He has participated in some group exhibitions including Jakarta Biennale (2015), Jakarta, Indonesia; Fukutake House Project, Sodoshima, Japan; Biennale Jogja XII, the Equator (2013), Yogyakarta, Indonesia; National Ceramic Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia. He also participated a number of residency programs including HotWave #3, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Britto International Residency, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is currently a resident artist at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
Briony Galligan (b. 1983 Hobart, Australia) is a Melbourne-based artist working with textiles, installation, video and performance work. Galligan explores points where personal, social and art histories collide. Her work is concerned with how the construction of the past, in archives, buildings and gestures, is continually remoulded and revolving through collective and individual bodies. Briony has presented new installation and performance works at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne in Dancing Umbrellas (2016), She imagines a city and with artist-run space, Comfort Station in Chicago, USA. Recent exhibitions include Nothing incarnadine, St Heliers Gallery, Abbotsford Convent, No I couldn’t agree with you more TCB Art Inc., Body language does not have a grammar, The Substation and Movement behind the Backdrop with Rafaella McDonald in The Kaleidoscopic Turn at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2015. Briony completed a BFA (Hons) at Monash University 2014, at the Institut Seni Indonesia, Yogyakarta (2012) and at Rhode Island School of Design (2014). In 2015, she completed residencies at Chicago-based ACRE and Ox-Bow, associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Arwin Hidayat (b.1983, Yogyakarta) creates small works on paper, mostly black and white, sometimes stained with grey washes. Their graphic, 2D nature recalls both batik patterning and comics that refer to symbols that incorporate the ordinary with the explicit. Hidayat is an alumnus of the ISI Yogyakarta, Faculty of Fine Art. Since 2000 he has exhibited in exhibitions such as Kobe, Japan in 2006, Neo Folk in IKKAN Gallery in Singapore, Asia Print (Crack Project) in Sydney, Australia and Artjog14 Legacy of Power in 2014. Hidayat also held his first solo exhibition Flash Show Drawing in West Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia in 2012 and Solo Exhibition Bau Powder Blues at Via Via Cafe Yogyakarta in 2013. He recently won the Red Base Young Artist Award from Jogja Gallery, Yogyakarta and exhibited as part of MASKS, at Diesel Art Gallery, Shibuya, Tokyo.
Reko Rennie (b. 1974 Melbourne, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist who explores his Aboriginal identity through contemporary media. Through his art, Rennie provokes discussion surrounding Indigenous culture and identity in contemporary urban environments. Largely autobiographical, his commanding works combine the iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti. Merging traditional diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity. He has shown internationally including Paris, Berlin, Italy, Jakarta, Shanghai and USA. Recent highlights include solo shows Visible Invisible at Blackartprojects, Melbourne 2016, I Was Always Here Blackartprojects at Sydney Contemporary 2015 and group shows ‘Painting. More Painting’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2016, Venice Biennale 2015 and No sleep till Dreamtime at the Art Gallery of NSW, 2014. He won the National Indigenous Art Awards in 2015 and was a resident at Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta in 2014. He lives and works in Melbourne.
Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan (b. 1983 Kebumen, Indonesia) creates works characterised by an ongoing tussle between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, blurring realism with decoration. His works illustrates a point of contact that exists between urbanization and agrarianism, the East and the West or between the local and the global. Hahan incorporates film, music and street culture into a distinct visual language, creating a sense of movement and spontaneity in what can be described as a topsy-turvy reality steeped in satirical humor. Since 2003, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Indonesia and abroad. His works have been collected by several art museum including Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Brisbane, Australia and National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Melbourne, Australia. He also one of the founders of Ace House Collective, a young artists’ collective and initiative space based in Yogyakarta which trying to capture the culture of Indonesian contemporary society through multidiscipline work process, collaboration, and research. In recent years, he attempts to display an art with the concept that emphasizes on the interaction with the visitors and relate it with the development of art in global as well as its society. By showing metaphorical atmosphere yet full of satirical humor. The mapping of production/consumption matter of cutting-edge art market and its gleaming, and also the ironies which are then packed with alluring spirit of artistic exploration.
Exhibition documentation All images: Document Photography
Jogja Calling (2016), ground floor gallery view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Art. Image: Document Photography.
Jogja Calling (2016), exterior view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Art. Image: Document Photography.
Left to right: Abdul Abdullah, Be happy (2016) and Don’t worry (2016), embroidery, 150 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary. Made with the assistance of DGTMB Art Embroidery. Image: Document Photography.
Jogja Calling (2016), first floor exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Art. Clockwise from right: Arwin Hidayat, Roh Roh Dalam Senjata (The Spirits Inside The Weapon), 2016; Reko Rennie, Warriors Come Out to Play, 2014; Uji Handoko Eko Saputro aka Hahan, Welkome Mate, 2012; Reko Rennie, Crest, 2014; Abdul Abdullah,Be happy, 2016; Abdul Abdullah, Don’t worry, 2016. Installation view. Courtesy the artists and Fehily Contemporary. Image: Document Photography.
Arwin Hidayat, Roh Roh Dalam Senjata (The Spirits Inside The Weapon) (2016), detail; cotton fabric, 200 x 110 cm. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Briony Galligan, Door-to-door (2015), installation detail. Teak hands made by Yogyakarta wood carver Pak Lejar based on sketches completed with Galligan of Queen Elizabeth’s hands, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Image: Document Photography.
Artists: to be announced soon, but works anonymous until sold.
After a five-year hiatus our celebrated fundraising exhibition 4A A4 returns in 2019 as a weekend-long event.
Challenging local and international, emerging and established artists to create works of A4 size, 4A’s new and existing networks will come together to support the institution. This is your opportunity to expand your collection with unique pieces from leading international artists and the next big thing, all for the price of $200. What will catch your eye?
Here’s how it works:
4A A4 is an exhibition, fundraiser and event that offers A4-sized artworks for sale, each selling at a fixed price of $200. With all works donated by 4A’s extended family of artist supporters, pieces will be hung and sold anonymously, and names of artists will only be revealed after their works are sold.
Here’s how to get involved:
Artists:
If you would like to donate an A4-sized artwork we would love to include your work as part of 4A A4. All works will be accepted: this is a celebration of the breadth and diversity of 4As artistic family.
We invite you to exercise your creativity with regards to the material and medium of the work as long as you keep within the A4 size limit. All works will be hung and sold anonymously, and names of artists will only be revealed after their works are sold, with much fanfare!
As this is a fundraiser for 4A – a non-profit organisation, we are asking artists to contribute their works for this exhibition in exchange for the obvious glory of being involved, and a couple of free drinks at the opening night party. All works will be sold at a fixed price of $200.
For our wider 4A network:
If you aren’t able to contribute an artwork we would still love you to participate in 4A A4. Please, spread the word by sharing our posts on social media with the hashtag #4AA4, and, most importantly, be ready to join us on Friday October 4 (or over the exhibition weekend from October 4-6) to snap up a mystery work. Be warned though – past 4A A4 sales have been very competitive!
Join us for opening night: 4A A4 Opening Night
6-10PM
Friday 4 October 2019.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Haymarket RSVP HERE.
As part of the biannual Curators’ Intensive 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presented keynote presentations by three leading international curators. Carol Yinghua Lu (Beijing, China) Zarmeené Shah (Karachi, Pakistan) and Pooja Sood (Delhi, India) are leading curatorial practitioners working to interrogate contemporary concerns through curatorial frameworks.
These talks are FREE and allow you to view Pio Abad, 1975-2015 by night with a drink in hand.
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art,
181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket, Sydney
We encourage you to book early as these keynotes will book out.
The 4A Curators’ Intensive supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Carol Yinghua Lu
Revisits and Thick Description – Critical Reflections of Art Historical Narratives in the Post-Seclusion Era in China through Exhibition-Making.
Seclusion (closed-door) policy has been employed by various Chinese governments in the recent history of China. Only during the Qing Dynasty, a generation of progressive thinkers and intellectuals introduced the notion of China as a nation state in the perception of its relationship to the rest of the world and in the field of history writing. In order to prevent the unorthodox ideas and cut off the outside forces, which interfered its authority, the Qing Administration implemented the seclusion policy, which had brought about serious consequences. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by the Communist Party, closed-door policy has been mobilized to various degrees over various periods, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, to cut off all diplomatic ties from the rest of the world, suspending exchanges in terms of economy, politics, culture and science, to assert nationalism and assure the unquestioned and unchallenged authority of the government.
More than three decades have passed since the end of the Cultural Revolution and China has been ushered into what can be considered “post-seclusion”, a term proposed by artist Liu Ding based on his observation and investigation into the contemporary ideology of the general public in China. In collaboration with Liu Ding, I have been working on researches concerning the recent history of art, especially on the critical issues in the broader context of the intellectual, political, social and revolutionary histories that inform and shape our sense of art history, the basis for our artistic practice and discourse in China. We have attempted to combine historic research and exhibition making in the field of contemporary art practice, envisioning and discovering connected links between historic events to contemporary thinking and practice. In this talk, I will elaborate on two examples of our collaborative curatorial practice: From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism and New Measurement Group and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s, and discuss how we employ the medium of exhibition with specific approaches as a means of historic research and reconsideration.
The Karachi Biennale: A Case Study in Alternative Sites of Exchange
Taking the upcoming inaugural Karachi Biennale in 2017 as model, this talk opens up possibilities of how one begins to formulate ways of anchoring the ideas and dialogues generated in contemporary practices from Pakistan and around. Focusing on the biennale’s thematic of Witness, Shah discusses curatorial approaches and strategies geared towards the unpacking of a layered conceptual framework, highly relevant to this historically and geopolitically charged region, that looks at ideas of the personal and the political (geo/socio/religio), of memories and histories (written, unwritten, rewritten), and of investigations of the urban, the city of Karachi, within which many artistic practices find themselves entrenched. With a lack of state support and of many formal institutional structures and spaces, this presentation also raises questions of art in alternative/public space and takes into consideration issues of articulation, dissemination, audience and engagement. In such places, how must the roles of curators, artists, institutions and individuals shift in order to meet the challenges of a burgeoning art industry and evolving art practices that do not find Western institutional, critical and infrastructural models at their heart? As co-curator of the exhibition, Shah looks at the biennale as a site of exchange, investigating the possibilities, potentials and impacts of this large-scale, inaugural international art event for the city where it is to be located, the country, and for the region at large.
48Degrees C. Public. Art. Ecology: Questions of public arts beyond spectacle
48C.Public. Art. Ecology was the first large scale contemporary public art and ecology festival in India. Held for 13 days in December, 2008 in the booming urban agglomeration of Delhi – the worlds most populous city with over 17 million inhabitants and the second most polluted city in the world, it was financially supported by the Goethe Instiut and GIZ in India.
Given that contemporary’ fine’ art is still largely confined to museums and galleries in South Asia and that the museum/gallery going audiences are themselves extremely thin, Sood will discuss the potential and challenges of conceptualizing and curating a public art project in Delhi.
Sood will explore issues particular to the urban ecology of Delhi and the possibilities of contemporary art production in exploring an alternative vision of the city and its urban development. Questions such as what constitutes public space in India and what its encounter with an elite discourse of contemporary, globalized art can possibly mean – if anything – to audiences in Delhi, will form the core of her presentation.
Images: Lead image: Little Movements II, Museion 2013, exhibition view. Foto Othmar Seehauser (Curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding) all curator images courtesy of the speakers.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the participants of both the 2016 Beijing Studio Program and the 2016 4A Curators’ Intensive.
Both programs are designed to support emerging arts professionals in their respective fields by providing them with opportunities to connect and interact with practicing professionals in both Australia and Asia.
Programs such as these further reaffirms 4A’s distinctive approach to addressing Australia’s cultural diversity through a dynamic program including local and international exhibitions, public programs, workshops, seminars, symposiums and community activities.
Beijing Studio Program
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (WA), Eugenia Lim (VIC), and Justin Shoulder (NSW) have been selected to embark on a month-long residency at the studios of renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
The Beijing Studio Program is now in its fifth year of operation. It provides early and mid career Australian artists with a valuable opportunity to research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build professional networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in Asia.
Abdul Rahmen Abdullah, Eugenia Lim and Justin Shoulder were selected by a committee comprising Sue Acret, 4A Board Member and Co-Founder, ArtAsia Advisory; Professor Colin Rhodes, Dean, Sydney College of the Arts, and Toby Chapman, Creative Producer, Information & Cultural Exchange.
Abdullah, Lim and Shoulder were selected based on the strength of their applications, the potential benefits for their practices and capacity to extend their own cross-cultural networks.
Sue Acret said of Abdul-Rahman Abdullah:
“The 4A Beijing Studio Residency Program offers Abdul-Rahman Abdullah the opportunity to explore a new mode of family and artistic life in the studio of Shen Shaomin. Although Abdullah’s artistic preoccupations are born out of the cultural and familial roots of his Malay-Australian Muslim heritage, they are universal in their commentary on the dialogue between the animal/natural world and the cultural/human one. The residency also presents a great opportunity for Abdullah to investigate new modes of art making and possibilities for collaboration.”
Professor Rhodes said of Eugenia Lim:
“Eugenia Lim has seized the moment and brought her practice front and centre. She has conceived a project that will make the most of a residency in Shen Shaomin’s studio and which, I suspect, will be impactful in China as well as here in Australia. Lim’s art is wise and arresting; two qualities that will only grow further out of this opportunity.”
Toby Chapman said of Justin Shoulder:
“Justin Shoulder’s application was outstanding and illustrated clear benefits of time spent at the studios of Shen Shaomin. His current area of research and previous projects illustrate interesting alignments and intersections with contemporary practices in China as well as traditional forms of knowledge sharing and storytelling.”
4A’sBeijing Studio Program will give these young artists a fantastic opportunity to place their practices within a much broader international art context in a city such as Beijing.
Abdullah, Lim and Shoulder will travel to China in September 2016.
4A Curators’ Intensive
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to be hosting the third iteration of the 4A Curators’ Intensive supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund
This biannual initiative is a week-long intensive program facilitated by leading international curators, Carol Yinghua Lu (Beijing, China) Zarmeené Shah (Karachi, Pakistan) and Pooja Sood (Delhi, India). Along with 4A Director Mikala Tai and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre’s Creative Producer Community Cultural Engagement Khaled Sabsabi. These international curators will host a week of workshops, artists’ studio visits and discussions that seek to encourage the next generation of Australian curators to create sustainable working methodologies that extend between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
4A’s Director Mikala Tai says:
“This program is a significant investment in the professional development of our future curatorial talent. The opportunity for them to work with leading curators from the Asia-Pacific throughout a demanding and rigorous week is unrivalled. We hope that at the end of the intensive that the manner in which they approach the act of exhibition making will have been extended and expanded.”
From a highly competitive pool of applicants from New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, the following 11 curators will participate in the 2016 4A Curators’ Intensive:
Hanann Al Daqqa (VIC)
Joanna Bayndrian (NSW)
Micheal Do (NSW)
Alana Hunt (WA)
Anabelle Lacroix (VIC)
Luke Letourneau (NSW)
Melissa McGrath (SA)
Laura McLean (NSW)
Adam Porter (NSW)
Talia Smith (NSW)
Amelia Wallin (NSW)
In addition to the closed program of 4A Curators’ Intensive designed for the participants, the three international curators will present keynotes at 4A. Open to the public, these talks focus on each curator’s current work and the curatorial context, art histories and cultural climates in which there are working. Book early to secure your place.
Carol Yinghua Lu
Revisits and Thick Description – Critical Reflections of Art Historical Narratives in the Post-Seclusion Era in China through Exhibition-Making.
Seclusion (closed-door) policy has been employed by various Chinese governments in the recent history of China. Only during the Qing Dynasty, a generation of progressive thinkers and intellectuals introduced the notion of China as a nation state in the perception of its relationship to the rest of the world and in the field of history writing. In order to prevent the unorthodox ideas and cut off the outside forces, which interfered its authority, the Qing Administration implemented the seclusion policy, which had brought about serious consequences. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by the Communist Party, closed-door policy has been mobilized to various degrees over various periods, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, to cut off all diplomatic ties from the rest of the world, suspending exchanges in terms of economy, politics, culture and science, to assert nationalism and assure the unquestioned and unchallenged authority of the government.
More than three decades have passed since the end of the Cultural Revolution and China has been ushered into what can be considered “post-seclusion”, a term proposed by artist Liu Ding based on his observation and investigation into the contemporary ideology of the general public in China. In collaboration with Liu Ding, I have been working on researches concerning the recent history of art, especially on the critical issues in the broader context of the intellectual, political, social and revolutionary histories that inform and shape our sense of art history, the basis for our artistic practice and discourse in China. We have attempted to combine historic research and exhibition making in the field of contemporary art practice, envisioning and discovering connected links between historic events to contemporary thinking and practice. In this talk, I will elaborate on two examples of our collaborative curatorial practice: From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism and New Measurement Group and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s, and discuss how we employ the medium of exhibition with specific approaches as a means of historic research and reconsideration.
The Karachi Biennale: A Case Study in Alternative Sites of Exchange
Taking the upcoming inaugural Karachi Biennale in 2017 as model, this talk opens up possibilities of how one begins to formulate ways of anchoring the ideas and dialogues generated in contemporary practices from Pakistan and around. Focusing on the biennale’s thematic of Witness, Shah discusses curatorial approaches and strategies geared towards the unpacking of a layered conceptual framework, highly relevant to this historically and geopolitically charged region, that looks at ideas of the personal and the political (geo/socio/religio), of memories and histories (written, unwritten, rewritten), and of investigations of the urban, the city of Karachi, within which many artistic practices find themselves entrenched. With a lack of state support and of many formal institutional structures and spaces, this presentation also raises questions of art in alternative/public space and takes into consideration issues of articulation, dissemination, audience and engagement. In such places, how must the roles of curators, artists, institutions and individuals shift in order to meet the challenges of a burgeoning art industry and evolving art practices that do not find Western institutional, critical and infrastructural models at their heart? As co-curator of the exhibition, Shah looks at the biennale as a site of exchange, investigating the possibilities, potentials and impacts of this large-scale, inaugural international art event for the city where it is to be located, the country, and for the region at large.
Artists: Rathin Barman, Jessica Bradford, Erika Tan and Moses Tan
Taking Singapore as a locus of multiple regional identities, By All Estimates brings together works by artists that give form to narratives obscured by the city-state’s rapid urban and social development and the coexistence of competing projections of cultural inheritance and recognition. Over the past decade especially, Singapore’s investment in cultural institutions has been seen as an attempt to position the nation as a beacon of cultural capital in Southeast Asia. Underpinning this expansion lies an ever-evolving matrix of received and contested narratives that within certain contemporary public realms—from the streets of the city to the corridors of the museum—jostle, overlap or otherwise mingle in approximations of the influence of multiple societal and economic imperatives. By All Estimates presents works from Kolkata-based Rathin Barman, London-based Erika Tan and Singapore-based Moses Tan in Australia for the first time, alongside works from Singapore-born and Sydney-based artist Jessica Bradford.
Rathin Barman’s Home, and a home (2016) takes as its foundation the façade of a colonial shopfront building in Singapore’s Little India district. Commissioned by and created for the Singapore Biennale 2016, Barman considers his 1:1 scale structure of welded brass and steel as a three-dimensional drawing in which he invites viewers to physically enter, thereby transforming the body’s relationship to the work from an architectural exterior to a cage-like interior space. During his research for this work, Barman spent significant time engaging with migrant workers – mostly men and mostly from the Bengal region of Bangladesh and India – whose day of hard labour in the construction and maintenance sectors begins before sunrise. Many of these men live in cramped conditions above such shophouses that, on the outside at least, offer tourists a picture of Singapore’s colonial past while at the same time masking the visibility of the migrant workers that are essential for the ongoing development of the city’s infrastructure and the services that keep its economy humming.
Jessica Bradford’s ongoing historical and present-day research around Singapore’s Haw Par Villa underpins her most recent body of work spanning painting, ceramics, video and installation. Formerly known as Tiger Balm Garden, Haw Par Villa’s website describes the site as ‘an 8.5-hectare Asian cultural park, the last of its kind in the world … The eclectic park is a treasure trove of Asian culture, history, philosophy and religion—quirky yet enlightening, at the same time.’ Established in 1937 by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, the developers of the famous Tiger Balm medicinal ointment, the park was intended as a both an educational and entertaining experience that offered hundreds of statues and giant dioramas based on Chinese folk history, mythology and morality. In the 1980s, a period coinciding with Bradford’s early memories of visiting with her family as a child, the park was acquired by the Singaporean Government during a period of concentrated governmental debate around national identity marked by a renewed focus on ‘Asian values’. Over the years, sculptures have been added or removed, modified or relocated by various involved parties, often altering the intended symbolism or meaning of the statues, dioramas and the park itself. In her work, Bradford excavates and further obfuscates Haw Par Villa’s layered representations of the intertwined projections of cultural and national identities that jostle among competing ideas about tradition and its processes of inheritance.
Erika Tan’s Repatriating The Object With No Shadow: Along, Against, Within and Through (2013–14) takes the structure of an A to Z (a ‘gesture’ towards the encyclopaedic or comprehensive), to approach a glossary of terms, events, artefacts and personal accounts which connect us to the historical through the specifics and the context of the colonial museum in Malaya. Beginning with ‘A is for adventure, advantage and advocate’, Tan’s video work employs archival anthropological films of indigenous tribes of the Malay peninsula, tracking shots of museum displays, animations of collection objects backed by green screens, and a voiceover narration that hovers between pedagogical lecture and fictional fable, among other audio-visual material, to create a mesmeric filmic montage that challenges past paradigms of ethnographic commission and omission, inclusion and exclusion, with broader contemporary resonances and implications.
Moses Tan presents works from his recent series, Memorial for Boogie Street (2018). Incorporating drawing, sculpture, audio and virtual reality, Tan’s suite of works in By All Estimates seek to re-articulate often forgotten, repressed and censored queer histories of Singapore, especially of the communities and activities that centred around Bugis Street from the 1950s to the mid-1980s when the downtown area begun its transformation from a well-known (and well-frequented) site for cruising and transgender sex workers and their clients to what is today a haven for tourists with malls, markets and cultural institutions. Playing with ‘Boogie Street’, the title of a Leonard Cohen song that is said to have been inspired by the songwriter’s short stopover in Singapore in the early 1970s on the way back from Sydney as part of a world tour, Tan’s works are an elegy to an era that seemed more open – and paradoxically, compared to today – permissive of flaunting queerness ,while at the same time stand as metaphors for the relationship between the street and the inner lives and latent desires of its varying denizens.
Artists:
Rathin Barman (b. 1981, Tripura, India) is an artist based in Kolkata, India, who is interested in interventions in urban spaces. His sculptures, drawings and installations seek to redefine space and investigate the city as a spatial and political phenomenon, reflecting many ideologies and different socio-political points of view. Recent solo exhibitions include I Wish to Let You Fall Out of My Hands (Chapter II) (2017) and No…I Remember It Well (2015), Experimenter, Kolkata, and A Goldfish Bowl (2014), GALLERYSKE, Bangalore. Group exhibitions include Art Basel 2018, Basel; Rendez-vous/13 Biennale de Lyon (2015), Institut de’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Land of No Horizon (2014), Nature Morte, New Delhi; Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Edge Effect, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, Kochi; Midnight’s Grandchildren, Studio X (2014), Mumbai; Art Dubai (2013); India Art Fair, New Delhi (2012–2014); nd Frieze New York Sculpture Park (2012); Barman’s work is in the collections of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Coimbatore Center for Contemporary Art (CoCCA), Coimbatore, among other important collections. He is represented by Experimenter, Kolkata.
Jessica Bradford (b. 1987, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney. Her work explores her mixed race heritage by questioning stereotypical representations of cultural or national identity. She has held solo exhibitions at Firstdraft, MOP Projects and Galerie Pompom, and is a 2018 Parramatta Artists Studios resident. Bradford’s work has been included in curated group shows at Delmar Gallery (2017), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2015), Fairfield Museum & Gallery (2014) and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest (2013). Bradford holds an MFA by Research from Sydney College of the Arts, and was a recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been a finalist in the John Fries Memorial Prize, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and the Jenny Birt Award. Bradford is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Erika Tan (b. 1967, Singapore) is an artist and curator based in London. Her work evolves from an extensive process of research focused on interests in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movements of ideas, people and things. Solo exhibitions include APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma, National Gallery Singapore ‘Uncommissioned’ tablet platform (2017-2020); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? (Sila Mengkanibalkan Kami, Mahu Tak?), a major exhibition, symposium and artist book project presented at NUS Museum, Singapore, and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (2014-2016), and Persistent Visions, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005), NUS Museum, Singapore (2010) and Vargas Museum, Manila (2010). Group exhibitions include Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); On Attachments and Unknowns, SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh (2017); Double Visions, He Xiangning Museum of Art, Shenzen (2014); Camping and Tramping Through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya, NUS Museum, Singapore (2011–2013); Thermocline of Art, ZKM, Germany (2007); Around The World in Eighty Days, South London Gallery/ICA (2007); the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move, Hayward Gallery, London (1999). Tan studied Social Anthropology and Archaeology at Kings College, Cambridge; Film Directing at The Beijing Film Academy, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. She currently teaches Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, was awarded the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship 2018-2020, and is a founding member of Asia-Art-Activism, Raven Row, London.
Moses Tan (b. 1986, Singapore) is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores histories that intersect with queer theory and politics while looking at melancholia and shame as points of departure. Working with drawing, video and installation, his interest lies in the use of subtlety and codes in the articulation of narratives. He graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a BA(Hons) in Fine Arts and a BA(Hons) in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University. He was awarded the Noise Singapore Award for Art and Design in 2014, Winston Oh Travel Research Grant in 2016, and the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence in 2016. He has shown in Grey Projects (SG), Hidden Space (HK), Indiana University (US), Sabanci University (TR), Kunst Im Dialog (DE) and also recently completed a residency in Santa Fe Art Institute (US).
By All Estimates is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the British Council and Singapore Tourism Board.
Erika Tan’s work and participation in public programs has been supported by the British Council.
Exhibition Documentation
All Images: Document Photography
Jess Bradford, Haw Par Villa – Video Snapshots Series, 2016-19, mixed media video installation, looping single-channel video, screens, bamboo, metal scaffold couplers, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
L-R: Jessica Bradford, Haw Par Villa – Video Snapshots Series, 2016-19, mixed media video installation, looping single-channel video, screens, bamboo, metal scaffold couplers, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Moses Tan, The Oral History of Boogie Street, 2019, fabric, 8 stereo-channel audio, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Moses Tan, The Oral History of Boogie Street, 2019, fabric, 8 stereo-channel audio, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Moses Tan, A Eulogy to Boogie Street, 2016-19 (ongoing), graphite on paper, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
L-R: Moses Tan, Slow Steps, 2019, fabric, wood, single-channel video and audio, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Erika Tan, Repatriating The Object With No Shadow: Along, Against, Within and Through, 2015, HDV originating in multiple formats and codex, 36.46min. Courtesy the artist. Erika Tan, Vacationem Universalem / Universal Call, 2015, originating as a 3D Maya model, output HDV, 13.30min. Courtesy the artist.
Jessica Bradford, Haw Par Villa #5 (Swans), 2016, pastel and liquid pencil on primed aluminium on top of underglazed ceramic base. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Pompom, Sydney.
Erika Tan, Vacationem Universalem / Universal Call (detail), 2015, originating as a 3D Maya model, output HDV, 13.30min. Courtesy the artist.
Erika Tan, Vacationem Universalem / Universal Call (detail), 2015, originating as a 3D Maya model, output HDV, 13.30min. Courtesy the artist.
Foreground: Moses Tan, Slow Steps, 2019, fabric, wood, single-channel video and audio, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Background: Rathin Barman, Home, and a Home, 2016, welded mild steel, rust-preventative coating, cast concrete and weathered steel, installation view. Commission by Singapore Art Museum for Singapore Biennale 2016. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata.
By All Estimates exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.
John Vea’s Australian debut examines the complex labour flow throughout our region. Continuing his exploration of pacific migrant workers his practice is anchored by his signature wit and humour that challenges viewers to consider the equality and validity of a global workforce.
Vea’s practice has been defined by a journalist-like investigation into how workers from Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) have been co-opted as labour for both Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Anchored by a series of talanoa (conversations) Vea’s work prefaces the voice and lived experience of the migrant worker employed within dominant and authoritative social structures. These discussions inform how Vea scaffolds his practice and locates his work as a means to examine the overlooked and the underrepresented.
In the contemporary globalised era migrant labour has emerged as a key indicator of regional socio-economic relationships. Labourers from Moana Nui a Kiwa have been subordinated by both Australia and New Zealand to support both agricultural production and urban development. Specific schemes such as Recognised Seasonal Employment (RSE) in New Zealand grants season migrant workers temporary entry to plant, harvest and pack crops in exchanged for minimum wage. On completion of the designated work they are immediately returned home; their contributions to the success and prosperity of New Zealand’s economy barely noticed or acknowledged. Vea uses polices such as the RSE as a basis from which to work, his crafted responses are sometimes humorous but always compelling counterpoints to dominant perspectives and the status quo.
If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? is John Vea’s first comprehensive international solo exhibition presenting recent significant works alongside a new commission from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This commission will be developed as a reflection of a year-long research project into the history of 4A’s locale in Haymarket, Sydney. As a site for trade and exchange on the banks of the harbor, the area now known as Haymarket has played an important role for the communities that have resided here for centuries.
John Vea: If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? includes new performance and installation works commissioned by PerformanceSpace and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
John Vea: If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? is powered by Lūpa, a media player for art galleries. More information at lupaplayer.com
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents the first Australian exhibition of London-based Filipino artist Pio Abad, 1975 – 2015. While much of Pio Abad’s work is concerned with the so-called ‘conjugal dictatorship’ of former Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda Marcos (1965-86), this exhibition expands this historical concern. For 4A Abad has established a historical framework, which begins in 1975 with the evacuation of United States forces from Saigon, Vietnam, and concludes in 2015 with a body of work that attempts to recalibrate the archiving of several conflicts spanning post-Marcos Philippines to the Balkans conflict of the 1990s.
Pio Abad employs strategies of appropriation and replication to reveal the social and political impact of specific objects usually consigned to the sidelines of history. Underpinning Abad’s telescopic practice is an ongoing interest in the social and political narratives that domestic objects play in our lives. Using inexpensive reproduction techniques that contrast with the opulent objects he replicates, the works presented in 1975 – 2015 draw connections between these otherwise disparate historical narratives.
A key work in this exhibition, 105 Degrees and Rising (2015) takes its title from the secret radio code used by the United States Army to signal the evacuation of Saigon. In this custom designed wallpaper, Pio Abad conscripts two found visual sources: the ERDL camouflage developed by the US military for the jungles of Vietnam, and the well-known 1976 pinup photograph of American actress Farah Fawcett. While the original radio call signalled America’s final dramatic retreat from its ignominious war in Indochina, Abad’s wallpaper proffers an alternative history of authoritarian rule, which is at once aggressive and seductive. As an aggregation and overlay of cultural artefacts, 105 Degrees and Rising suggests a complex reading of history which acknowledges the sustained colonial influence of the United States across Southeast Asia.
Pio Abad choreographs familiar objects and narratives, animating them to initiate a critical conversation on the discourses of singularity, surplus and semblance. He looks at his source material as traces of something sordid, a body of evidence that exhibits morbid symptoms of a possible psychopathology of power. By presenting these discrete bodies of work, Abad attempts to unpack his own interest in the artifice and its claims to originality, whether it is art that is not replicable, or national leader who found their own narratives of fabulation.1
1. Patrick Flores, The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders, Jorge B. Vargas Museum, exhibition notes, 2014.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s first exhibition in Adelaide is a touring presentation of Future Archaeologyhosted by our collaborative parter Nexus Arts.
Future Archaeologypresents work by a group of emerging and mid-career artists who conceptually engage with notions of tradition through contemporary cultural artefacts. Through an appropriation of the discipline of archaeology, the exhibition attempts to present a complex image of the social and political movements throughout the Asia-Pacific based on narratives of migration, cultural displacement and appropriation.
Future Archaeology draws on a leading theme of multiplicity – of numerous geo-historical trajectories borne of moments of disruption, rather than continuity – as a means to consider both historical moments and contemporary developments that have shaped the cultural landscape. Attempting to draw connections between cultural traditions and contemporary experiences are works that explore, for example, the mass migration of Vietnamese to Australia, the widespread deforestation and cultural destruction of Central America, and the confluence of Western and Pakistani ideals of masculinity.
The exhibition features new works that have been commissioned by 4A complemented by existing works presented in Australia for the first time. With art forms spanning sawdust carpets through to truck art medallions, Future Archaeology reflects upon experiences of cultural dislocation and the attempts made by artists to initiate new conversations across geographical and historical distances, which together offer alternatives on aesthetic and conceptual development of contemporary Australian art.
Nexus Arts,
Lion Arts Centre; Corner North Terrace & Morphett St
Adelaide 5000
Produced & Presented by
Nathan Beard is an interdisciplinary artist based in Western Australia whose work engages syncretistically with the myriad of influences from his Thai-Australian background. He critically deconstructs tense binary divisions between the East and West, the highbrow and low culture, and the conceptual centre and periphery relationship and explores these cultural exchanges through his playful artistic practice. Beard had participated in solo and group exhibitions including Ad Matres, Artereal Gallery, Sydney (2015); Light Locker Art Space, Perth CBD, Perth (2013); Interregna, Moana Peroject Space, Perth (2013); and the 2012 Next Wave Festival – the space between us wants to sing, NGV Studio, Melbourne (2012). He has held residencies in Speedy Grandma, Bangkok and the Perth Institude of Contemporary Arts, Perth and is part of The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere with fellow artists Abdul Abdullah and Casey Ayers.
Léuli Eshraghi is a Melbourne-based artist who uses illustration, painting, photography and installation to discuss indigeneity, language, body sovereignty and queer possibility. His works on paper retrace and reconnect to his Persian and Samoan heritages, taking inspiration from the traditional aesthetics of gabbeh carpet and siapo barkcloth in order to visualise hidden stories, concealed traumas and spirits of the past. Eshraghi is the current Gertrude Contemporary-Next Wave Emerging Curator and editor of the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival’s Oceania Now publication. He has exhibited at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2015); the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival (2015); and RM Gallery, Auckland (2014). Eshraghi’s curatorial projects include Total Eclipse, Melbourne Fringe Festival, The Ownership Project (2014); and the award winning So Fukin Native with Pauline Vetuna mentor Taloi Havini, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Blak Dot Gallery (2012).
Deanna Hitti is an artist specializing in printmaking, drawing from her professional experience of over 14 years in the field. Her books and prints, published through her own studio, investigate the complex relationship between Eastern and Western cultures and how this relationship is understood and constructed through the perspective of a Lebanese-Australian. Hitti’s arist books reflect on classicism in both hemispheres of the world, analysing the notions of exoticism, romanticism and the orientalist gaze to comprehend contemporary representations of the Middle East in both art and the media. She has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows including The Centre for Book Arts (New York); IMPACT8 Conference, Scotland; Langford120, Melbourne; and 45 Downstairs, Melbourne. The artist’s books and prints have been bought by The State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia, among other major Australian collections.
Andy Mullens is a Canberra-based artist whose practice discusses concepts of singular and group identity, and self-representation through an exploration of cultural identity, family history and national history. Working between both film and digital photography as well as sculpture and traditional craft, she strives to reconcile her Australian and Vietnamese identity, realigning herself with her Vietnamese family, cultural heritage and her history. After completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2014, Mullens exhibited her first solo show three at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra in 2015. She has also participated in group exhibitions including Past Perfect, Leta Gallery + Project Space, Canberra (2015); and Plucked, gallery@bcs, Canberra (2015), part of the ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Scheme BSC Springboard Award.
Claudia Nicholson was born in Bogota, Colombia 1987. In 2011 she graduated with a Bachelor Of Fine Arts (Honours) from UNSW Art and Design (Formally COFA). In 2013 She exhibited at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art as part of their emerging artist program. In 2013 she participated in Centro Selva’s artist in residency program in the Peruvian Amazon and had her first solo show, Silly Homeland, at Gaffa gallery. In 2014 Nicholson was an artist in residence at Firstdraft gallery resulting in her second solo exhibition. She recently participated in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art studio program in Beijing with Shen Shaomin. Nicholson is an associated artist of Gaffa gallery Sydney. As a Colombian born artist, adopted and raised in Australia, Nicholson occupies an ambivalent position between Australian, Amerindian and Latino cultures. Her work is multidisciplinary with a focus on ceramics, video art, sculpture and painting. She works extensively with her family, using performance to comment on social attitudes pertaining to kinship and familial relationships. The tensions of cultural hybridity and dislocation resonate throughout her practice.
Abdullah M.I. Syed is an interdisciplinary artist working between Karachi and Sydney. His works utilize a variety of mediums and techniques to present a complex political commentary that tackles controversial topics such as the War on Terror, immigration and Western attitudes towards Eastern society. He participated in the Britto artists’ workshop and an artist residency at Cicada Press. He has also co-curated exhibitions, notably Michael Esson: A Survey of Drawing, Michael Kempson: A Survey of Prints, Aboriginal Dreams and Let’s Draw the Line in Karachi, Pakistan. As a designer, Syed co-coordinated the Design Department at the University of Karachi and has lectured there and at UCO in the United States. He is recently completed his Ph. D at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, Australia.
Artists: Bettina Fung, Brian Fuata, Minja Gu and Ko Siu Lan.
Building upon its critically acclaimed performance programme, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) returns to Hong Kong’s Art Central for a fourth year with Performance x 4A: a series of interactive live works examining ideas of time and duration that question the futility and fruits of human endeavour. Featuring over 100 leading international galleries in 2019, the 2018 edition of Art Central had its highest ever attendance, welcoming over 39,000 international collectors, curators and art enthusiasts.
In partnership with Art Central, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will continue to push the boundaries of durational performance art in 2019 by commissioning four artists from the Asia Pacific who will transform the fair experience. Bettina Fung’s | 馮允珊 (Hong Kong/United Kingdom) I am tired with you uses the traditions of printmaking to create a collective mind-map of the audience’s reflections on fatigue, labour relations and possibilities of ‘non doing’. Brian Fuata’s (Australia/Samoa) Care disfigurements (other men’s flowers)crosses emotional, artistic and entertainment spectrums and will traverse the fair from booth to booth with a combination of performance exercises, deadpan humour, bed sheets and mineral water. Minja Gu’s (Korea) The Authentic Quality: HK will set up a restaurant-cum-exhibition-cum-relational-aesthetics project in a fair booth, prompting audiences to re-evaluate cycles of consumerism through the ubiquitous three-minute noodle packet and Siu Lan Ko’s (Hong Kong/Canada) New Territories Old Territories will ask audiences to consider their ideas of Hong Kong now and into the future through interactive sculpture works examining ideas of space, geography, and nationhood.
Art Central will showcase over 100 leading galleries alongside a dynamic program of ambitious installations, engaging panel discussions and experimental film. As Art Central’s exclusive performance partner, the performance works presented by 4A seek the public’s participation with site-specific movement, activity and actions that encourage critical engagement.
About the artists:
Bettina Fung | 馮允珊 is best known for her performative drawing practice that invites collaboration. Drawn to the liminal space between nothing and existence that is potent with possibilities, Fung is interested in sharing process and allowing works to unfold over time before an audience. Fung’s key exhibition history includes works at Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK, Spacex, Exeter, UK, Musee d’Art, Toulon, France and the One Billion Rising UK Art Festival.
Brian Fuata works in performance through live and mediated forms. He employs various modes of presentation within the framework of structured-improvisation. In Fuata’s works, the act of viewing is a reciprocating action between artist and audience and audience with each other. Fuata employs the ‘blank sheet’ as a recurring motif in his work, which transforms with different contexts into emails, paper, Word.Doc, google.doc, SMS text, concrete, film, and in the case of his 20-minute ghost performances, a white bedsheet. Major solo works include Placeholder, Enjoy Gallery, Christchurch (2016); All titles, Performa Biennial, New York (2015); Untitled (ghost machinery refit/letting go of the sheet), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); and nationally at the Close to the knives (one to five) email performances, Tarrawarra Biennale, Tarrawarra (2016); FIFO Ghost, Liquid Architecture at the National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne (2015); Apparitional Charlatan… Carriageworks (2016); Privilege (performance), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2015); Points of Departure: one to three, email performance, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014) He is one half of Wrong Solo a performace collaboration with artist Agatha Gothe-Snape since 2009.
Minja Gu’s performance works explore the cyclical forces of consumerism in society with durational pieces that turn everyday occurrences into ceremonies and rituals. Gu’s key recent exhibition history includes works in SPACE CROFT, Seoul, Arko Art Center, Seoul, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, and The Taipei Biennale, Taipei. She received the award of excellence in the Songeun Art Award in 2010 and in 2018 was one of the participants for the Korea Artist Prize.
Ko Siu Lan lives between Hong Kong and Toronto, and creates text based installations and durational performances that examine ideas and constructs of space, geography and identities. Ko’s art installations and performances have been shown internationally in Beijing, Brussels, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, London, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw.
Documentation:
Bettina Fung | 馮允珊, I am Tired With You, Courtesy Art Central 2019.
Bettina Fung | 馮允珊, I am Tired With You, Courtesy Art Central 2019.
Brian Fuata, Care disfigurements (other men’s flowers), Courtesy Art Central 2019.
Brian Fuata, Care disfigurements (other men’s flowers), Courtesy Art Central 2019.
Brian Fuata, Care disfigurements (other men’s flowers), Courtesy Art Central, 2019Brian Fuata, Care disfigurements (other men’s flowers), Courtesy Art Central, 2019
Minja Gu, The Authentic Quality: HK, Courtesy Art Central, 2019.
Siu Lan Ko, New Territories Old Territories, Courtesy Art Central, 2019
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce Minerva Inwald as the recipient of the inaugural 4A Emerging Writer’s Project.
Ahead of the November 2016 launch of the online publication The 4A Papers, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is supporting an Australian emerging writer to participate in Sea Pearl White Cloud, a collaborative two-stage exhibition project between 4A and independent Guangzhou contemporary art space Observation Society that will open on 2 June 2016.
Selected by a panel comprising Michael Fitzgerald, Editor, Art Monthly Australasia; Luise Guest, Director of Education and Research, White Rabbit Collection; and Pedro de Almeida, 4A Program Manager and Editor of The 4A Papers, Minerva will be an integral part of 4A’s project team, travelling to Guangzhou to undertake fieldwork as Observation Society’s exhibition unfolds, and later the exhibition in Sydney at 4A. Her research will see the publication of two critical texts that document the development, realisation and reception of the exhibitions, along with interviews with the artists and ongoing online content.
Pedro de Almeida says, “4A’s inaugural Emerging Writer’s Project attracted application from writers from New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia. The range of educational, professional and artistic backgrounds from the applicants was also diverse with, for example, some writers having arts journalism experience, while others forging more experimental writing forms through artist-run platforms. 4A looks forward to offering more professional development and publishing opportunities for writers as we establish The 4A Papers later this year.”
Michael Fitzgerald says, “Minerva’s submission was outstanding. Her ongoing historical research in China as a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, and her broader interest in how art objects circulate in the public and private spheres places her as a perfect candidate to contribute meaningfully and intelligently to this unique cross-cultural project.”
Luise Guest remarks, “Minerva’s application was outstanding in a range of ways. Firstly, her recognition that she aims to broaden her critical writing style beyond the constraints of academic writing was refreshing. Her background in carrying out art historical research on the ground in China, at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), using primary sources, and dealing with the complexities of dealing with a Chinese institution, will clearly be an advantage in quickly assessing the possibilities on the ground in Guangzhou. Her obvious level of fluency in Chinese (Mandarin) will also be an asset to the project. Minerva’s current doctoral research is both interesting and relevant, relating to curatorial practices, museology and the circulation of objects and artefacts. I particularly liked her thoughtful (and highly topical) plan for an extended contemplative essay reflecting on the notion of ‘southern-ness’, and how that plays out in the relationship between the sister cities of Sydney and Guangzhou. Her sample of writing – an extract from a conference paper – indicated her clarity of thought and expression, and her willingness to push against the conventional boundaries of a discipline (in this instance, historical research) indicating the potential for some innovative texts and other modes of communication emerging from the collaboration in Guangzhou.”
Sea Pearl White Cloud is supported by the City of Sydney with the Observation Society exhibition opening being part of the official program of the City of Sydney and Guangzhou Municipal Government’s civic celebrations as part the 30th anniversary of their sister-city relationship. Additionally, the Emerging Writer’s Project is supported by Art Monthly Australasia.
Minerva Inwald is a current PhD candidate in the Department of History, University of Sydney, whose research focuses on the history of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) between 1958 and 1989. Using Chinese-language primary sources to examine how exhibitions at this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in China in relation to conceptions of ‘the people,’ her research seeks to investigate broader questions of how art objects circulate in museum contexts, as well as outside museums such as in domestic, work and public spheres. Minerva graduated with Bachelor of Arts (Languages) Honours degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and in the same year was awarded the Francis Stuart Prize for Asian Art History form the Department of Art History. She has contributed a number of papers at academic conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and recently undertook an 8-month postgraduate exchange program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
GUANGZHOU. 2 JUNE – 24 JULY 2016.
GALLERY 4A SYDNEY. 30 JULY – 24 SEPTEMBER 2016.
Sea Pearl White Cloud is a project realised through a collaboration between 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, located in the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown, and Guanzghou’s Observation Society, one of China’s most exciting contemporary art project spaces. Bringing together Sydney-based artist Lucas Ihlein and Guangdong-born, Hong Kong-based artist Trevor Yeung, Sea Pearl White Cloud presents new works informed by questions of temporality, exchange and poetics that reflect on the urban condition in the twenty-first century.
This is a two-stage exhibition project with the first presented at Observation Society in Guangzhou from 2 June – 24 July 2016, and second iteration that will extend the themes and collaboration to premier in Sydney at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art from 30 July – 24 September 2016.
Following fieldwork within the distinctive spatial and social setting of the residential community in which Observation Society is situated in Guangzhou’s district of Haizhu, as well as further afield throughout the Pearl River Delta, this project has arisen from conversations and research undertaken by the artists over six months. Ihlein and Yeung’s conceptual approaches are informed by quasi-scientific methodologies of tracking and testing various dynamic systems of movement and stasis, control and disorder. Their aims as artists have little to do with producing knowledge in the traditional sense, but rather serve to propose poetic visual and gestural allegories that seek to illuminate everyday occurrences of material and spiritual transformations.
Trevor Yeung’s works are particularly concerned with manipulations of nature – as in his use of UV lighting, dehumidifying units and aquariums – to poetically propose connections between nature, the material world and their emotional import. Complementing this, Lucas Ihlein has extended his ongoing interest in Sydney’s more hidden and neglected natural waterways to that of Guanzghou. In his studied commitment to the idea of ‘drifting’ through landscapes, Ihlein’s psycho-geographies reveal often contradictory and chance encounters between human and natural imperatives at play in a delta that is also one of the most densely urbanised regions in the world. This artistic collaboration across themes and context is signaled by the project’s title: 海珠 (Haizhu) or ‘Sea Pearl,’ signaling a process of materiality – and even beauty – being forged through time; and 白雲 (Baiyun) or ‘White Cloud’, suggestive of interminable transience, while in a more practical sense being the name of the district in which Guangzhou’s international airport is located and where Trevor Yeung has sourced live fish and water for his works.
This project is supported by the City of Sydney with Observation Society’s exhibition opening being part of the official program of the City of Sydney and Guangzhou Municipality’s civic celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of their sister-city relationship. Having artistic collaboration at its heart – between individuals, organisations and cities – this exhibition builds on the links between cities while forging new modes of dialogue that reflect on our shared local, regional and global experiences.
Complementing the two-stage exhibition project 4A, with the support of the City of Sydney and Art Monthly Australasia, is pleased to announce Minerva Inwald as the recipient of the inaugural 4A Emerging Writer’s Project. Selected by a panel comprising Michael Fitzgerald, Editor, Art Monthly Australasia; Luise Guest, Director of Education & Research, White Rabbit Collection; and Pedro de Almeida, 4A Program Manager and Editor of The 4A Papers, Minerva will be an integral part of the project team, travelling to Guangzhou to undertake fieldwork as Observation Society’s exhibition unfolds, and later the exhibition in Sydney at 4A. Her research, including conversations with the artists, will see the publication of two critical texts that document the development, realisation and reception of the exhibitions, along with interviews with the artists and ongoing online content.
Artists:
Lucas Ihlein (b. 1975, Sydney, Australia) is a Wollongong-based artist whose current work explores the relationship between socially engaged art, agriculture and ecological management. He is a founding member of artists’ collectives SquatSpace, Big Fag Press, and Teaching and Learning Cinema.Exhibitions include The Yeomans Project (with Ian Milliss), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2013-14); Green Bans Art Walk, The Cross Arts Projects & Big Fag Press, Sydney (2011); In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); There Goes the Neighbourhood, Performance Space, Sydney (2009); TheBon Scott Project, Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth (2008); and Bilateral, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (2002). He completed a PhD at Deakin University, Melbourne, in 2008 entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art, which won the Alfred Deakin Medal for best Doctoral Thesis in Humanities and Social Sciences. A recipient of numerous awards and artist residencies, in 2015 Ihlein was awarded a prestigious Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Arts. He is currently an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at University of Wollongong, Australia.
Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, Guangdong Province, China) lives and works in Hong Kong. He graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Yeung’s practice uses botanic ecology, horticulture, photography and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations toward human relationships. Solo exhibitions include No Pressure, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich (2015); Garden Cruising: It’s Not That Easy Being Green, Blindspot Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong (2015); That Dog at the Party, Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong (2014); and Trevor Yeung’s Encyclopedia, Observation Society, Guangzhou (2013). Group exhibitions include Adrift, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2016); Peep Show, Long March Space, Beijing (2015); A Hundred Years of Sham – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015); and Social Factory, 10th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2014).
Writer:
Minerva Inwald is a current PhD candidate in the Department of History, University of Sydney, whose research focuses on the history of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) between 1958 and 1989. Using Chinese-language primary sources to examine how exhibitions as this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in China in relation to conceptions of ‘the people,’ her research seeks to investigate broader questions of how art objects circulate in museum contexts, as well as outside museums such as in domestic, work and public spheres. Minerva graduated with Bachelor of Arts (Languages) Honours degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and in the same year was awarded the Francis Stuart Prize for Asian Art History form the Department of Art History. She has contributed a number of papers at academic conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and recently undertook an 8-month postgraduate exchange program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Lucas Ihlein（1975年生於澳洲悉尼）現居卧龍崗市，他的創作涉及社會參與性藝術、農業及自然環境管理。他是藝術家小組SquatSpace、Big Fag Press及Teaching and Learning Cinema的創辦成員。他的展覽項目包括：《The Yeomans Project》（與Ian Milliss合作，新南威爾士美術館，2013－14年）、《Green Bans Art Walk》（The Cross Arts Projects & Big Fag Press，悉尼，2011年）、《In the Balance: Art for a Changing World》（悉尼當代藝術館，2010年）、《There Goes the Neighbourhood》（悉尼Performance Space，2009年）、《The Bon Scott Project》（柏斯Fremantle Arts Centre，2008年）及《Bilateral》（Australian Experimental Art Foundation，阿德來德，2002年）。在2008年，他在墨爾本迪肯大學獲得了博士學位，他的論文「框起日常經驗：博客作為藝術」獲得了Alfred Deakin 最佳人文及社科類博士論文獎；在2015年，他又獲得了澳洲藝術獎助局頒發的新銳實驗藝術獎。他現在是澳洲卧龍崗大學的ARC DECRA研究員。
Minerva Inwald 現於悉尼大學歷史系攻讀博士學位，她的研究針對1958年至1989年之間北京中國美術館的歷史，探討歷史上在中國美術館這個尊貴地點舉行的展覽如果表達出藝術在中國的地位及藝術與「人民大眾」的關係，她研究的核心問題是在美術館語境中與在私人、工作及公共語境中藝術作品的流通。Minerva在2012年獲悉尼大學文學士學位，同年獲得悉尼大學藝術史學系的Francis Stuart 亞洲藝術史學獎。她曾在悉尼、墨爾本及布里斯本的學術會議上發表論文，現正在北京中央美術學院參加為期八個月的研究生交流計劃。
On May 25 2019, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents the second edition of Club 4A, leaving the confines of the white cube and taking performance art back to the club.
Curated by Mathew Spisbah and Rainbow Chan, Club 4A will host an evening of adventurous performance and audio visual art at Dynasty Karaoke, Chinatown. For the second event in this series, launched by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2018, we welcome the avant-garde club sounds of headlining Chinese artist Rui Ho.
Known for her work on Shanghai label Genome 6.66 MBP and her genre-defying live performances, Rui Ho will make her Australian debut at Club 4A. With a practice that bridges modern club influences with traditional Chinese sounds, her music fuses the tension of heritage, identity and modernity in a globalised world.
Club 4A will also feature new collaborative works from interdisciplinary artists Rainbow Chan x Marcus Whale, live electronic improvisations from Del Lumanta x Milkffish, the sensitive and brutal catharsis of Ptwiggs, Yumgod’s deconstructed footwork techniques and the debut performance of Wtychings.
Showcasing alongside these musicians, Club 4A presents new visual and 3D works from Hong Kong artist Harry Chan will create the LED backdrop for the evening, plus animated contributions by Sydney videos artists Kynan Tan and Craig Stubbs-Race.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
SOUND ARTISTS
Rui HO is a Berlin based Chinese artist making electronic music that bridges modern club influences with traditional Chinese sounds. Her music is inspired by a diverse range of club genres, Rui Ho combines the intensity these sounds with sweet and refreshing melodies from her past and present.
Rainbow Chan & Marcus Whale, Sydney based artists and musicians, collaborate to perform a new semi-imporvised piece, drawing on their mutual interests in identity and memory. Rainbow Chan is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and musician whose works engage with mistranslation, diaspora and globalisation. Marcus Whale similarly works across music, performance and text, focusing on the blurry, haunted intersection between desire and religion. In this joint performance the pair melds together voice, electronics, and marginalised narratives.
Del Lumanta & Milkffish bring together their distinctive musical voices through this collaborative performance. Del Lumanta is an artist and musician from Western Sydney. Their ambient music is a meditation on modern restlessness. Their other music projects include GAS, Call Compatible, Video Ezy (Paradise Daily), Skyline (Nice Music) and Basic Human (Meatspin). Milkffish is an experimental noise-maker who blends digital sounds, field recordings, bass guitar and Filipino folkloric instruments.
Yumgod aka Neil Cabaingan, is a Filipino producer known for his deconstructed footwork techniques. Having worked with Pacifica rap crews such as Fanu Spa and being an integral part of TSV label in Melbourne, Yumgod’s output crosses juke, footwork, trap and hip-hop.
Ptwigg aka Pheobe Twiggs, is a Sydney based prodcuer who creates expansive, deconstructed bass productions; swerving between the sensitive and the brutal in the blink of an eye. Working with extended recording techniques, Twigg produces lustral, experimental club music as a form of catharsis. Her debut EP ‘Purge’ explores the eerie and unnerving, meticulously crafting each track whilst disregarding genre imposed boundaries.
VIDEO ARTISTS
Kynan Tan is interested in networks, data, relationality and digital systems of control, exploring these areas through digitally-derived artworks. These works engage with digital aesthetics, code and data, taking form as multi-channel audio-visual performances and installations, sculptures, sound, and 3D simulations of data processes and materials. These works collectively examine the affectivity and relationality of digital systems as they operate across (non)sensibility.
Harry Chan is a Hong Kong based artist working in photomedia. His works often reconfigure quotidian objects into humorous, poetic and absurd combinations. For Club 4A, Harry Chan’s new video work will be in dialogue with Rui Ho’s futuristic music by experimenting with VR footage of Hong Kong cityscapes. Follow him on @nth_hppns
Craig Stubbs-Race is a 3D designer/artist with a passion for typography, experimental shapes, and communicating succinct messages through motion. With a background in film-making, his work is inspired by a range of text-based graphics including interactive digital art, book covers, band posters and East Asian signage. See @craig_sr.
ABOUT 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary Asian and Australian culture through research, documentation, development, discussion and presentation of contemporary visual art. We believe that Asian cultural thinking will have an important impact on the future. 4A’s aim is to ensure contemporary visual art plays a central role in understanding the dynamic relationship between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. 4A has a distinctive approach to addressing Australia’s cultural diversity through a dynamic program including local and international exhibitions, public programs, workshops, seminars, symposiums and community activities. These have been recognised locally and internationally as having raised awareness of Asian-Australian art and culture and Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region.
Club 4A is presented by project partner 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, with support from project partner Liquid Architecture.
Artists: Simon Denny, exonemo, Sunwoo Hoon & Mijoon Pak, Baden Pailthorpe
The Invisible Hand considers how digital platform technologies are exploiting technological convenience to co-opt personal data in an uncertain zero-sum game. With work from Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan, this exhibition explores current and projected complications and contradictions in the digital realm that increasingly oscillate between technological evangelism and scepticism.
In 1991, the World Wide Web creator, Tim Berners-Lee, developed the first website at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, over one billion websites have proliferated across the globe, with 2.5 trillion Internet searches made every year. Everyday our connected devices generate some 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, creating a rapidly expanding field of human communication and providing unparalleled insights into our lives. The rise of global platform companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Rakuten, Tencent and Naver among others—are largely underpinning this mass connectivity, with Facebook alone weaving together over 700 billion friendships across the globe.
However, from search results to self-publishing platforms, these global corporate powers are logging every digital click, like, share and scroll made on these supposedly free services—selling on this consumer information to third parties and advertisers. While this business model has produced mass convenience, connectivity and information sharing, a closer examination reveals a vast information inequity between users and these providers. Nowhere are these invisible computing forces more present than in the hyper-connected East Asia region, where household internet penetration and use is at its global highest. In this region, platform technology companies have the power to alter the course of history, in the same way recent technologically-led scandals like Cambridge Analytica have manipulated contemporary politics in America, Thailand and India, and the coordinated cyber-attacks of public health records loom over Singapore.
Against this dystopic information landscape, The Invisible Hand examines our ever evolving digital realm with careful focus on the East Asia region, a place at the bleeding edge of this technological frontier. Exploring the existential threat of Big Tech through a series of commissioned and recent works the artists each untangle the networked rhythms of our age, with careful allusion to science, public policy, economics and share price. Through these meditations The Invisible Hand presents artistic agitation to the arena of public debate—providing new perspectives, understandings and predications that enable us to better understand our place in this newly formed digital battleground.
Artists:
BadenPailthorpe:Born 1984 Canberra, Australia. Baden Pailthorpe lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Baden Pailthorpe’s work explores the spatiality of power, politics and the cultures of late Capitalism through hyper-real animation, video and sculpture. His key exhibitions include UTS Art Gallery, Sydney (2018); Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney & Singapore (2017); 21st Triennale di Milano, Milan (2016); Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015); Casula Powerhouse, Sydney (2015); Artspace, Sydney (2014) & CACSA, Adelaide (2015); Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); Westspace (2014); La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (2013); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).
exonemo:Formed 1996, Tokyo, Japan. The artists live and work in New York, New York, United States of America. Artist unit, Exonemo formed in 1996 with key members Sembo Kensuke and Akaiwa Yae. Exonemo create experiments that explore the boundaries of the internet and internet culture. Critical to this examination are the exploration of digital paradoxes and the divide between analog, digital and real life. Exonemo’s exhibitions include: Baruch College Library, New York, U.S.A 2018; Plg.in, Basel, Switzerland, 2008, Whitney Museum, New York, 2019; Jogja National Museum, Jog Jakarta, Indonesia, 2018, New Museum, New York, USA; Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki, Japan, 2018. Since 2012 they have organized the ‘Internet Yami-Ichi’, a large flea market that has taken place in Tokyo and New York and which makes the often immaterial flotsam of cyberspace tangible in online-themed objects.
Simon Denny: Born 1982, Auckland, New Zealand, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Drawing upon research into the practices and aesthetics of technology companies, Simon Denny creates artworks that interrogate the implications of big data in our contemporary age. Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). His work was included in Manifesta 11 (2016), 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), 6th Moscow Biennale (2015), 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), La Biennale de Montreal (2014), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), 1st Brussels Biennial (2008), and the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008). His work has been included in exhibitions at museums and institutions throughout Europe and the United States, and has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); BOZAR, Brussels (2017); the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2016); Wiels, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015-2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig MUMOK, Vienna (2013); and Kunstverein München, Munich (2013).
Sunwoo Hoon:Born 1989, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Sunwoo Hoon translates key socio-political moments from history into isometric 8 bit ‘digital drawings’ loaded with intense meaning and narrative. His key exhibitions include the Daum, online web-portal, 2015 – 2017, Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2017 and Gwangju Biennale, 2018. His work is collected by Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and in 2015, he won the Emerging Artist
Award from the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF). From 2016 – 2017, he was Editor-in-chief of Yourmana.
Mijoon Pak:Born 1978, Seoul, South Korea, lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Mijoon Pak is long-term collaborator with Sunwoo Hoon. Since meeting fellow artist Sunwoo Hoon, she has been critical to the development of their collaborative practice as a storyteller. Prior to this, Mijoon has had a corporate career at large multinational firms including Google, Bloomberg, Oracle, SAP, and Samsung.
Exhibition Documentation
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Left: exonemo, Kiss, or Dual Monitors, 2017, HD video, cables, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists. Right: exonemo, Live Streams, 2018, T.V. monitors, live cameras, software, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. exonemo, Kiss, or Dual Monitors, 2017, HD video, cables, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. exonemo, Live Streams, 2018, T.V. monitors, live cameras, software, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Front: Simon Denny, Shenzen innovation paradigm – Mass Entrepreneurship – 2, acationem Universalem / Universal Call, 2017, New Rixing K7 Wireless Microphone & HIFI Speaker, laser cut airbrush stencils, UV print on plexiglasm laser cut mdf, 75 x 120 x 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Front: Simon Denny, Shenzen Mass Entrepeneurial Huaqiangbei Market Counter in OCT Theme Park Style – Battery, 2017, airbush on synthetic plaster, illuminated plinth, 125 x 132 x 68 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts Sydney. Back wall projection: Simon Denny, Real Mass Entrepreneurship, 2017, video, 14:23. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Front: Simon Denny, Shenzen Mass Entrepeneurial Huaqiangbei Market Counter in OCT Theme Park Style – Battery, 2017, airbush on synthetic plaster, illuminated plinth, 125 x 132 x 68 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts Sydney. Back left: Sunwoo Hoon, Flat is the new deep, 2018, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale, 2018 with support from Christina H. Kang. Courtesy the artist. Back right: Sunwoo Hoon and Mijoon Pak, Flat Earth, 2019, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Left wall front: Sunwoo Hoon, Flat is the new deep, 2018, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale, 2018 with support from Christina H. Kang. Courtesy the artist. Left Wall Far: Sunwoo Hoon and Mijoon Pak, Flat Earth, 2019, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Courtesy the artists. Back wall: Baden Pailthorpe, One and Three PCs, 2019, digital imagery produced by a DCGAN machine learning algorthim, various LED screens, In-Win Z Tower, Threadripper 2970WX, ASUS RGB 64 GB, 2 x AMD Radeon VII, 2 x WD Black 1TB NVMe, ASIS ROG Thor 1200W Platinum, Themaltake Ring Trio, CableMod Pro Sleeved Cables, Custom 7” screen (running Aida64). PC build: Stuart Tonks, GGF LAN Party; AI assistance Dr Charles Gretton, ANU Kieran Browne, ANU; Network architecture by Radford et al., 2015. Code: https://github.com/gsurma/image_generator. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Supported by In-win. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Left: Sunwoo Hoon, Flat is the new deep, 2018, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale, 2018 with support from Christina H. Kang. Courtesy the artist. Right: Sunwoo Hoon and Mijoon Pak, Flat Earth, 2019, digital drawing, dimensions variable. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Baden Pailthorpe, One and Three PCs, 2019, digital imagery produced by a DCGAN machine learning algorthim, various LED screens, In-Win Z Tower, Threadripper 2970WX, ASUS RGB 64 GB, 2 x AMD Radeon VII, 2 x WD Black 1TB NVMe, ASIS ROG Thor 1200W Platinum, Themaltake Ring Trio, CableMod Pro Sleeved Cables, Custom 7” screen (running Aida64). PC build: Stuart Tonks, GGF LAN Party; AI assistance Dr Charles Gretton, ANU Kieran Browne, ANU; Network architecture by Radford et al., 2015. Code: https://github.com/gsurma/image_generator. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Supported by In-win. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Image: Kai Wasikowski.
The Invisible Hand, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, July 2019. Baden Pailthorpe, One and Three PCs, 2019, digital imagery produced by a DCGAN machine learning algorthim, various LED screens, In-Win Z Tower, Threadripper 2970WX, ASUS RGB 64 GB, 2 x AMD Radeon VII, 2 x WD Black 1TB NVMe, ASIS ROG Thor 1200W Platinum, Themaltake Ring Trio, CableMod Pro Sleeved Cables, Custom 7” screen (running Aida64). PC build: Stuart Tonks, GGF LAN Party; AI assistance Dr Charles Gretton, ANU Kieran Browne, ANU; Network architecture by Radford et al., 2015. Code: https://github.com/gsurma/image_generator. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia. Supported by In-win. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Image: Kai Wasikowski
Image: Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001, installation view, Gallery 4A, 26 October – 17 November 2001. Courtesy the artist. Photo: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is delighted to announce its partnership with the Australian War Memorial and its commissioning of Vietnamese-Australian artist Dacchi Dang to create new works that respond to the Vietnamese-Australian perspective on the Vietnam War.
In 2012 a bequest to purchase works of art was left to the Australian War Memorial by the retired Major John Milton Gillespie, a Vietnam veteran and immigration consultant. In recognition of both this significant gift and Mr Gillespie’s life and work, the Memorial decided to use the bequest to commission work that explores the wartime experience of Vietnamese–Australians and its legacy today. As a result, in 2015 the Australian War Memorial engaged 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to assist in undertaking extensive national research for The Gillespie Bequest. Curators from the Memorial and 4A collaborated to identify contemporary artists living and working in Australia who deal with Vietnamese-Australian narratives.
The Australian War Memorial announced today that it has commissioned Sydney-based artist Dacchi Dang to create new work, a welcome contribution that will help address the gap in the Memorial’s collection as the Vietnamese-Australian perspective on the Vietnam War has been under represented. Dang’s creative process and research-based methods will be the subject of a short documentary produced by 4A.
4A Director Mikala Tai says, “We are delighted to be working with the Australian War Memorial on what is an initiative of historical importance, the commissioning of artworks for this significant national collection that, for the first time, will address Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War from an Australian-Vietnamese perspective. The selection of Dacchi Dang by the Australian War Memorial is especially heartening given Dacchi’s reputation as a preeminent Vietnamese-Australian artist working over the past few decades.”
“We are also proud of Dacchi’s long involvement with 4A, beginning with his role as a founding artist when he was invited by 4A’s founding director, Melissa Chiu, to join the management committee of 4A in its first year of exhibiting in 1997. In addition, Dacchi’s seminal solo exhibition The Boat, presented at 4A in 2001, remains a milestone in the development of the wider public reception and understanding of art from Asian-Australian perspectives, attracting a queue around the block on its final exhibition day, such was the community response to a work that spoke of the perils of seeking asylum while also provoking the audience to project their personal histories into the installation’s abstract narrative. More recently, 4A in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre worked with Dacchi over three-years as part of Edge of Elsewhere(2010-2012), a major project that commissioned new works from Dachhi produced with community participation.”
“4A looks forward to working closely with the artist and the Memorial’s curatorial team as we document the creative development and unveiling of Dacchi’s work over the coming year.”
More detail on the Australian War Memorial’s announcement of The Gillepsie Bequest and Dacchi Dang can be viewed here
Dacchi Dang was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1966 to a Chinese father and Vietnamese mother. At the age of sixteen Dang fled Vietnam with his brother and sister on a fishing boat. After a traumatic sea voyage the boat arrived on Malaysian shores where Dang was transported to the refugee camp of Pulau Bidong. After spending nine months at the camp, Dang was transported to Kuala Lumpur where he was accepted as a Vietnamese refugee by Australia in late 1982.
Dacchi Dang works primarily with photography and printmaking, in various forms and processes, and also installation. His work examines the ‘liminal’ spaces of the Vietnamese-Australian experience, racial diaspora, nature, cultural identity, the refugee experience and self-identity. As a result of his personal experience as a displaced refugee, Dang has a unique understanding of the geographical and social landscapes of both Australia and Vietnam, often creating and reinventing physical and social landscapes by reflecting on his ‘self’ in relation to the location and concept of ‘home’. He did not return to his home country until 1994.
His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally since the early 1990s. Solo exhibitions include The Land of Golden Shadow (2016), Le Malamot Cultural Centre, France; Full Circle (2009), Metro Arts Gallery, Brisbane; Liminal (2006-2008), Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Spectacle I (1996), Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney; Spectacle II, Stills Gallery, Sydney. Group exhibitions include DDESSIN [14] (2014), Paris Contemporary Drawing Fair, Atelier Richelieu; Crossing Boundaries (2014), Sydney Town Hall; Edge of Elsewhere (2010-2012), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; Planet Ueno (2008); Taito Community Museum, Tokyo; Re-StArt (2008), 733 Art Factory, Chengdu; and News From Islands (2007), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney.
Dacchi Dang graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1991) and a Master of Arts (1996) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney; Graduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management (2000) and Graduate Certificate of Applied Science in Cultural Heritage Studies specialising in Photography (2003) from University of Canberra; and a Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Arts) from Queensland College of the Arts, Griffith University, Brisbane. He has undertaken numerous artist in residence programs including at Bundanon Trust, Hill End (2001); Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2003) and Tokyo University of the Arts Geidai (2008). His work is held in public and private collections in Australia, France, China and Hong Kong.
4A’s Curators’ Intensive is an initiative developed by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to encourage professional advancement amongst early career Australian cultural practitioners with an interest in curatorial practice. In 2016, the Curators’ Intensive, will take place between Monday June 27 – Thursday June 30, 2016.
This is the third Intensive program and will be led by three established curators who are working in an international context with a particulate focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
In 2016 the Curators’ Intensive will feature:
Zarmeene Shah (Karachi, Pakistan)
Pooja Sood (New Delhi, India)
Carol Yinghua Yu (Beijing, China & Melbourne, Australia)
Khaled Sabsabi (Sydney, Australia)
These curators along with 4A will deliver this program over four consecutive days through a mix of public discussions and closed forums. The Curators’ Intensive will consist of public presentation by each international curator followed by closed session workshops the following day, studio visits, exhibition visits and roundtable led discussions where the participants actively engage with issues raised by curators during their public presentations.
This program is rigorous and suited for curators interested in expanding their engagement with contemporary Asian art, in particular, contemporary art from South Asia. While focused on a broad conception of contemporary Asian art, this program will encompass a much larger range of curatorial discussions and have a particular focus on curatorial methodologies, models and frameworks. The participating curators have a wide variety of experiences from socially engaged art, curating local history, international perspectives, as well as museums and independent spaces.
Participants will be required to attend and participate in all aspects of the four-day program. This will include evening presentations and active involvement in the workshops.
Zarmeené Shah is an independent curator and critic currently based in Karachi, Pakistan. Returning to Karachi after an MA in Critical & Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in 2010, she has curated several notable and often large-scale exhibitions, both institutionally and independently. She has previously held positions of Lecturer at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, Chief Curator of the IVS Gallery, Karachi, Independent Consultant for South Asian Art for the CCA Derry-Londonderry (Northern Ireland), and most recently Assistant Director at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi. Focusing on contemporary art and continental and semiotic theory, she is particularly interested in new media, the body, and the political in art. As a writer, she regularly contributes to academic journals, catalogues as well as several print and online publications, including The Herald Pakistan, ArtAsiaPacific, ArtReview and ArtReview Asia magazines.
Pooja Sood is an independent Curator and Art Management Consultant based in New Delhi, India. Working field of curating alternative contemporary art practices in India as well as exploring different models of institution building for contemporary art, with expertise in the establishing and running of cultural networks. She is committed to developing the infrastructure for the arts in India and develop ongoing dialogue in south Asia. Sood is the Director of KHOJ International Artists’ Association, an autonomous, artists’ led registered society aimed at promoting intercultural understanding through experimentation and exchange. It is possibly the only such public organization for experimental contemporary art in India. As a founding member of Khoj she coordinated the KHOJ International artist’s workshop in Delhi from 1998-2001, facilitated the workshops in Bangalore 2002-2003, in Mumbai 2005, Kolkata2006 and Srinagar 2007. Sood is the Regional Coordinator of the international artists’ network facilitated by the Triangle Arts Trust , UK. In May 2009 she assumed Directorship of the project Arthinksouthasia. Sood was on the selection committee of the Fukuoka Triennale # 4, Japan ( Jan 09), the Transmediale Award, Berlin( Oct 2008) and the Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong ( October 2008). She is on the board of the Delhi Biennale Society, New Delhi and the South Asian journal of visual culture, Sri Lanka; she is also on the Academic Advisory Board of the Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong starting 2007- 2009 .
Carol Yinghua Lu lives in Beijing. She is a PhD scholar in art history at the University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor at Frieze and is on the advisory board of The Exhibitionist. Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She also served as co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen. Lu was the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Tate Research Centre in 2013.
Khaled Sabsabi is a Sydney-based visual artist of Lebanese descent. He has been a recipient of the Blake Art Prize 2011, Helen Lempriere Scholarship and an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship and have participated in the New Media Fest, SoundLAB, Beirut Arts Festival, Electrofringe, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, the Monographic Sample of Art Average Colombia and 3rd Digital Art Festival in Argentina and Italy. He has also presented solo exhibitions in Sydney at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Casula Powerhouse, Gallery 4A and Mori Gallery, and has exhibited in group exhibitions including Making It New: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Out of Place, Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin; Integration, Assimilation and a fair go for ALL, Gallery 4A; Soft Power: Asian Attitudes, Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; ASIA – EUROPE Mediations, National Gallery, Poland; The Resilient Landscape, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney; Interdigitate, The Moving Image Centre, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand; Living Here Now – Art and Politics, Y2K, Australian Perspecta.
APPLICATION GUIDELINES
To apply to submit a single PDF document including:
1, A Cover Page with your name, address, phone number and email address
2. A Letter of Intent addressing your interest in participating in the program; why the Curators’ Intensive will be beneficial to you; how your skills and research will contribute to the process and how it will contribute to the development of your practice. Maximum one page.
3. A Statement which outlines your current curatorial or research focuses and interests. Maximum one page.
4. A CV illustrating relevant curatorial projects or work experience. Maximum one page.
Applications should be submitted via email, post or in person to:
Toby Chapman, Curator, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Applications are now open and close 6.00PM Friday 29 April 2016.
Applications will be assessed approximately two weeks following the submission deadline.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
– Up to 10 individuals will be selected by a panel consisting of Mikala Tai (4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art), Khaled Sabsabi (Casula Powerhouse) and Carol Yinghua Yu (Independent Curator) to take part in this program.
– Participants will be paid a small honorarium for their involvement.
– 4A will offer support for up to three interstate participants through provision of return flights to Sydney and accommodation.
– 4A will appoint a Project Assistant Curator to assist with a South Asia project after the Curators’ Intensive.
If you have any questions in relation to the program or how to apply please contact Toby Chapman on (02) 9212 0380 or toby.chapman@4a.com.au
The Curators’ Intensive 2016 is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and is supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Ahead of the November 2016 launch of the online publication The 4A Papers, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is supporting an Australian emerging writer to participate in a collaborative exhibition project between 4A and independent Guangzhou contemporary art space Observation Society.
Complementing a two-stage exhibition project that is first being presented at Guangzhou’s Observation Society from 2 June – 24 July 2016, and then at 4A in Sydney from 30 July – 24 September 2016, the writer will extensively document the development, production and realisation of the exhibitions.
This project is supported by the City of Sydney with the Observation Society exhibition opening being part of the official program of the City of Sydney and Guangzhou Municipal Government’s civic celebrations as part the 30th anniversary of their sister-city relationship.
The writer will be asked to conceive and deliver a collection of writings that include an extended critical essay which is complemented by a Q&A with the participating artists, online audio-visual content, or other formats that the writer believes effectively documents and extends the exhibition program. These texts will contribute to the exhibition booklet published as part of the Sydney exhibition, but also be released in their entirety with the first edition of The 4A Papers. In addition, in collaboration with project supporter ArtMonthly Australasia,the writer will be invited to produce a text for publication in Australia’s preeminent art magazine.
The successful applicant must be able to travel to Guangzhou from 28 May – 5 June 2016 to complete research and participate in the opening activities of the first presentation of the exhibition. This project will be rigorous and it suited for a writer with a keen interest in fieldwork research, contemporary Asian art and a diversity of writing formats.
The writer will be supported by the team at 4A and in particular by Pedro de Almeida, Editor of The 4A Papers and regular contributor to Art Monthly Australasia, ArtAsiaPacific, Broadsheet Journal and other publications; Sue Acret, 4A Board member, art consultant and previous Editor of ArtAsiaPacific; and Michael Fitzgerald, Editor of Art Monthly Australasia.
4A’s Emerging Writer’s Project is developed as part of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s larger professional development program for early career contemporary art workers. Together with 4A’s annual Beijing Studio Program and the biannual Curators’ Intensive, the Emerging Writer’s Project supports emerging Australian talent to work within the Asia-Pacific region.
KEY DATES
Applications open: Friday 1 April 2016
Applications close: Tuesday 26 April 2016 (6.00pm)
Guangzhou travel dates: 28 May – 5 June 2016
APPLICATION GUIDELINES
The selected writer must be:
Over the age of 18 years.
An Australian permanent resident.
The definition of “emerging” is a writer who has not previously published more than 10 texts in any subject, in print or online (blogs excluded).
4A will provide the selected writer with:
Return airfare from Sydney to Guangzhou for the travel dates 28 May – 5 June 2016. If the selected writer is not based in Sydney, 4A may provide airfares from another Australian state capital city if the cost is equivalent to a Sydney departure, otherwise the writer must provide their own transit to/from Sydney.
Accommodation, per diems and travel insurance for the period of the Guangzhou trip.
An honourarium.
To apply, submit a single PDF document including:
A Cover Page with your name, address, phone number and email address.
A Letter of Intent addressing your interest in participating in the program, articulating why the Emerging Writer’s Project will be beneficial to you, and how it will contribute to the development of your practice. Maximum one page.
A Statement that outlines your current writing or research focuses and interests. Maximum one page.
A CV illustrating relevant curatorial projects or work experience. Maximum one page.
A Writing Sample of up to 700 words (this can be unpublished and preferably in a professional writing style rather than academic in tone).
A Proposed Collection of Writings that you would produce as part of this project. Maximum one page.
Shortlisted writers will be asked to provide evidence of Australian permanent residency status and date of birth.
Applications should be submitted via email, post or in person to:
Pedro de Almeida
Program Manager / Editor, The 4A Papers
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
In person: 181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket, NSW 2000
Three early or mid-career artists will embark on a month-long intensive studio program in September 2016 (exact dates to be announced) at the studios of internationally renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin, located in Huairou District on the outskirts of Beijing.
The 4A Beijing Studio Program provides a unique opportunity for artists to research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build professional networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in the Asia region. On their return to Australia the artists will be invited to present their experiences in a public forum and make a proposal for an exhibition at 4A. If successful they will be mentored by 4A in the development of an exhibition in 2017. This is the fourth consecutive year that the program has been running.
The Program covers airfares, accommodation, daily meals, the cost of travel/medical insurance and a small stipend. It will provide an ongoing professional mentorship, cross-cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks in China.
ABOUT SHEN SHAOMIN
Over the last twenty years Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin has forged an important international career with an emphasis on experimental, conceptual and installation works. Based in Beijing, and having spent over a decade in Australia, Shen’s work spans a number of mediums and explores individual and collective experiences of humanity and their impacts on our natural and constructed surroundings. Shen Shaomin has previously exhibited with 4A in The Floating Eye, Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012); and presented the solo exhibition, The Day After Tomorrow (2011). His work has been included in Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). In China he has exhibited at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Shanghai Zendai MoMA, Shanghai; and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Across Europe and North America selected exhibitions include, Groniger Museum, Holland; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; ZKM Museum Karlrusche, Germany; Millennium Park, Chicago and Eli Klein Fine Art, New York.
Application is open to visual artists who are currently Australian permanent residents with less than ten years’ continuous professional experience (including postgraduate studies), or who consider themselves early or mid-career for other reasons.
Please submit support material which has been completed in the last two years.
PROGRAM PERIOD
Successful artists must be available for travel to Beijing, for one month in the beginning of September 2016 (exact dates to be announced). Once set, dates are not negotiable. The selected artists will be travelling at the same time.
CRITERIA
Successful artists will be chosen based on the quality of their works, reasons for participation, viability of their participation and the potential benefits to the applicant’s artistic development.
1. A statement of interest detailing why you would like to participate in the Studio Program and how you will benefit from it. Maximum 1 page.
2. A current CV. Maximum 1 page.
3. Support material material comprising a Powerpoint document with 10 images OR video material (10 minutes maximum) supplied as URL link to uploaded content.
Please do not send us original material and note that submitted material will not be returned.
Applications should be submitted via email, post or in person to:
Toby Chapman – Curator
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
In person: Shop 3/181-187 Hay Street Haymarket NSW 2000
Postal address: PO Box K1312 Haymarket Sydney NSW 1240
Applications for the 4A Beijing Studio Program 2016 close 6PM AEST Thursday 12 May 2016.
SUPPORT MATERIAL
Please supply images in Powerpoint or PDF at 72-dpi res with your application. Please do not send individual files.
Video material must be uploaded to a website and URL should be supplied for viewing.
AMENITIES
Accommodation and facilities are housed in Shen Shaomin’s studio, 52km from Beijing city centre (approximately 60 mins drive). These are newly built residences. In addition to a stipend, the studio will provide meals daily as well as a driver/translator available for a limited number of days to explore surrounding artists’ studios, galleries and other locations.
Chinese language skills are not necessary.
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Artists are responsible for obtaining necessary visas for entry into China and appropriate travel/medical insurance.
Artists are responsible for any excess baggage or freight to/from the Studio Program.
Artists will be asked to sign an agreement outlining the terms of the Program and their travel.
Artists will be asked to provide a public presentation of their trip on their return.
ENQUIRIES
Toby Chapman
Curator
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW 2000
02 9212 0380
toby.chapman@4a.com.au
Nusra Latif Qureshi’s first solo Australian institutional exhibition presents her ongoing investigation into the symbolism and assumptions embedded in art history. Reflecting on almost two decades of practice Qureshi’s attempts to undermine, shift and negate historical imagery reads as a warning for the contemporary age, where assumed realities can be little more than constructed visions.
Qureshi’s practice is characterised by meticulous layering, fragmentation, erasure and juxtaposition of visual material. Through such intervention, she investigates little known histories of colonial eras, questions established narratives and engages with the politics of representation. Through an examination of the visual histories of the South Asian region Qureshi has developed a new visual vernacular in which to examine and interrogate the act of historicisation.
Strategies of Intent brings together key works from Qureshi’s oeuvre as well as a series of new commissions by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. These commissions are Qureshi’s most ambitious to date and include a series of installations that draw on key colonial imagery, engage with the reverence of weaponry and critique the museological convention of collecting and ownership.
Nusra Latif Qureshi (b. Lahore, Pakistan, lives and works in Melbourne, Australia) attended the National College of Arts, Lahore and completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Qureshi’s practices engages with the visual histories of the South Asian region and Australian culture, questioning conventional interpretations, pulling apart and reconfiguring the found patterns to construct new narratives. Her work has been exhibited widely in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Afghanistan, Italy, India, Japan, France, Switzerland, Finland and her home countries of Pakistan and Australia. Most recently she was exhibited at the Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna, Austria as well as Brisbane’s QAG/GOMA. Her work has been collected widely including the British Museum, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Qureshi is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and is currently the artist in residence at the Lyceum Club, Melbourne.
#StrategiesofIntent @4a_Aus
www.4a.com.au
Nusra Latif Qureshi, The House of Irredeemable Objects, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, The House of Irredeemable Objects, 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Mild Red Steel, 2019, embroidery on velvet and mixed media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Five Honours, 2019, digital print on clear film and light box, 41 x 29 cm, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Inventory of Noble Causes, 2019, mixed media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Inventory of Noble Causes (detail), 2019, mixed media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Left to Right: Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Inventory of Noble Causes (detail), 2019, mixed media installation, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Black Widow Watches On, 2015, lithograph, 66 x 82 cm, commissioned by Landfall Press, Santa Fe. Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Identity of the Sword Shall Remain a Mystery, 2015, lithograph, 66 x 82 cm, commissioned by Landfall Press, Santa Fe. Nusra Latif Qureshi, Chain-Man-Equine, 2019, digital print on fabric, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. All works courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Chain-Man-Equine, 2019, digital print on fabric, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Fortunate Days for Warlike Enterprise, 2019, digital print on acrylic clear film, dimensions variable, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; courtesy the artist. Image: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Dark Fantasy plays with the narrative tropes, visual aesthetics and ideologies explored within the umbrella genre of fantasy as a method of navigating the potential crisis of identity. The works of Gerald Leung and Louise Zhang are uneasily fantastical, simultaneously drawing upon cyberpunk and body horror and personal experiences to construct imaginary scenes of unhinged otherness.
These fractured glimpses of otherworldly scenes, populated by Taoist demons, anatomical organs, health-goth angels and cyberpunk samurai, reflect the imagined realities Leung and Zhang have created as attempts at interpreting themselves. This exhibition asserts the artists’ personal narratives through their idiosyncratic methodologies, aesthetics and artistic production.
Artist bios:
Gerald Leung (born Hong Kong, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) is an illustrator and artist. He is best known for his character driven illustration series, Brutal Brackmetal, where he tirelessly creates/ recruits members for his ever expanding fictional gang.
Born in Hong Kong but raised in Australia, Leung grew up with a steady diet of comic books, video games and cartoons from both the east and the west. Through these influences he became fascinated by the concept of man-made universes. Imagined worlds not bound by reality or physics, no rules and infinite possibilities. Places that could be so vast and complex but yet only existing in the creator’s mind. Through traditional illustration methods and his love of ink & graphite, Leung aims to share with the audience an insight to his inner universe.
Gerald has exhibited consistently since 2011 with selected exhibitions including Within the Garden of Earthly Delights (2019), Outre Gallery, Melbourne; SFW (2016), Kong Art Space, Hong Kong; and Arcadia (2015), aMBUSH Gallery, Sydney.
Louise Zhang (born 1991, Sydney, Australia) is a Chinese-Australian artist, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. Her work negates the space between the attractive and repulsive. With an interest in horror cinema, particularly body horror, Zhang investigates the idea of the visceral as medium, method and symbol in negotiating horror as art form.
Louise Zhang completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours (First Class) at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 2013, before recently completing a Masters of Fine Arts by research at UNSW Art + Design in 2016. Since 2012, Zhang has been invited to exhibit as part of curated exhibitions including: Closing the Distance (2017), Bundoora Homestead Art Centre; Ereignis (2016), Cessnock Regional Gallery, Cessnock; From Old Ground (2015), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Work, rest, PLAY! (2015), Hawkesbury Regional Gallery; Right Here, Right Now (2015), Penrith Regional Art Gallery; Biggie Smalls (2015), Casula Powerhouse and Chinese Whispers (2014), Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. Zhang has also collaborated on projects with institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (who invited her to curate MCA Art Bar in January 2017) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (who commissioned Louise to create a work as part of the 2017 Lunar New Year festival program).
Exhibition Documentation
All images by Garry Trinh.
Dark Fantasy exhibition view, 2019, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Louise Zhang, Inferno (maquette), 2016, plywood, acrylic paint, oil paint, Perspex, resin, glitter, plastic and metal hinges. Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney.
Gerald Leung, Brack Metal (Series), 2014 – , ink and pen on paper, custom mural. Courtesy the artist.
Louise Zhang, The Pure Land, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney.
Saturday 19 March: Artist talk at 12.30pm // Art Monthly Australasia launch at 1pm
Artist Adri Valery Wens focuses on cultural stories of Hindu-Javanese origin, specifically the Wayang Orang (Human Puppet) performance based on two foundation epics – the Mahabharata (the story of the great Bharata Dynasty) and the Ramayana (the story of Rama’s Journey). Wens delves into the complexity and tensions of his cultural background through a series of photographic depictions of himself ‘performing’ characters within these epic narratives. Staged in Jakarta, dressed in elaborate costumes and theatrical makeup, the images translate the philosophical, political, poetic, performance and re-performance content of the epic stories through the genre of self-portraiture.
Join the artist as he discusses his work in Monyet Gila: Episode One.
Following the talk, Art Monthly will relaunch as Art Monthly Australasia. Reflecting the magazine’s expanded Asia-Pacific coverage, Art Monthly’s March 2016 bumper edition explores Australia’s historic and contemporary engagement with Asia across the visual arts, with essays by some of Asian art’s leading curators, including Russell Storer and Mami Kataoka, artist pages by Jumaadi, and much to contemplate.
To help celebrate its launch, you are invited to join us at 4A on Saturday 19 March 2016 at 1pm.
Art Monthly’s Asia focus edition will be officially launched by Chaitanya Sambrani, followed by 20th Biennale of Sydney artist Yuta Nakamura in conversation with Jasmin Stephens.
Saturday 16 April from 11am – 12.30pm. Children are invited to meet artist Adri Valery Wens and learn about the legend of Hanoman and the traditional Javanese artistic theatrical form of Wayang Orang. Children will be encouraged to respond to their learnings through craft activities. Recommended for 6 to 12 years old.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents the first iteration of an ongoing exhibition project by Adri Valery Wens and Shaun Gladwell, curated by Natalie King and Mikala Tai.
Monyet Gila: Episode One – The Episode with the Crazy Monkey investigates the role that narrative plays in contemporary culture. The artists consider their projects as separate works, installed in parallel to allow for moments of intersection as each excavates and reappraises epic narratives.
Indonesian, Sydney-based artist, Adri Valery Wens focuses on cultural stories of Hindu-Javanese origin, specifically the Wayang Orang (Human Puppet) performance based on two foundation epics – the Mahabharata (the story of the great Bharata Dynasty) and the Ramayana (the story of Rama’s Journey).
Wens delves into the complexity and tensions of his cultural background through a series of photographic depictions of himself ‘performing’ characters within these epic narratives. Staged in Jakarta, dressed in elaborate costumes and theatrical makeup, the images translate the philosophical, political, poetic, performance and re-performance content of the epic stories through the genre of self-portraiture.
Australian-born, London-based artist Shaun Gladwell’s video artwork explores the popular Japanese television drama Monkey, based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Considered a cult classic, the program incorporated Taoist and Buddhist Philosophy, which had a great influence on Gladwell. The artist’s work looks to re-cast the role of Tripitaka – a young Buddhist Monk. The actress who originally played the monk, Masako Natsume, died in 1985 and Gladwell’s project acts as homage to Natsume’s portrayal of the character.
The collaboration of Gladwell and Wens illustrates how traditional epics and long loved narratives remain a determining factor in the creation of the contemporary self.
Shaun Gladwell (b. 1972 Sydney) is an Australian-born, London-based artist. He completed Associate Research at Goldsmiths College, London in 2001 and has since undertaken numerous international residencies and commissions. He has exhibited prodigiously in Europe, North and South America, and in the Asia Pacific Region. In 2011, Gladwell had major survey exhibitions at the SCHUNCK* museum in Heerlen, The Netherlands and at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, USA as part of the Matrix Exhibition Series. His exhibition, Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne was the first in a series of major commissions by the institution. He also held a solo exhibition, Riding with Death: Redux at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney. His work featured in significant group exhibitions, including: The Power of Doubt, curated by Hou Hanru, Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid, 2011; Paradise Lost, Istanbul Museum of Art, 2011; Southern Panoramas, 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2011; and the John Kaldor Family Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011. Shaun Gladwell represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale and travelled to Afghanistan as the official Australian War Artist in 2009. A two-part project was exhibited across two sites with Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation featuring a major new commission The Lacrima Chair and UNSW Galleries presenting Collection+: Shaun Gladwell in 2015. He exhibited in the group exhibition Face to Face at the Perth International Art Festival 2016. His work is held in significant public and private collections nationally and internationally, including: Wadsworth Atheneum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Progressive Art Collection, USA; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Adri Valery Wens (b. 1974 Jakarta) is an Indonesian, Sydney-based artist. Wens completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Art and Design UNSW (previously COFA) in 2012. His first solo show was at MOP Projects in 2012, titled Cinta Mati (Crazy Love). He was shortlisted in several Australian Art Prizes, including the Josephine Ulrich and Win Schubert Photography Award 2015 (acquired), Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2014, Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize 2013 (highly commended), Josephine Ulrich and Win Schubert Photography Award 2012, Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize 2009.
After a five-year hiatus our celebrated fundraising exhibition 4A A4 returns in 2019 as a weekend-long event.
Challenging local and international, emerging and established artists to create works of A4 size, 4A’s new and existing networks will come together to support the institution. This is your opportunity to expand your collection with unique pieces from leading international artists and the next big thing, all for the price of $200. What will catch your eye?
Here’s how it works:
4A A4 is an exhibition, fundraiser and event that offers A4-sized artworks for sale, each selling at a fixed price of $200. With all works donated by 4A’s extended family of artist supporters, pieces will be hung and sold anonymously, and names of artists will only be revealed after their works are sold.
Get ready to grace your walls with artworks by leading Asian and Australian artists from around the world or snare a beautiful piece by a promising early career artist. 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to confirm the extensive line-up of artists behind 4A A4 2019 include:
Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Abdullah M.I. Syed, Ah Xian, Alana Hunt, Alex Seton, Amala Groom, Amber Hammad, Andrew Yee, Anke Stacker, Anna Louise Richardson, Annie Gobel, Benjamin Hosking, Bettina Fung, Briony Galligan, Carol Liu, Catherine Harbuz, Chico Leong, Chris Yee, Chrissy Lau, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Craig Loxley, Cyrus Tang, Dacchi Dang, Damien Butler, Dean Cross, Deanna Hitti, Drew Pettifer, EJ Son, Emily Parsons-Lord, Enija Mi, Erika Tan, Esther Olsson, Fan Dongwang, FJ Kunting, Gabrielle Courtney, Grace Kingston, Gary Carsley, Garry Trinh, Gregory Yee, Guan Wei, Hana Hoogedeur, Harry Copas, Helen Grace, Huseyin Sami, Hyun Lee, Ida Lawrence, Jae Hoon Lee, James Newitt, James Tylor, Janelle Evans, Jason Phu, Jayanto Damanik Tan, Jessica Bradford, Jen Bowmast, Jenson Tan, Jia Guo, Jiawei Shen, Joolie Green, Joy Li, Julian Day, Jumaadi Jumaadi, Justin Malinowski, Justine Youssef, Karima Baadilla, Kate Vassallo, Kathryn Pappas, Katie Sfetkidis, Khadim Ali, Kirtika Kain, Kristone Capistriano, Kynan Tan, Lachlan Warner, Laura Hunt, Laurens Tan, Lleah Amy Smith, Leo Tanoi, Leonardiansyah Allenda, Liane Rossler, Linda Brescia, Linda Sok, Lisa Myeong-Joo, Maleeka Gazula, Marco Antonia Scarelli, Matt Huynh, Moses Tan, Nicola Smith, Olivia Freeman, Owen Leong, Pamela Leong, Patricia Petersen, Patrick Cremin, Pei Pei He, Penelope Cain, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Phuong Ngo, Pia Johnson, Pio Abad, Princess Pea & Peter Burke, Rainbow Chan, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Resatio Adi Putra, Rone Waugh, Roohi S. Ahmed, Rosie Deacon, Rumpa Paweenpongpat, Rushdi Anwar, Sarah Kukathas, Sarker Protick, Sergio Hernandez Merchan, Seung Yul Oh, Shivanjani Lal, Solomon Barbar (aka RABRAB), Sophie Penkethman-Young, Somchai Charoen, Sonia Leber & David Chesworth, Soyoun Kim, Sue Pedley, Sue Seymour, Tammy Wong Hulbert, Tanaporn Norsrida, Tane Andrews, Tim Andrew, Tianli Zu, Tobias Gutmann, Tom Blake, Toni Paul, Tony Albert, Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko Eko Saputro, Victoria Lobregat, Vipoo Srivilasa, Vy Tsan, Ying Huang, Yvonne Boag and more.
Here’s how to get involved:
Artists:
If you would like to donate an A4-sized artwork we would love to include your work as part of 4A A4. All works will be accepted: this is a celebration of the breadth and diversity of 4As artistic family.
We invite you to exercise your creativity with regards to the material and medium of the work as long as you keep within the A4 size limit. All works will be hung and sold anonymously, and names of artists will only be revealed after their works are sold, with much fanfare!
As this is a fundraiser for 4A – a non-profit organisation, we are asking artists to contribute their works for this exhibition in exchange for the obvious glory of being involved, and a couple of free drinks at the opening night party. All works will be sold at a fixed price of $200.
For our wider 4A network:
If you aren’t able to contribute an artwork we would still love you to participate in 4A A4. Please, spread the word by sharing our posts on social media with the hashtag #4AA4, and, most importantly, be ready to join us on Friday October 4 (or over the exhibition weekend from October 4-6) to snap up a mystery work. Be warned though – past 4A A4 sales have been very competitive!
Exhibition Documentation
All images: 4A A4 2019 installation and event documentation. Image: Garry Trinh
ROUNDTABLE X 4A is a series of discussions, interviews, presentations and performances hosted by 4A. This dynamic program will focus on artistic and curatorial practices from across Asia and the Pacific, in particular highlighting the work of 4A and other non-profit organisations in supporting and developing new discourses and conversations. Roundtable breaks down the stigma around contemporary art by inviting guests to join the 4A team at their communal table to participate or simply listen to their extensive program.
Learn more about what it takes to commission new artworks, hear experiences of artists participating in residencies abroad, or watch new performance artworks by some of Australia’s leading practitioners. Roundtable will feature new performances by artists Frances Barrett, Abdullah M.I. Syed and Latai Taumoepeau, each of which reflect on the context of the contemporary art fair in Asia.
Artists: Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Owen Leong, Kynan Tan
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presented the works of three Australian artists as part of the inaugural Longli International New Media Arts Festival in Longli Ancient Town, China, in early October 2016.
Three Sydney-based artists of Chinese heritage were selected for participation by 4A: Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Sydney-based singer, producer and performance artist whose works investigate translation, diaspora and the fluid relationship between original and copy; Owen Leong, a contemporary artist exploring the transmission of culture and the body as a physical site of exchange; and Kynan Tan, a Perth-born, Sydney-based artist interested in networks, relationality and digital systems of control.
Accompanied to the Festival by 4A Program Manager Pedro de Almeida, the three artists responded to the Festival’s theme “Metabolism” with a series of media works, installed within an ancient temple.
Longli International New Media Arts Festival is supported by the China Culture Industrial Investment Fund, and focuses focused on the integration of regional culture with the folk culture of Longli, to make artistic works strike a chord with the Ancient City of Longli in various new ways.
Longli International New Media Arts Festival rans from 1 – 5 October, 2016.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
CHUN YIN RAINBOW CHAN
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is a multidisciplinary artist who works across sound, performance and installation. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Sydney, she is interested in duality, diaspora and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society. Chan often evokes traditional Chinese methods or styles and represents them in uncanny ways. Her research engages with the authentic and the copy, exploring sites of exchange and desire which complicate Western notions of originality and “appropriate” consumption.
Central to Chan’s work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global media. Her work positions the fake as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values and contemporary commodity production. Sustained by a parasitic relationship to the original, the counterfeit interacts with the world in unpredictable ways. Chan investigates how these mimetic symbols, such as bootlegs or fake luxury goods, problematise the socially-regulated impulse of consumerist desire.
Tying together her works across installation and pop music is the relationship between nostalgia, migration and identity. Since winning FBi Radio’s Northern Lights Competition in 2011, Chan has been building a reputation as one of the most innovative artists in Australia with her highly personal, experimental pop music. She recently released her debut album Spacings (Silo Arts & Records) which was met with critical acclaim, handpicked as the feature album on FBi Radio, Radio Adelaide, RTRFM and scoring 4 stars from Rolling Stone.
OWEN LEONG
Owen Leong is a contemporary artist exploring the transmission of culture and the body as a physical site of exchange. His work transforms the body through fictional selves to open a space for new identities to come into being. In recent work, Leong engages more deeply with his heritage; turning towards Chinese medicine, philosophy, and ancient systems of cultural knowledge to explore the poetics of healing.
Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including solo exhibitions at Artereal Gallery, Sydney; Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. His work has been exhibited in major group exhibitions at Singapore Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; and the National Museum of Poznan, Poland.
In 2015, he received the prestigious Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, one of the most important annual surveys of contemporary Australian photographic practice.
Leong is the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Art Gallery of NSW and Asialink. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai; and is currently in-residence at Parramatta Artist Studios, Sydney. Leong’s work is held in the public collections of Bendigo Art Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Leong holds a Master of Fine Arts by research at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, where he studied printmaking, sculpture, performance and installation, and was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award.
KYNAN TAN
Kynan Tan is an artist interested in networks, relationality and digital systems of control, exploring these areas through artworks that are themselves multi-sensory relational structures. These works engage with digital aesthetics, code and data, taking form as multi-screen audiovisual performances and installations, 3D-printed sculptures, sound, and kinetic artworks of electronic circuits, speakers and lights.
Kynan has been the recipient of a DCA Young People and the Arts Fellowship (2013), Australia Council Artstart grant (2013), and participated in the JUMP Mentorship Program (2012), studying with audiovisual artist Robin Fox. Kynan has performed in Japan, Germany, New Zealand and throughout Australia, including events such as Test Tone (Tokyo), Channels Video Art Festival (Melbourne) and the NOW now Festival of Art (Sydney). His installation works have also been exhibited at MOCA (Taipei, Taiwan), NH7 Festival (Pune, India), First Draft (Sydney), Fremantle Arts Centre (Perth) and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Kynan is currently a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design.
The Longli Media Arts Festival is to be situated in Longli Ancient town, listed as one of the ecological museums in Guizhou for the cooperation between China and the Kingdom of Norway due to its profound ecological cultural deposits. The town has enchanted artists from all over the world.
As a result, the China Culture Industrial Investment Fund will offer critical support to the Longli International New Media Arts Festival in terms of partnership promotions, investment and financing, talent training, technical support and expert consulting. The Fund will also encourage the organizers to apply for China’s special funds for cultural industry development this year.
16 January – 27 February 2016
Haymarket Library, 744 George Street, Sydney
A selection of books and other materials documenting the development of Sydney’s historic Haymarket district to coincide with the exhibition Chen Qiulin: One Hundred Names
John Vea’s Australian debut examines the complex labour flow throughout our region. Continuing his exploration of pacific migrant workers his practice is anchored by his signature wit that challenges viewers to consider the equality and validity of a global workforce.
Vea’s practice has been defined by a journalist-like investigation into how workers from Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) have been co-opted as labour for both Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Anchored by a series of talanoa (conversations) Vea’s work prefaces the voice and lived experience of the migrant worker employed within dominant and authoritative social structures. These discussions inform how Vea scaffolds his practice and locates his work as a means to examine the overlooked and the underrepresented.
In the contemporary globalised era migrant labour has emerged as a key indicator of regional socio-economic relationships. Labourers from Moana Nui a Kiwa have been subordinated by both Australia and New Zealand to support both agricultural production and urban development. Specific schemes such as Recognised Seasonal Employment (RSE) in New Zealand grants season migrant workers temporary entry to plant, harvest and pack crops in exchanged for minimum wage. On completion of the designated work they are immediately returned home; their contributions to the success and prosperity of New Zealand’s economy barely noticed or acknowledged. Vea uses polices such as the RSE as a basis from which to work, his crafted responses are sometimes humorous but always compelling counterpoints to dominant perspectives and the status quo.
If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? is John Vea’s first comprehensive international solo exhibition presenting recent significant works alongside a new commission from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. This commission will be developed as a reflection of a year-long research project into the history of 4A’s locale in Haymarket, Sydney. As a site for trade and exchange on the banks of the harbor, the area now known as Haymarket has played an important role for the communities that have resided here for centuries.
John Vea (b. 1985 ) is an Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) based artist who works with sculpture, video and performance art. Vea works with tropes of migration and gentrification that exist within Moana Nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean). By enacting stories that have been collected through everyday interactions with people, both in his home community and abroad, with a journalistic sensibility he offers a sometimes humorous and always powerfully symbolic emic viewpoint to the Western meta narrative. Most recently Vea has exhibited in the Honolulu Biennale (2017), the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2018) and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2018). His work is also in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Vea received his Master of Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology in 2015, where he is currently undertaking his practice led Ph.D.
If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? includes new performance and installation works commissioned by PerformanceSpace and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
John Vea: If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? is powered by Lūpa, a media player for art galleries. More information at lupaplayer.com
Exhibition Documentation
All images: Kai Wasikowski
John Vea, she sows this āina with her younger siblings, yet she cannot inherit that same āina (detail), 2017, video and installation. Courtesy the artist.
John Vea, Section 69DZ Employment Relations Act 2000, 2019, participatory installation. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
John Vea, Section 69DZ Employment Relations Act 2000, 2019, participatory installation. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
John Vea, Section 69DZ Employment Relations Act 2000, 2019, participatory installation. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
L-R: John Vea, seasonal worker survival kit, 2015 – , mixed media installation. John Vea, If you pick my fruit will you put mine back?, 2019, participatory installation and performance documentation. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Performance Space.
L-R: John Vea, seasonal worker survival kit, 2015 – , mixed media installation. John Vea, 29.09.09 Tribute to Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga, 2013, video. Courtesy the artist.
John Vea, 29.09.09 Tribute to Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga, 2013, video. Courtesy the artist.
John Vea, Finish this week off and that’s it!, 2014, five-channel video. Courtesy the artist.
L-R: John Vea, Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t, 2017, six-channel video. Courtesy the artist. John Vea, seasonal worker survival kit, 2015 – , mixed media installation.
John Vea, seasonal worker survival kit, 2015 – , mixed media installation.
Delving through more than a century of the Dion family, an indelible part of the Illawarra’s social fabric as members of the Chinese diaspora and operators of the region’s bus services, On the Move tells a story of migration, survival, acceptance and community spirit of a remarkable family through archival material and responses from contemporary artists.
The Dion family, whose name evolved from Chong Da On to Chong Di On then Di On before eventually settling with Dion, arrived in Australia in the late 1800s as part of a larger migration driven by the prospects of alluvial goldmining. The family eventually arrived in the Illawarra in 1907, where they quickly established themselves as prominent members of the community, playing an important role in creating the multicultural social fabric of the Illawarra that we know today. They did this by building on a successful market garden family business before forming a bus service in 1923, which imparted a great community sentiment over the decades through their committed service and hospitality. The company was established by Tom Dion who commandeered a 1923 Model T Ford fitted with timber seating to accommodate twenty passengers. The family, over several generations, are widely admired by the residents of the Illawarra, with a particular fondness for the memory that during the Great Depression the Dions routinely allowed locals to ride their buses free of charge if they could not pay fares due to mass unemployment and economic hardship. The Dion’s Bus Service continues to operate a fleet of buses in Wollongong and surrounds today.
The Dion family story represents a fascinating example of the important contributions Chinese-Australians have made to Australia and, indeed, the nation’s perception of itself as an inclusive and culturally diverse society. This exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery presents a selection of curated objects drawn from the family’s vast archive of material, along with the presentation of new commissions by contemporary Australian artists that distil this historical archive and history.
Artist Biographies
Matt Chun(Lives and works Bermagui, Australia) is a studio artist, independent writer and children’s author, working from his seaside studio in Bermagui, a small town on Yuin country in regional NSW. He also divides his time between Melbourne and Taipei. Matt lives, works and travels with his 8-year-old son, making portrait, landscape and travelogue studies across a range of media. He has undertaken tenures as artist-in-residence in Australian at Casula Powerhouse, Nishi Gallery and New Acton Precinct, and in Taiwan at both Bamboo Curtain Studio and Guandu International Art Festival. His first Taiwanese solo exhibition was held at Pon Ding Space, Taipei, in September 2019. As a writer, Matt is primarily interested in Australian national identity and the visual culture of colonisation, combining first-person narrative reportage with field research into the semiotics of public space. His essays have appeared in Overland Literary Journal, Meanjin Quarterly and Runway Experimental Art. Matt’s second picture book for Australian publisher Little Hare is due for release in October. His first, Australian Birds, released in 2018, has been listed as a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book and is currently shortlisted for the CBCA Award for Best New Illustrator. He is currently working on a graphic novel for young children.
Pia Johnson (b. 1983, Melbourne, Australia lives and works in Woodend, Australia) Pia Johnson is a photographer and visual artist, whose practice seeks to investigate issues about cultural difference, diaspora and identity. She also has a strong practice in portrait and performance photography, working with major and independent arts organisations in Australia. Pia has exhibited throughout Australia, the USA, China, Japan and Mexico. She has been a finalist in many photography awards, and is regularly invited as a guest speaker and artistic advisor for a range of organisations. Her work is collected in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria. Recent highlights include solo exhibitions Cusp (2019) at Stockroom, She that came before me (2018) at Manningham Art Gallery, being a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2019), group exhibition All That We Can’t See (2018), her curatorial exhibitions The Family Mantle (2018) and Chinese Whispers and Other Stories (2017), and an artistic residency at National University of Singapore (2018).
Naomi Segal (b.1998, Sydney) Naomi Segal’s practice draws from her experience of loving and being loved. Inspired by the generosity of her Shanghainese family, her art-making often meditates on food, gifts and physical affection as expressions of love that can traverse linguistic and cultural barriers. More recently, Segal has created comics, drawings and letters as transmissions of love to her Toronto-based partner. Her work occurs through experiments with modes of display and tactile mark-making processes. She is also an avid maker of zines.
Segal has exhibited at Artereal Gallery, Newcastle Art Gallery, Kudos Gallery, Down Under Space, Brunswick Street Gallery and others. Her awards include the Girl Genius Award (2018) and Little Things Art Prize (2017), and is an inaugural studio resident with the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Her emergent curatorial practice began at Firstdraft in 2019 with Peach Blossom Spring.
One Hundred Names is the first Australian solo exhibition by Chinese artist Chen Qiulin. Chen belongs to a generation of Chinese artists whose work articulates the social repercussions of China’s ongoing process of political and economic reform. Her work explores the many contradictions inherent within the conditions that frame contemporary life in a country where myriad tensions and conflicts between tradition, progress and appearances are constantly tested. Raised in Wanzhou City, located in the municipality of Chongqing in western China, Chen’s home city was partially submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River since 2001 and her work responds to this lived experience of natural and urban landscapes in flux.
4A’s exhibition includes a survey of the artist’s practice from the last ten years. Included are key works such as The Garden (2007) and Farewell Poem (2007), which through performance explore and document the physical and psychological upheaval caused by the comprehensive expansion of the city and the construction of the dam, which forced more than one million people from their ancestral homes. Also exhibited are new works such as City Manager (2015), a single-channel video which focuses on three archetypal figures and their role in the urban expansion and development of a new kind of architecture and class system within China. Playful and irreverent, City Manager speaks to immense influence of a small group of people in shaping the physical and social landscapes of contemporary China.
Commissioned especially for 4A is One Hundred Names for Kwong Wah Chong (2015), the latest iteration of Chen Qiulin’s ongoing One Hundred Surnames in Tofu(2004 – ) project that presents the one hundred most common Chinese family names carved from tofu, slowly decaying over a period of weeks or months. For Chen, tofu is not only one of China’s oldest and most commonly used ingredients but also an apt artistic medium that symbolises the material transformation through intensive labour. One Hundred Names for Kwong Wah Chong has been produced to commemorate Sydney’s iconic Haymarket district and, in particular, Sydney’s first Chinese-owned and operated shopfront business, Kwong Wah Chong, whose location at 84 Dixon Street which was an economic and social cornerstone for the Chinese community in the early decades of the twentieth-century.
As one of China’s foremost artists, Chen Qiulin represents a new voice in contemporary Chinese art which is at once highly personal and universal, speaking to broader politics of migration and identification. One Hundred Names presents a dynamic platform across an exhibition, performance and public programs that showcases the conceptually and technically diverse practice of Chen Qiulin that articulates past experiences and future potentials of social and urban landscapes of our region.
Chen Qiulin (b. 1975, Yichang, Hubei Province) belongs to a generation of younger artists whose work articulates the social repercussions of China’s ever-constant push for political and economic reform. Visualising the many contradictions inherent to the condition of contemporary living in a country where the tension and conflict between tradition, custom and ritual are consistently challenged, Chen Qiulin’s carefully considered photographic and video compositions are powerful provocations of progress and ambition.
Chen Qiulin has participated in numerous exhibitions in China and abroad, recently featured in 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea, 2008; ‘Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art’, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, USA, 2008; ‘China Power Station II’, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Olso, Norway, 2007; ‘THIS IS NOT FOR YOU – Sculptural Discourses’, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria, 2006-2007; and ‘The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art’, Millenium Art Museum, Beijing, China and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, USA (touring), 2005 and a number of influential solo exhibitions in Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Max Protetch Gallery, Long March Space, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum.
Her works have been collected by many important art galleries, collections and private collectors in the United States and Europe, for example Astrup Fearnley Museum (Norway), Denver Art Museum (USA), Logan Collection (USA), T-BA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Austria), Hammer Museum (USA), the Bohen Foundation (New York, USA), Worcester Art Museum (USA), Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Today Art Museum (Beijing, China).
陈秋林作品参与的国内国外展览众多，近期展出包括：2008年在韩国举办的第七届光州双年展（7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju）；同年在美国芝加哥大学David and Alfred Smart 美术馆展出的《位移－三峡大坝与中国当代艺术》（Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art）；2007年于挪威奥斯陆Astrup Fearnley现代艺术博物馆展出的《中国电站II》（China Power Station II）；2006-2007年奥地利维也纳Thyssen-Bornemisza当代艺术馆呈现的《这不是给你的－雕塑语境》（THIS IS NOT FOR YOU – Sculptural Discourses）；2005年于北京中华世纪坛美术馆和纽约诺克斯美术馆巡回展出的《墙－重构中国当代艺术》（The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art）。其个展在世界各地多家艺术机构亮相，其中包括洛杉矶翰墨博物馆、纽约Max Protetch画廊、北京长征空间、Eli and Edythe Broad艺术博物馆等。
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will close our offices and galleries from Wednesday 18 to ensure the health and wellbeing of our staff, creatives, audiences and wider community. The original closing date for this exhibition has been brought forward. View the documentation of this exhibition below.
Wansolwara: One Salt Water is a series of exhibitions, performances and events from across the Pacific and throughout the Great Ocean. Wansolwara – a pidgin word from the Solomon Islands meaning ‘one-salt-water’ or ‘one ocean, one people’ – reflects not a single ocean, but rather a connected waterscape that holds distinct and diverse cultures and communities. Through art, performance and conversation, the project celebrates the depth and diversity of contemporary visual and material culture throughout these regions, placing customary practices alongside contemporary articulations in art, writing and the moving image.
Unfolding across multiple sites over the summer of 2020, Wansolwara: One Salt Water profiles the creativity of the region through multidisciplinary forms. Artists Terry Faleona, Ruha Fifita, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Shivanjani Lal, Paula Schaafhausen and Vaimaila Urale all present significant bodies of work that trace connections to the Pacific through language, tradition, dance and ceremony. Commissioned by 4A and UNSW Galleries, artist and curator Léuli Eshrāghi presents O le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa a focus within the exhibition that expands the Pacific from a geographical region to consider networks and exchange facilitated by the Great Ocean. The project brings fresh international perspectives to current endeavours to embody and awaken Indigenous sensual and spoken languages through works that focus on language, the body, gender, sex, desire and pleasure. It features works by asinnajaq, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, Mariquita Davis, Amrita Hepi, Caroline Monnet, Faye Mullen, Shannon Te Ao, Angela Tiatia and Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu.
4A and UNSW have also commissioned Troppo Galaktika, a Sydney-based collective to curate the third iteration of Club 4A focused on the continuing and contemporary cultures of the Pacific. This evening of food, parades and performances weaves its way from 4A to a karaoke club in Haymarket, animating the streets of Sydney with performances that occur outside the gallery and within the living, pulsating nightlife of the city.
Alongside the exhibition a series of academic modes of enquiry elucidate key themes of the project. Australian based early-career writers Mitiana Arbon, Winnie Dunn, Enoch Mailangi and Talia Smith have been commissioned to participate in the Wansolwara Writers Program. Their critical responses to the exhibition will be shared on FBi Radio, through podcasts and in a special edition of 4A’s biannual online journal the 4A Papers available in May 2020. A day-long symposium at UNSW Art & Design and series of public programs will further illustrate, through research, the depth and diversity of creativity from the region.
Creatives: Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, Mitiana Arbon, asinnajaq, Mariquita ‘Micki’ Davis, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Winnie Dunn, Léuli Eshraghi, Terry Faleono, Ruha Fifita, Troppo Galaktika, Amrita Hepi, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Shivanjani Lal, Enoch Mailangi, Caroline Monnet, Faye Mullen, Paula Schaafhausen, José Da Silva, Talia Smith, Mikala Tai, Shannon Te Ao, Angela Tiatia, Vaimaila Urale and Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu.
Exhibiting artists at 4A: Terry Faleono, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Paula Schaafhausen and Vaimaila Urale.
Wansolwara: One Salt Water is exhibited across both 4A (17 Jan – 29 Mar) and UNSW Galleries (17 Jan – 18 April).
As part of Wansolwara: One Salt Water, 4A presented a new installment of the Please Explain talks series. Please Explain: no one’s drowning, baby features artist Paula Schaafhausen, Guardian Australia Pacific Editor Kate Lyons and Professor John Church, pre-eminent expert in sea level rise, speaking to to the issue of climate change in this major Sydney Festival panel event moderated by Wesley Enoch.
Back left: Vaimaila Urale, Manamea ma Anivanuanua, 2020, black card and sand, 240 pieces across two walls, each wall installation measuring 5940x2520mm. Front right: Terry Faleono, Sand, 2020, sand and plastic flower, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Vaimaila Urale, Manamea ma Anivanuanua, 2020, black card and sand, 240 pieces across two walls, each wall installation measuring 5940x2520mm. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Vaimaila Urale, Manamea ma Anivanuanua, 2020, black card and sand, 240 pieces across two walls, each wall installation measuring 5940x2520mm. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Terry Faleono, Sand, 2020, sand and plastic flower, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Front: Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Back: Vaimaila Urale, Manamea ma Anivanuanua, 2020, black card and sand, 240 pieces across two walls, each wall installation measuring 5940x2520mm. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Paula Schaafhausen, EbbingTagaloa, 2020, coconut oil, found objects from Sydney, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Rebecca Ann Hobbs in collaboration with the dancer Amelia Lynch, Ōtara at Night, 2011, 2:00 HD video. Soundtrack: Limb By Limb, by Cutty Ranks, on Reggae Anthology. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Rebecca Ann Hobbs in collaboration with the dancer Amelia Lynch, Ōtara at Night, 2011, 2:00 HD video. Soundtrack: Limb By Limb, by Cutty Ranks, on Reggae Anthology. Photo: Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artist.
Pacific Island nations are in the midst of a climate change crisis. This edition of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Please Explain talks series takes Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, educator Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s address and poem “Dear Matafele Peinem”, presented at the 2014 Opening Ceremony of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit as a starting point for discussion on the role artists and activists play in this major challenge facing our Pacific region.
Although the South Pacific Islands collectively emit far below 1% of total global greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, the region and its island countries remain among the most vulnerable in the world to its negative impacts. With the failure of Australia to agree to the Tuvalu Declaration at the 2019 Pacific Islands Forum (which aimed to not only acknowledge a climate change crisis but also have countries agree to revise the emissions reductions targets and calls for a rapid phase out of coal use), PIF chair, Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga said to Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “ ‘You are concerned about saving your economy in Australia … I am concerned about saving my people in Tuvalu.'”
4A’s series Please Explain invites presenters to rethink, recharge and reimagine contemporary issues through the arts and academia and in this session we ask: what stories are being told across our ocean, and what are we to lose if the crisis is not met with appropriate action? What is the role of art and policy here – what can we do?
In a discussion moderated by Sydney Festival Artistic Director Wesley Enoch, artist Paula Schaafhausen exhibiting at 4A Centre as part of Wansolwara: One Salt Water will speak to this issue alongside Guardian Australia Pacific Editor, Kate Lyons and UNSW’s Professor John Church, pre-eminent expert in sea level rise, in this major Sydney Festival panel event.
Wansolwara: One Salt Water is presented in partnership with UNSW Galleries, and supported by Art Monthly Australasia, FBi Radio and Sydney Festival.
Please Explain: no one’s drowning, baby is presented with support from Sydney Festival.
4A acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which 4A Centre for Contemoporary Asian Art is built and operates.
Artist Paula Schaafhausen, exhibiting at 4A Centre as part of Wansolwara: One Salt Water,Guardian Australia Pacific Editor Kate Lyons and Professor John Church, pre-eminent expert in sea level rise, speak to this issue in this major Sydney Festival panel event moderated by Wesley Enoch.
Listen to the days recording here:
Speaker Profiles:
| Moderator: Wesley Enoch
| Wesley Enoch is a writer and director for the stage. He was the Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company from 2010 to 2015 and is the current Artistic Director at the Sydney Festival. He hails from Stradbroke Island (Minjeribah) and is a proud Noonuccal Nuugi man.
Previously Wesley has been the Artistic Director at Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts; Artistic Director at Ilbijerri Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative and the Associate Artistic Director at Belvoir Street Theatre. Wesley’s other residencies include Resident Director at Sydney Theatre Company from 2000 – 2001; the 2002 Australia Council Cite Internationale des Arts Residency in Paris and the Australia Council Artistic Director for the Australian Delegation to the 2008 Festival of Pacific Arts. He was creative consultant, segment director and indigenous consultant for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. Wesley has written and directed some of Australia’s most iconic Indigenous theatre productions.
Kate Lyons
| KateLyons is the Pacific Editor of Guardian Australia, and was previously a reporter and live-blogger on Guardian Australia’s foreign desk, where she anchors the Guardian’s live coverage of breaking world news and reports on Asia and the Pacific. She previously worked at the Guardian UK and has won a Drum Online Media Award and been longlisted for the Orwell Prize for exposing Britain’s social evils. Through the Pacific journalism project Guardian Australia will establish a network of Indigenous Pacific journalists and collaborate with publications across the Pacific, including Vanuatu, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, French Polynesia and New Caledonia. The aim is to increase public discussion of the social, geo-political, environmental, and economic issues relevant to the region. Kate will also commission major investigations and present these stories in new and engaging ways, including through collaboration with other Australian media organisations.
| Paula Schaafhausen
| Paula Schaafhausen (b. Motuatua, Samoa 1972 lives and works in Maloloelelei, Samoa) is a Samoan artist who has been educated in Aotearoa New Zealand obtaining her Masters of Fine Arts from Elam, University of Auckland. Her practice reflects her culture and her concerns around the environment. Since returning to Samoa as an adult the clear effects of climate change on the landscape – from changes in the coastline to the impact of plastics on the beaches and ocean – have deeply influenced her practice. Paula currently manages the Aiga Folau o Samoa (the Samoan Voyaging Society) where she is developing programs around traditional navigating drawn from traditional Samoan knowledge. Exhibitions include: Hidden Gems, Taumeasina Island Resort, Apia, Samoa (2019), Ebbing Tagaloa, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington Aotearoa New Zealand (2014) and Material Culture, Fresh Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand (2010).
| Professor John Church
| Professor John Church was a research scientist with CSIRO from 1978 to 2016, and in the 1990s was the initial leader of the ocean climate program in the then Division of Oceanography. He helped establish the predecessor of the now Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Research Centre. He was promoted to CSIRO Fellow in 2010. His focus for the last two decades has been the role of the ocean in the climates system, particularly anthropogenic climate change. He is an expert in estimating and understanding global and regional sea-level variability and change, and the Earth’s energy budget. He has made major contributions to the international climate research over many years through membership and chairing of the Scientific Steering Group of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment and the Joint Scientific Committee of the Wold Climate Research Programme and contributions to the Global Climate Observing System. He is the author of over 150 refereed publications, over 100 other reports and co-edited three books. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the American Meteorological Society and the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation. In her work, Lim transforms herself into invented fictional personas who traverse through time and cultures to explore how national identities and stereotypes cut, divide and bond our globalised world.
This 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) initiated touring project presents Lim’s most recent body of work, The Ambassador series. In this three-part project, Lim takes on a Mao-like persona who sits halfway between truth and fantasy – dressed in a gold lamé suit and matching bowl haircut. Throughout each of her works, the Ambassador takes on new roles in uncovering the Australian-Asian narrative – drilling down into racial politics, the social costs of manufacturing and the role of architecture in shaping society.
Visitors have commented:
“Wonderful revelation”
“Absurd and profound”
“What an incredible exhibition”
Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, SA
Part 1: Yellow Peril (2015)
Yellow Peril contemplates the fraught stories from the first wave of Chinese migrants seeking to make their fortunes in the Australian gold rush. The 17-minute featurette transports Lim’s Ambassador to the Sovereign Hill theme park, an open air museum that reimagines 1850’s Ballarat, Victoria. Mixing in with a cast of modern-day visitors and historical theme-park actors, Eugenia’s lone Ambassador silently wanders throughout the site from dawn to dusk. She partakes in gold mining, inspects machinery and eventually strikes gold and ‘wins big’. However, throughout the process, Lim’s Ambassador seems twice removed – silent, isolated and ambiguous – appearing as a literal and cultural relic from another time and place.
Exhibited alongside is the sculptural gold nugget featured in the video work and two photographs printed on gold emergency blankets – one picturing the artist’s hopeful parents shortly after their arrival in Australia in front of Ron Robertson-Swann’s public sculpture Vault (1980), or better known in Melbourne as ‘yellow peril’.
These poetic elements draw careful attention to the local and personal experiences for many first-generation Chinese migrants, including Lim’s own parents, and the social costs of seeking fortune in a faraway land.
Part 2: The People’s Currency (2017)
When almost everything is now ‘Made in China’, how are we, as consumers, implicated in the poor labour conditions of the production line? – Eugenia Lim
Borrowing its name from the renminbi (China’s Currency), The People’s Currency turns the gallery into ‘Renminconn’, a closed-loop ‘special economic zone’. Within this zone Lim dressed as the Chairman Mao-like, gold-suited Ambassador, stands over her factory of counterfeit money-printing and ceramic imitation electronic consumer goods. As the Ambassador, Lim invites the public to enter into ‘short-term employment’ as shift workers on her factory floor, completing a menial yet meditative task. Based on her satisfaction with the completed product, she will remunerate the ‘employee’ with her counterfeit notes printed on site – The People’s Currency.
In Lim’s project, this collision of mass-production, menial work and counterfeit currency become strategies to evaluate the two-fold impacts of global capitalism – on those who seek their fortunes in the factories of China or ‘the workshop of the world’, and the global consumers of these ubiquitous and aspirational products.
Part 3: The Australian Ugliness (2018)
Lim’s latest project surveys the role of architecture in marking a society and shaping national identity. The work has been titled after the bestselling book by Robin Boyd, arguably one of Australia’s most prominent architects and Modernists. Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness denounces the conservative, kitsch and decorative tastes of post-war 1950s Australia, warning against parochialism and insularity. Lim will build upon these ideas, transporting them into 21st century Australia.
This multi-channel video work, will see the Ambassador lead a wide-ranging tour of iconic public and private spaces in Australian cities. The work will insert a female and Asian identity on screen and into the built environment of our cities – spaces still dominated by macho-white taste. Throughout her journey, The Ambassador will interrogate the tensions between globalism and localism, natural and the cultural and the importance of understanding Boyd’s featurism today in the Asian century.
Curated by Mikala Tai, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, The Ambassador is travelling to eight galleries and art centres across Australia between 2019 and 2021 through Museums & Galleries of NSW.
A 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition. This project is assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program
Journal of Dusk is a new performance by Indonesian-Australian artist Jumaadi that has been commissioned especially for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Featuring a series of new shadow puppets created by the artist and accompanied by musical performances, Journal of Dusk draws on a form of traditional Indonesian theatre called wayang kulit to weave poetic narratives based on historical connections between Australia and South-East Asia. Beginning with depictions of agrarian life, Jumaadi presents a montage of imagery from Australia and Indonesia including animals and plants, through to more abstract scenes of landscapes and places.
Journal of Dusk continues Jumaadi’s interest in the history of migration and exchange between Australia and Indonesia during the twentieth century through a creative reinterpretation of the story of the construction of Australia’s first gamelan, an Indonesian percussion instrument. Jumaadi has been investigating historical moments from the period 1927-1949, a time of significant movement of people between Indonesia and Australia, particularly Indonesians held as prisoners in exile some of whom were moved by the Dutch colonial government to Australia during the Second World War. This work is inspired by the story of a Javanese man who produced a gamelan ensemble using scrap metal during his exile in Dutch New Guinea (now a district within the Indonesian province of Papua). The gamelan came to Cowra, NSW, in 1942 and is now held by the University of Melbourne.
Jumaadi is accompanied by co-performers and musicians Margaret Bradley, Cameron Ferguson, Aris Setyo and Kyati Suharto.
Journal of Dusk
Jumaadi, Margaret Bradley, Cameron Ferguson, Aris Setyo and Kyati Suharto.
Friday 16 October 2015, 7pm – Saturday 17 October 2015, 7pm
Journal of Dusk is commissioned and produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is also supported by the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia, Sydney.
Drawn by stones brings together artists who utilise the ceramic medium to interrogate contested histories, stolen land, Indigenous sovereignty, and concepts of national identity. Exhibiting artists from Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan investigate the creation of a sense of ‘nationhood’ and ownership through ceramics and demonstrate how the ceramic form can both memorialise and tell alternative histories.
In 2021, Drawn by stones is staged at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick on sovereign Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land.
Taking its title from Marvin Bell’s 1984 poem Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have Been in the Fire, this exhibition recognises that the foundations of ceramic practice lie in the earth – and through the work of exhibiting artists, aims to expand the relevance of ceramic histories, dialogues and interrogations of land, place, sovereignty and ownership across Asia and Australia.
The exhibition is grounded by the 2020 installation of Monuments, Dean Cross’ site-responsive work – an ongoing project since 2016, intended for exhibition every two years. Cross’ Monuments challenges colonial concepts of ceramics, memorialising and memory, with handfuls of white ochre – handfuls of Ngunnawal/ Ngambri Country – gathered by the artist’s father on their property with permission from local elder and custodian of the land Aunty Matilda House – building a grid that spreads across the gallery floors.
Contemporary ceramic projects by Wen-Hsi Harman (Taiwan/United Kingdom) with Amis potters Lakaw, Dogin, Palos, Lisin, and Byimu; and Ray Chan See Kwong (Hong Kong) with Chuen Lung community members, and works by Dean Cross displayed together for the first time highlight local and Indigenous ceramic tradition and materiality in times of change. Newly commissioned works from emerging ceramic artists Jody Rallah (Yuggera/Brisbane) and Ruth Ju-shih Li (Cammeraygal/Sydney) engage through site specific practice with stories, clay and exchange.
This exhibition is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, part of Moreland City Council.
Custom artwork display elements created by Mount Framing.
Development support for Drawn by stones has been provided by the Ministry of Culture Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney, and The Gordon Darling Foundation.
Exhibition documentation
Drawn by stones (installation view), 2021, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro
Drawn by stones (installation view), 2021, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro
Drawn by stones (installation view), 2021, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro
Left: Dean Cross, Nothing Changes (apart/hide), 2016, Ngunnawal Ochre and fibre-based pen on craft paper, triptych, 228 x 102cm. Right: Dean Cross, Full Moon Dreaming, 2016, Ngunnawal Ochre and fibre-based pen on craft paper, diptych, 152 x 102cm; both works courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021.
Dean Cross, Full Moon Dreaming (detail), 2016, Ngunnawal Ochre and fibre-based pen on craft paper, diptych, 152 x 102cm; courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Jody Rallah, More than Stones: Throughout the Generations, 2021, installation view, clay bodies, charcoal (Yuggera Country), fired ceramic coolamons, looped audio track, wall drawing with Yuggera clay bodies and charcoals; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2021; courtesy the artist; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Jody Rallah, More than Stones: Throughout the Generations (detail), 2021, clay bodies, charcoal (Yuggera Country), fired ceramic coolamons, looped audio track, wall drawing with Yuggera clay bodies and charcoals; commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2021; courtesy the artist; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Ray Chan See Kwong, NEW RE NEW, 2018, 49 teacups: various local Chuen Lung clays, glazed and fired; produced as part of the 2018 public art and community project Hi! Hill!, by the Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department, Organised by the Art Promotion Office with Curatorial Partner (art in-situ): Make A Difference Institute, Hong Kong; courtesy the artist; Mounted on River bench, recycled spotted gum bench and assorted hardwood legs, wax, by Bryden Williams of Mount Framing, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2021; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Ray Chan See Kwong, NEW RE NEW (detail), 2018, 49 teacups: various local Chuen Lung clays, glazed and fired; produced as part of the 2018 public art and community project Hi! Hill!, by the Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department, Organised by the Art Promotion Office with Curatorial Partner (art in-situ): Make A Difference Institute, Hong Kong; courtesy the artist; Mounted on River bench, recycled spotted gum bench and assorted hardwood legs, wax, by Bryden Williams of Mount Framing, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2021; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Drawn by stones (installation view), 2021, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro
Wen-Hsi Harman, Theory of land, from Land Series, 2015, handbuilt royale porcelain, with enamel, gold luster, multiple firings, 60 x 53 x 3cm; courtesy the artist; mounted on: blackwood bench and assorted recycled hardwood legs, shou sugi-ban finish, wax, by Bryden Williams of Mount Framing, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 2021; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
Drawn by stones (installation view), 2021, Counihan Gallery In Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro
Lakaw, Dogin, Palos, Lisin and Byimu, installation of Amis earthenware pottery with from left to right: Tatolonan, Amis earthenware pottery, 9 x 8.5 x 5.5cm; Atomo, Amis earthenware pottery, 12 x 10 x 9cm; Diwas, ceremonial Amis earthenware pottery, 8.3 x 7 x 8cm; Koleng, Amis earthenware pottery, 13 x 9 x 7cm; all works courtesy Wen-Hsi Harman and Amis earthenware potters Lakaw, Dogin, Palos, Lisin and Byimu; photo: Christian Capurro for Drawn by stones, presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2021
“Defining Taiwanese Identity: Constructing Narratives Through the Institution and Within Artistic Practice” by Annette An-Jen Liu in 4A Papers Issue #10 (forthcoming late 2021)
Ray Chan’s works criss-cross between historical accounts and narratives, often deploying unexpected use of mediums. He is interested to unearth the past through layering, moulding, firing and experimenting in his ceramic practice. Having received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Cambridge, U.K., Ray also obtained his BA (Fine Art) and MFA degrees from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (co-presented with Hong Kong Art School) in 2002 and 2007 respectively. Over the years, he has participated in Artist-in-residence programs in Japan, Korea and Estonia. Ray is currently a part-time lecturer at the Hong Kong Art School and Hong Kong Baptist University and the Vice Chairman of the Contemporary Ceramic Society (H.K.). His artworks are in the collection of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.
Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is of Worimi descent. He is a trans-disciplinary artist primarily working across installation, sculpture and photography. His career began in contemporary dance, performing and choreographing nationally and internationally for over a decade with Australia’s leading dance companies. Following that Dean re-trained as a visual artist, gaining his Bachelor’s Degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and his First Class Honours from the ANU School of Art and Design.
Dean has shown his work extensively across Australia. This includes the Indigenous Ceramic Prize at the Shepparton Art Musuem, curated by Anna Briers and Belinda Briggs (2018), Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Nici Cumpston (2017), RUNS DEEP a solo show at Alaska Projects, Sydney (2018), The Churchie Emerging Art Prize (2016), The Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize (2015), and the Macquarie Group Emerging Art Prize (2015) where his work was awarded the Highly Commended prize by artist Joan Ross. In 2018 Dean has also exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, as a part of the NEXTWAVE Festival Melbourne, with curator Amelia Winata, and at Artbank, Sydney in Talia Smith’s “In a World of Wounds”. Also, Dean has been a year-long Artist in Residence at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS). Dean was also selected to be a part of the 4A Beijing Studio Residency Program in Beijing, China.
Dean is represented by Yavuz Gallery, Sydney and Singapore.
WEN-HSI 文曦 Harman (1984-) was born in Taipei, Taiwan and is a ceramic artist currently living and working in Bristol, United Kingdom. She also is the member of the UNESCO-International Academy of Ceramics IAC and NCECA National Council on Education for the ceramic arts. Wen-Hsi studied her BA in Chinese Literature at the Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan (2006). After this she studied her first MA in Chinese History of art in the National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan (2008). After this she studied her second MA in Contemporary Crafts (Ceramics) at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK (2010). She has been awarded the degree of the Doctor of Philosophy in ceramics at Bath Spa University, UK (2018).
Her ceramic practice investigates cross-cultural identity through clay. Living away from her homeland gives her a clearer perspective of the culture in which she grew up. These experiences have provided a platform from which she can address cross-cultural questions. Wen-Hsi creates series of ceramic art based on handmade sculptural porcelain spoons, fingerprints, bananas, and traditional Chinese characters to explore tension of cross-cultural identity, between the East and the West. Wen-Hsi has exhibited her work internationally in Taiwan, South Korea, Britain, Germany, France, China, Denmark and Australia. Her work is also in the public collections such as the Compass Centre, Bristol, UK (2017). The Fule International Ceramic Art Museum in China (2016). The New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan (2016). The Ceramic Foundation in South Korea (2015).
Ruth Ju-Shih Li is a ceramic artist currently working between Australia, China and Taiwan. She explores different ways of narrating both traditional and multicultural concepts of beauty, transcendence and the sublime. Li draws from her diverse philosophical and cultural heritage, and from the language of dreams, myths and utopias. Li has exhibited in Sydney, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Thailand. Ruth is represented by May Space, Sydney.
Jody Rallah is a descendant of the Biri Gubba, Yuggera and Warangu peoples. Rallah is an emerging contemporary Indigenous Australian Artist based in the unceded lands of Yuggera language nation, Brisbane. She employs a concept-led interdisciplinary practice which investigates how celebrating cultural wealth by creating ‘knowledge vessels’ as embodiments of living histories ranging from sculptural installations, to painting and performance, can generate ancestral healing. Her practice addresses living histories as vessels embedded in materiality, investigating how haptic processes of making can be used to create conversations spanning between generations; connecting community throughout the generations and opening dialogues of cultural exchange for hopefully futures.
4A & The University of Melbourne present a conversation on building and expanding the contemporary art museum in Asia & the Pacific.
Speakers: Dr Thomas Berghuis (Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia) & Dr Rebecca Coates (Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria, Australia) Date: Tuesday, September 15, 6.30-7.30pm Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Join 4A for a conversation between Thomas J. Berghuis and Rebecca Coates, two new museum directors working respectively in Indonesia and Australia, as they consider the expanding role of new and existing museums in the Asia-Pacific. From conceiving the strategic beginnings of a new museum to reconsidering an existing museum for the contemporary era this discussion brings together two of the regions most influential directors. With the role of the museum in consistent flux this conversation promises to address the challenges that face the museum director today.
The conversation will be facilitated by Mikala Tai, Director of 4A, and Pedro de Almeida, Program Manager at 4A.
Dr. Thomas J. Berghuis, has recently left the position of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to become the Director of Museum MACAN (pronounced mah-chaan), a future Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Indonesia, with a strong international collection and focus.
Dr. Rebecca Coates is Lecturer in Art History and Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne and has recently taken on the position of Acting Director of the Shepparton Art Museum in Victoria, Australia.
This conversation is part of Art Curatorship, Now & Beyond – A two-day symposium celebrating 25 years of the Masters of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne, that will be held from September 17-19.
Founded in 1990, the Masters of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne incorporates theoretical, art historical and practical study units, focusing on the changing role of art museums and arts organisations, and training generations of art curators, exhibition managers and museum professionals, many of who have gone on to hold significant positions in Australia and internationally.
Image: Katie Lee, Collected Objects, Varied Materials (2013), mixed media, dimensions variable with objects from the SAM Collection. Courtesy the artist & Shepparton Art Museum.
Running over 48 continuous hours at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 48HR Incident is a program of performance art and live actions initiated or performed by artists from Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
Challenging conceptual and social frameworks that surround the position of the individual in relation to the group, 48HR Incident presents a series of works ranging from artistic interventions through to longer durational performances. Participating artists have drawn upon contested historical narratives, political provocations and social situations to conceive and present works specifically for the context of 4A, taking into account dynamics of space, geography and social relations in and outside of the gallery. 48HR Incident considers the impact of these actions on the decisions that individuals and groups make, avoid or otherwise oppose in the daily act of living.
Conceived as the third and final component of MASS GROUP INCIDENT, 48HR Incident is in many ways a culmination of the discussion that occurred during the development of this broader curatorial project, in particular how ephemeral, interdisciplinary and performative artforms embody real social conditions or frictions. 48HR Incident is a call to action, a test of audiences’ will and commitment to meet the challenges that artists present them, and an admission that at the irreducible core of any collective actions or movement is the latent power of the individual.
48HR Incident
Frances Barrett, Dadang Christanto, Blak Douglas, JD Reforma, Tony Schwensen, Abdullah M. I Syed, Latai Taumoepeau, Salote Tawale, Wok the Rock & Lara Thoms, & Samson Young.
48HR Incident is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; and supported by Museums & Galleries NSW and Gordon Darling Foundation. Lara Thoms and Wok The Rock’s project ‘Jakarta Whiplash ’93 Re-Revisited’ was developed during a residency in Yogyakarta as part of Gertrude Contemporary’s Indonesia/Australia exchange project #banyakbanyak.
Journal of Dusk is a new performance by Indonesian-Australian artist Jumaadi that has been commissioned especially for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Featuring a series of new shadow puppets created by the artist and accompanied by musical performances, Journal of Dusk draws on a form of traditional Indonesian theatre called wayang kulit to weave poetic narratives based on historical connections between Australia and South-East Asia. Beginning with depictions of agrarian life, Jumaadi presents a montage of imagery from Australia and Indonesia including animals and plants, through to more abstract scenes of landscapes and places.
Journal of Dusk continues Jumaadi’s interest in the history of migration and exchange between Australia and Indonesia during the twentieth century through a creative reinterpretation of the story of the construction of Australia’s first gamelan, an Indonesian percussion instrument. Jumaadi has been investigating historical moments from the period 1927-1949, a time of significant movement of people between Indonesia and Australia, particularly Indonesians held as prisoners in exile some of whom were moved by the Dutch colonial government to Australia during the Second World War. This work is inspired by the story of a Javanese man who produced a gamelan ensemble using scrap metal during his exile in Dutch New Guinea (now a district within the Indonesian province of Papua). The gamelan came to Cowra, NSW, in 1942 and is now held by the University of Melbourne.
Jumaadi is accompanied by co-performers and musicians Margaret Bradley, Cameron Ferguson, Aris Setyo and Kyati Suharto.
In addition to the three performances, Jumaadi will be leading a workshop for younger audiences (recommended age 7-12)*. Children will join Jumaadi in the making of shadow puppets, story writing and the actual performance of shadow puppetry. They will leave with a shadow puppet of their own creation.
Journal of Dusk – A Contemporary Shadow Play by Jumaadi
Venue:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Sydney.
Price:
$15 per person for Performance Only tickets
$35 for child and guardian (Children’s Workshop & Performance combo ticket)
$15 per additional child or guardian (Children’s Workshop & Performance combo ticket)
Jumaadi (b. 1973, Indonesia) has an artistic practice that encompasses drawing, painting, performance, weaving and installation that tells stories based personal memory and folkloric traditions. His work has been presented extensively worldwide, including in Asia, Europe, USA and Australia. In 2013 Jumaadi represented Australia at the Moscow Biennale Of Contemporary Art in Russia for which he was supported by the Australia Council through its New Work Grant for Mid Career Artist. Solo and group exhibitions include David Roberts Art Foundation, UK, 2014; Watters Gallery, Australia, 2014; National Gallery of Indonesia, Indonesia, 2011; and the French Cultural Centre, Indonesia, 2010. Jumaadi holds a Master in Fine Art from the National Art School in Sydney and divides his time between Australia and the Netherlands. He is represented by Watters Gallery, Sydney, and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane.
Margaret Bradley is an artist and educator who currently works in Early Learning and Primary Education, Learning and Teaching for the NSW Department of Education. Margaret’s professional practice is underpinned by her passion for Indonesian arts and culture, particularly the Sundanese music of West Java. She has studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and with leading musicians. Margaret has been exploring Indonesian music and culture for over thirty years while performing in Indonesia and Australia as a soloist and with Songket, Bodiswara, Sirkus Barock, Alan Dargin, Djaelani, Dody Satya Ekagustdiman, Ismet Ruchimat, Robert Lloyd, Mandiri, Balai, Meritja and Arafura.
Cameron Ferguson is a visual artist, musician and performer. Cameron’s practice is broadly based within the still life genre and object-based art, and involves creating illustrations and installations that form associations between objects, place and memory. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Art (Research) at the National Art School, Sydney. His work is held in numerous private collections.
Aris Setyo graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts SOLO Central Java in 2015 with a Masters of Music with a major in Traditional Javanese Gamelan Music. He has been an employee of the Consulate of the Republic of Indonesia since 2015, and prior to this worked extensively throughout Indonesia with a number of traditional music ensembles. His compositions are inspired by the main characters of famous Javanese shadow puppet plays, making an aural connection between the imagery, narrative and themes of the performance.
Kyati Suharto graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School and studied illustration at Enmore Design Centre. This education has given her a rich knowledge of the interplay between visual culture and music. She is a multi-instrumentalist who specialises in trombone. Kyati grew up in Java and her music is influenced by her experiences as an artist who is inspired by the sounds and sights of her hometown.
SUPPORTER
Journal of Dusk is commissioned and produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is also supported by the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia, Sydney.
Check out The Woman Who Married The Mountain (2013) for a taste of Jumaadi’s unique shadow play performance work. The Woman Who Married The Mountain was exhibited at the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in Russia in 2013.
Image/s: Jumaadi, Journal of Dusk (2015). Images courtesy the artist.
Video: Jumaadi, The Woman Who Married The Mountain (2013), performance with Cameron Ferguson, 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow, Russia.
Tell Me My Truth seeks to address persistent and often contentious relationships that frame the individual within the group. Exploring the motivations of artists for whom a questioning of the veracity of the status quo is a defining aspect of their practice, Tell Me My Truth presents works that give form to alternative narratives.Contrasting fiction with the documentary, remembrance with negation, responsibility with impunity, and privacy with surveillance within the public realm, Tell Me My Truth is at once a provocative demand and an admission of the futility of splendid isolation in a world that more than ever is defined by our connectedness. This is the second exhibition instalment of MASS GROUP INCIDENT, a major five-month multi-stage project curated and produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Comprising a series of exhibitions, site-specific projects, performances, film screenings and public programs, this broader project’s central theme is the power and limits of social engagement and collective action as experienced by the individual. Within this construct, Tell Me My Truth takes a more analytical and meditative approach in its investigation of the causes of social friction and mutual understanding.
Tell Me My Truth Simon Fujiwara, Helen Grace, Amala Groom, Fx Harsono, He Xiangyu, James Newitt, Tony Schwensen, John Von Sturmer 27 March – 16 May 2015 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Haze is an exhibition of new work by Australian artists Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos and Jensen Tjhung. Together, these three artists undertook 4A’s inaugual Beijing Studio Program at the studios of Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin in Huairou on the northern outskirts of Beijing in September 2013. In this video the artists’ discuss the highlights and challenges of living and working on the fringes of the Chinese capital, and the way in which the experience played into the works exhibited at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art between 22 August – 25 October 2014.
4A is pleased to announce the two selected Australian artists for our 2015 Beijing Studio Program.
Robert McDougall (VIC) and Angela Tiatia (NSW) have been selected to embark on a month-long residency at the studios of renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
4A’s Beijing Studio Program, assisted by major supporter Vicki Olsson, is now in its fourth year of operation. It provides early career Australian artists with a valuable opportunity to research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build professional networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in Asia.
Robert McDougall and Angela Tiatia were selected by a committee comprising Sue Acret, 4A Board Member and Co-Founder, ArtAsia Advisory; Gary Carsley, artist and UNSWAAD lecturer, and Maurice O’Riordan, Director of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin. Artists McDougall and Tiatia were selected based on the strength of their applications, the potential benefits for their practices and capacity to extend their own cross-cultural networks.
Sue Acret said of Robert McDougall:
“Robert’s thoughtful sound, video and installation works reflect an ongoing engagement with Asia. His focus has seen him undertake research, exhibitions and residencies in countries that include India, Vietnam, East Malaysia (Borneo) and Tblisi (Georgia). 4A’s Beijing Studio Program will allow him to continue this exploration of Asian practices and traditions, while also drawing on his own Australian cultural experience and framework to produce work that is informed by both environments.”
Maurice O’Riordan said of Angela Tiatia:
“Angela’s proposal was succinct and her work (performance/video/installation) shares a similar succinctness and clarity of intent. Although she is emerging in the sense of being in the first 5 years of her practice, her international experience and exposure has prepared her for a studio program such as this. This Program will allow Angela to develop a professional relationship with 4A and as such, consider her practice within the context of contemporary Asian art.”
The Program will give these young artists a fantastic opportunity to place their practices within a much broader international art context in a city such as Beijing.
Toby Chapman, 4A Assistant Curator and Beijing Studio Program coordinator said,
“We were thrilled by the number and high standard of applications in 2015. The committee expressed the great challenge in selecting only 2 participants for this program. I believe that both Angela and Robert will benefit greatly from this cultural and professional experience and I look forward to seeing the results of their time in Beijing and the potential of future mentoring.”
McDougall and Tiatia will travel to China to commence their month-long residency in September 2015.
Artists’ Bios:
Angela Tiatia is a filmmaker, curator, and visual artist, exhibiting since 2010 after completing a Visual arts degree at Auckland University of Technology. Tiatia has lived in New Zealand, Australia and Samoa and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Tiatia’s art practice explores the shift in identity encountered by the Pacific Diaspora. Her work explores global contemporary cultures, drawing attention to their relationship to the construction of pacific cultural and sexual identity, the commodification of the body and place, representation, gender politics and neo-colonialism. Tiatia featured in the 2015 Video Platform at Art Stage Singapore, and is an invited artist in the Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT 8), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane in November 2015. Tiatia is represented by Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.
Robert McDougall (b. 1986, Melbourne) is an artist working across sound and installation. He has studied a range of compositional modes in electro-acoustic music, video and installation art. Robert is interested in the durational and reductionist temporal aesthetics of early minimalism and various folk traditions, attention to surface and textural detail, numinous spaces and the sublime. Previous exhibitions include Sixty-Five Abstracts 2015, NIICE Public Education, Otar Karalashvili, Tbilisi Art Books, Kiev, Ukraine (2015); Tanpura Study, Pepperhouse Residency Exhibition, Pepperhouse Studios, Kochi, India (2014); John Cage 101: Past, Present, Future Conference, UPSI, Tanjong Malim, Malaysia (2013); and TarraWarra Biennial 2012: Sonic Spheres, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2012).
Images: Angela Tiatia, Hibiscus Rosa Sinesis (still) 2010, single-channel digital video, 1:30 mins. Courtesy the Artist and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
Angela Tiatia, Liminality (still) 2014, single-channel digital video, 5:37 mins. Courtesy the Artist and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
Angela Tiatia, Walking the Wall (still)2014, single-channel digital video, 13:05 mins. Courtesy the Artist and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
Robert McDougall, Hotel Windsor Study #2 (Triptych) 2013, HD video installation, sound (dimensions variable), 9:50 mins. Courtesy the artist.
Robert McDougall, In Memoriam to the Kayan Keledi 2013, metal, bamboo, glass, rubber, leather, linen, keledi, tv monitor, HD video (dimensions variable). Courtesy the artist.
Robert McDougall, Tanpura Study #2 (sa, ma, pa in C#) 2014, found ceramic pots, wiring, lights, speakers, cotton, television, DVD with sound (dimensions variable). Courtesy the artist.
4A’s Beijing Studio Program is an annual program of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Major supporter: Vicki Olsson.
Untold Movements is a single-work exhibition that has been commissioned by 4A with the support of the Keir Foundation. Comprising thirty-two channels of synchronised and orchestrated audio, this sculptural platform premieres Tintin Wulia’s most ambitious sound installation to date, Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland (2015).
Developed over the past eighteen months across several continents, this new work weaves poetic and abstract narratives of inhabiting the obscured networks of global nomadism as it amalgamates the artist’s personal anecdotes, intimate first-hand interviews, and sustained research on borders and forced migration. This narrative structure converges on Tintin Wulia’s personal experience of being deported from Germany after being accused of attempted illegal entry, whilst also touching on the lives of displaced individuals that the artist has developed relationships with. These include a taxi driver from Melbourne who aspires to live in the Middle East; stateless Arab émigrés living in the United Arab Emirates but without citizenship; and Sobron Aidit, a notable Indonesian poet and writer who became exiled whilst living in China during an abrupt shift of political power in Indonesia in 1965, whom the artist sees as key to understanding her own condition.
This elaborate sonic work plays through a system of synchronised speakers constructed by the artist as sculptural elements. In this way Wulia harnesses accessible technology and develops her examination of language as a political border as in recent works such as Babel (2013), a synchronised composition of poetry narrated simultaneously in Arabic, Indonesian and English featuring prominent Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian poems about borders. In Untold Movements, Wulia develops her own platform by which individual experiences of living within the space at the border can be embodied and continue to be recontextualised locally, as the ongoing project travels.
Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland references traditions of oral storytelling and poetry as a way of exploring languages and their potential as a conduit for universal experiences. Its translations and performances by over fifteen narrators in variegated languages (amongst others, English, Indonesian, Arabic and Vietnamese) are reverberated visually in a dynamic composition of shadows cast by sound-reactive small lights. In this, and in its exposed circuitry which bind the entire installation together, Untold Movements highlights the secretive systems of survival that these fictional characters perpetually inhabit within globally shifting boundaries.
Nasim Nasr: Only For My Shadow
Only For My Shadowis an exhibition of photography, video and sculptural works by Iranian-born Adelaide-based artist Nasim Nasr. Through her practice Nasr addresses biographical and social concerns in contemporary society by engaging with issues of censorship, the transience of identity, and civil and social turbulences. Only For My Shadow brings together a selection of Nasr’s recent works which articulate the complexity of identity within the context of cultural difference and global communities, as personally experienced between the artist’s past and present homelands.
This exhibition includes a new work, Ashob: Unrest (2015), which has been realised with the assistance of 4A. The single-channel video work takes as its focus the recital of a passage from twentieth-century Persian author Sadegh Hedayat’s seminal text, The Blind Owl (farsi) (1937). Although the image focuses only on the artist’s mouth reciting the passage, the audio soon becomes a cacophony of different languages, interweaving and competing to become a polyglot of both eloquence and confusion. While the spoken excerpt of Hedayat’s text speaks of the universal experience of an identity in flux, the barrage of voices is a reminder of difficulty of understanding across culture.
Earlier works by Nasr, including the photographic series Muteness (2011), the sculptural work Slow Burn (2013) and video What To Do? (2012), are also included here. Drawing on the artist’s emigration from Iran to Australia, this body of work focuses on gestures, actions or objects familiar to the artist reinterpreted in dynamic relationship to one other. In Only For My Shadow, Nasr reflects upon the challenges of articulating personal identity within a new cultural context, questioning what constitutes the boundaries of self and society.
Tintin Wulia (b. 1972, Denpasar, Indonesia) is an Australia Council for the Arts’ Creative Australia Fellow 2014-2016. Her art practice is a reflection on the border, seen through critical geopolitics. Wulia often stages interactive performances that serve as tactile playgrounds for her audience to take part in a process. Her work has been included in The 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art (2005); The 13th Jakarta Biennale (2009); The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2012) and Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013) and museums and galleries around the world. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture (Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, Bandung, 1998), a Bachelor of Music in Film Scoring (Berklee College of Music, Boston, 1997), and a Doctor of Philosophy in Art (RMIT University, Melbourne, 2014). Tintin Wulia is represented by Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.
Nasim Nasr (b. 1984, Tehran, Iran) explores and comments on both specific and universal cultural concerns in contemporary society through her art practice. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design at the Art University of Tehran, Iran (2006), and a Master of Visual Arts (Research) at the SA School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia, (2011). Since graduating Nasr has developed a body of work that has been featured in exhibitions, festivals and publications in Australia and internationally. Previous exhibitions include Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, National Art School, Sydney (2015); Art Dubai (2015); TarraWarra Biennial 2014: Whisper in My Mask (2014); Art Stage Singapore (with GAGPROJECTS) (2013 & 2015); and Landlocked, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney (2013). Her work was also presented at the 2011 Boston Online Biennial Project, New York, which was later featured at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Nasim Nasr is represented by GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide/Berlin.
Join 4A for drinks next Friday 17 April from 6pm – 8pm to farewell 4A’s Director Aaron Seeto before he leaves for his new role at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney
Date: Friday 17 April 2015
Time: 6pm – 8pm
MASS GROUP INCIDENT is a major five-month project curated and produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Between 17 January – 31 May 2015, a multi-stage program of exhibitions, site-specific projects, performances, film screenings and public programs will be presented at 4A’s galleries in Sydney’s Chinatown district and a number of off-site locations.
Bringing together artists from Australia, Asia and Europe, MASS GROUP INCIDENT explores ideas of social engagement and collective action through the ever-shifting and complex position of the individual in relation to the group. From the fervour of the dissenting drive in the struggle for a different world, through to the sober realities of expediency and complicity, contemporary ideas and expressions of collective action resonate across history and geographies in ways that have profound implications for our present and our futures.
In its spectrum of artist-driven ‘incidents’, MASS GROUP INCIDENT takes a measure of the masses within the works and practices of a varied group of artists tracing several arcs of activity and points of contact between individual and collective forces in Asia alongside the Australian context.
MASS GROUP INCIDENT is a deliberately provocative title that leaves itself open to a multiplicity of social actions – as well as inactions, interactions, transactions, counteractions, distractions, contractions and abstractions. As contemporary art practice increasingly takes interdisciplinary and ephemeral forms as a means of navigating individual experience that mirror or set themselves against very real social frictions, the relationships between artists and their audiences are no longer incidental to the actual, physical work of art. Within and without the contemporary art object, the cumulative broader societal effect of ‘mass group incidents’ in our region has a profound role to play in the decisions individuals and groups make, avoid or oppose in the daily act of living.
Tell Me My Truth Simon Fujiwara, Helen Grace, Amala Groom, FX Harsono, James Newitt, Tony Schwensen, John von Sturmer, He Xiangyu
27 March – 16 May 2015
Launch: Thursday 26 March 2015, 6pm – 8pm
48HR Incident Frances Barrett (Australia), Dadang Christanto (Indonesia), BLAK DOUGLAS (Australia), J.D. Reforma (Australia), Tony Schwensen (Australia), Abdullah M. I. Syed (Pakistan/Australia), Latai Taumoepeau (Australia), Salote Tawale (Australia/Fiji), Wok The Rock & Lara Thoms (Indonesia & Australia), Wok The Rock & Lara Thoms (Indonesia & Australia) and Samson Young (Hong Kong),
Performances: Friday 29 May 2015, 6pm – Sunday 31 May 2015, 6pm
MASS GROUP INCIDENT is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; supported by Chinese Garden of Friendship – Darling Harbour; assisted by the generous supporters of 4A’s Actions for Tomorrow Kickstarter campaign. Actions for Tomorrow and Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar are associated events of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Image credit: He Xiangyu, The Death of Marat, 2011, fiberglass, silicone, fabric, human hair and leather. Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is seeking a Director to lead this vital organisation.
The Director of 4A will have a passion for and deep knowledge of contemporary Asian and Australian arts and culture. He or she will be an inspiring leader and an entrepreneurial thinker, with the ability to collaborate and to work independently. This position reports directly to the board of the Asian Australian Artists Association (4A).
The Director provides the creative vision, strategic leadership, management expertise, and financial oversight of the 4A Program. The Director leverages 4A’s historical leadership in Australia and its global networks to extend its impact.
The Director oversees a small team, leads the program vision and maintains excellent working relationships with stakeholders.
Critical to the Director’s success is their ability to approach resource building with inventiveness and clarity of purpose, and the capacity to fundraise effectively. The director will work with the board to increase and diversify financial support from individual donors, foundations, sponsors and government funders. He or she will have management and financial responsibility, and a clear understanding of budgets.
Additionally, the Director will lead a dedicated professional staff that includes a Program Manager, Assistant Curator, Communications Coordinator, and casual front-of-house staff.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Program
Developing and implementing a world-class program of exhibitions, public programs and other programs
Leading discussions of contemporary Asian art and culture in Australia
Formulating strategic and artistic visions that maintain and grow 4A’s leadership
Management
Provide effective management of physical, financial and human resources
Lead and manage 4A staff, interns and volunteers
Manage the financial affairs of 4A
Support and report effectively to the Board and its committees
Fundraising
Identify and develop private sector support
Maintain excellent working relationships with government agencies to ensure continued funding for 4A activities
Initiate and implement fundraising programs and events as necessary
Secure financial and in-kind support for 4A’s activities from government and non-government sources including sponsors, foundations and private donors.
Leadership/Strategic
Develop and monitor 4A’s strategic plan
Develop strategies to increase membership
Build new working relationships and enhance existing ones with respect to program, funding and cultural advocacy
Maintain excellent relationships with other arts organisations nationally and internationally to ensure 4A’s continued leadership in the field
Develop and maintain relationships with all stakeholders including government funding agencies; all tiers of government; donors and foundations, and corporate partners
Communications/Advocacy
Present a visible and accessible public face and represent 4A in the public domain
Communicate 4A and its mission nationally and internationally in a range of different forums
Work collaboratively with other cultural organisations; develop networks and relationships with both local and international stakeholders
Present and liaise with media to promote 4A’s programs and mission
Actions for Tomorrow is the first solo exhibition in Australia of Yangjiang Group, the Chinese artist collective that use the medium of calligraphy as a conceptual springboard into a diverse range of installations and performances. Hailing from Yangjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong province, Yangjiang Group comprises of three key members – Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin – as well as a number of collaborators from their hometown. In this video Yangjiang Group introduce their practice and their solo exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art held 17 January – 7 March 2015.
A conversation between acclaimed Chinese artist Zheng Guogu (郑国谷) and Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on 30 October 2014.
Zheng Guogu is internationally recognised for producing large-scale installations and architectural interventions that highlight the absurd and often ironic connections between traditional Chinese culture and everyday life. He works both independently and as a leading member of the Chinese contemporary art collective, Yangjiang Group, based in the coastal city of Yangjiang in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. As part of a generation of Chinese artists who have been affected by the explosion of global market forces, Zheng’s art practice questions the meaning of calligraphy, painting, performance and architecture in our globalised contexts.
In this talk Zheng Guogu discusses the emergence of Yangjiang Group during the early 2000s; the artistic strategies employed by the group living outside the key centres of artistic production in China; and their idiosyncratic perspective on the relationship between culture and everyday activities such as gambling, gaming, drinking tea, calligraphy, food and built environments. Zheng also talks about previous projects by Yangjiang Group and the development of a major new project for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presented in January 2015.
The conversation is presented in association with University of Sydney China Studies Centre.
About Zheng Guogu’s visit
Zheng Guogu will be in Sydney undertaking a site visit at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Darling Harbour where the Yangjiang Group will exhibit and perform in a special project to take place in early 2015. You can participate and support this major project by supporting 4A’s Kickstarter crowdfunding Initiative to bring these artists to Australia.
Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art with the support of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, The Australia Council for the Arts, City of Sydney and the Australia-China Council.
Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Chair of the Board of 4A, and
Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
invite you to the opening of
TELL ME MY TRUTH SIMON FUJIWARA, HELEN GRACE, AMALA GROOM, FX HARSONO, HE XIANGYU, JAMES NEWITT, TONY SCHWENSEN, JOHN VON STURMER
Opening: Thursday 26 March 2015, 6pm – 8pm
To be launched by Michael Snelling, Director and Chief Executive, National Art School, Sydney.
Exhibition dates: 27 March – 16 May 2015
RSVP: info@4a.com.au or via Facebook
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181 – 187 Hay St
Sydney NSW 2000
Tell Me My Truth is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; and supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program.
Photos from the launch of Actions for Tomorrow by Yangjiang Group on 17 January 2015.
Photography: Zan Wimberley
Left to right: Edmund Capon OBE, AM, Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and Councillor Robert Kok, City of Sydney.
Left to right: Sun Qinglin (Yangjiang Group), Zheng Guogu (Yangjiang Group), Councillor Robert Kok, City of Sydney, Edmund Capon OBE, AM, Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Chen Zaiyan (Yangjiang Group), Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) announces the publication of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town, a comprehensive exhibition catalogue that traces key ideas, moments and works in the development of one of Thailand’s foremost contemporary artists, and a leading female voice in South East Asian art.
Published following Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s 2014 solo exhibition at 4A which presented two decades of her practice through seminal installation and video works, this publication includes newly commissioned texts by exhibition curators, Professor Emeritus John Clark, University of Sydney, and curator and PhD candidate, Clare Veal, Department of Art History & Film Studies, University of Sydney; a text by Thai art critic and researcher Judha Su; and an interview with the artist, originally published in 2007 and reproduced for the first time in English.
Beautifully designed by Michael Boston and published in hardcover, the Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town catalogue will be launched at the opening of 4A exhibition, Tell Me My Truthand is also now available for purchase online. RRP AU$50.00 (inclusive of GST).
Thursday 26 March 2015, 6:00PM
RSVP info@4a.com.au
Coinciding with the launch of 4A exhibition Tell Me My Truth
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney
This publication has been produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok; Gordon Darling Foundation; the Commonwealth through the Australia-Thailand Institute of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra; and the University of Sydney.
Image: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Great Times Message, Storyteller of the Town, The Insane (2006), three-channel video installation, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. Photo: Zan Wimberley
For those attending 4A’s Twilight Garden Party at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour here’s some information to ensure you make the most of the night’s event.
The Chinese Gardens is located in Darling Harbour close to the Chinatown end of the precinct. (MAPLINK).
The event starts at 7pm and runs until 11pm. You can collect your tickets from box office at the entrance to the Chinese Gardens. When you pick up your tickets you’ll also receive vouchers for a complimentary cocktail and food by Grasshopper Bar and Eating House at the event. See menu here.
Performances will run at different times and some overlap throughout the night. Some performance works with the artists Yangjiang Group have limited capacity so we recommend arriving early to catch these.
If you are driving tonight please allow extra time and note special event road closures and event clearways here near Chinatown and Haymarket due to Lunar New Year Celebrations. You’ll find the locations of parking stations here. For details on public transport options see here.
For those catching public transport please allow extra time for trackwork on trains this weekend.
In the event of wet weather the event will still go ahead in covered areas of the gardens.
If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, don’t forget to share your favourite moments using #TwilightGardenParty
If you have questions don’t hesitate to contact 4A on 9212 0380 or info@4a.com.au
This public symposium is based on an ARC Linkage project by researchers at the Institute for Culture and Society (UWS) in collaboration with the City of Sydney, on Sydney’s Chinatown in the 21st Century: From Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub. The symposium is an opportunity for the researchers, Chinatown stakeholders and members of the community to discuss the transformations of Chinatown in the past few decades.
Presentation and discussion from 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm, followed by a reception from 7.00PM – 8.00PM
Sydney’s Chinatown in the Asian Century
Date: 9 March 2015
Time: 5.30PM – 8.00PM
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181- 187 Hay St, Sydney NSW 2000
Free Admission (bookings essential)
RSVP by 1 March 2015: ics@uws.edu.au or 02 9685 9600 More info
Photo: Andrea Del Bono, University of Western Sydney.
Actions for Tomorrow is the first solo exhibition in Australia of Yangjiang Group, the Chinese artist collective that use the medium of calligraphy as a conceptual springboard into a diverse range of installations and performances. Hailing from Yangjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong province, Yangjiang Group comprises of three key members – Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin – as well as a number of collaborators from their hometown.
In Actions for Tomorrow, Yangjiang Group will continue their investigation into the impact of social change on people and communities by addressing the relationship between calligraphy as high culture and it’s everyday use; from personal catchcries to marketing slogan; hand-scrawled gambling receipts to the written rules for sports and games. The exhibition focuses on two distinct bodies of work which will include wax-encased sculpture, kinetic elements, and a specially commissioned large-scale calligraphic mural spanning 10 metres of the gallery walls.
Download the exhibition room sheet for the exhibition here.
Yangjiang Group are Zheng Guogu (b. 1970, Yangjiang, China), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971, Yangchun, China) and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974, Yangjiang, China). Founded in 2002 the group name themselves after their home town, a city in Guangdong province, where their principle studio is located. Their work is dedicated to reaching the widest possible audience often through creating ephemeral works. Yangjiang Group have been widely exhibited at prestigious galleries and museums such as the San Diego Museum of Art, USA; Tate Liverpool, UK; Kunthaus Graz, Austria; Mori Art Museum, Japan; and Guangdong Museum of Art and He Xiangning Museum of Art, China. They also participated in Art Basel in 2008, 2010 and 2012; the Venice Biennale in 2003; and the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.
Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; supported by Chinese Garden of Friendship – Darling Harbour; assisted by the generous supporters of 4A’s Actions for Tomorrow Kickstarter campaign; and is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
4A Twilight Garden Party at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour (2015). Photos: Blue Murder Studios.
Celebrate the Chinese New Year with 4A and Chinese artist collective Yangjiang Group as they take over Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship!
This one-night-only special event will feature live art performances led by Yangjiang Group, a contemporary art collective hailing from the coastal city of Yangjiang in China’s southern Guangdong province.
Featuring DJs as well as food and bar by pioneering Sydney laneway outfit Grasshopper Eating House and Bar, this is a rare opportunity to experience a night of contemporary art and performance set within the beauty of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Darling Harbour.
Yangjiang Group will be bringing their unique brand of art and reverie to Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship with a series of performances and encounters that take calligraphy off the page and into every aspect of the celebrations.
This is a special ticketed event presented as part of the major exhibition Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow at 4A.
Twilight Garden Party at the Chinese Garden of Friendship
Date: Saturday 14 February 2015, 7pm – 11pm
Venue: Chinese Garden of Friendship, Pier St, Darling Harbour NSW
Price: $45 per person
Ticket price include a cocktail on arrival and 7 courses of food designed by Grasshopper Eating House specifically for this event. This is strictly an 18+ event.
THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT
WET WEATHER INFO
In the event of rain the event will still go ahead in covered areas of the garden.
Enjoy a complimentary cocktail by Grasshopper Bar upon entering the Garden.
Join Yangjiang Group at the bar to play a traditional Chinese party game – with unexpected results!
Witness the artists create original poetry and rhyming couplets onsite, producing bespoke pieces of calligraphy for audiences.
Be a part of Yangjiang Group’s trademark After Dinner Calligraphy performance where the artists will create a large-scale piece of calligraphy live using the food scraps from your meal.
End the night with Tea Garden, an intimate performance designed especially for the Garden where guests will sample four kinds of tea prepared by Yangjiang Group artist Zheng Guogu which, when consumed in a particular sequence, offer a shift in physical and spiritual perception.
All while enjoying a specially curated set by DJ Leo Tanoi with surpise musical guests.
Menu
Water Pavilion
Cucumber, funghi, lotus root and black sesame
Spicy eggplant and tofu
Peace Boat Pavilion
Vermicelli, Chinese broccoli, carrot and egg net salad
Jellyfish and baby octopus wasabi salad
Tea Pavilion
Peppered beef and rice box
Sweet potato and rice yakitori
Sherry, soy and sesame crispy chicken wings
The Chinese Garden of Friendship in Darling Harbour was built as a symbol of friendship between Sydney and Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, to mark Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. The Garden was built by Chinese landscape architects and gardeners observing a 3000 year old tradition of imperial park design.
The Twilight Garden Party at the Chinese Garden of Friendship is presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority in association with the 2015 Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Image: Yangjiang Group, After Dinner Shu Fa at Cricket Pavilion, 2012, Eastside Projects and Grizedale Arts, Birmingham. Courtesy the artists.
4A Twilight Garden Party at Chinese Garden of Friendship is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; supported by Chinese Garden of Friendship – Darling Harbour; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Art, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; assisted by the generous supporters of 4A’s Actions for Tomorrow Kickstarter campaign. Twilight Garden Party is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival. Event Partner: Grasshopper.
On Friday 14 November, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art took home an award in the Community Engagement category at the 2014 IMAGinE awards.
Vertical Villages was a collaborative partnership between Ruangrupa ArtLab (Indonesia), Keg de Souza (Australia) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, working with international tertiary student population living in Sydney’s CBD and communities in Jakarta.
Recognising innovation and excellence in 500 museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres across NSW, the IMAGinE industry awards acknowledges outstanding achievement of over 8,000 individuals in fostering local communities, enhancing NSW’s vibrant cultural tourism and improving visitor experiences.
Michael Rolfe, CEO, Museums & Galleries NSW commended all recipients across the categories of Projects, Sustainability, Engagement and Individual Achievement in both paid and volunteer staffed organisations and said,
“The winners of the 2014 IMAGinE awards highlight the exemplary work of staff and volunteers who work tirelessly to develop and present engaging and exciting programs for all facets of our community. The awards recognise outstanding accomplishments from small volunteer run museums to large cultural institutions, and celebrate NSW’s vibrant cultural sector.”
Record numbers attended the awards event at the popular artist-run initiative 107 Projects on Friday 14 November, demonstrating the awards’ growing popularity and the spirit of IMAGinE: Inspiring Museums and Galleries in Excellence.
On Thursday 24 November 4A received the prestigious Australian Multicultural Marketing Award (AMMA) in Arts & Culture for project Vertical Villages, 2013 that provided insight into the international tertiary student population living in Sydney’s CBD and Jarkarta.
Winners were announced at a gala award ceremony held at the Sydney Opera House.
The awards celebrate the achievements of organisations running innovative campaigns and projects that speak to culturally diverse audiences across a range of industries including business, sports, media, the arts and community.
Vertical Villages was a collaborative partnership between Ruangrupa ArtLab (Indonesia), Keg de Souza (Australia) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, working with international students in Sydney and communities in Jakarta.The project comprised of: artist-led community workshops: the creation of collaborative new works: dual exhibitions at 4A and in Jakarta as part of the 15th Jakarta Biennale: public programs curated by community groups and students: and a project blog, and print publication and active engagement with these communities via 4A’s Facebook and instagram.
Now in its 25th year, The Australian Multicultural Marketing Awards is coordinated by Multicultural NSW. Full details of winners can be seen here.
Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Chair of the Board of 4A, and
Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
invite you to the opening of
ACTIONS FOR TOMORROW
YANGJIANG GROUP
Saturday 17 January 2015, 2 – 4pm
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181 – 187 Hay Street, Haymarket
RSVP: info@4a.com.au or via Facebook
Exhibition dates: 17 January – 7 March 2015
Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; supported by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia-China Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; supported by the City of Sydney Cultural Grants Program; supported by Chinese Garden of Friendship – Darling Harbour; assisted by the generous supporters of 4A’s Actions for Tomorrow Kickstarter campaign; and is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Be first through the door for our much anticipated 4A A4 fundraising exhibition for your chance to purchase works by leading contemporary Australian and international artists available across the board for $200 each. Artworks are exhibited anonymously with artists’ names and artwork details revealed upon sale. Support 4A’s programs by getting in before the general public.
4A A4 – EXCLUSIVE MEMBERS’ PREVIEW
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Date: Thursday 6 November 2014
Time: 5.30pm – 6.30pm (prior to general admission 6.30pm – 8.30pm) Become a 4A Member
The 4A Members’ Program is a series of tailored events offering a chance to connect with people who share your passion for contemporary art. If you’re not a Member then join today to enjoy what our Members’ Program has to offer and all the other benefits of membership. View our 2014 program here.
To celebrate the launch of 4A A4 we’re offering some special deals on 4A EDITION artworks on the night of Thursday 6 November only. These deals are available in our gallery only.
– A 25% discount off 4A EDITION artworks for 4A Members.
– A 10% discount off 4A EDITION artworks for the general public.
Visit our online store to peruse works by FX Harsono, Jae Hoon Lee, Vernon Ah Kee, Owen Leong, Vipoo Srivilasa, Jason Wing, Ming Wong.
Zheng Guogu in conversation with Aaron Seeto Thursday 30 October 2014, 6.30-7.30pm Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
RSVP via eventbrite This event has now booked out. Please join the waiting list for tickets.
Join us for a conversation between acclaimed Chinese artist Zheng Guogu (郑国谷) and Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Zheng Guogu is internationally recognised for producing large-scale installations and architectural interventions that highlight the absurd and often ironic connections between traditional Chinese culture and everyday life. He works both independently and as a leading member of the Chinese contemporary art collective, Yangjiang Group, based in the coastal city of Yangjiang in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. As part of a generation of Chinese artists who have been affected by the explosion of global market forces, Zheng’s art practice questions the meaning of calligraphy, painting, performance and architecture in our globalised contexts.
Zheng Guogu will discuss the emergence of Yangjiang Group during the early 2000s; the artistic strategies employed by the group living outside the key centres of artistic production in China; and their idiosyncratic perspective on the relationship between culture and everyday activities such as gambling, gaming, drinking tea, calligraphy, food and built environments. Zheng will also discuss previous projects of Yangjiang Group and the development of a major new project for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to be presented in January 2015.
The conversation is presented in association with University of Sydney China Studies Centre.
About Zheng Guogu’s visit
Zheng Guogu will be in Sydney undertaking a site visit at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Darling Harbour where the Yangjiang Group will exhibit and perform in a special project to take place in early 2015. You can participate and support this major project by supporting 4A’s Kickstarter crowdfunding Initiative to bring these artists to Australia.
Yangjiang Group – Actions for Tomorrow is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art with the support of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, The Australia Council for the Arts, City of Sydney and the Australia-China Council.
Thanks to our Kickstarter supporters: Deborah Paauwe, Geoff, Anna Waldmann, Hanna Barber, Antonio Lopez, Michael Snelling, Eliane Marti, Elke Wohlfahrt, Caroline Chanthaporn, Michael McGregor, Yu Ye Wu, Michèle Reymond, Julia Champtaloup, Luise Guest, Annette Larkin, Sally Brand, Gina Fairley, JZT, Johnny Stark. Mingyue Zhou, Jennifer Stafford, James Turnbull, Bonita Ely, Hong An James Nguyen, Pedro de Almeida, Kyle Weise, Michael Rolfe, Sarah McGhee, Sam Wild, Kim Spinks, Kiong Lee, Xia Li Summerfield, Sam, Rebecca Craig, Bridget Ikin, Harrie Sengers, Willi’s WIne Bar, Naomi Shedlezki, Annette Shun Wah, Jason Phu, Tony Albert, Michele Sandoz, Mark Connolly, Lena Walter, Gerda can den Bergh, Elliott Blesdoe, Chloé Wolifson, Pam Hewitt, Mikala Tai, Winnie Chan, Toby Chapman, Jane O’Sullivan, Monique Claire, Jess Scully, John Choi, Tatyana, Sheila Pham, Ronana Sulich, Jun Qiu, Jane Somerville, Dick Quan, Gene Sherman, Kirsty Collins, Jayanto Damanik, Brooke Aitken, Lucy Wang, Daniel Droga, Nicholas Forrest, Andrew Rothery, Christine Maroussis, Stephanie Pereira, John Lam-Po-Tang and Lorraine Heller-Nicholas.
Last week 4A’s Director Aaron Seeto, Assistant Curator Toby Chapman and Project Assistant Joanna Bayndrian traveled to China to undertake research for Actions for Tomorrow in Yangjiang Group’s home city and namesake, located in southwestern Guangdong Province, and meet the Yangjiang Group artists Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin.
The journey began early one morning with a flight from Beijing to Guangzhou, followed by a three-hour car ride to the coastal city of Yangjiang. By Chinese standards, Yangjiang is a small city with a population of about 2.6 million. The city itself runs along the Pearl River Delta, with the humidity, near tropical vegetation and expanse of blue sky a constant reminder of the city’s location.
After meeting with Zheng Guogu, we were taken to the artist’s awe-inspiring project,The Age of Empires (2008- ), a complex of unfinished buildings and structures, an artist studio and sprawling gardens. This mythical project, developed as part of Zheng’s own practice, was a project that we had read about and eagerly explored. It gave us a glimpse into the working process and conceptual ambition of Zheng, his connection to the city of Yangjiang, and his interest in how art can be integrated into life, and life into art.
After a studio visit and a tour of his new work, Zheng led us on a walk through his garden to a series of elevated pavilions nestled in the treetops and overlooking the property. These pavilions were specially constructed for tea ceremonies, which we happily participated in. After some time of drinking, heavy rains and strong winds swept through, which we later discovered to be Typhoon Kalmaegi, heading towards Hainan.
As the afternoon passed, Zheng told us that we had been invited to the wedding banquet of a friend, where we would then meet the other members of the Yangjiang Group, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin, as well as other local artists and friends. This generous hospitality and openness to visitors would continue through the rest of our time in Yangjiang. At dinner, many of the guests remarked how excited they were that visitors from so far away had come to Yangjiang, and that they were proud that Yangjiang Group would be coming to Australia. The other main topic of conversation was food, and the quality of Australian seafood.
The following day we ventured to the Yangjiang Group studio – a massive concrete building, constructed out of compound geodesic shapes and surrounded by gardens. Zheng designed the building himself, and when asked what his neighbours thought of the studio he simply said, ‘they think we are aliens’.
During the morning we were given a tour of the building and talked about earlier projects – Yangjiang Group’s take on shu-fa (calligraphy); After Dinner Shu Fa at Cricket Pavilion (2012); Waterfall an important sculptural work constructed out of calligraphy and wax; as well as more recent projects that incorporate clothing sourced from Yangjiang.
The rest of the day was left to drinking tea and discussing the influence that various teas can have on the body, as well as the upcoming project in Sydney. It was a rare and great privilege to spend this time discussing and reflecting upon the relationship between life and art for Yangjiang Group, and how both life and art exert influence upon one another. How one expresses themselves in space; how one considers the built environment; the contemplation of the cultural value of tea and food; what one does with the left-overs from dinner; these are all opportunities for reflection for Yangjiang Group.
From this trip and the time spent with Yangjiang Group in their hometown it’s clear that their artistic process is an expression of everyday life and an exploration of the connections between social action and cultural meaning.
We’ve now proposed to Yangjiang Group that they take over all of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – to incorporate the office and administrative functions into the installation and to allow us (the staff) to think carefully about the roles that we assign to culture in our daily lives. In the coming months, Zheng Guogu will travel to Sydney for a site visit as part of the development of the exhibition and performance in January 2015.
Stay tuned for another update about Zheng’s visit to Sydney, and an invitation to all of our Kickstarter supporters to attend a private artist talk by Zheng about the Yangjiang Group.
Drinking tea with Yangjiang Group
Drinking tea with Yangjiang GroupYangjiang Group StudioYangjiang Wedding PartyTyphoon Approaching
Friday 10 October, 6-7pm RSVP HERE
To be officially launched by Frank Panucci, Executive Director of Arts Funding, Australia Council for the Arts.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181 – 187 Hay Street, Sydney
NSW 2000 Australia
Over three years Edge of Elsewhere (2010 – 2012) co-curated by Dr Thomas J. Berghuis, Lisa Havilah, and Aaron Seeto saw the presentation of commissioned works that were the result of community engaged projects produced by some of the most exciting contemporary artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art invites you to the launch of the Edge of Elsewhere 2011/2012 publication, a comprehensive book that documents the creative development of this unique project, showcases each artists’ work and features contributions from local and international writers and curators.
The book will be available for sale at the launch (RRP AUD$40.00) and from Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Edge of Elsewhere 2011/2012 is published by Campbelltown Arts Centre in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Board and Community Partnerships and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
Yangjiang Group, one of China’s most talked about artist groups, is coming to Australia this Summer to take over our patch of Sydney’s Chinatown. Through their unique brand of Chinese calligraphy and all-night binge brainstorming sessions that lead to wild ideas and spontaneous, strange and surreal happenings, Yangjiang Group explode the boundaries of traditional Chinese art forms to explore ideas of collective action and the ever-shifting dynamic of the individual in relation to the group.
Hailing from Yangjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong province, Yangjiang Group has three members – Zheng Guogu (郑国谷), Chen Zaiyan (陈再炎) and Sun Qinglin (孙庆麟) who have developed projects all over the world. They expand ideas of traditional Chinese calligraphy in experimental and surprising ways alongside performance, painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation. Their works are often a series of daily actions and processes that take several forms: from large-scale architectural structures that envelope audiences in offbeat and immersive environments, to performances that invite social actions and private introspection.
4A has been selected by Art Basel’s International Crowdfunding Jury to be part of Art Basel’s Crowdfunding Initiative that supports projects from non-profit visual arts organisations from around the world.
With your support Yangjiang Group will surprise and delight audiences with Actions for Tomorrow (明日行动) an intoxicating contemporary art project to heat up Sydney’s summer.
More than just an exhibition of artwork Actions for Tomorrow is a process that highlights the importance of artistic actions as part of our everyday encounters, tracing arcs of activity and points of contact between individual and collective forces in Asia alongside our own Australian context. The project will comprise a major installation at 4A and a one-night-only performance and party at the Chinese Gardens of Friendship during Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival Celebrations.
#ACTIONSFORTOMORROW
Image above: Yangjiang Group, Interior Courtyard III (The Garden of Pine) (2008), Multimedia Installations, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists.
Yangjiang Group, After Dinner Shu Fa, 2012, Performance and Photo, Exhibition view at Eastside Projects. Courtesy the artists.
Yangjang Group, The Garden of Pine – Also fierce than tiger (2010), mixed media installation. Courtesy the artists.
Edmund Capon, AM, OBE Former Director, Art Gallery of NSW, and Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Toby Chapman, Curator, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; James Nguyen, 4A Beijing Studio Program 2014; Claudia Nicholson, 4A Beijing Studio Program 2014; will be speaking at the upcoming 2nd FASIC Australian Studies in China Conference, Renmin University of China, Beijing – The Big Picture: Lives, Landscapes, Homelands in Australian and Chinese Art. Registration for this conference is currently open and closes on 10 September.
Hosted by:
The Australian Studies Centre, Renmin University
In collaboration with the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC)
Convened by:
Professor David Walker, BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies Peking University
The Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC), and the Australian Studies Centre at Renmin University, are pleased to present the 2nd FASIC Australian Studies in China Conference, The Big Picture: Lives, Landscapes, Homelands in Australian and Chinese Art.
The conference is designed to stimulate discussion in a field that has become increasingly important to both Australia and China, but which has not received the kind of attention it deserves within the broader Australian Studies community in China.
The conference will address artistic practices and exchanges, the role and function of the cultural industries and changing perceptions of identity, place and belonging.
It will be the first event of this scale focusing specifically on the China- Australia arts relationship to be held in China, and will bring together a leading lineup of Australian and Chinese artists, curators, gallery directors, academics and cultural thinkers. They will share their insights over two days of panel discussions, keynote presentations, interviews and special performances and exhibitions, running on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 September at Renmin University. Additional public talks will also run on Saturday September 13 at the Red Gate Gallery and Capital M Restaurant in Beijing.
Program highlights include keynote presentations by previous Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon AM OBE, on ‘Understanding and Defining Australia through Art’, and Prof Julianne Schultz AM FAHA, Editor of the Griffith REVIEW, on ‘The Uses of Culture’. The program will also feature a special performance by acclaimed Australian photographer and storytelling artist William Yang.
The conference is open to the public and attendance is free but registration is required. To register to attend the conference, please email Joanna Bayndrian by September 1 on joanna@creative-asia.net
Featured speakers for 2014 include:
Edmund CAPON, AM, OBE Former Director, Art Gallery of NSW
Artists! 4A is seeking A4 art works from across Australia and the globe for this year’s 4A A4 fundraising exhibition, celebrating the work of emerging and established artists alike and raising funds for 4A’s program.
Last year 4A A4 raised over $25,000 in 24 hours, through the generosity of artists and supporters. Help us break this record!
Join the challenge and make it A4. Be creative with your choice of material and the medium of the work, so long as you keep within an A4 size limit.
Registration is free. Then post or deliver your art work to 4A by Friday 31 October 2014, 5pm.
All art works will be:
Featured in the exhibition
Featured online at 4a.com.au and on 4A social media
Available for sale for a fixed price of AUD $200 each with proceeds going directly back to 4A’s program.
Art works will be sold anonymously. The names of artists only announced once works are sold.
All submitted art works are considered donations to 4A. Entries will not be returned.
Rally your networks to take part by sharing this link with friends. Thank you for your support!
Since 1996, artists have always supported artists and contributed to the making of 4A. Today we’re just as passionate as the artists who started the organisation and our ethos stands: to create opportunities for other artists, develop platforms to exhibit and encourage critical, independent discussion. Artists today need all the help they can get! This is the second year of 4AA4, check out the artists list from last year here.
Exhibition dates
Submission deadline: Friday 31 October, 5pm
Exhibition opening: 6 November 2014, 6-8pm
Eligibility
Submission is open to all artists from Australia and internationally.
Registration is free and submissions are unlimited. We value your support!
How to Apply
Complete the registration form and submit it with the art work to:
4A A4 submissions
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
PO BOX K1312
Haymarket NSW 1240
4A takes you to beautiful Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park to the studio of celebrated Chinese-Australian artist, Shen Jiawei. Members have the rare opportunity to get a personal glimpse into the studio practice of a prominent painter who was a self-taught and prolific propaganda artist during China’s Cultural Revolution, with his work reproduced on posters seen in the millions. Members meet at 4A and travel with us by public transport (train and ferry) to Bundeena (approx 60 mins travel time each way). Places are limited so book early!
EVENT #2 SHEN JIAWEI STUDIO VISIT Meeting point: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Date: Saturday 30 August 2014
Time: 1.00pm – 5.30pm
Ticketed: $22 for Members / $77 for non-Members / $49.50 for non-Members (concession)
Bookings are now closed.
The 4A Members’ Program is a series of tailored events offering a chance to connect with people who share your passion for contemporary art. If you’re not a Member then join today to enjoy what our Members’ Program has to offer and all the other benefits of membership. View our 2014 program here.
Haze Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos, Jensen Tjhung
22 August – 25 October 2014
Opening: Thursday 21 August, 6.00pm-8.00pm, in the presence of the artists
To be opened by Guan Wei.
Artists’ talks: Saturday 23 August, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Image: Tully Arnot, Alternate Great Wall (2014), digital image. Courtesy the artist.
Cosmin Costinas
A Journal of the Plague Year: A Case Study of Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.
This talk will present an insight into recent research and projects by Cosmin Costinas for Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Para/Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art space and one of the oldest and most active independent art centres in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society. Since 2011 Cosmin Costinas has been the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site, where he has delivered a number of exhibitions that discuss and explore local political and historical contexts. Costinas will discuss a number of the challenges in presenting these projects, and consider how they fit within broader curatorial conversations in Hong Kong. As a relative newcomer to Hong Kong, Cosmin will also speak about his personal perspective in developing exhibitions and the role that collaboration plays in working in a new cultural context. What kind of responsibility does a curator, or indeed an organisation, have to the local?
This talk was presented as part of the 4A’s Curators’ Intensive 2014. More here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
Dr Sophie McIntyre
Politics, Art & Representation: Curatorship in an intercultural context
This presentation explores the spatial and relational dynamics of curating exhibitions in an intercultural context by focussing on the meaning and significance of place in a geo-political, cultural, artistic and museological context. Drawing on several exhibitions of contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region that Dr. McIntyre has (co)curated, the presentation will delve into the politics of cultural representation and it will reflect on some of the challenges and valuable insights gained when curating across and between different cultures and audiences.
This talk was presented as part of the 4A’s Curators’ Intensive 2014. More here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
Robin Peckham Tracing the Post-Internet:A Case Study in Curatorial Process
What are the relationships between the movement that has come to be called ‘post-internet’ and the media realities of the historical moment that enables it? This talk will present the curatorial process and research behind the exhibition Art Post-Internet co-curated by Peckham, paying close attention to the differences between survey methodologies and thematic approaches. Peckham will respond to notions including the differences between intent and effect in artistic practice, the tension between documentation and materiality in recent art, collaboration as a tool, the specificities of the exhibition and other possible realisations, and categories of curatorial work from essayistic narrative compositions to forms of analysis. This presentation will tentatively structure a logic by which we might be able to expand a thematic understanding of post-internet art based on an empirical understanding of its social core.
This talk was presented as part of the 4A’s Curators’ Intensive 2014. More here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
Politics, Art & Representation: Curating in an intercultural context
Friday 11 July, 2.00pm – 4.00pm This event has now ended
This presentation explores the spatial and relational dynamics of curating exhibitions in an intercultural context, and it focuses on the meaning and significance of place in a geo-political, cultural, artistic and museological context. Drawing on several exhibitions of contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region that McIntyre has (co)curated, the presentation will delve into the politics of cultural representation and it will reflect on some of the challenges and valuable insights gained when curating across and between different cultures and audiences.
For more information about the 4A Curators’ Intensive click here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
Cosmin Costinas Ten Million Rooms of Yearning & A Journal of the Plague Year: A Case Study of Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.
Saturday 12 July, 2.00pm – 4.00pm This event has now ended
This talk will present an insight into recent research and projects by Cosmin Costinas for Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Para/Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art space and one of the oldest and most active independent art centres in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society. Since 2011 Cosmin Costinas has been the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site, where he has delivered a number of exhibitions that discuss and explore local political and historical contexts. Costinas will discuss a number of the challenges in presenting these projects, and consider how they fit within broader curatorial conversations in Hong Kong. As a relative newcomer to Hong Kong, Cosmin will also speak about his personal perspective in developing exhibitions and the role that collaboration plays in working in a new cultural context. What kind of responsibility does a curator, or indeed an organisation, have to the local?
For more information about the 4A Curators’ Intensive click here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
Robin Peckham Tracing the Post-Internet:A Case Study in Curatorial Process
Thursday 10 July 6.30pm – 8.00pm This event has now ended
What are the relationships between the movement that has come to be called ‘post-internet’ and the media realities of the historical moment that enables it? This talk will present the curatorial process and research behind the exhibition Art Post-Internet co-curated by Peckham, paying close attention to the differences between survey methodologies and thematic approaches. Peckham will respond to notions including the differences between intent and effect in artistic practice, the tension between documentation and materiality in recent art, collaboration as a tool, the specificities of the exhibition and other possible realisations, and categories of curatorial work from essayistic narrative compositions to forms of analysis. This presentation will tentatively structure a logic by which we might be able to expand a thematic understanding of post-internet art based on an empirical understanding of its social core. Watch Online
For more information about the 4A Curators’ Intensive click here
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
4A is pleased to announce the two Australian artists selected for our Beijing Studio Program in 2014 at the studios of Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
Claudia Nicholson and James Nguyen were chosen by 4A’s Visual Arts Advisory committee based on the strength of their applications, the potential benefits for their practices and capacity to extend their own cross-cultural networks.
Aaron Seeto, 4A’s Director stated that “the committee were impressed by the extremely high standard of individual applicants from across Australia. It proved difficult to selected only two participants, and I am encouraged by the number of younger artists who applied. Congratulations to both Claudia and James, who I expect will benefit greatly from this opportunity.”
The Program will give these young artists a fantastic opportunity to place their practices within a much broader international art context in a city such as Beijing.
Nicholson and Nguyen will travel to China to commence their month-long residency in September 2014.
Claudia Nicholson (b. 1987, Bogota, Colombia; raised in Australia) is a Sydney-based artist, whose work is multidisciplinary with a focus in painting, video and performance. As an artist and an adopted child Nicholson occupies an ambiguous position between Australian and Latino cultures. Her work questions the construction of identity in the absence of a known ancestry and subsequent experiences of cultural and geographic dislocation. She graduated from College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and spent a semester in 2008 as an exchange student in Centro Universitario de Arte, University of Guadalajara, Mexico. Nicholson has been selected as a finalist for several awards, including Marrickville Contemporary Art Prize (2008) and Yen Art Award, Gaffa (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions, predominantly in Sydney, including at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Firstdraft, Gaffa, Somewhere Gallery, Kudos Gallery and COFA Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was Silly Homeland at Gaffa, Sydney (2013) and her most recent solo exhibition was presented at Firstdraft, Sydney in April 2014, titled Ni Chicha Ni Limonada. Nicholson has also taken part in the Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2012) and has undertaken artist residency programs in Sydney and Peru.
James Nguyen (b.1982, Vietnam) is a Sydney-based artist interested in the critical and applied methods of new art forms to politics and culture. His diverse work ranges from drawing and painting to installation, video and performance. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from National Art School, Sydney, in 2012 and is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of Arts (SCA), University of Sydney. Since 2012 Nguyen has participated in several group exhibitions including at Articulate Project Space, Sydney; YOLK Collective, Sydney; William Wright’s Artists Projects, Sydney; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. He has also taken part in collaborative projects in Sydney such as Briony Barr Drawing Project at AIAS Conference and COSMOS Collaborative between SCA and Sydney Conservatorium. His first solo exhibition was at Bradfield College, North Sydney, in 2013 titled EXIT Strategy, and his recent solo exhibition, The Man With the Movie Camera, was presented at both SCA Gallery and FELTspace, Adelaide in 2014.
Images: Claudia Nicholson, Baby I Would Climb The Andes (2014), Silleta made of plywood and native Australian flowers, Image courtesy the artist and Zan Wimberley.
James Nguyen, 360 Degree Radial Arc (2014), multi-channel video installation. Image courtesy the artist.n flowers, Image courtesy the artist and Zan Wimberley.
Beijing Studio Program is an annual program of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and in 2014 is supported by Vicki Olsson.
Australia’s relationship with Asia is always changing.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has been at the forefront of understanding Asian-Australian art and culture since 1996. We have world-wide networks and expertise. We support artists, develop exhibitions, run education workshops and present our program around Australia and the world.
4A’s perspective is unique. We speak globally about the social, cultural and economic transformations happening in our region. We know that Asian culture is making an important impact on Australia’s future and that contemporary art tells the story of our time.Without your support 4A’s activities can’t reach their greatest potential to reflect and enact change in Australia’s unfolding relationship with Asia.
Support us to make creative connections with Asia happen.
Make a tax-deductible donation* to support us now
* The Australian Taxation office recognises the importance of donations to charitable organisations and provides incentives to encourage them. Donations will be received by the AAAA INC Fund of the The Asian Australian Artists Association Inc (4A) which has DGR status. All donations of $2 or more will be tax deductible.
If you would like to support 4A in other ways, or would like to know more about our donor program, please contact the Director by email or on 02 9212 0380.
Ways is the first solo exhibition by Australian artist Omar Chowdhury. Chowdhury has spent the past two years working in the country of his birth and one of the most densely populated on earth, whose character is deeply informed by religious faiths and daily acts of worship. There, he has created an ambitious new body of work, which traverses urban and rural terrains searching for material embodiments of spiritual transcendence.
Chowdhury produces large-scale and richly detailed moving image works filmed on location in Bangladesh during extended periods of immersion in various cultural and physical landscapes.
4A’s Curators’ Intensive is an initiative developed by 4A to encourage professional advancement amongst early career Australian cultural practitioners with an interest in curatorial practice. The Intensive will take place between Thursday 10 – Sunday 13 July at various locations in Sydney, Australia.
This is the second Intensive (following 2012) and will be led by three established curators who are working in an international context with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region. In 2014 the Curators’ Intensive will feature:
Cosmin Costinas (HK)
Dr Sophie McIntyre (AUS)
Robin Pekham (HK/Beijing)
These curators along with 4A will deliver this program over four consecutive days through a mix of public discussions and closed forums. The Intensive will consist of the following: each evening there will be a public presentation by one curator. On the following day a closed workshop will be led by one of the curators for participants only. Through these discussions participants will expand on the issues raised by curators during their public presentations.
This program will be of interest to curators or cultural practitioners at the beginning of their careers, as well as those currently working independently or in institutions and interested in participating in an expanded discussion around curatorial practice. While focused on a broad conception of contemporary Asian art, this program will encompass a much larger range of curatorial discussions. The participating curators have a wide variety of experiences from socially engaged art, curating local history, international perspectives, as well as museums and independent spaces.
PUBLIC LECTURES
In 2014 the 4A Curators’ Intensive includes a series of free public talks at 4A presented by our guest curators.
Bookings are essential via eventbrite. Please note you will need to book separately for each talks.
Thursday 10 July, 6.30pm – 8.00pm Tracing the Post-Internet: A Case Study in Curatorial Process Robin Peckham Book here
What is the relationship between the movement that has come to be called ‘post-internet’ and the media realities of the historical moment that enables it?
This talk will present the curatorial process and research behind the exhibition Art Post-Internet co-curated by Peckham, paying close attention to the differences between survey methodologies and thematic approaches to curating. Peckham will respond to notions including the differences between intent and effect in artistic practice, the tension between documentation and materiality in recent art, collaboration as a tool, the specificities of the exhibition and other possible realisations, and categories of curatorial work from essayistic narrative compositions to forms of analysis.
This presentation will tentatively structure a logic by which we might be able to expand a thematic understanding of post-internet art based on an empirical understanding of its social core.
Friday 11 July, 2.00pm – 4.00pm Politics, Art & Representation: Curatorship in an intercultural context Dr Sophie McIntyre Book here
This presentation explores the spatial and relational dynamics of curating exhibitions in an intercultural context by focussing on the meaning and significance of place in a geo-political, cultural, artistic and museological context. Drawing on several exhibitions of contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region that Dr. McIntyre has (co)curated, the presentation will delve into the politics of cultural representation and it will reflect on some of the challenges and valuable insights gained when curating across and between different cultures and audiences.
Saturday 12 July, 2.00pm – 4.00pm
Ten Million Rooms of Yearning & A Journal of the Plague Year: A Case Study of Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Cosmin Costinas Book here
This talk will present an insight into recent research and projects by Cosmin Costinas for Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Para/Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art space and one of the oldest and most active independent art centres in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society. Since 2011 Cosmin Costinas has been the Executive Director and Curator of Para/Site, where he has delivered a number of exhibitions that discuss and explore local political and historical contexts. Costinas will discuss a number of the challenges in presenting these projects, and consider how they fit within broader curatorial conversations in Hong Kong. As a relative newcomer to Hong Kong, Cosmin will also speak about his personal perspective in developing exhibitions and the role that collaboration plays in working in a new cultural context. What kind of responsibility does a curator, or indeed an organisation, have to the local?
Curators’ Biographies:
Cosmin Costinas is the Executive Director of the Para/site Art Space, Hong Kong’s leading non-profit organisation dedicated to contemporary visual art. He was born in Satu Mare, Romania in 1982. His was previously curator of BAK in the Netherlands; co-director of the 2010 Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, ; and editor of the magazine documenta 12. Major exhibitions include Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong inNew York for Para/site (2012); Spacecraft Icarus 13. Narratives of Progress from Elsewhere and In the Middle of Things for BAK (2011), and I, the Undersigned, a touring exhibition at the Institute of International Visual Arts in London, the Lunds Konsthall in Lund, tranzit+display in Prague, and Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2010–2011).
Dr Sophie McIntyre is a curator, art writer and lecturer with a particular interest in contemporary Asian art. After working for more than seventeen years as an art curator and gallery director, she completed a PhD on the impact of identity politics on artistic and exhibitionary practices during the post-martial law period in Taiwan. Sophie has lived in China and Taiwan and curated several art exhibitions from this region that have toured nationally and internationally. These include Penumbra (2007); Islanded: Contemporary Art from New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan (2005) (co-curated with Lee Weng Choy and Eugene Tan), Concrete Horizons: Art from China (2004) and Face to Face: Contemporary Art from Taiwan (1999-2000). She has given papers and published extensively on this field in exhibition catalogues, books and journals. Sophie was employed as a curator and gallery director of two university art museums in Australia and New Zealand, and prior to this time she worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in other public and commercial galleries in Sydney and Brisbane.
Robin Peckham is an editor and curator based between Hong Kong and Beijing. He operated the independent exhibition space Saamlung, Hong Kong from 2011-2013, and has organised exhibitions for institutions including the City University of Hong Kong; Goethe-Institut, Hong Kong; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Peckham has lectured at the University of Hong Kong City University, and Asia Art Archive. His writing is published in Artforum, LEAP, Monopol and Yishu, as well as books for the Minsheng Art Museum, Para/site Art Space, and Timezone8, including publications on video art pioneer Zhang Peili and architectural interventionists MAP Office.
2014 Intensive Participants:
Miriam Arbus (VIC) is originally from Canada where she studied Art History, Contemporary Theory and Curatorship at Concordia University and the University of Toronto. After completing her Masters degree she relocated to Melbourne. With dedicated interest in contemporary localised art practice, Miriam works as the Director and Curator of Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne. Her areas of foci are pertinent to new media practices as well as participatory art.
Mira Asriningtyas (INDONESIA) works as an independent curator and writer in Yogyakarta. In 2011 she founded an independent space that aims to build a supportive and positive environment for young artists – Lir Space, Yogyakarta. She was chosen as one of the curators in Young Curator Forum of Cemeti Art House, and recently selected to be part of the Young Curators Workshop by the Japan Foundation, Indonesia. Mira is especially interested in conceptually-driven projects, contemporary artworks and text-based art.
Andrew Ewing (NT) is Vietnamese-Australian. He has curated a discussion panel on Art & Censorship in Indonesia in the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival where he worked for three years. He was Program Manager at 24HR Art – the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, curating smaller spaces as well as co-curating a touring show with David Broker called Territorial. He received an Australia Council grant to work at the Venice Biennale, was Director and curator of the Darwin Pride Festival, and is currently on the selection committee for Asialink.
Sebastian Goldspink (NSW) is a Sydney-based curator and administration. In late 2011 he founded ALASKA Projects, a multi-disciplinary art space located in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Since opening, ALASKA has held over 50 exhibitions and showcased the work of over 300 emergings artists. Sebastian has curated extensively for ALASKA’s touring shows including I Miss Your More When It Rains, Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch and As Above So Below, Good Children Gallery, New Orleans. He is the curator of the John Fries Memorial Prize and the Art Bank roving curator for 2013/14. He is a regular contributor to arts publications including Inside, Art Collector, NAVA Quarterly and Sturgeon.
Sophie Kitson (NSW) has spent the last few years focusing on architecture and design, public programs, invigilating, writing and arts administration for various Australian and Italian based arts institutions. Most recently, she has been working at the USA Pavilion for the 55th Biennale di Venezia; has been curatorial assistant for Alaska Projects’ Director Sebasian Goldspink; completed a 3-month internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, and was the recipient of the 2012 Firstdraft Emerging Curators Program.
Alana Kushnir (VIC) is a freelance curator and art lawyer. She recently returned to Melbourne after living in London while completing her MFA Curating course at Goldsmiths. Her curatorial interests are focused on the intersection of the law, methodologies of curating and art practices which have been influenced by the advent of the internet.
While working across a variety of contexts, Tess Maunder (QLD) is primarily interested in a field of public inquiry beyond the individual curatorial position. Maunder is a founding co-director of The Maximilian with Laura Brown. In 2013, Maunder participated in both the 5th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course and ICI course: What does it mean to be international? Tess currently works for Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
Tulleah Pearce (NSW) is a Sydney-based curator and producer. She is interested in performative, situated and interdisciplinary art practices. She currently works as the Associate Curator at Performance Space and is a Co-Director of Firstdraft artist-run initiative. She has previously co-directed Critical Animals creative research symposium as part of This is Not Art, Newcastle.
Kyle Weise (VIC) is co-director of Screen Space, a not-for-profit screen-based gallery in Melbourne. He is a PhD candidate in Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne, where his research is focused on the moving image and the construction of space. Kyle is a former committee member of Kings ARI, Melbourne and was co-director of Beam Contemporary, Melbourne from 2010 to 2014.
Chloé Wolifson (NSW) is a Sydney-based independent arts writer and curator with an emerging practice across artist-run, commercial and public domains. She has curated exhibitions in Sydney at Breezeblock, Slot Gallery and Carriageworks, and is regularly commissioned as an arts writer. She currently sits on the board of Runway Australian Experimental Art Journal. www.chloewolifson.com
Gintani Nur Apresia Swastika (INDONESIA) is an independent curator currently based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Luisa Tresca (NSW) is an Italian born writer and gallery assistant with a background in Comparative Literature and five years working experience in the Chinese contemporary art field. After receiving an MA in Comparative Literature from Dublin City University, she moved to Beijing in 2009 and worked as a team member of Cao Fei’s RMB City art studio and with contemporary art gallery Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Luisa recently relocated to Sydney, Australia.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Curators’ Intensive is an initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been made possible with the support of Sue Acret & James Roth and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. 4A acknowledges the support of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
The 4A Members’ Program is a series of tailored events offering a chance to connect with people who share your passion for contemporary art.
As part of 4A’s 2014 Members’ Program we spend an afternoon at the Bundeena studio of Chinese-Australian painter, Shen Jiawei. Later in November, Members once again have first pick of artworks at our hugely popular 4A A4 fundraising exhibition, before wrapping up the year with an exclusive tour of a Sydney-based collector’s acquisitions.
If you’re already a 4A Member then be sure to get in quick as places are limited for a number of events.
If you’re not a Member then join today to enjoy what our Members’ Program has to offer and all the other benefits of membership.
SHEN JIAWEI STUDIO VISIT
Meeting point: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Date: Saturday 30 August 2014
Time: 1.00pm – 5.30pm
Ticketed: $22 for Members + booking fee
Bookings: HERE
4A takes you to beautiful Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park to the studio of celebrated Chinese-Australian artist, Shen Jiawei. Members have the rare opportunity to get a personal glimpse into the studio practice of a prominent painter who was a self-taught and prolific propaganda artist during China’s Cultural Revolution, with his work reproduced on posters seen in the millions. Members meet at 4A and travel with us by public transport (train and ferry) to Bundeena (approx 60 mins travel time each way). Places are limited so book early!
4A A4 EXHIBITION – EXCLUSIVE MEMBERS’ PREVIEW
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Date: Thursday 6 November 2014
Time: 5.00pm – 6.00pm
Bookings: HERE
Be first through the door for our much anticipated 4A A4 fundraising exhibition for your chance to buy works by leading contemporary Australian and international artists. Artworks are exhibited anonymously with artists’ namesand artwork details revealed upon sale. Support 4A’s programs by getting in before the general public.
COLLECTOR’S TOUR
Meeting point: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Date: November 2014 (date to be announced)
Time: To be announced
Bookings will be announced
For our final 4A Members’ event 4A’s Director Aaron Seeto takes you to the home of a passionate Sydney-based art collector who will introduce you to significant works in their collection and the stories behind their acquisitions.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 4A Beijing Studio Program.
Through this initiative, two early career artists will embark one a month-long intensive studio program in September 2014 (exact dates to be announced) at the studios of internationally renowned Chinese-Australian, artist Shen Shaomin located in Huairou District on the outskirts of Beijing.
4A’s Beijing Studio Program provides a unique opportunity for artists to research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build professional networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in the Asia region. On return to Australia artists will be invited to present their experiences in a public forum and make a proposal for an exhibition at 4A. If successful they will be mentored by 4A in the development of an exhibition in 2015. This is the third consecutive year that the program has been running.
The Program covers airfares, accommodation, daily meals, travel/medical insurance and a small stipend. Moreover it will provide an ongoing professional mentorship, cross-cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks in China.
ABOUT SHEN SHAOMIN
Over the last twenty years Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin has forged an important international career with an emphasis on experimental, conceptual and installation works. Based in Beijing, and having spent over a decade in Australia, Shen’s work spans a number of medium and explores individual and collective experiences of humanity and their impacts on our natural and constructed surroundings. Shen Shaomin has previously exhibited with 4A in The Floating Eye, Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012); and presented the solo exhibition, The Day After Tomorrow (2011). His work has been included in Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). In China he has exhibited at Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Shanghai Zendai MoMA, Shanghai; and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Across Europe and North America selected exhibitions include, Groniger Museum, Holland; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; ZKM Museum Karlrusche, Germany; Millennium Park, Chicago and Eli Klein Fine Art, New York.
Please read guidelines below and download the application form for full details.
Application is open to visual artists who are currently Australian permanent residents with less than five years’ continuous professional experience (including postgraduate studies), or who consider themselves early career for other reasons.
Please submit support material which has been completed in the last two years.
PROGRAM PERIOD Successful artists must be available for travel to Beijing, for one month in the beginning of September 2014 (exact dates to be announced). Once set, dates are not negotiable. Both selected artists will be travelling at the same time.
CRITERIA
Successful artists will be chosen based on the quality of their works, reasons for participation, viability of their participation and the potential benefits to the applicant’s artistic development. Decisions will be made by 4A’s Visual Arts Advisory Committee Panel and all decisions are final.
A statement of interest detailing why you would like to participate in the Studio Program and how you will benefit from it. Maximum 1 page.
A current CV. Maximum 1 page.
Support material material comprising a Powerpoint document with 10 images OR video material (10 minutes maximum) supplied as URL linke to uploaded content.
Please do not send us original material and note that submitted material will not be returned.
Applications should be submitted via email, post or in person to:
Applications for the 2014 Beijing Studio Program have now closed.
SUPPORT MATERIAL
Please supply images in Powerpoint or PDF at 72-dpi res with your application. Please do not send individual files.
Video material must be uploaded to a website and URL should be supplied for viewing.
AMENITIES
Accommodation and facilities are housed in Shen Shaomin’s studio, 52km from Beijing city centre (approximately 60 mins drive). These are newly built residences. In addition to a stipend, the studio will provide meals daily as well as a driver/translator available for a limited number of days to explore surrounding artists’ studio, galleries and other locations.
Chinese language skills are not necessary.
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Artists are responsible for obtaining necessary visas for entry into China and appropriate travel/medical insurance.
Artists are responsible for any excess baggage or freight to/from the Studio Program.
Artists will be asked to sign an agreement outlining the terms of the Program and their travel.
Artists will be asked to provide a public presentation of their trip on their return.
ENQUIRIES
Toby Chapman
Assistant Curator
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW 2000
02 9212 0380
toby.chapman@4a.com.au
“One of the important things about art
is its capacity to make us to reflect upon who we are… 4A does this through its entire program.”
Lindy Lee, artist and former 4A President
Lindy Lee, a leading contemporary Australian artist, became a 4A Member not long after 4A’s establishment. She remains a passionate supporter of 4A and its ideals – working with young artists, creating better awareness of Chinese-Australian history and culture and the valuable connections between Australia and Asia.
Video: Co-Produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Das Platforms
“The arts of Asia have always been an absolute passion of mine. 4A deals so much with contemporary life: it’s about bringing the art of Asia here now, so that we can get that rapport and communication with the creative spirits around us in the Asian region.”
“You cannot imagine anything more important and pertinent to a place like Sydney and Australia than to get involved with Asia culturally, socially and economically and to underwrite all that with a certain cultural sensitivity – that’s what the arts has the power to do.”
Edmund Capon, Chair of 4A discusses the role of Asia to Australia.
Video: Co-Produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Das Platforms
In this special keynote presentation Hammad Nasar discusses recent and ongoing projects that he and his colleagues have developed at the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive, one of the world’s leading public collections of primary and secondary source material about contemporary art in Asia, as well as his curatorial work with Green Cardamom.
Hammad addresses the idea of archive as verb: a dynamic process that looks beyond the physical aspects of material culture towards the actions that engagement with archives can enable. How can artists, curators, researchers, educators, students and the broader public generate new ideas, works and individual responses that continually reshape the archive itself? What does it mean to enrich and complicate histories that are told through the archive by means of active engagement? What are the responsibilities of collecting organisations towards public accessibility, public education and the historical and political implications of facilitating others to challenge dominant global art historical narratives?
Hammad connects this theme and his current work with Asia Art Archive with his experiences in producing curatorial projects at Green Cardamom, a London-based not-for-profit organisation that focuses on art from South and West Asia and which he co-founded.
Hammad Nasar is co-hosted by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Section through its International Visitors Program.
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer and Head of Research and Programmes at the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive. Earlier he co-founded the non-profit arts organisation Green Cardamom, London, that focuses on art from South and West Asia and has a commitment to exhibition-led enquiry. Hammad has curated or co-curated numerous international exhibitions and symposia, including: Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, Johnson Museum, Cornell University (2012, Ithaca, USA) and Nasher Museum, Duke University (2013, Durham, USA); Drawn from Life, Abbott Hall Art Gallery (2011, Kendal, UK); Beyond the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art from Pakistan (Pacific Asia Museum (2010, Pasadena, USA); Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, Cornell University (2012, Ithaca, USA); and Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Whitechapel Gallery and Fotomuseum Winterthur (2010, London, UK and Winterthur, Switzerland). Hammad plays an advisory role for various arts organisations including Delfina Foundation (UK), Rhode Island School of Design (USA) and San Art (Vietnam). He was a Fellow of the UK’s Clore Leadership Programme and Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London.
Asia Art Archive (AAA) was initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and secure the multiple recent histories of contemporary art in the Asia region. With research posts in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region. Built of 85% donated material, the collection now holds over 34,000 records, comprised of hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items, and it continues to grow. Through collecting and making information on the recent history of contemporary art in Asia easily accessible, AAA offers a range of programmes for educators, youth and young adults, and other members in the community, with the goal of becoming the definitive arts resource and library for the Hong Kong public, particularly educators and students.
Storytellers of the Town is an exhibition of work by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook spanning two decades. Araya is one of Thailand’s foremost contemporary artists, whose practice is concerned with the fundamental aspects of life and death, collective experiences of history and fate, and the configuring of self through the redeployment of everyday images and situations. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town includes seminal installation and video works, a number of which have never been presented outside of Thailand.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town
14 March – 10 May, 2014
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Interview: Clare Veal
Subtitles: Phaptawan Suwannakudt
Video: Co-Produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Das Platforms
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Section invite you to:
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION:
ARCHIVE AS VERB
HAMMAD NASAR
HEAD OF RESEARCH AND PROGRAMMES, ASIA ART ARCHIVE
Thursday 3 April 2014
6.30pm-7.30pm
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay Street, Sydney Bookings: Free, bookings essential via eventbrite here
Refreshments will be served
In this special keynote presentation Hammad Nasar will discuss recent and ongoing projects that he and his colleagues have developed at the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive, one of the world’s leading public collections of primary and secondary source material about contemporary art in Asia.
Hammad will address the idea of archive as verb: a dynamic process that looks beyond the physical aspects of material culture towards the actions that engagement with archives can enable. How can artists, curators, researchers, educators, students and the broader public generate new ideas, works and individual responses that continually reshape the archive itself? What does it mean to enrich and complicate histories that are told through the archive by means of active engagement? What are the responsibilities of collecting organisations towards public accessibility, public education and the historical and political implications of facilitating others to challenge dominant global art historical narratives?
Ideal for those who are interested in understanding the development of contemporary art in Asia and the ideas and motivations behind activating archives, Hammad will link this theme and his current work with Asia Art Archive with his experiences in producing curatorial projects at Green Cardamom, a London-based not-for-profit organisation that focuses on art from South and West Asia and which he co-founded.
Hammad Nasar’s presentation complements 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s renewed focus on developing its contemporary art archive for research, education and program opportunities in the near future. Since 1996, 4A has been documenting and collecting information about contemporary artists and Australia’s evolving cultural relationships in the Asia Pacific region.
Hammad Nasar is co-hosted by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Section through its International Visitors Program.
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer and Head of Research and Programmes at the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive. Earlier he co-founded the non-profit arts organisation Green Cardamom, London, that focuses on art from South and West Asia and has a commitment to exhibition-led enquiry. Hammad has curated or co-curated numerous international exhibitions and symposia, including: Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, Johnson Museum, Cornell University (2012, Ithaca, USA) and Nasher Museum, Duke University (2013, Durham, USA); Drawn from Life, Abbott Hall Art Gallery (2011, Kendal, UK); Beyond the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art from Pakistan (Pacific Asia Museum (2010, Pasadena, USA); Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, Cornell University (2012, Ithaca, USA); and Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Whitechapel Gallery and Fotomuseum Winterthur (2010, London, UK and Winterthur, Switzerland). Hammad plays an advisory role for various arts organisations including Delfina Foundation (UK), Rhode Island School of Design (USA) and San Art (Vietnam). He was a Fellow of the UK’s Clore Leadership Programme and Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London.
Asia Art Archive (AAA) was initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and secure the multiple recent histories of contemporary art in the Asia region. With research posts in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region. Built of 85% donated material, the collection now holds over 34,000 records, comprised of hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items, and it continues to grow. Through collecting and making information on the recent history of contemporary art in Asia easily accessible, AAA offers a range of programmes for educators, youth and young adults, and other members in the community, with the goal of becoming the definitive arts resource and library for the Hong Kong public, particularly educators and students.
On Saturday 15 March 2pm, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is hosting an artist talk with Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook introducing her solo exhibition Storytellers of the Town. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of Thailand’s foremost contemporary artists who has had a significant impact upon the contemporary art of South-East Asia and a lasting influence upon other generations of artists working in video and installation practice.
Araya’s work will be familiar with Australian audiences, having participated in the Biennale of Sydney (1996 and 2010) and most recently in Documenta 13 (2012), Istanbul Biennale (2003) as well as other group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2012); National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011); National Art Gallery, Singapore (2010)
Saturday 15 March 2pm
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Free event
The Board of 4A today announces the appointment of Edmund Capon AM, OBE as the new Chair of the Board of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Capon is one of the most respected and recognised figures in the arts, and takes up the position just prior to the launch of 4A’s major 2014 solo exhibition of internationally acclaimed Thai artist, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, in Storytellers of the Town (opening 14 March).
4A Director Aaron Seeto said, “Edmund Capon’s appointment to the Board of 4A as its Chairman is a tremendous appointment and we warmly welcome him to the role. Following Edmund’s extensive career at the highest levels of the art sector, including leading the Art Gallery of NSW for 33 years, he brings enthusiasm and a great wealth of knowledge and expertise to the 4A organisation. Edmund also shares with 4A a strong passion for Asian art and cultural exchange. His appointment comes at a significant time for both 4A and the rapidly developing Australia-Asia cultural network which we operate within.”
“The arts of Asia have always been an absolute passion of mine. 4A deals so much with contemporary life: it’s about bringing the art of Asia here now, so that we can get that rapport and communication with the creative spirits around us in the Asian region.”
“You cannot imagine anything more important and pertinent to a place like Sydney and Australia than to get involved with Asia culturally, socially and economically and to underwrite all that with a certain cultural sensitivity – that’s what the arts has the power to do.”
4A is a pioneering organisation and one of the first in Australia to dedicate its entire program and activities to the contemporary art of the Asia-Pacific region. Since its humble beginnings in 1996 in a small office space in Chinatown, 4A has undergone a number of significant transformations that reflect the growth of contemporary Asian art in Australia. 4A has grown into an important national site for contemporary artistic contemplation with an impressive network of artists, organisations and supporters throughout Australia and around the world.
Recent notable projects include the Sydney Pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale (2012); Song Dong Waste Not presented through a partnership with 4A and Carriageworks (2013) and Vertical Villages developed for the Jakarta Biennale (2013). 4A’s list of artistic collaborators spans China, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Cambodia, Korea, Taiwan, US, UK, Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand as well as Australia.
Dr Melissa Chiu, Museum Director and Senior Vice President, Global Arts and Cultural Programs at the Asia Society in New York City, who is also 4A’s founding Director said, “4A has emerged as an important regional voice, not only creating opportunities for Asian artists in Australia, but also advocating for the contemporary art of the region. The appointment of Edmund Capon to the Board of 4A signals an exciting opportunity. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience which I imagine will raise the profile of 4A more broadly both in Australia and elsewhere.”
Lindy Lee, artist and former Chair of 4A states: “In its history, 4A has been at the forefront of the discussions of Australia’s cultural diversity ensuring that the voices of contemporary Asian-Australian artists are included within broader definitions of Australian culture. It’s work is of fundamental importance. Edmund Capon will bring a great exuberance to ensure the longevity of 4A.”
Caroline Choy, who held the position of Chair remains a member of the Board.
See the video announcement with Edmund Capon, Lindy Lee and Aaron Seeto talking about 4A here.
EDMUND CAPON AM, OBE: Biography
Mr Capon took up his appointment as Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in November 1978 following his arrival from London where, for the previous five years, he held the position of Assistant Keeper, Far Eastern Section, Victoria and Albert Museum. He stepped down as director on 23 December 2011.
Mr Capon attained a Master of Philosophy Degree in Chinese Art and Archaeology (including language) from London University’s Department of Oriental and African Studies with his thesis entitled: The Inter-dependence of Chinese Buddhist Sculpture in Bronze and Stone from AD386 to 581, and is a recognised world expert in his particular field.
In October 2003 Mr Capon opened the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ newly rebuilt Asian galleries. This major building project has created two levels of greatly enhanced and expanded exhibition space for the Gallery’s Asian collection, as well as space for touring exhibitions of Asian art. In May 2011 Mr Capon opened 3,300 square metres of new and refurbished modern and contemporary galleries, which includes dedicated display space for the Kaldor Family Collection.
Mr Capon is a Visiting Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of New South Wales; is on the Board of the St James Ethics Committee; has written extensively on the arts of China; written and presented a 3-part ABC TV-China Central Television co-produced documentary entitled Meishu: Travels in Chinese Art which has been distributed worldwide; developed the AGNSW as a centre for Asian art display and education; created the Gallery’s highly successful Foundation, a Capital fund, to acquire works for the Collection; has curated exhibitions encompassing Asian, European and Australian art; has written extensively on Chinese art & archaeology and on the work of artists such as Jeffrey Smart, Caravaggio and Giacometti.
Mr Capon’s most recent non-Gallery publication is a collection of essays entitled I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s Adventures in Art which was published in November 2009 by Penguin Australia.
He was awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of NSW in 2000 and from Macquarie University in 2010. He has been honoured by the governments of Britain, France, Italy and Australia for his contribution to art and culture.
4A BOARD MEMBERS
Edmund Capon (Chair)
John Choi (Vice President)
Adrian Williams (Treasurer)
Caroline Choy
Lisa Corsi
Sharon Chen
John Young
Hannah Skrzynski
Over the last few months we have revamped our online shop, streamlined our payment system and presented a cache of previous 4A publications. It’s the place now where you can order 4A editions which we have been producing over the last few years, our back catalogue of exhibitions, make a donation or purchase and renew membership.
One of the benefits of 4A membership is discounts in the 4A shop. All current members receive 10% off books, catalogues and editions. To receive the discount, you just need to be a current member and you will receive the secret code which is sent to you when you sign up as a member.
Featured alongside leading international galleries and renowned international artists in this weekend’s
Art Stage Singapore is the first Australia Platform, an exhibition comprising six Australian artists curated by Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Established in 2011, the last three years have positioned Art Stage Singapore as a top art market capital, attracting the world’s most influential private art collectors, corporate buyers and VIPs. Art Stage Singapore returns in 2014 for its 4th edition with a stronger than ever showing of galleries from Singapore and the Asia Pacific region, underscoring the fair’s core Asian identity presenting over 100 galleries.
Aaron Seeto has selected a number of Australian artists to present at Singapore’s most important art fair. The Australia Platform is part of Art Stage’s new fair format comprising eight country and regional Platforms adding a new dimension to the fair’s artistic offerings. The Platforms include Southeast Asia, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia and Central Asia.
Included in the Australia Platform are both emerging and established artists represented by leading Australian galleries: Peter Alwast (GALLERY 9), Sam Jinks (SULLIVAN+STRUMPF), Juz Kitson (GAGPROJECTS), Jasper Knight & Isabelle Toland (CHALK HORSE), Samuel Quinteros (GALERIE POMPOM), and Khaled Sabsabi (MILANI GALLERY). More on Australian platform artists here.
Says Aaron “This selection of six artists based in different cities around Australia is a snapshot into varied concerns and interests. Their work responds to many of the complexities of contemporary Australian life – from the intersection of its colonial and migrant histories and the politics that arise from Australia’s particular geography, landscape and climate, through to expressions of intimacy and privacy in contrast to the broad openness that characterizes our global interactions.
“This selection is not directed by a theme per se, but really an attitude – that art has an important social role to play, that we understand our contemporary condition when we delve into the complexities and totality of our social and historical experiences.”
Art Stage Singapore takes place 16-19 January 2014. Visit the official website for further information here.
Join 4A for curator-led talks and Chinese language tours as part of Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine exhibition and during the City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival 2014. 4A will be open late til 9pm during the Chinese New Year Festival Night Markets.
4A UP LATE FOR CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL NIGHT MARKETS
WITH CURATOR TALKS
Friday 24 January & Saturday 25 January 6 – 9pm
Free event
CHINESE LANGUAGE TOURS
Saturday 18 January & Saturday 15 February 12 – 1pm
Free event
Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar is a night of Chinese cinematic wonder and cutting-edge video art presented in the architectural grandeur of the art deco Paramount Pictures building in the ‘Hollywood Quarter’ of Sydney’s Surry Hills.
Curated by 4A in response to the unique setting of Golden Age Cinema and taking as its inspiration contemporary resonances of recent Chinese cinema history, Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar presents two feature films and two installations of video art that explore the significant changes that have occurred to the physical and cultural landscape of China over recent decades. Offering ticketed cinema screenings in addition to contemporary art installations that respond to this unique setting, join us for drinks, wonder and splendour in the elegant surrounds of a ‘golden age’.
Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Golden Age Cinema & Bar and is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
TICKETED SCREENING ($20 +bf)
6.30PM Still Life (2006) duration 108mins
TICKETS SELLING FAST
Renowned Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s haunting minimalist drama Still Life takes as its focal point the construction of the colossal Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Interweaving two intimate stories with the dramatic geographical transformation of landscapes and cities flooded by the dam, Still Life is a beautiful and haunting meditation on memory and impermanence.
TICKETED SCREENING ($20 +bf)
9.00PM A Touch of Sin (2013) duration 133 mins
SOLD OUT
A man who becomes a tiger after being pushed to the edge by corruption, a receptionist who finds an emphatic way of dealing with bad customers, a motorcyclist who discovers that happiness is a warm gun and a waiter with no one left to turn on but himself. These are a few of the characters you meet in Jia Zhangke’s explosive new film that tackles prodigious social tensions in China with startling flashes of violence.
FREE
6.00PM – midnight In The Foyer
Contemporary Chinese artist Chen Qiulin’s multi-channel video installation The Empty City (2012) investigates the history and modernisation of her home province of Sichuan. Offering strange juxtapositions afforded by the rapid pace of changes sweeping China, The Empty City plays with the incongruities in modern China, conflating images of traditional and contemporary life with personal histories and themes of demolition and transformation.
FREE
6.00PM – midnight In The Bar
SOLD OUT JOIN OUR WAITING LIST
Hong Kong-based video, installation and performance artist Adrian Wong explores connections between the recent urban redevelopment of Hong Kong’s west end and his own family history. Umbrellahead I Will Find You (2012) is a multi-sensory installation that is the result of intensive social research that Wong undertook with Hong Kong residents about their memories of the city, particularly during the 1960s and ‘70s, known as the ‘Golden Age of Chinese Cinema’. To accompany this video installation the artist has created bespoke costumes, cocktails and a dining menu to complete the evening.
Cinema Alley at Golden Age Cinema & Bar is curated by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Golden Age Cinema & Bar and is an associated event of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
BEIJING SILVERMINE北京银矿 THOMAS SAUVIN
OPENING: SATURDAY 11 JANURY 2PM – 4PM To be officially opened by Councillor Robert Kok of the City of Sydney, with special guest speaker
Linda Jaivin, novelist, writer, translator and Visiting Fellow, Australian National University
4A Centre or Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St
Sydney NSW 2000
#BeijingSilvermine
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
4A MEMBERS’ EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW WITH THOMAS SAUVIN
Saturday 11 January 1 – 2pm
Free with 4A Membership. Become a Member today here.
4A UP LATE FOR CHINESE NEW YEAR FESTIVAL NIGHT MARKETS
WITH CURATOR TALKS
Friday 24 January & Saturday 25 January 6 – 9pm
Free event
CHINESE LANGUAGE TOURS
Saturday 18 January & Saturday 15 February 12 – 1pm
Free event
Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the Chinese capital and the life of its inhabitants in the decades following the Cultural Revolution.
Since 2009 Beijing-based collector Thomas Sauvin has amassed, edited and archived more than half a million photographic negatives destined for destruction in a recycling plant on the edge of the city. It was here that Sauvin encountered a man by the name of Xiao Ma who stockpiles negatives, x-rays, compact discs and other detritus to melt down and filter for their silver nitrate content intended to be sold to laboratories. Recognising a rare chance to rescue abandoned memories, Sauvin struck up a deal to buy these photographic negatives by the kilo. This ‘silvermine’ of anonymous subjects and vernacular photography styles covers a period of roughly 20 years – from 1985, when affordable consumer film first came into widespread use in China, to 2005 when digital photography encouraged the mass disposal and willful neglect of film.
In his phenomenal accumulation of photographs Thomas Sauvin allows us to witness the intimate and public lives of ordinary Chinese people during a period of immense social change. These material images reveal the mundane and extraordinary moments in everyday life that have been rescued from oblivion. More than just a glimpse into the lives of people that might otherwise have been invisible participants in an impersonal collective history, the subject of Beijing Silvermine is as much the wondrous, imperfect and perishable qualities of film photography itself – its delayed surprises between the split-second of exposure and the alchemical magic of development.
Beijing Silvermine at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents a selection of photographs from this extraordinary archive curated by Thomas Sauvin that explore universal themes of love, leisure, birth, youth, happiness and the subtle changes – both in domestic settings and in the wider public realm – that the economic opening to the West brought into ordinary Chinese people’s lives. Also presented are two mesmerising video animations, produced by Beijing-based animator Lei Lei in collaboration with Sauvin, that reveal the surreal imagescape and stupendous depth of the Silvermine.
Beijing Silvermine opens at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Saturday 11 January 2014, 2pm – 4pm to be officially opened by Councillor Robert Kok of the City of Sydney, with special guest speaker Linda Jaivin, novelist, writer, translator and Visiting Fellow, Australian National University.
Thomas Sauvin is a French photography collector, editor and curator who lives in Beijing. Since 2006 he has worked as a consultant for the UK-based Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) for whom he collects Chinese work, from contemporary art photography to period publications and anonymous photography. A glimpse into this collection is presented in the photobook Happy Tonite published by AMC in 2010. Sauvin has participated in exhibitions including Photographic Oddities from the AMC, Caochangdi Photo Festival, Beijing (2012), and more recently his project Beijing Silvermine has been presented by Singapore International Photo Festival (2012); FORMAT Photo Festival, Derby, UK (2013); The Salt Yard, Hong Kong (2013); and Lianzhou Foto Festival (2013), China’s premier international photography festival, where it received New Photography Award of the Year. Sauvin’s Silvermine, a limited edition five-album set of photographs from his archive, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2013 and was selected by renowned English photographer Martin Parr as one of the Best Photobooks of the Year for The British Journal of Photography.
Lei Lei is a Chinese multimedia animation artist based in Beijing with experience in graphic design, illustration, short cartoons, graffiti and hip-hop. In 2005, while still in school, he founded the design group Raydesign Studio and in 2009 received his master’s degree in animation from Tsinghua University, Beijing. His works have been screened in international festivals and have received numerous awards.
Emiland Guillerme is a French filmmaker and journalist currently based in Rome. Since graduating in journalism from La Sorbonne his news stories have appeared in The New York Times, France 2 and Canal + among others. His short documentary Silvermine (2012) about Thomas Sauvin’s project is included in 4A’s exhibition.
MEDIA COVERAGE
Steve Dow, Exhibition captures life from negative past, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 2014.
Storytellers of the Town is an exhibition of work by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook spanning two decades. Araya is one of Thailand’s foremost contemporary artists, whose practice is concerned with the fundamental aspects of life and death, collective experiences of history and fate, and the configuring of self through the redeployment of everyday images and situations. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook:Storytellers of the Town includes seminal installation and video works, a number of which have never been presented outside of Thailand.
The installation Has Girl Lost Her Memory (1994), which has been reconstructed for 4A, presents the artists negotiations with traditional roles for women in Thailand, recognising the restrictions placed on her mother and grandmother, as well as her own attempts to surpass these limitations. Further exploring the circumvented space of women in Thai society, Great Times Message, Storytellers of the Town, The Insane (2002) is a multi-channel video installation which sees the artist give voice to those women whose experience in contemporary Thai society remains un-representable. By interviewing female patients of an insane asylum, Araya offers her subjects the opportunity to narrate their own experiences, while also drawing into focus a collective understanding of femaleness and the trauma that often accompanies it.
Having lost her mother at an early age, Araya’s work also attempts to create a space for the representation of death and loss. In The Class (2005) the artist leads a tutorial to a classroom of six corpses which are shrouded in white sheets and arranged side-by-side on silver morgue trays. The Class negotiates both the diversity of cultural attitudes towards mortality and the seeming futility of communicating with those that have passed.
In her more recent works, such as Some unexpected events sometimes bring momentary happiness. Afterwards, regret rises in our memory even for bygone hardship (2009) and Treachery of the Moon (2012) the artist shifts beyond the overriding sense of melancholia, creating works which are precariously imbued with humour, charm and joy. Often steeped with a sense of impermanence, sadness and loss, these works nonetheless act as a counterpoint to the artist’s contemplation of the emotional and physical trauma of female experiences and death.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town presents the artist’s attempts to find a language to represent her experience as a woman; a Thai person; a daughter and granddaughter; a teacher and as an individual who has experienced extreme loss through the deaths of those close to her.
The exhibition has been curated by John Clark and Clare Veal.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook was born in Trad, Thailand, in 1957. After earning both a BFA and an MFA in graphic arts from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, she continued her studies in Germany at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, receiving a diploma in 1990 and an MA in 1994. Radjarmrearnsook’s work has been installed in solo presentations at international institutions including the National Gallery, Bangkok (1987, 1992, 1994, 1995 and 2002); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2003); Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach (2012); Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (2012) and Denver Art Museum, Denver (2013). She has been included in a number of biennial and periodic exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (1996 and 2010), Istanbul Biennale (2003) and Documenta 13 (2012). The artist’s work has also been show in group exhibitions internationally, at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2001 an 2007); Fine Arts Museum, Berne, Switzerland (2006); National Art Gallery, Singapore (2010); National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011); Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2012) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013). Rasdjarmrearnsook, a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
John Clark is a specialist on modern Japanese and Chinese art as well as several other Asian countries. He retired from Professor of Asian Art History [Personal Chair] at the University of Sydney in October 2013, and is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Humanities. He first visited Thailand in October 1976, and has been working on modern and contemporary Thai art since 1992. He recently published the first comparative study in English of two modern Asian art cultures, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s, Sydney, Power Publications, 2010 with a forewords by Yin Shuangxi and Apinan Poshyananda.
Clare Veal is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History & Film Studies at the University of Sydney, where she is completing her thesis on the relationship between photography and Thai identity from 1950 to 2010. She has published in Trans Asia Photography Reviews, Modern Art Asia, and the Silpakorn Journal of Fine Arts, and is currently working as a sub-editor for Asian art for the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism.Between 2012 and 2013 she was a researcher in residence at the Thai Art Archives, Bangkok and completed fieldwork in Thailand with funding from the Asia Institute, Melbourne and the Royal Thai Embassy.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in association with ANU Drill Hall Gallery and the University of Sydney and is supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-Thailand Institute of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Gordon Darling Foundation and 100 Tonson Gallery, Bangkok.
Ways is the first solo exhibition by Australian artist Omar Chowdhury. Chowdhury has spent the past two years working in the country of his birth and one of the most densely populated on earth, whose character is deeply informed by religious faiths and daily acts of worship. There, he has created an ambitious new body of work, which traverses urban and rural terrains searching for material embodiments of spiritual transcendence.
Chowdhury produces large-scale and richly detailed moving image works filmed on location in Bangladesh during extended periods of immersion in various cultural and physical landscapes. Producing an expansive view of the country and its spiritual practice, he has captured both intimate and communal moments that show people taking part in religious ceremonies and festivals as well as engrossing himself in a level of committed observance and transformation of everyday actions. In this suite of works tensions arise — between form and formlessness, action and inaction, presence and absence — which are heightened by the artist through a cinematic style that draws on both the mechanisms of documentary filmmaking as well as more experimental narrative structures.
For Chowdhury the camera is not simply a tool for image-making but a means to frame and test acts of philosophical and artistic enquiry. How might individual gestures and the movement and rhythm of ritualistic acts embody collective experiences of spiritual transcendence? To what extent does an immersion in architecture shape the human body and mind within real and imagined boundaries? Is the path to enlightenment necessarily an individualistic and hermetic journey, or one that can be experienced and shared with others?
Commissioned especially for this exhibition by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art with support from The Keir Foundation is Omar Chowdhury’s Locus I, II, a two-channel video installation that over its long duration presents sequences of complex layers and sequences of communities and their built environment that ultimately question the symbiotic relationship between spiritual ways and physical means.
FURTHER INFORMATION AND RESOURCES
Download the brochure for this exhibition featuring an essay by Murtaza Vali, An Index of the Divine here
MEDIA COVERAGE
Nicholas Forrest, Review: Omar Chowdhury Experiments with Faith and Form at 4A Gallery, Sydney, Blouin ArtInfo, 17 July 2014.
Andrew Frost, Omar Chowdhury review: A wilful disregard for convention, The Guardian, 3 June 2014.
Naomi Gall, Find a Deeper Meaning with Omar Chowdhury,Artery, 23 May 2014.
Naomi Gall, Arts Review: Ways,The Au Review, 2 June 2014.
Omar Chowdhury Showcases Dhaka in Ways Solo Exhibition, Broadsheet
Omar Chowdhury: Ways is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and supported by the Keir Foundation and the Edward M. Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts, Dhaka.
Haze is an exhibition of new work by Australian artists Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos and Jensen Tjhung. Together, these three artists undertook 4A’s inaugural Beijing Studio Program at the studios of Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin in Huairou on the northern outskirts of Beijing in September 2013. Upon returning to Australia the artists spoke of both the highlights and challenges of living and working on the fringes of the Chinese capital. The experience had a subtle effect on each artists’ individual practice, broadening their understanding of different conceptual approaches to object-making and divergent modes of interpretation.
Despite Huairou being known domestically as an ‘oxygen bar’ for Beijing due to its leafy environment at the foot of the Great Wall, Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos and Jensen Tjhung were transfixed by the grey mist that was a constant element within their surroundings. During their stay they individually began to consider their own position in this foreign landscape and the ways in which quotidian materials and objects – and language itself – can obfuscate simple understandings or explanations of place.
The artworks presented in Haze juxtapose structural materials such as concrete and steel with kinetic components, reconfiguring domestic objects with a sense of playfulness that highlights the absurdity and humour that can occur in moments of cultural exchange.
Tully Arnot’s practice develops on ‘outsider’ modes of invention, generating a non-teleological creative process with unanticipated outcomes. Inventive and alchemical explorations of material and form are used to explore the subtle changing of states within art from everyday object to sculpture/invention/artwork, or stuck between in a state of flux. Further Arnot’s work aims to reconnect with objects and understand what their functions (and by extension, our needs) really are. His works poetically interpret the intangible relationships we have with everyday items and illuminate new ways of thinking and interacting with the world around us., More subjectively, his work addresses feelings of absence, longing, play, the uncanny, human relationships with objects and technology, the absurd and contradiction. Arnot’s current research explores various real and imagined Artificial Intelligences, addressing the value of our relationships with non-sentient forms. His current body of work looks at the way these relationships feed back into our own capacity to interact meaningfully with one another. His work often integrates complex technologies with everyday or crass components. This merging of high and low thought exemplifies the isolating nature of our increasingly connected, but ultimately disconnected world.
Sarah Contos is a multidisciplinary artist working across various modes of collage, sculpture and installation. Her work unpacks notions of primitivism, eroticism and history – whether cultural or personal – utilising formal and referential counterpoints to explore ideas of identity, sensuality and myth. Working with a diverse range of materials – from ceramics, plaster and screenprinted textiles to collected fabrics and discarded objects – Contos forges disjunctions in culture, time and gender to create new mythologies, characters and histories, reflected in fictional objects and forms that float between the familiar and the uncanny. Her work is at once highly personal, intimate and enmeshed in wider taxonomies of art history.
Jensen Tjhung is a Melbourne-based artist. Graduating from the Victoria College of the Arts (painting) in 2002, Jensen has shown work at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, and has undergone residencies at Artspace, Sydney and Beijing Studio Program at 4A Centre Of Contemporary Art. Jensen’s work is often project-based, large scale installation and sculpture which addresses themes of belief, loss of belief, hysteria and void.
MEDIA COVERAGE
2SER Radio 107.3FM, So Hot Right Now with Jess Scully. Exhibition curator Toby Chapman and Sarah Contos interviewed on 16 August 2014. Podcast available here.
Haze is produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been assisted by Shen Shaomin Studios, Beijing; Concordia Galleries Artist in Residence program, Newington College, Sydney; Square One Studios, Sydney; and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
The Beijing Studio Program is an annual program of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art that is supported by Vicki Olsson.
4A A4 is your chance to snap up a unique work by an international or local art star. Established and emerging artists have risen to our challenge to make a work that’s A4.Add original works to your collection for a mere $200.
Here’s how it works All A4 artworks are available for purchase at a fixed price of $200. Artworks are exhibited anonymously with artists’ names and artwork details revealed upon sale. What will catch your eye? From opening night through to sell out, you can pick up a small masterpiece. All proceeds from sales go right back into 4A’s coffers to support our 2015 artistic program.
ABDUL ABDULLAH, ABDUL-RAHMAN ABDULLAH, RENDY ‘RADIT’ ADITYA, CHRISTINE AI, TONY ALBERT, ANONYMOUS, LIU ANRAN, RUSHDI ANWAR, TAI ANXIN, ARAHMAIANI, TULLY ARNOT, BABABA INTERNATIONAL, SUNIL BADAMI, TIYAN BAKER, CATHY BALL, BRAMASTYA ‘SOTIL’ BAYU SADEWA, PRISCILLA BOURNE, LINDA BRESCIA, TINA BRIDGE, CORINNE BRITTAIN, DAMIEN BUTLER, PENELOPE CAIN, ALIVA CALLAGHAN, CONSUELO CAVANIGLIA, JESSICA CHAM, DU CHENYAN, OLIVA CHOW, OMAR CHOWDHURY, DARREN CHUK, DANICA CHUK, RHONDA CLASPER, TERRENCE COMBOS, SARAH CONTOS, BRADLEY COOK, MARY COSTELLO, GABRIELLE COURTENAY, LOUISE COX, JAYANTO DAMANIK, DACCHI DANG, JULIAN DAY, M. EDGAR DEGAS, GARY DEIRMENDJIAN, SHOUFAY DERZ AND FIONA DOBRIJEVICH , SHOUFAY DERZ, RUDY ‘ATJEH’ DHARMAWAN, ISABELLA DOBRIJEVICH, FIONA DOBRIJEVICH, SONG DONG, FAN DONGWANG, ELEANOR ER, MINE ERER, LUX ETERNA, JANELLE EVANS, ZHOU FAYE, OLIVIA FREEMAN, KATH FRIES, JOOLIE GREEN, ISHU HAN, UJI ‘HAHAN’ HANDOKO ES, IPEH HANIFA, JOSH HARLE, HENDRA ‘HEHE’ HARSONO, PEI PEI HE, LORRAINE HELLER-NICHOLAS, SERGIO HERNANDEZ MERCHAN, VICTORIA HODGKINSON, SHEN HONGWEI, YING HUANG, CAROL HUDSON, LAURA HUNT, FA INDUN, ROSLISHAM “ISE” ISMAIL, HOU JIANAN, LUAN JIAQI, SHEN JIAWEI, JUMAADI, ELLEN KENT, SHIVANJANI LAL, DAVID LANGLEY, NELSON LAU, GILLIAN LAVERY, HYUN-HEE LEE, WALTER LEE, JAE HOON LEE, OWEN LEONG, PAMELA LEUNG, SONG LING, SHIYUAN LIU, ZHANG LONG, KASANE LOW, CRAIG LOXLEY, LI LUO, MANDA MA, KERRY MACAULAY, GE MALI, GE MALI AND LI XIANG, JUSTIN MALINOWSKI, KAYE MARESSO, ENJIA MI, PRIHATMOKO MOKI, NATASHA MURRAY, PETER NELSON, JAMES NGUYEN, SIMON NICHOLLS, CLAUDIA NICHOLSON, RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN, ENKA NKOMR, PAUL OGIER, SEUNG YUL OH, DAVID OLLIFFE, RAQUEL ORMELLA, TONI PAUL, TAMARA PAVLOVIC, SUE PEDLEY, JIM PENG, ANYA PESCE, JASON PHU, JENNIFER POON, JOSH PURNELL, CHRISTINA PUTH, IRINDHITA ‘AYASH’ LARAS PUTRI, ANNE QUILTY, STEPHANIE RADOK, PEDRO RAMOS, ALWIN REAMILLO, LI RENJIANG, LIANE ROSSLER, RUWAHYUDI, KOJI RYUI, KAY S LAWRENCE, JOANNE SAAD, KHALED SABSABI, OKTA SAMID, JOSEP SANTAMARIA, MARCO ANTONIO SCARELLI, TONY SCHWENSEN, PAMELA SEE, AARON SEETO, ALEX SETON, JOSEPHINE SEYFRIED, SUE SEYMOUR, MICHAEL SHAOWANASAI, SAI KE CHANG SHENGING, ZHOU SHUAIBING, VIPOO SRIVILASA, ANKE STÄCKER, PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT, GINTANI NUR APRESIA SWASTIKA, LUHSUN TAN, CYRUS TANG, RIONO ‘TATANG’ TANGGUL, WU TIANTIAN, LUCIA TRAN-DINH, GARRY TRINH, MARY VAN DEN BERK, DANIEL VERNER, JONATHAN VERZOSA, JERRY WANG, LACHLAN WARNER, JESSICA B WATSON, SHEN WEDNESDAY, GUAN WEI, KARL WEIMING LU, TUO WEN, KRISNA WIDIATHAMA, RACHEL WILLIAMS, LAURA WILSON, JASON WING, EKO BAMBANG WISNU, ELKE WOHLFAHRT, GEORGINA WOOD, YU YE WU, SONG XI, HE XIANGYU, TAN XIAOGUANG, BAO XIAOWEI, YIN XIUZHEN, ZHOU YANFENG, JUN YANG, SIMON YATES, WANG YING, HELEN YIP, KEN + JULIA YONETANI, JOHN YOUNG, WU ZHE, TIANLI ZU AND MORE.
Vertical Villages: Level Up is the second phase of the collaboration between ruangrupa ArtLab, Keg de Souza and 4A, presented at the 15th Jakarta Biennale 2013. Vertical Villages: Level Up is contextualised within the theme of the 15th Jakarta Biennale, ‘siasat’ – translated as ‘tactics’ – which unpacks the strategies individuals and communities apply to navigate and negotiate the urban environment of Jakarta. Artists and collectives were invited to participate by making new work in Jakarta either in collaboration or response to specific communities and groups.
The installations in Vertical Villages: Level Up comprises a series of maps of Jakarta and Sydney visualising the experience of an emerging middle class. As a precursor to the Vertical Villages project in Sydney, Vertical Villages:Level Up engaged with a diverse group of students and teachers from international schools and residential developments in Jakarta examining the role that education has played as a strategy to increase mobility and status within both the city and the region. A number of Indonesian students currently studying in Australia were also interviewed as a means of creating connections between lived experiences of Jakarta and Sydney. The aspirations of these group are highlighted in this exhibition through the promotional materials distributed by international schools and universities abroad within Jakarta.
Over the last twenty years, a number of political and economic factors have contributed to the development of a middle and upper class in Jakarta. This along with the increase of expatriates living in Jakarta have increased the demand for gated communities, high-rise residential towers, shopping centres and international schools. These structures are often combined into single ‘one-stop-living’ developments that in essence produce self-contained enclaves within the city. Vertical Villages: Level Up is on until 30 November.
4A would like to thank the artists involved in Vertical Villages: Level Up; Reza Afisnia, Haoritsa, Iswanto Hartono and Ade Darmawan from ruangrupa ArtLab; and Keg de Souza for their insightful and fresh perspective contributed to the project. Thank you also to the participants from the second phase of the project, in particular Maya, Anna, Bayu, Ibnu, Andan, Natasya, Mark, Geo, Jeffry, Thea and Claude for taking the time to be interviewed.
4A also wishes to thank our Government Partners and Sponsors for Vertical Villages & Vertical Villages: Level Up:
4A A4 is a fundraising exhibition featuring renowned international artists alongside local Australian artists who have risen to the challenge to make an artwork that’s A4 – in support of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
4A put the call out through to its international network and the response has been phenomenal, bringing together a staggering 200 works from from Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Phillippines, Turkey and USA.
4A A4 features works by leading contemporary artists including Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Kazim Ali, Arahmaiani, Dadang Christanto, Gary Deirmendjian, Heri Dono, Shaun Gladwell, Guan Wei, FX Harsono, Pei Pei He, He Xiangyu, Roslisham Ismai (aka ISE), Jumaadi, Jasper Knight, Hyun Hee Lee, Lindy Lee, Liu Jianhua, Liu Xiaoxian, Raquel Ormella, Reuben Paterson, Alwin Reamillo, Koji Ryui, Khaled Sabsabi, Tony Schwensen, Shen Jiawei, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Michel Tuffery, Ruth Watson, Ah Xian, Jun Yang, John Young, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, Zhang Xiao, Zhou Xiaoping, and many more!
Here’s how it works: all A4 artworks are available for purchase at a fixed price of $200. Artworks are exhibited anonymously with artists’ names and artwork details revealed upon sale. From opening night through to sell out, visitors can pick up a small masterpiece in person at the gallery or online at the 4A Shop. All proceeds from sales go right back into 4A’s coffers to support 4A’s 2014 artistic program –artists helping artists.
Join us at the launch on Thursday 7 November 6.30pm, Members’ Exclusive Preview at 5.30pm, more info here
Celebrate with us on opening night for music, drinks by Grasshopper and fever-pitch sales, hosted by our special guest and MC, Sunil Badami, writer, bon vivant, raconter, flâneur and ABC Radio broadcaster.
A catalogue of the exhibition is available for download here. It has been split into 8 separate files for easy download:
4A A4
Opening night Thursday 7 November 2013 General launch: 6.30pm-8pm Members’ Preview: 5.30pm-6.30pm Exhibition Dates: 8 November – 30 November 2013
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, SydneyARTISTS:Lyla Abdallah, Bo Ablan, Deb Affleck, Lucinda Aguiar, Vernon Ah Kee, Christine Ai, Tony Albert, Chad Alley, Pedro de Almeida, Osnat Alice Almog, Kate Andrews-Day, Michelle Ang, Angelfxck, Adrian Apante, Arahmaiani, Bababa International, Sunil Badami, Min Woo Bang, Majella Barbe, Clementine Barnes, Gloria Bohorquez, Linda Brescia, Anastassia Briantseva, Tina Bridge, Peter Burke, Camilo Bustamante, Corine Li Ling Chan, Claudia Chan Shaw, Hannah Chapman, Somchai Charoen, Olivia Chow, Omar Adanan Chowdhury, Dadang Christanto, Shu Rui Chuah, Thomas C. Chung, Adrian Clement, Susan Cole, Terrence Combos, Billy Bob Coulthurst, Gabrielle Courtenay, Dawn Csutoros, Jayanto Damanik, Gary Deirmendjian, Michael Art M. Deleon, Michael Art M. Deleon, Shoufay Derz, Isabella Dobrijevich, Heri Dono, Drew Duckworth, Andish Ebrahim, Jo Ernsten, Janelle Evans, Equardo Ezequiel Martinez, Dong Wang Fan, Kathryn Farr, Ann Fletcher, Ryan Flocco, Kath Fries, Brigitta Gallaher, Gao Ludi, Maryann (Xanthie) Gascoigne, Simryn Gill, Hayley Givins, Shaun Gladwell, Andrew Grant, Matthew Greene, Guan Wei, Ishu Han, Newell Harry, FX Harsono, Pei Pei He, He Xiangyu, Daisy Hsu, Hu Ming, Huang Yan, Atila Ilkyaz, Feyza Ilkyaz, Roslisham Ismail (a.k.a. ISE), Anna Jarvis, Daniel Jestin, Jumaadi, Katrina Katipunan, Ali Kazim, Deborah Kelly, Gail Kenning, Sukhmani Khorana, Samuel Kirby, Danica Knezevic, Jasper Knight, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, Karen Kriss, Nuengruthai Kuanpadoong, John Lam-Po-Tang, Ida Lawrence, Lindy Lee, Jae Hoon Lee, Rachel Lee, Hyun Hee Lee, Lei Tong, Owen Leong, Renjing Li, Lin Mei, Liu Tongwu, Liu Xiao Xian, Winson Liu, Liu Shiyuan, Victoria Lobregat, Kim Lowe, Luo Li, A. Gethsoline Lydina, Ma Jingjing, Ma Yujiang, Mandy Ma, Kaye Mahoney, Jessica Mais Wright, Ingrid Maltsson, Flora Mavrommati, Caitlin Mee, Enjia Mi, Modi, Susan Montano, Nicola Morton, Apinya Nantanon, Peter Nelson, Grace Ng, Toan Nguyen, Claudia Nicholson, Takashi Ohuchi, Raquel Ormella, Rafaela Pandolfini, Chris Pang OAM, Sarah Park, Rueben Paterson, Sue Pedley, Peter Pham, Debra Porch, Zul Rahaman, Alwin Reamillo, Joanne Regan, Katie Russel, Koji Ryui, Joanne Saad, Khaled Sabsabi, Saffaa, Jeffry Santony, Tony Schwensen, Pamela See, Aaron Seeto, Camille Serisier, Rebecca Shanahan, Michael Shaowanasai, Shen Jiawei, Shen Hua, Shen Shaomin, Shen Hongwei, Shi Zhiying, Pearl Hae Jin Shin, Jennifer Skeoch, Song Xi, Vipoo Srivilasa, Ariani Sugiarta, Maja Suljevic, Sherly Susan, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Alvin Teck Heng Tan, Luhsun Tan, Cyrus Tang, Yal Ton, Thao Tran, Lucia Tran-Dinh, Dana Trijbetz, Garry Trinh, Rachael Tse, Michel Tuffery, David Veleski, Dell Walker, Wang Zhiqiang, Lachlan Warner, Ruth Watson, Laura Williams, Laura Wilson, Eko Bambang Wisnu, Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria, Ruyi Wong, Bridget Wood, Shea Woodbridge, Anne Woods, Shuang Wu, Tintin Wulia, Lilian Wycisk, Ah Xian, Wang Xu, Jun Yang, Lan Yin, Cheryle Yin-Lo, Ken and Julia Yonetani, Victoria York, John Young, YOUNGHAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, Zhang Xiao, Zhang Rui, Zhang Yanping, Zhang Yue, Zhou Xiaoping, Tianli Zu, Diana Zyliene
Because all good things must come to an end, Vertical Villagesis moving out. To see it off before the Jakarta leg of the project, 4A is throwing a Demolition Party.
Join us onFriday 25 October from 6pm and for a drink to celebrate the last days of Vertical Villages at 4A!
Like all good demolition parties, the wallpaper will come down and the furniture’s gotta go. If you’re an international student, join the party and you can pick up a new bed, wardrobe or bookcase for free. Register your interest for furniture by email to toby.chapman@4a.com.au. BYO allen key and strictly pick up only on the night or Saturday 26 October (11am-6pm).
Curator Toby Chapman, artists Keg de Souza and Reza Afisina and
Hauritsa (ruangrupa ArtLab) with interntational student Jeffry Santony discuss Vertical Villages
Vertical Villages is a collaborative partnership between ruangrupa ArtLab (Indonesia), Keg de Souza (Australia) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Australia) working with the international student population living in Sydney’s CBD.
Vertical Villages is the first time that ruangrupa have worked in Sydney and by collaborating with Keg de Souza this project represents a unique, organic and process-driven experiment that will culminate in an exhibition at 4A that will be incorporated as part of the 15th Jakarta Biennale in November 2014.
Vertical Villages
Ruangrupa & Keg De Souza
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
6 SEPTEMBER — 26 OCTOBER 2013
Vertical Villages is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia International Cultural Council, an initiative of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
As part of Vertical Villages, 4A will present a series of events to be hosted by different international students. House Party invites four students to host a party in the Ground Floor of 4A from 6pm til late. Bookings essential.
5 September 6pm – late Opening of Vertical Villages & House Party
20 September 7pm – late Chinese hot pot with Jeffry Santony Booked out please join our waiting listhere
5 October 6pm – late hosted by Fuse Worapot and Angelica Casado bookings essential please email info@4a.com.au
25 October 6pm – late Demolition Party
Subscribe to our E-News for the latest updates HERE.
Caroline Choy, President and Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art invite you to the launch of
Vertical Villages ruangrupa ArtLab & Keg de Souza
Exhibition Launch: 5 September 2013 6 PM – Late
Exhibition dates: 6 September – 26 October 2013 Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St Sydney Maplink
The exhibition is to be officially opened by Councillor Robert Kok of the City of Sydney, with special guest speaker Suhanya Raffel, Director of Collections, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Join us on the opening night for the first in the series of House Party events hosted by international students for Vertical Villages. Opening night will be hosted by DJ Geo Asasi featuring DJ Leo Tanoi.
Chinese-born artist Zhang Rui (张 瑞) talks about her new collection of paintings in the exhibition, One Year (一年).
Having moved to Sydney one year ago, the body of work in One Year portrays Rui’s development of a visual language working across the context of her experiences of China and Australia. Faced with new physical and psychological environments, the artist’s new work draws on a vast array of images – usually sourced from the internet – as a means of reading or engaging with her surroundings. The results are dense and at times visually cryptic paintings that subtly combine the autobiographical with political threads and interweave personal and social worlds.
Zhang Rui (张 瑞) was born in 1983 in Tianjin, China and graduated from the Department of Painting, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. She has presented work internationally, both in China and Europe, including the solo exhibition Freedom We Need, Laden No.5 Gallery, Bad Ems (2011). Rui has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including Fang – then there was no more living room, 978 Art District, Beijing (2007); Xu Ni, Cao Chang Di Art Space, Beijing (2008) and Mud, curated by Ai Weiwei, China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Rui met Weiwei as a participant in his acclaimed project, Fairytale, presented as part of dOCUMENTA (12), Kassel, Germany (2007).
Vertical Villages is a collaborative partnership between ruangrupa ArtLab (Indonesia), Keg de Souza (Australia) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Australia), working with the international student population living in Sydney’s CBD. Throughout July the artists’ were based in 4A’s ground floor gallery, utilising the street-front space as an opportunity to meet and collaborate with international students.
Vertical Villages articulates how international students engage with urban design and architecture through an amassing of personal experiences and belonging. Through a series of alternative mapping processes, Vertical Villages unpacks the individuals movements both within the city, and more broadly in the region. Personal objects and communication have also been incorporated into the exhibition as a means of highlighting the many voices of international students who participated in the project.
After intensive research, ruangrupa ArtLab and Keg de Souza recognised these students – specifically those living in high-density and multiple occupancy housing – as a group with varied understandings and expressions of domestic and communal spaces. As temporary migrants, this group illustrate the capacity of self-organisation in an unfamiliar situation, whether that may be through improvised and makeshift living situations, or a specific engagement with the urban context.
With over 35,000 international students enrolled in Sydney tertiary institutions annually, international students play an important role in the social and economic dynamic of Sydney, yet their presence within a wider conversation about the cultural and architectural development of the city.
Equally, the structure of residential living in Sydney is about to change dramatically. Developments such as World Tower, Central Park and Green Square are evidence of a shift from low to medium and high-density housing. But is the city of Sydney itself equipped for such a dramatic shift in the scale of personal and public space?
Vertical Villages is the first time that ruangrupa have worked in Sydney and by collaborating with Keg de Souza this project represents a unique, organic and process-driven experiment that will culminate in an exhibition at 4A that will be incorporated as part of the 15th Jakarta Biennale later this year.
Parallel research is currently being undertaken in Jakarta by ruangrupa ArtLab and de Souza. In the second phase of Vertical Villages the artists are gathering experiences of migrant workers in Jakarta, as a study of a population who – similarly to students in Sydney – temporarily move to a city, and in doing so impact the design of public domain and the immediate environments they inhabit. The Jakarta Biennale opens on the 9 November 2013.
ruangrupa is a non-profit organisation founded in 2000 by a collective of Jakarta-based artists that focuses on supporting the development of art in contemporary cultural contexts through research, experimentation, collaboration and documentation through its member artists’ exhibitions, artist residency programs, site-specific projects and workshops. ruangrupa work collaboratively with a range of artists, architects, designers, musicians, community members and other creative producers to support and mediate fresh ideas that consider visual art as a cultural practice with a relationship to the social spheres that mediate contemporary living. From June 2008 they have operated the RURU Gallery in Jakarta, providing a space to exhibit works by young artists and curators, as well as presenting ongoing art and visual culture writing and curatorial workshops. ruangrupa also established the Jakarta 32°C, a biennale exhibiting visual artworks by Jakarta students; founded and present the international video festival, OK Video; and publish the regular journal Karbon. As a collective they have worked extensively internationally with projects having been included in the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010), and 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2012). ruangrupa.org
ruangrupa Artlab artist members participating in Vertical Villages are Reza Afisina, Iswanto Hartono, Hauritsa and director and founding member Ade Darmawan.
Keg de Souza is a Sydney-based artist who works across disciplines including architecture, screen-printing, installation, cartography, social research and tours. She formally trained as an architect and continues to be influenced by her training, concerned with the spatial politics of the built environment and the changes in relationships between a community and their surroundings. Her work is often ephemeral and reflective of the constant state of flux in which cities and their populations operate. De Souza has previously worked as part of the curatorial and artistic duo You Are Here (with Zanny Begg), that included initiating and presenting the exhibition, residency, discussion and publishing project There Goes the Neighbourhood (2009) at Performance Space that explored the politics of urban space in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern. In addition, De Souza has extensive experience working collaboratively with such groups as SquatSpace Artist Collective, Network of Un-Collectable Artists and The Rizzeria. De Souza has worked extensively in Australia as well as across Asia and North America. Recent group exhibitions include the 5th Auckland Triennial, If you were to live here… (2013); Gonflables et amuses-bouches, Darling Foundry, Montreal (2012); andPrimavera, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2011). De Souza is the recipient of numerous international residencies, grants and awards including, most recently, a Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts to support the professional development of outstanding Australian artists.http://allthumbspress.net/
As part of Vertical Villages, 4A will present a series of events to be hosted by different international students. House Party invites four students to host a party in the Ground Floor of 4A from 6pm til late. Bookings essential.
5 September 6pm – late Opening of Vertical Villages & House Party
20 September 6pm – late Chinese hot pot with Jeffry Santony
5 October 6pm – late hosted by Fuse Worapot and Angelica Casado
25 October 6pm – late Demolition Party
Subscribe to our E-News for the latest updates HERE.
4A will be hosting a preview with the artists before the Vertical Villages opening party with complimentary drinks. Join the artists Keg de Souza, Reza Afisina and Hauritsa with curator Toby Chapman for an introduction and discussion about the work and the process employed in Vertical Villages. This is a special opportunity for members to learn about this unique collaboration and to hear more about the next project for the 15th Jakarta Biennale.
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket
Date: Thursday 5 September
Time: 5-6PM
Bookings: Book Online HERE
Not yet a Member? It’s easy to Become a Member. To sign up online go HERE
The exhibition of Gennifer Hirano was a visual documentation of different Asian-Australians who emigrated to or were born in Australia and their experiences with culture, assimilation, representation, sexuality and other identity “crisis” issues. A wide variety of people from different occupations, nationalities and age groups were chosen to be a part of this exhibition in an attempt to dismantle the opinion that “all Asians are alike.” The work is very much about stereotypes and impressions. It is under the the theme that negative and positive are one of the few concepts that are simultaneously universal and subjective. The performance work “Identity Crisis” examined the journey from self-denial to self hatred to self discovery which many minorities in white Anglo countries like the U.S. and Australia have embarked upon to some degree. A gang member, a Japanese-Australian art student, a Vietnamese refugee, a lesbian political activist, a TV presenter on Fox Channel, two G.P.s, the beautiful child of two Asian mothers all in the same room? Under the same category? The work is about a group of people, their trials and talents that run much deeper and more captivating than any discussion about Pauline Hanson.
Members of the Asian and non Asian communities were invited to attend this aesthetic informative presentation in hopes that they may come away with a “Re-Orientated” Presentational of what Asian-Australia is.
Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Chi Min Chan, Nelia Justo, Harriet Parsons, Renata Petanceski and Angelina Marcon.
Take Away is an exhibition featuring the work of five emerging Sydney-based artists. While the exhibition does not have prescriptive theme, a number of common issues do circulate throughout the work. Shared concerns for the de-construction of interior environments as well as a sense of intimacy are prevalent in each of the artists work. A doorway of still water, botanical specimens, hair embroidery, copper sound weaving and a boxed Buddha are just some of the works on show at Take Away.
The series I have called “I Ching Paintings” were developed over a period of seven years. My aim was to pursue a fresh interpretation of nature through my technique. On further study of “I Ching”, I was amazed to find that the metaphysical symbols in my pictures co-incided with the characters of “I Ching”. This made be believe deeply in the interaction between the universe of nature and human beings’ inner universe. In the paintings, I explore the relationship between human beings and nature. Changes are represented by using colours and numbers in a unity of opposites, with the aim of providing a true picture of the universe.
Gallery 4A presented the work of Tim Johnson and My Lee Thi in an exhibition exploring ideas of transculturalism.
Although Thi had collaborated on a number of paintings with Johnson, this was the first time that they exhibited their work side by side.
This exhibition looked at these two art practices as parallel—informed by similar cultural influences—yet with different formal approaches.
Tim Johnson is a well respected Australian artist who has been exhibiting for the past twenty years. He has held exhibition in Gemrnay, Japan and the United States. In Australia he has also shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Although a central figure in the Australian conceptual movement of the 70s, Johnson’s recent work is characterised by a process of cultural distillation. His paintings combine influences from Eastern, Buddhist art, Western Aboriginal Desert painting and Asian symbols.
My Le Thi was born in the South of Vietnam. Her paintings and collages reflect this cultural heritage through the inclusion of Vietnamese poetry and sayings. The subjects of these texts are often about farming which Thi uses as a metaphor for the vitality of life. Her intimate works possess a delicate sensibility: grains of rice are paired with sketches of farmers.
The Annual Members’ exhibition presents the work of our Members to bring diverse practices together, and celebrate their support of 4A throughout the year. It is a unique opportunity for Members to share their talents with 4A’s creative community, and have their work seen by artists, curators, and other industry professionals.
Last night at the Inaugural Australian Arts in Asia Awards, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) won an Award for Philanthropy. The award made by the NSW Arts Minister Hon Tony Burke MP was in recognition of our work on the Sydney Pavilion, part of the Inter-City Pavilions Project of the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012.
4A was a finalist in two other categories in the Small to Medium Arts Organisation and for the Visual Arts. Winners were announced at the award ceremony last night in celebration of the achievements of Australian arts organisations and artists engaging in Asia, promoting cultural links and strengthening connections across Asian nations.
“This award recognises the important role that individuals, families, foundations, artists and sponsors play in assisting board and staff to realise the ambitious work of 4A. Our supporters understand the valuable contribution that 4A makes to cultural discussions here in Australia and also around the world, raising the profile of the contemporary art from the region and building better cultural understanding,” says Caroline Choy, President of the Asian Australian Artists Association (4A).
“I am proud of the Sydney Pavilion because our patrons and partners worked with us to deliver something of true substance and beauty, which reflects the history of Australian culture and the contemporary life of our cities as being fundamentally touched by intercultural experiences,” says Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the curator of the pavilion.
The Floating Eye – the Sydney Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale was located on Nanjing Dong Lu, in a precinct of historic Art Deco buildings near the Bund. It included the work of six artists and collectives: Brook Andrew, Shaun Gladwell, Bababa International, Shen Shaomin, Raquel Ormella and Khaled Sabsab and had visitation of over 57,000 people.
Our partners Asialink also won an Australian Arts in Asia Award for Community Engagement.
The branding and design work that our partners Re produced for this project has also subsequently won numerous design awards and being reviewed far and wide including: a Silver Pencil in this year’s One Show Awards; D&AD, NY Type Directors Club, and AWARD (Australasian Writers & Art Directors Association).
See the full list of our supporters and donors below.
4A is pleased to announce the three Australian artists selected for our Beijing Residency in 2013 at the studios of Chinese Australian artist Shen Shaomin are: Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos, Jensen Tjhung.
The selected artists were chosen by 4A’s Visual Arts Advisory committee. Aaron Seeto, 4A’s Director states that “the committee were impressed the number of high calibre of applicants across Australia. The residency program will give these young arts a great opportunity to place their art practice within the much broader international art context and within a city such as Beijing.”
All three artists will fly to China to commence their month long residency in September.
One Year (一年) presents a new collection of paintings by Chinese-born artist Zhang Rui (张瑞). Having moved to Sydney one year ago, the body of work in One Year portrays Rui’s development of a visual language working across the context of her experiences of China and Australia. Faced with new physical and psychological environments, the artist’s new work draws on a vast array of images – usually sourced from the internet – as a means of reading or engaging with her surroundings. The results are dense and at times visually cryptic paintings that subtly combine the autobiographical with political threads and interweave personal and social worlds.
The conceptual development of Rui’s works indicate a broad cultural practice that encompasses an education in Western oil painting, an ongoing interest in the Wumen School (吳門學校) painters of China and a broader interest in how to express a sense of humanism through painting. Rui’s practice reveals the complexity of translating meaning across cultural and geographical distances despite the expanding reach of technology. Presented as a series of constellations the works in One Year produce a sense of meaning through a cumulative reading of the language and imagery embedded in the canvases.
Zhang Rui (张瑞) was born in 1983 in Tianjin, China and graduated from the Department of Painting, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. She has presented work internationally, both in China and Europe, including the solo exhibition Freedom We Need, Laden No.5 Gallery, Bad Ems (2011). Rui has also participated in a number of group exhibitions including Fang – then there was no more living room, 978 Art District, Beijing (2007); Xu Ni, Cao Chang Di Art Space, Beijing (2008) and Mud, curated by Ai Weiwei, China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Rui met Weiwei as a participant in his acclaimed project, Fairytale, presented as part of dOCUMENTA (12), Kassel, Germany (2007).
In celebration of the exhibition Zhang Rui: One Year 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) and Musica Viva have teamed up and are pleased to present an afternoon of public programs
on Saturday 29 June 2013. Join us for lively talks and drinks.
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 181-187 Hay St
Sydney NSW 2000 Maplink
1PM Artist talk with Zhang Rui
Join us for a brief tour of One Year led by the artist followed by…
2PM Cellist Jian Wang in conversation with Dominic Knight
Cellist Jian Wang first came to international attention as a child prodigy in the 1980s documentary From Mao to Mozart. Since then his career has taken off around the globe and Musica Viva now brings him to Australia to perform with pianist Bernadette Harvey. Jian Wang will be in conversation with Dominic Knight relating his experience growing up in the Cultural Revolution to his current international career highlighting themes in Zhang Rui’s One Year that resonate with him.
Dominic Knight is Evenings presenter on 702 ABC Sydney, co-founder of the Chaser and novelist.
Presented by Musica Viva, Jian Wang and Bernadette Harvey will be touring Australia in July. At the event 4A will have two double passes to give away to the Sydney shows. Further information.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art invites international students to participate in a contemporary art project: Vertical Villages
4A is asking international students based in Sydney’s CBD to share their experiences of living and working in the city as part of a unique contemporary art project: Vertical Villages
Throughout July, Sydney’s international student community have an opportunity to drop-in to a temporary studio on the ground floor of 4A’s Haymarket gallery to talk with internationally renowned artists ruangrupa ArtLab (Indonesia) and Keg de Souza (Australia), who are currently artists-in-residence.
Students can participate in a series of artist-led workshops and discussion sessions, where they will explore issues relating to social mobility and urban density. The sessions aim to develop an alternative map of the Haymarket area and city ‘survival guide’ for international students.
Workshop sessions: Friday 19 – Tuesday 23 July 2013, 2-7pm daily Bookings essential: Students can register their interest in participating in the workshops with 4A’s Assistant Curator Toby Chapman: toby.chapman@4a.com.au or 9212 0380
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
The Capital Gains Consultation Project developed by Teik-Kim Pok is a participatory intervention into the rituals and economics of commerce in the Haymarket community. Beyond being a centre for trade, Pok’s interest in Haymarket lies in the social relations established as a consequence of daily interactions between businesses within the local community. In the last year, Pok has amassed an archive of stories of the individuals and businesses of Haymarket.
For the past few weeks Pok has been ‘in-residence’ at various locations along Haymarket’s Dixon Street arcade. Among buskers, street vendors and restaurants, the artist will establish a portable studio where passers-by are encouraged to sit down and trade a story with the artist.
On the final day The Capital Gains Consultation Project will culminate at the Dixon Street Night Markets on Friday 19 July, 5-9pm Pok will present his findings and experiences with participants among the evening trade. It offers the local community a chance to participate and in conversation with the artist, springboarding ideas to establish their own narrative of exchange in Haymarket. Follow the project blog capitalgainsconsultation.tumblr.com
Teik-Kim Pok is a Sydney-based interdisciplinary performance and installation artist and theatre pedagog whose early solo work examined identity transgression within popular culture tropes. He continues to be invested in intercultural dialogue and its role in engendering communal arts practice, partly through his work as a drama teacher and as Outreach Coordinator, Playwriting Australia. As part of the 2012 Next Wave Festival, Pok mentored the Perth artists Abdul Abdullah, Casey Ayres and Nathan Beard during the development of their project, The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Teik-Kim Pok The Capital Gains Consultation project
Friday 19 July 2013, 5-9pm
Dixon St Night Markets
This project is part of the 4A Chinatown Mapping Project which is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW and the City of Sydney
4A wishes to acknowledge the support of Chinatown Markets Sydney.
4A 亚洲当代艺术中心策展人,艺术创作涵盖亚太地区,内容多探讨人类迁徙的经历和全球化对现 代艺术的影响。他曾多次策展大型当代艺术展览,包括第九届上海双年展的悉尼城市馆,2012 年 悉尼艺术节“别处的边缘”(Edge of Elsewhere)艺术展和 2007 年亚太地区 News from Islands 艺术展。目前,Aaron 还就任于悉尼干草市场商会(Haymarket Chamber of Commerce)执行委员 会以及担任国家视觉艺术协会(National Association for the Visual Arts)总监. 2010 年, 他被指派为悉尼市政府唐人街公共艺术计划的主策展人。
We congratulate Sam Zammit on his appointment as the new Curatorial Fellow at Artspace.
After three years of working at 4A, Sam Zammit will join the Artspace team in this newly established program. Sam has been an instrumental member of the 4A team and has worked across our exhibition program as both our Gallery Assistant and Program Coordinator, working with artists to deliver complex projects.
Sam joined us directly after completing his Masters in Art Curatorship at the University of Sydney, during his time with us at 4A, it has been rewarding to see Sam emerge as an active member of the artistic community, as a writer and curator. We all look forward to seeing the research and projects that Sam will embark on in the future.
In celebration of Musica Viva’s upcoming series of concerts featuring Chinese cellist Jian Wang performing
with pianist Bernadette Harvey, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is pleased to present an
afternoon of public programs on Saturday 29 June 2013. Join us for lively talks and drinks.
Saturday 29 June 2013
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 181-187 Hay St
Sydney NSW 2000 Maplink
1PM Artist talk with Zhang Rui
Join us for a brief tour of One Year led by the artist followed by…
Cellist Jian Wang first came to international attention as a child prodigy in the 1980s documentary From Mao to Mozart. Since then his career has taken off around the globe and Musica Viva now brings him to Australia to perform with pianist Bernadette Harvey. Jian Wang will be in conversation with Dominic Knight relating his experience growing up in the Cultural Revolution to his current international career highlighting themes in Zhang Rui’s One Year that resonate with him.
Dominic Knight is Evenings presenter on 702 ABC Sydney, co-founder of the Chaser and novelist.
Presented by Musica Viva, Jian Wang and Bernadette Harvey will be touring Australia in July. At the event 4A will have two double passes to give away to the Sydney shows. Further information
Please note that some of the details for this event have been changed from our original posting.
Perth: Two new exhibitions ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections curated by
Ted Snell (Director, Cultural Precinct, UWA) and Sally Quin (Curator, UWA) and ORIENTing: With Or Without You curated by Aaron Seeto (Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney) and Toby Chapman (Assistant Curator, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney) opened in early May 2013 at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia. With Or Without You features a number of prominent Australian artistsincluding Newell Harry, Tom Nicholson, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Roy Wiggan, Tintin Wulia, and John Young.
According to the official media release:
ORIENTing is an exhibition in two parts, each exploring a different aspect of artistic engagement with Asia. ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections gathers together for the first time a series of significant early works by Fairweather in Western Australian collections, focusing on the influence of Asian art and culture on the artist’s practice. A major artist of the twentieth century, Fairweather was Scottish born, though spent periods of his life in China, Bali, the Philippines, India and Australia. He was particularly fascinated by Chinese culture and this is reflected in the subject matter and style of his works, which indicate a strong fascination with calligraphy. The exhibition focuses on Fairweather’s early paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, which recall his experiences of travel.
ORIENTing: With or Without You is an exhibition of contemporary art by Australian artists which touches on similar themes, considering the significance of place, identity and landscape in a variety of art forms. Artists include Newell Harry, Tom Nicholson, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Roy Wiggan, Tintin Wulia, and John Young. While some artists respond directly to Ian Fairweather’s paintings, others reflect on the broader themes of cross-cultural engagement and interaction.
The exhibitions enable us to look at the past to provide an understanding of the present, and also to act as a lens onto the future by exploring our cultural relationship to our geographic region over a broad time span.
Additionally, in June 2013 the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery will launch a companion book including full-colour plates of all the works together with essays written by leading scholars and authors.
The exhibition is on from 4 May – 13 July 2013.
ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections ORIENTing: With Or Without You
4 May – 13 July 2013
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Hwy (cnr Fairway)
Crawley, Perth
Western Australia 6009
Ph: 08 6488 3707
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery hours 11.00am to 5.00pm Tuesday to Saturday
Recently during his trip to Beijing 4A’s Program Manager, Pedro de Almeida met with Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin. This visit coincides with 4A’s recent announcement of a Beijing Residency Program at the studios of Shen Shaomin in September this year. The residency program is a great opportunity for three emerging artists to work in China and to research new projects.
The deadline for applications for 4A’s Beijing Residency Program has now closed. Stay tuned for more information on selected artists.
In Possible Worldsbrings together a selection of recent works by Australian artists Elly Kent, Claudia Nicholson, and Tianli Zu.
Touching on themes of intimacy, dislocation, violence and the pleasures of ordinary life, In Possible Worlds encourages us to question the concrete reality of visual fact when faced with shifting realms of meaning beneath the surface of things. Engaging with the material qualities of forms and imagery enables a process of exchange and negotiation that opens up possibilities of seeing the world in different ways.
Elly Kent’s works on paper draw on her knowledge of traditional Indonesian batik practices – a skill she learnt during her studies at the Indonesian Institute of Art in Yogyakarta. Interested in subverting the ways in which difference is identified and named, Kent re-contextualises batik processes by creating patterns using familiar everyday objects. Crafting stamps out of domestic utensils sourced from her home Kent prints the same object repetitively onto strips of paper that are then dyed, stitched together and stretched over door and window frames.
Born in Colombia and raised in Australia, Claudia Nicholson occupies an ambiguous position between Australian and Latino cultures. As an adopted child, her work questions the construction of identity in the absence of a known ancestry and subsequent experiences of cultural and geographic dislocation. Interested in the social functions of folklore and myth surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, Nicholson works extensively with her family, using performance to comment on social attributes pertaining to kinship and familial relationships.
Fascinated by the powerful potential of shadows, Tianli Zu’s large-scale intricate hand cut-outs and animations are inspired by human and organic forms and genitalia. Drawing on traditional Chinese paper cutting techniques, Zu creates complex visual environments by projecting animations through multiple layers of acetate. These beautiful objects cast shadows that evoke a sense of restlessness, anxiety, doubt and contradiction, reflecting on the inseparable relationship between light and shade and the intertwining of yin and yang.
Developed over a year through a process of curatorial guidance with 4A, these artists were chosen to exhibit by Lisa Havilah, Chief Executive Officer, Carriageworks and Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A through 4A’s early career artists’ initiative.
Elly Kent (b. Australia) is a Canberra-based printmaker whose works on paper, inspired by Indonesian Batik practices, are created with everyday objects sourced from her home. Kent holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in Printmaking and Drawing, and a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies specialising in Indonesian, from the Australian National University, Canberra, where she is currently completing doctoral research on the theory and practice of contemporary artists in Indonesia. Over the past decade Kent’s works have been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across Australia, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Bundanon Trust and Megalo Print Studio and Gallery. Kent has further strengthened her ties to Indonesia by studying at the Indonesian Institute of Art and Universitas Gadjah Mada, and has also worked previously at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta (2003-2004).
Claudia Nicholson (b. Colombia) is a Sydney-based artist, adopted from Colombia and raised in Australia. Nicholson is a graduate of the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales, completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in Painting and Drawing in 2011. She has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions across Sydney, including ARC annual emerging artist and design show (2007 & 2011) at Kudos Gallery and EASY SPEAK Tortuga Studios Group Show (2011). Nicholson’s work has been featured in COFA’s graduate exhibitions and group shows, including Halfway House at COFA Space Paddington (2011).
Tianli Zu (b. China) is a Sydney-based artist who practices in intricate papercuts and projecting light and sound animations. Her body of work is inspired by Chinese philosophy and much of her work and research dwells on shadows and the powerful dynamics between light and dark. She graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1987, and has a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, where she is presently completing a Doctor of Philosophy, researching Taoism and the power of the shadow.
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
Produced for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art by Das Platforms.
Image: Claudia Nicholson, Alliance VS Decent (work with dentures) (2011), single channel video, 2 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Elly Kent, Diverge (2012-13), production image (detail), batik wax, machine stitching concrete oxides on paper, found door and window frames, dimensions variable, private collection. Courtesy of the artist; Tianli Zu, White Shadows (2013),(detail) acrylic on acetate film, handcut, and light projection and animation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
4A BEIJING STUDIO PROGRAM APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (4A) is proud to announce that applications are now open for its studio residency in Beijing.
Through this initiative three early career artists will embark on a month-long residency in September at the studios of renowned Chinese Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
4A’s Beijing Studio Program provides a unique opportunity for the selected artists to research new projects in rich cultural surroundings, build networks and observe the changes taking place in one of the most important cities in the Asia region.
On return to Australia artists will be invited to present their experiences in a public forum and will be invited to make a proposal for an exhibition. If successful they will be mentored by 4A in the lead up to an exhibition in 2014.
The residency covers airfares and accommodation and a small stipend, as well as ongoing professional mentorship, cross-cultural exchange and access to 4A’s networks across China.
Applications have now closed.
ABOUT SHEN SHAOMIN
Over the last twenty years Chinese Australian artist Shen Shaomin has forged an important international career with an emphasis on experimental conceptual and installation works. Based in Beijing and having spent over a decade in Australia Shen’s work has enjoyed critical success across international cities, London, New York and Hong Kong.Shen Shaomin has previously exhibited with 4A at the Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012) and presented a solo exhibition, The Day After Tomorrow (2011). He has presented at major biennales including Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). In China he has exhibited at The Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Shanghai Zendai Moma, Shanghai Osage; Kwun Tung, Hong Kong. Across Europe and North America selected exhibitions include , Groniger Museum, Holland; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; ZKM Museum Karlrusche, Germany; Millennium Park, Chicago and Eli Klein Fine Art, New York.
APPLICATION GUIDELINES
ELIGIBILITY
Application is open to visual artists who are currently Australian residents.
Please submit support material which has been completed in the last 2 years, material completed earlier than this will not be eligible.
RESIDENCY PERIOD
Successful artists must be available for travel to Beijing, China for one month in the beginning of September 2013. Once set, dates are not negotiable.
All three artists will be travelling at the same time.
CRITERIA
Successful artists will be chosen based on their portfolio, quality of their works, their reasons for participation and the potential benefits to the applicant. Decisions are final and will be made by 4A’s Visual Arts Advisory Committee Panel. Applications will be assessed approximately four weeks following the deadline.
REQUIRED INFORMATION
To apply for the 4A Beijing Studio Program please download a copy of the application form and type into form fields or print or complete by hand. The final submission should include:
A completed copy of the application form which includes your CV, a statement outlining your intention for participating and work details for support material
Support material which includes a Powerpoint document with 10 images OR video material (10 mins. max.) supplied as URL links to uploaded content.
Please do not send us original material and note that submitted material will not be returned.
SUPPORT MATERIAL
Please supply images in Powerpoint at 72-dpi res with your application. Please do not send individual files.
Video material must be uploaded to a website and URL should be supplied for viewing.
AMENITIES
The studio accommodation is housed in Shen Shaomin’s studio one hour from Beijing’s city centre. These are newly built residences. Transfers and limited assistance will be provided and shared by the artists.
Chinese language skills are not necessary.
TERMS & CONDITIONS
The ability to accommodate artists using heavy or unusual materials may be restricted and if new work is created, artists are responsible for shipping work from China.
Artists will be asked to sign an agreement
Artists will be asked to provide a public presentation of their trip on their return.
HOW TO APPLY
PLEASE NOTE APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED
For updates on future 4A opportunities, please subscribe to our newsletter.
ENQUIRIES
Toby Chapman
Assistant Curator
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW 2000
02 9212 0380
toby.chapman@4a.com.au
In celebration of 4A’s exhibition In Possible Worlds, join us for a 4A Members’ walking tour of various artist-run-initiatives (ARIs) in inner-city Sydney. Hear a series of talks and meet the Directors of MOP, Firstdraft, Chalk Horse at their contemporary art spaces. Find out more about the opportunities and avenues that exist to gain further exposure and build confidence as an emerging artist, curator and arts writer, or come along simply to learn more about the scene. Join us at a local pub afterwards for a friendly drink and chat.
Meeting Point: MOP Projects, 2/39 Abercrombie St Chippendale NSW MAPLINK
Date: Saturday 18 May 2013
Time: 1.00pm-4.00pm
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP essential: sam.zammit@4a.com.au
Not yet a Member? It’s easy to Become a Member. To sign up online CLICK HERE
In the fourth and final 4A Members’ Program event for 2013, we’re taking you on a behind the scenes Members’ exclusive artist studio tour. On the afternoon of Saturday 26 October, 4A’s Assistant Curator Toby Chapman will be in conversation with Lindy Lee in her Sydney studio, exploring the day-to-day processes of her studio practice and her current and future projects.
Lindy Lee is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists with a career spanning three decades in Australia and internationally. She is currently leading a team of designers and artists in the creation of City of Sydney’s public art project, ‘New Century Garden’ on Thomas Street, Chinatown, Sydney. Lindy is a founding Member of 4A, a Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts and a Member of the Board of Trustees at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
As a 4A Member Lindy has kindly granted access to other 4A Members into her studio. Spaces are limited and bookings are essential. Free for 4A Members. Not yet a Member? sign up online here.
For the tour 4A Members will meet at 4A before travelling to Lindy’s inner-city artist studio.* Join us afterwards at a local pub and mingle with other 4A Members.
In My Space: Artist Studio Visits
Meeting point: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Sydney
Date: Saturday 26 October
Time: 1.45pm – 4pm
Cost: Free for 4A Members. Not yet a Member? Join us here
Please note we are now booked out however you can join our waiting list.
*Cost of transport from 4A to the studio (one way) will be covered by 4A.
In Possible Worlds
Claudia Nicholson, Elly Kent, Tianli Zu
Opening night: Thursday 18 April, 6.00 – 8.00PM
To be launched by Anna Davis, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Exhibition dates: 19 April – 8 June 2013
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St Sydney Maplink
Image: Claudia Nicholson, Alliance VS Decent (work with dentures) (2011), single channel video, 2 mins. Courtesy of the artist; Elly Kent, Diverge (2012-13), production image (detail), batik wax, machine stitching concrete oxides on paper, found door and window frames, dimensions variable, private collection. Courtesy of the artist; Tianli Zu, White Shadows (2013),(detail) acrylic on acetate film, handcut, and light projection and animation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s (4A) upcoming exhibition, In Possible Worlds, to open April 18, alongside launch of 2013 Australian artist residency in Beijing, China
“As we move through the Asian Century, it is important for artists and the cultural sector in Australia to have the opportunity to witness some of the big cultural changes taking shape in the region.”
– Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art continues to champion Australian emerging artists with two major new initiatives announced this week.
The upcoming exhibition, In Possible Worlds, part of 4A’s Early Career Artist Initiative, brings together a selection of recent works by Australian artists Elly Kent, Claudia Nicholson and Tianli Zu. Developed over a year–long process of curatorial guidance with 4A, these artists were chosen to exhibit by Lisa Havilah, Chief Executive Officer of Carraigeworks and Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A.
Touching on themes of intimacy, dislocation, violence and the pleasures of ordinary life, In Possible Worlds encourages us open up to the possibilities of seeing the world in different ways.
This month 4A will also launch its 2013 Artist Residency Program in Beijing, a program developed by 4A and the acclaimed Australian Chinese artist Shen Shaomin. Now based in Bejing and having spent almost a decade in Australia, Shen has received critical success with exhibitions of his work shown in New York, London and Hong Kong. Through the initiative Shen and 4A are keen to give three younger Australian artists the opportunity to access new cultural networks as well as establishing productive connections between China and Australia.
This exciting initiative gives three emerging Australian artists, selected through a competitive application process, to be based for one month from September 2013 at Shen Shaomin’s studios in Beijing, presently China’s most vibrant epicentre for contemporary art.
Being able to create professional capacity for Australian artists to engage with the Asia-Pacific now and in the future is a core ideal of 4A. As Director Aaron Seeto says,
“Our intention is based on giving young, creative Australians access to our networks, knowledge and expertise that will allow the conversation that 4A has developed between Australia and Asia, over the last decade-and-a-half, to be further enhanced.”
4A Beijing Residency Program
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has established a one month studio residency program for three emerging Australian artists at Shen Shaomin’s expansive artist studios in Beijing. 4A will soon open applications for the residency commencing in September 2013.
While presentation of new work is not an outcome, this residency provides a great opportunity for the selected artist to research and to develop new projects and networks in rich cultural surroundings. Applications will open on 18 April and will be available for download from 4A’s website. The deadline for applications is 31 May 2013.
Shen Shaomin
Over the last twenty years Chinese Australian artist Shen Shaomin has forged an important international career with an emphasis on experimental conceptual and installation works. Based in Beijing and having spent over a decade in Australia Shen’s work has enjoyed critical success across international cities, London, New York and Hong Kong.
Shen Shaomin has previously exhibited with 4A at the Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012) and presented a solo exhibition, The Day After Tomorrow (2011). He has presented at major biennales including Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). In China he has exhibited at The Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Shanghai Zendai Moma, Shanghai Osage; Kwun Tung, Hong Kong. Across Europe and North America selected exhibitions include , Groniger Museum, Holland; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; ZKM Museum Karlrusche, Germany; Millennium Park, Chicago and Eli Klein Fine Art, New York.
For media inquiries please contact Hannah Skrzynski at hannah@4a.com.au or 0412 825 586.
For more information on 4A’s Artist Residency program, contact Yu Ye Wu at yuye.wu@4a.com.au or 02 9212 0380.
Congratulations to Dr Thomas Berghuis, for his future appointment as the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Berghuis currently serves as a committee member on 4A’s Visual Advisory Committee and also serves as Lecturer in Asian Art at the Department of Art History & Film Studies at the University of Sydney; Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Asian Art and Archeology (ACAAA) and is on the committee of the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre. Most recently he was founding co-curator of Edge of Elsewhere (2010-12).
He states that, “This is great news for contemporary Asian art and contemporary Chinese art, and provides a recognition for the valuable work we do in Sydney.”
According to the Guggenheim’s official press release this appointment has been “made possible by a major grant to the Guggenheim from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, (and) the new program will enable the commissioning of artworks by artists who were born in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macao.” The Hong Kong based foundation has previously supported the museum’s 2008 Cai Guo-Qiang major retrospective, I Want to Believe and the 2009 show The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.
Major work by at least three artists or group of artists look set to be commissioned and will enter into the Guggenheim’s permanent collection as The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. These works will later be exhibited at the Guggehnheim in New York between 2014-2017.
Best wishes to Thomas and his family as they move to NYC later in the year!
To preface the opening of 4A’s touring exhibition Survivor by Dadang Christanto at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to invite its members to an exclusive 4A Members’ floor talk at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with Natalie Siez, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, AGNSW. Framed within the gallery’s current presentation of Christanto’s key work They Give Evidence (1996-97), please join us as Natalie discusses the complexities of the conceptual and working processes of one of Indonesia’s most prominent contemporary artists.
Not yet a Member? It’s easy to Become a Member. To sign up online CLICK HERE
Event Details
Dadang Christanto: They Give Evidence
Venue: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1 Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney
Meeting place: AGNSW entrance steps, 11:20AM
Date: 11:20AM – 12PM Saturday 6 April
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP to sam.zammit@4a.com.au
Images above: Dadang Christanto, They give evidence, 1996-97 (detail), 16 standing figures holding clothes; terracotta powder mixed with resin/fibreglass, cloth and resin. height 200cm (male) 190cm (female) width and depth c100 x 150cm, weight c90kgs each. Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased 2003.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the launch of our 2013 4A Members’ Program.
Join up as a Member this year and you’ll gain exclusive access to a suite of 4A Members’ Program events. Held every few months, 4A Members will get the opportunity to engage in behind the scenes tours, artists’ studio visits and special talks. These curated events will offer 4A Members greater insight into 4A’s exhibition program and direct access to artists and other industry professionals.
The 4A Members’ Program is also a unique way to support 4A and engage in a variety of different ideas related to contemporary art and culture in Sydney, wider Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.
Membership is just $33 (adult) and $16.50 (student) or $44 (international).
It’s easy to Become a Member. To sign up online CLICK HERE
BENEFITS OF 4A MEMBERSHIP INCLUDE:
Access to 4A’s Members’ Program which will include : curator-led tours, ARI tours, studio visits, talks, networking and social gatherings
Invitations to all 4A exhibitions and events
Opportunities to exhibit in our Annual Members’ Exhibition
Discounts on 4A products including publications and 4A EDITION
Regular newsletters and communications including opportunities for artists
4A MEMBERS’ EVENTS IN 2013:
Dadang Christanto: They Give Evidence 4A Members’ Tour
Venue: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1 Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney
Meeting point: AGNSW entrance steps, 11:20am
Date: Saturday 6 April
Time: 11:20am – 12.00pm
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP: sam.zammit@4a.com.au or 02 9212 0380
To preface the opening of 4A’s touring exhibition Survivor by Dadang Christanto at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 4A is pleased to invite its members to an exclusive 4A Members’ floor talk at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with Natalie Siez, Assistant Curator of Asian Art. Framed within the gallery’s current presentation of Christanto’s key work They Give Evidence, please join us as Natalie discusses the complexities of the conceptual and working processes of one of Indonesia’s most prominent contemporary artists.
Sydney ARI Tour
Meeting Point: MOP Projects, 2/39 Abercrombie St Chippendale NSW MAPLINK
Date: Saturday 18 May 2013
Time: 1.00pm – 4.00pm
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP essential: sam.zammit@4a.com.au
In celebration of 4A’s exhibition In Possible Worlds, join us for a 4A Members’ walking tour of various artist-run-initiatives (ARIs) in inner-city Sydney. Hear a series of talks and meet the Directors of MOP, Firstdraft and Chalk Horse at their contemporary art spaces. Find out more about the opportunities and avenues that exist to gain further exposure and build confidence as an emerging artist, curator and arts writer, or come along simply to learn more about the scene. Join us at a local pub afterwards for a friendly drink and chat. Stay tuned for updates on this walking tour.
Exclusive artist talk ( TO BE ANNOUNCED)
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket
Date: TO BE ANNOUNCED (JULY 2013)
Time: TO BE ANNOUNCED
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP: yuye.wu@4a.com.au
4A is currently developing an exciting project that will be launched in September 2013. Prior to this, we’ll be hosting a group of artists in July as part of their Sydney residency for creative development. This exclusive 4A Members’ event will offer the chance to meet the artists and hear first-hand about their artistic process. We’ll be announcing this event later in June so stay tuned!
In My Space: Artist Studio Visits
Venue: Various (to be announced)
Date: Saturday 19 October 2013
Time: 1.00pm – 5.00pm
Bookings: Free for 4A Members. RSVP: yuye.wu@4a.com.au or 02 9212 0380
For the final event in 4A’s 2013 Members’ Program, 4A Assistant Curator, Toby Chapman has selected a Sydney-based artist whom he has worked with in the past. Join Toby conversation with the selected artist in the intimate setting of the artists’ studios, exploring the day-to-day processes of each artist’s studio practice and their current and future projects. Stay tuned for the announcement of selected artists.
BECOME A MEMBER
It’s easy to Become a Member. To sign up online CLICK HERE
Or you join up over the phone 02 9212 0380 or when you next visit our gallery.
For more information about our 2013 Members’ Program please contact Yu Ye Wu or Pedro de Almeida on (02) 9212 0380.
Next Monday night, Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A, along with Dr Thomas Berghuis, Paschal Daantos Berry, Lorraine Chung and Su-wen Leong will be speaking at a SAMAG seminar about Australia’s place in the Asia Century and in particularly will discuss how the cultural sector has responded to changing shifts in Asia’s growth.
“The idea of preparing Australia for a time when Asia reaches its ‘apex’ is one that has been current since Paul Keating claimed that Australia was an Asian country. Since then, Asia’s growth has been marked with a proliferation of Biennales, Museums, Art Fairs, auction houses and other arts organisations.
Australia has a long history of engagement with countries in Asia and has benefited from political and financial links and strong relationships in business, tourism, culture and the arts. However 2011 and 2012 marked significant developments in acknowledging the need to further strengthen Asia-Australia relations in policy and pathways including the release of a multicultural policy, the Australia in the Asia Century White Paper, a discussion paper leading to a National Cultural Policy, and the recent Australia Council and UNESCO MOU.” Asia Arts Literacy Date: Monday 25 March 2013 Time: 6pm Where: Australia Council for the Arts
372 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills
Admission Free (SAMAG members)
$10 (non-members) $5 students.
To register please email Lizzy: info@samag.org
Grab some friends and have a local adventure through Surry Hills and city galleries as part of Art Month from 6 to 8 before heading to 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for drinks and music at the Art Bar from 8 till late.
See the exhibition Song Dong:Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are AllWell an exhibition of work by Song Dong spanning the last 30 years. Emerging as an important artist during a period of significant cultural, social and economic transformation in China, Song Dong’s work reinforces the family unit as a microcosm for society at large. Family members are featured in the artist’s earlier experimental video, photographic, sculptural and neon works which present compelling portraits of parent and child relationships and the power of simple actions in the process of memorialising and remembering.
Five Senses: Chui Lee Luk in conversation with Aaron Seeto, coincides with the major exhibition, Song Dong: Waste Notat Carriageworks, a single artwork consisting of over 10,000 objects from the artist’s family home. Conceived by Song Dong following the death of his father, the work represents his mother’s process of mourning and remembrance. Consisting of the entire contents of her house, Waste Not reflects a journey of hardship and grief, resulting in a display of personal resilience and ultimately a celebration of life. Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art will be joined by Chui Lee Luk, chef and current owner of Claude’s, a culinary institution at the forefront of French fine dining for over 35 years, to talk through some of the links and ideas which emerge from this monumental installation, and resonate within her culinary practice.
Chui Lee Luk was born in Singapore and spent her childhood in Malaysia before migrating to Sydney. Her food is admired for its classical French heritage and an innate understanding of South East Asian and Chinese cuisine. The relationship between good eating and life is what drives her creative discipline. Chui Lee Luk recently made a trip to her hometown in Sandakan in Sabah, Malaysia, and Five Senses will explore, through memory and the five senses, her recollections of home and the process of rememberance through food.
Please note that this event will take place at Carriageworks. Presented by Carriageworks and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Public Program:
Five Senses – Chui Lee Luk in Conversation with Aaron Seeto Saturday 23 February, 2013
11am – 12 noon Carriageworks
245 Wilson St, Eveleigh NSW FREE EVENT
Waste Not Song Dong
5 January – 17 March 2013
Carriageworks
245 Wilson St, Eveleigh NSW
Contact: 02 8571 9099 10am – 6pm daily Free
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well Song Dong 5 January – 30 March 2013 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW
Contact: 02 9212 0380 11am – 6pm
Tuesday – Saturday Free
Presented by
About Chui Lee Luk
After qualifying as a lawyer, Chui realised that her calling was not to practise law, but to cook. She firstly enlisted for work experience with Christine Manfield at Paramount; a move that confirmed her aspirations to own and run a restaurant. She followed that by spending time working with inspiring female chefs Anabel Savill at Emporio Armani and Kylie Kwong at Wockpool. She then headed to Cleopatra in Blackheath to work with Dany Chouet. It was there that she found her passion for French cuisine. In the next stage of her culinary education, she joined the kitchens of Banc to work with Liam Tomlin. Then she set her sights on Claude’s to learn from Tim Pak Poy, who admired her for her “sensitivity, drive, passion and intellect”. In turn, she saw in Pak Poy the same vision for fusing his Asian heritage with classical French technique. It is this innate understanding of South-East Asian, Chinese and French cuisine that gives Chui’s a unique culinary edge. Moreover, Chui’s cooking has always come from the heart and she regards creating harmonious dishes that can be appreciated on many levels, as her paramount goal. Claude’s restaurant has been at the forefront of French fine dining and culinary inventiveness in Australia throughout its history. Celebrating its 35th anniversary in May 2011, an impressive collection of chefs have presided at 10 Oxford Street Woollahra. Founding chef and owner Claude Corne opened the restaurant in 1976.
4A will be open late until 8pm over two consecutive nights, Friday 8 and Saturday 9 February during the City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival’s opening weekend.See Song Dong’s exhibition and join us for gallery floortalks held on both nights at 7pm, before making your way to one of the many celebrations around Sydney.
Come and celebrate the Chinese New Year, Year of the Snake with us! Share the Facebook Event with you friends.
Gallery Hours
Fri 8 February 11AM – 8PM
Sat 9 February 11AM – 8PM
Floortalks led by gallery staff on both nights at 7PM
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney NSW
Contact: 02 9212 0380 Maplink
Song Dong and curators, Aaron Seeto and Lisa Havilah were recently interviewed about the exhibitions, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well presented at 4A and Waste Not presented at Carriageworks. With thanks to Das Platforms.
We’re proud to announce Artist Must Be Beautiful (1) (2012) by Ming Wong is the next in the 4A EDITION series. 4A EDITION is our annual subscription project in which subscribers receive signed and numbered limited artworks commissioned exclusively for 4A by leading Asian and Australian artists. But we’re keeping the line up of artists a secret. All will be revealed when the parcel arrives on your doorstep. We promise that you will receive something unique and unexpected, for your collection or to gift to a friend.
Ming Wong Artist Must Be Beautiful (1) (2012)
Fine Art Print, 40 x 50 cm
Courtesy of the artist.
Ming Wong is a Singaporean artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. Wong’s artistic practice is inspired by world cinema and is characterised by the appropriation and re-enactment of key scenes from classic foreign language films. His aesthetic and conceptual re-interpretations of well-known films are informed by his interest in themes relating to gender and the shared experiences of immigrant communities. Often deliberately miscasting himself in the lead role in his films, Wong’s work is autobiographical in the sense that he incorporates and reflects on his own personal experiences of alienation and dislocation in a global context.
Ming Wong’s selected solo exhibitions include I Should be Like You, Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin, 2012; Persona Performa, Performa 11, Museum of the Moving Image, New York, 2011; and Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2011. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennales, most notably the Liverpool Biennale, 2012; Open House: 2011 Singapore Biennale, 2011; and the Gwangju Biennale, 2010. Wong has been the recipient of a number of awards and residencies including a Special Mention at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009; a one-year residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2007-8; the Pearson Creative Research Fellowship at the British Library, London, 2003-5.
Please join Song Dong and his family at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for an informal walk through of his exhibition, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well prior to the opening of Waste Not:
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well informal tour with Song Dong and family
5 January 2013, 2PM
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay St, Sydney
A bus will leave 4A for Carriageworks at 330pm. Bookings essential media@4a.com.au
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is seeking Volunteer Gallery Invigilators for our forthcoming major exhibitionSong Dong: Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (5 January – 30 March 2013) presented in association with Carriageworks, Sydney Festival 2013 and Chinese New Year 2013. Volunteer shifts are available on Saturdays during the exhibition period.
Volunteer Gallery Invigilators form an essential part of 4A’s Front of House team and support 4A in maintaining the security of the exhibition. Invigilators play an important role in warmly welcoming our visitors as well as providing information on artworks on display.
This is an excellent opportunity to become part of a small team, gain behind the scenes insight into the day to day running of a contemporary arts space, meet like-minded people and interact with the public.
How to Apply
Thank you for your interest. Volunteer positions have now been filled.
Hot off the press from Shanghai, 4A’s Sydney Pavilion team have brought back a number of these cool canvas tote bags from The Floating Eye exhibition. They’re designed by the talented team at Re, part of the M&C Saatchi global network and they’ve got major street cred.
We’re got four to giveaway this month, two to lucky current 4A Members and two to the first new Members who sign up to 4A Membership online. Then email media@4a.com.au and you could be a winner!
Look out for the canvas bags in the coming months, they’ll be available for purchase along with copies of The Floating Eye catalogue.
Curator, Aaron Seeto and participating artists Raquel Ormella and Khaled Sabsabi introduce The Sydney Pavilion exhibition, The Floating Eye part of the Inter-City Pavilions Project at the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012. The exhibition is on until 30 December 2012. Visit the Sydney Pavilion blog for the latest updates.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art proudly presents TheSydney Pavilion, titled The Floating Eye as part of the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, Reactivation.
The Shanghai Biennale is the largest international art event in mainland China, expected to attract over 8 million visitors and is led in 2012 by Qiu Zhijie (Chief Curator) and co-curators, Jens Hoffman (Director, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts), Boris Groys (art critic) and Johnson Chang (curator and co-founder of the Asia Art Archive).
The Inter-City Pavilions’Project, one of the platforms of the biennale is under the direction of Qiu Zhijie housed in a number of historic buildings throughout the city. 4A has been selected as the only Australian organisation with The Sydney Pavilion occupying part of an Art Deco building located near the Bund and is one of 30 international institutions invited to represent their city which will include Pavilions spanning from Amsterdam, Berlin, Brooklyn, Istanbul, Mexico City, Moscow and Sendai.
Curated by 4A’s Director, Aaron Seeto, The Floating Eye presents new and existing works from six contemporary Australian artists, Brook Andrew, Shaun Gladwell, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, Shen Shaomin and Bababa International.
In a location like Sydney, Australia’s oldest settler city, with its Aboriginal history, colonisation, waves of mass migration, shifting economic bases and trade, awareness of the natural environment, natural disasters there is no single narrative and straightforward representative space of its history.
Sydney’s geography between Asia and the West results in the constant overlaying of different historical and cultural contexts. In presenting the personal accounts generated by individual artists, to mark out the engagements and the discontinuities they experience as they try to negotiate ideas of locality and culture in globalised context, all of the artists in The Floating Eye articulates a specific history of Australia; a feeling of being connected and disconnected simultaneously.
The exhibition encourages an observation of a city’s shifting references and influences, how the overlay of time and history and our emotions and sensations of a place, give meaning and form to our shared spaces. As such the contemporary artists in The Floating Eye hold strong connections with Sydney and offer varied perspectives of the city’s transforming reality observed though its demographics, environment, history, politics, geography and society.
Together the artists in The Floating Eye presents a framework to illustrate how Sydney, and Australia, considers itself within the region and highlights the layering of histories and diverse social and cultural experiences, which speak to the experience of individuals living in global cities such as Sydney.
Curator, Aaron Seeto and participating artists Raquel Ormella and Khaled Sabsabi introduce The Sydney Pavilion exhibition, The Floating Eye part of the Inter-City Pavilions Project at the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012. The exhibition is on until 30 December 2012.
Check out 4A’s dedicated SYDNEY PAVILION, THE FLOATING EYE BLOG for more information on participating artists and regular updates as the project unfolds.
PREORDER THE PUBLICATION
A special Sydney Pavilion publication will be produced featuring contributions by Michael Fitzgerald, Olivier Krischer, Aaron Seeto, Souchou Yao amongst others. Preorder the publication.
Sydney Pavilion 悉尼馆 The Floating Eye 东张西望
October 2 – 30 December, 2012
2012年10月2日 － 12月30日
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are AllWellis an exhibition of work by Song Dong spanning the last 30 years
Emerging as an important artist during a period of significant cultural, social and economic transformation in China, Song Dong’s work reinforces the family unit as a microcosm for society at large.
Song Dong creates spaces in contemporary art where members of his family from the present and the past are able to reunite and establish connections. Family members are featured in the artist’s earlier experimental video, photographic, sculptural and neon works which present compelling portraits of parent and child relationships and the power of simple actions in the process of memorialising and remembering. Song Dong’s experimentation with video over the past three decades – superimposing images of himself, his father, his mother and his daughter – bears the hallmark of emotional and spiritual connections but with the impossibility of physical contact ever materialising. Since his parent’s passing, Song Dong created his neon work, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (2011)which faces the direction of the sky and relays a personal message from his family to his late father, Song Shiping and late mother, Zhao Xiangyuan.
Coinciding with Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry about Us, We are All Well isWaste Not presented at Carriageworks, Song Dong’s most celebrated work previously exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009 and London’s Barbican Art Gallery in 2012.
Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry about Us, We are All Well andWaste Not are presented by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Carriageworks in association with Sydney Festival.
Song Dong (born 1966) lives and works in Beijing and has been at the forefront of conceptual art in China since the 1990s. Known for combining aspects of performance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation, Song Dong’s works are often ephemeral and utilize modest materials that explore notions of transience and impermanence in personal, local, and global spheres. He has long been part of a traditional, tight-knit Beijing community, and his work reflects the everyday concerns and realities of his neighbors. Song Dong graduated from the Normal University in Beijing in 1989 and has exhibited widely in Asia and abroad. Recent exhibitions include Song Dong (2008) at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai; Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004-2006) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and Oalors, a chine: Chinese Contemporary Art (2003) at the Center Pompidou in Paris. His work was presented at the 2004 Sao Paolo Biennale in Brazil and at the 2003 Istanbul Biennale. He was also shown in the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art Exhibition (1998) at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
Song Dong and curators, Aaron Seeto and Lisa Havilah were recently interviewed about the exhibitions, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well presented at 4A and Waste Not presented at Carriageworks. With thanks to Das Platforms.
Carriageworks and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in association with Sydney Festival proudly presents, Waste Not by Song Dong.
From his family home in Beijing, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Barbican Art Gallery in London, Waste Not presented at Carriageworks is a transformative installation by one of China’s pre-eminent artists, Song Dong. Conceived by the artist following the death of his father, the work represents his mother’s process of mourning and remembrance. Consisting of the entire contents of his mother’s house, Waste Not reflects a journey of hardship and grief, resulting in a display of personal resilience and ultimately a celebration of life.
Coinciding with Waste Not is Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well, presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, an important survey of Song Dong’s work from the last three decades which reinforces the power of simple actions and the process of remembering.
Song Dong (born 1966) lives and works in Beijing and has been at the forefront of conceptual art in China since the 1990s. Known for combining aspects of performance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation, Song Dong’s works are often ephemeral and utilize modest materials that explore notions of transience and impermanence in personal, local, and global spheres. He has long been part of a traditional, tight-knit Beijing community, and his work reflects the everyday concerns and realities of his neighbors. Song Dong graduated from the Normal University in Beijing in 1989 and has exhibited widely in Asia and abroad. Recent exhibitions include Song Dong (2008) at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai; Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004-2006) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and Oalors, a chine: Chinese Contemporary Art (2003) at the Center Pompidou in Paris. His work was presented at the 2004 Sao Paolo Biennale in Brazil and at the 2003 Istanbul Biennale. He was also shown in the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art Exhibition (1998) at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
Song Dong and curators, Aaron Seeto and Lisa Havilah were recently interviewed about the exhibitions, Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well presented at 4A and Waste Not presented at Carriageworks. With thanks to Das Platforms.
The Board of 4A invites you and your guests to the opening of
4A ANNUAL MEMBERS’ EXHIBITION 2012 Launch: 6-8PM Thursday 22 November 2012
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket (between Pitt and George St)
Want to exhibit at 4A? Whether you’re an emerging artist wanting to crack the scene, or an established artist looking to show off your new work, we’ve got the wall space for you.
4A’s 2012 Annual Members’ Exhibition is set to be a blockbuster, so if you haven’t registered yet, time is running out!
Being a participant in the Members’ show is a great way to share your creative talents and interest in contemporary Asian Art and culture with like-minded individuals and industry professionals. It’s also a unique way to contribute to 4A’s exhibition program.
Limited places are available. Registration closes 6PM Friday 16 November, all artwork must be delivered to the gallery by then, Our office is open Tuesday – Saturday from 11AM-6PM until then.
Key Dates
REGISTRATION CLOSES: 6PM FRIDAY 16 NOVEMBER 2012 2012 MEMBERS EXHIBITION & PARTY OPENING: 6PM, THURSDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2012 EXHIBITION DATES: 23 NOVEMBER – 1 DECEMBER 2012
You can return this form in person OR by email to info@4a.com.au OR by post to:
4A Annual Members’ Exhibition
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
PO BOX K1312, Haymarket, NSW 1240
OR Give us a call on 02 9212 0380 and register over the phone.
OR Fill out the form when you bring in your work.
Conditions of Entry
You must be a member to exhibit. A registration fee of $30 applies. All payments must be received with this form.
There is a limit of one artwork per person. A size restriction of 100 x 100 cm applies to all artworks.
All technology requirements need to be discussed and agreed with 4A prior to submission of work.
All artworks must be ready for hanging and clearly labelled with the artist’s name, title of work, medium and price (no double-sided tape please).
Installation instructions need to be submitted with this form. For 3D objects participants must provide their own plinths and other install requirements
All artworks must be collected following the closure of the exhibition between 11 am – 6 pm, Wed 5 and Thur 6 December 2012. We are expecting a large volume of work and cannot safely store work after this date.
4A will take a 40% commission on the sale of artwork which will contribute towards the running of our program. All artworks must be delivered to the gallery by 6PM Friday 16 November 2012.
4A EDITION is our annual subscription project in which subscribers receive three signed and numbered limited artworks commissioned exclusively for 4A by leading Asian and Australian artists. But we’re keeping the line up of artists a secret. All will be revealed when the parcel arrives on your doorstep. We promise that you will receive something unexpected and unique for your collection or to gift to a friend.
We’re proud to announce the 4A EDITION Vol 2 #2, Phoenix Claw (2012) by Owen Leong is the next in our series.
4A EDITION
VOL 2 #2
Owen Leong
Phoenix Claw (2012)
Bleached beeswax, 18 x 6 x 4 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne.
Owen Leong is a Sydney-based artist who uses the human body as a medium to interrogate social, cultural and political forces. His photographs, sculptures and video performances attempt to subvert our relationship to the body by evoking abject responses to his work. Often employing liquids in his practice such as blood, milk and honey, Leong explores the passage between perceptual and physical thresholds of the body.
Phoenix Claw reflects on the memory of culture, place and identity. The sculpture takes the form of a chicken foot, which is renowned in China for its healing qualities and is considered a culinary delicacy. Cast in pristine bleached beeswax, the sculpture is the physical echo of a once living form: an impression of a body that no longer exists. In the same way that memory holds restorative and regenerative potential, Phoenix Claw gestures towards both a remembered past and an imagined future.
Owen Leong was born 1979 in Sydney, Australia. He studied printmaking, sculpture, performance and installation at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales where he completed his Master of Fine Arts and was the recipient of a prestigious Australian Postgraduate Award. Selected solo exhibitions include Infiltrator at Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne (2012); Tidal Skin at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne (2012); and White Amnesia at Sherman Galleries, Sydney (2004). Selected group exhibitions include the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool (2006); Magic Spaces at Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011); Soft Power at Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai (2007); and Asian Attitude: Transit Forces at the National Museum of Poznan, Poland (2007). He has held artist residencies in Sydney, Manchester, Paris, and Tokyo.
Register for 4A Edition 2012
Editions are limited to only 50. Register online or contact 02 9212 0380 and see what suprise awaits you*.
*Shipping and handling fees apply for international orders please contact us for a quote.
In the lead up to preparations, 4A has created a special blog dedicated to The Floating Eye, the 4A Sydney Pavilion exhibition part of the Inter-City Pavilions’ Project at this year’s 9thShanghai Biennale. Over the next three months 4A will regularly update the blog as this project unfolds, documenting everything from the behind the scenes install process, to reflections on participating artists, to photos of the exhibition and further resources.
Curated by 4A’s Director, Aaron Seeto alongside the Sydney Pavilion team, Curatorial Project Manager, Sharon Chen and Assistant Curator, Toby Chapman, the exhibition will feature exciting new and existing, installation and video works by six contemporary Australian artists Bababa International, Brook Andrew, Shaun Gladwell, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, and Shen Shaomin. The Floating Eye will illustrate the layering of histories and diverse social and cultural experiences, which speak to the experience of individuals living in global cities such as Sydney.
The exhibition brings together six contemporary artists who each have strong connections with Sydney and offer varied perspectives of the city’s transforming reality observed though its demographics, environment, history, politics, geography and society. The Floating Eye encourages an observation of a city’s shifting references and influences, how the overlay of time and history and our emotions and sensations of a place, give meaning and form to our shared spaces.
4A is one of several institutions from 30 cities across the world invited to curate an exhibition as part of the Inter-City Pavilions’ Project, one of the several platforms presented at the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012. With the theme of Reactivation, born out of an exploration of energy emanating from resources, collectives, contemporary life and from various locales, the Inter-City Pavilions’ Project is under the direction of the 9th Shanghai Biennale chief curator Qiu Zhijie (Chief Curator) and co-curators Jens Hoffman (Director, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts), Boris Groys (art critic) and Johnson Chang (curator and co-founder of the Asia Art Archive). Housed in a historic Art Deco building on Nanjing Road East (Nanjing Dong Lu) in Shanghai, the Sydney Pavilion site alongside the Brooklyn and San Francisco Pavilions occupies one of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares near the Bund in Shanghai.
After three years with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art as its Program Manager and then General Manager, Summar Hipworth is leaving our organisation. Summar joined us in mid 2009 returning to Australia after a decade in London studying and working in a number of prestigious contemporary art organisations and artist studios. In her time with us, Summar has worked on key artist projects and she has overseen and driven much of the administrative transformation of 4A. We would not be the organisation we are today, producing the scale and complexity of our current program, without her tireless work, tenacity and humour.
While it is sad to see such a valued member of our close-knit team leave, I am immensely proud of the work we have achieved together, and I am sure the many artists whom she has worked with during her time with us would say much the same. I know that she will take these qualities with her to her next role and future positions. Best of luck Summar!
– Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
In addition to 4A’s presentation of the Sydney Pavilion at the Sydney Biennale our team has also been busy working with a group of Australian writers on an exciting new publication designed by Re, part of the M&C Saatchi global network, featuring essays on each of the six Australian artists: Brook Andrew, Bababa International, Shaun Gladwell, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, and Shen Shaomin who have been curated into the Floating Eye exhibition.
We’re giving 4A Members the opportunity to preorder the Sydney Pavilion catalogue at the special rate of $45 or $50 for Non-Members. To order, fill out this form and email info@4a.com.au, post it to us, or phone 02 9212 0380.
The Flying Room’s, PinkHunt begins this week at 4A and across several contemporary galleries, cafes and shops across Sydney. For the next month when you visit us you can join in the hunt to win some cool prizes. Check out the sets of pink cut outs designed for us by the folks at The Flying Room. With a new set out each Wednesday depicting a mystery contemporary Asian artist, until 18 October these will certainly have you itching to think of who each one symbolises. For full details visit their website.
They’re also giving 4A Members the exclusive chance to win one of two cool prizes on instagram, a Mujjo iPhone Sleeve Brown or a Dr Bird Juicer. Are you following 4A already on instagram @4acentreforcontasianart?
All you have to do is currently be or become a Member of 4A, take a picture of the pink cut on instagram, guess the answer and be sure to hashtag #4AMember #PinkHunt so we can see it!
This competition has now closed.
Not a Member yet? Visit our Members’ Page to find out more.
Terms and Conditions
1. This is a game of chance. You can enter as many times as you like as by guessing the answers as long as you submit only one entry per cut out. To enter you must upload your picture and answer to instagram and hashtag #4AMember #PinkHunt so we can find your entry.We will randomly select a picture post on instagram with the correct answer.
2. You must be a 4A Member to answer.
3. Competition closes COB 18 October 2012. Winners will be contacted by 2 November 2012 and names published on the 4A website.
2. The prizes are Mujjo iPhone Sleeve Brown (retails for AUD $43) and Dr Bird Juicer (retails for AUD $29)
4A recently had a chat with Ken + Julia Yonetani just after the launch of their current exhibition at 4A, What the Birds Knew (3 August – 3 November 2012). They spoke about the use of Uranium Glass as a material in this exhibition and how it relates to our allure of the power of electricity and technology in the digital age. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year they also hope to manifest in the exhibition the fear of radiation in contemporary Japan and parallel the cultural anxieties shared between the Japanese, and Indigenous Australians through the Aboriginal story of the Green Ant Dreaming.
Ken + Julia Yonetani talk about their latest artworks in 4A’s exhibition, What the Birds Knew (3 August – 3 November 2012) and how the use of Uranium Glass as a material in these works relate to our sense of allure to the power of electricity and technology. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year they also convey how through this exhibition they hope to manifest the fear of radiation in contemporary Japan and parallel the cultural anxieties shared between the Japanese, and Indigenous Australians through the Aboriginal story of the Green Ant Dreaming.
Dadang Christanto’s performance, Survivor, will tour to a number of NSW regional galleries throughout 2012 and 2013.
Survivor by Dadang Christanto is a performance by contemporary Indonesian-Australian artist Dadang Christanto and continues his interrogation of disaster and its human impact through a performance based on events in the Sidoarjo region of East Java where hot volcanic mud has wiped out 11 nearby villages. Unrelenting, the mud continues subsumed livelihoods, memories and futures.
In this touring performance and exhibition, volunteers will silently occupy the gallery space, covered in mud from the neck down and holding a photographic portrait. Over the course of three hours the participants will maintain a silent vigil, memorialising this catastrophe and its continuing consequences. The performance is followed by a visual exhibition consisting of detritus from the performance, video and photographic documentation memorialising the catastrophe and its ongoing consequences. As a key part of Christanto’s artistic practice, Survivor continues a line of enquiry that the artist developed in response to his father’s disappearance under the Suharto regime in the mid-1960s.
This project was originally presented as an exhibition and performance at 4A in 2009 and was developed from a previous performance by the artist in Jakarta in 2008.
The exhibition will tour to the following galleries. Please check back for updates on performances.
Presented by Kultour in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and toured by Museums & Galleries NSW. This exhibition is supported by the Contemporary Touring Initiative through Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Government and state and territory governments.
4A’s teaming up once again with Eat. Drink. Give to bring you The Art of Taste 2. Enjoy an evening of bespoke culinary creations in the presence of the Yonetani’s giant green ant and inspired by the works in the exhibition from 6.30-9.30PM, Thursday 1 November 2012.
A discovery of artistic and culinary creations.
In collaboration with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Eat. Drink. Give. is proud to bring you The Art of Taste 2. An evening where science and creativity come together in the name of amazing food and art.
Enjoying beautiful food for a cause.
While most of us have the opportunity to enjoy a good meal in a restaurant environment, there are many who cannot afford this simple pleasure. As a result, we’ve developed the Food Without Prejudice Project. Our aim is to raise funds by hosting events in order to provide special food experiences for those less privileged than ourselves.
An evening not to be missed.
Tickets are just $50 per person and include a selection of delectable canapés, wines and soft drinks. You’ll also get an exclusive look at Japanese and Australian artists Ken + Julia Yonetani’s exhibition, What the Birds Knew – which draws on their concerns over the recent nuclear tragedy in Fukushima, Japan.
Date: 6.30 – 9.30PM Thursday 1 November 2012 Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St Sydney MAPLINK Tickets are limited $50 each Available Online Now Eat. Drink. Give. are holding 10 tickets exclusively for 4A Members to purchase.
What the Birds Knew refers to the alternative title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 post-war film I Live In Fear (生き物の記録, Ikimono no kiroku) which captures Japan in the atomic age. In this film, overwhelmed by the threat of nuclear radiation in Japan but unable to convince his family to move to Brazil, the protagonist Kiichi Nakajima follows a path of increasing frustration and anxiety and declares that the birds would flee if they knew of impending environmental threats.
Coinciding with Ken + Julia Yonetani’s What the Birds Knew exhibition, 4A invites our Members and their friends, to join us for a special screening of Akira Kurosawa’s film, I Live in Fear (1955) on Thursday 18 October 2012. Experience the film projected in its magical, black and white 35mm, original format and within the surrounds of the Yonetani’s giant glowing, green ant and radioactive artworks*.
Bookings are essential for this event as space is limited, email media@4a.com.au to reserve your spot.
Date: 6-8PM Thursday 18 October 2012 Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 181-187 Hay St, Haymarket Cost: Free for 4A Members – you can bring a friend along as well. Not a Member? Join up now and you and a friend can come along for free. Book: Email media@4a.com.au to reserve your spot Length: 103 mins with intermission
Subtitles in English
SHARE the event with your friends on Facebook.
**Uranium Glass Health and Safety
Modern uranium, or “Vaseline” glass is typically only up to maximum 2% uranium by weight. This is not sufficiently radioactive to pose a health hazard to those viewing the glass.
4A is very proud to be working again with contemporary Chinese Australian artist, Shen Shaomin and will launch our first 4A International Artist Residency Program for young Australian artists at Shen Shaomin studios on Monday 8 October 2012.
Supporting young artists in their professional development and also providing opportunities to create valuable networks between the art worlds of Australia and China is critical to both 4A and Shen Shaomin. Now based in Bejing and having spent almost a decade in Australia, Shen has received critical success with exhibitions of his work shown in New York, London and Hong Kong.
For the past month, Sydney Pavilion artists, Bababa International have been based in Beijing and have been 4A’s first artists in residence at Shen Shaomin studios in the lead up to The Floating Eye.
Join us at the launch of 4A’s International Artist Residency Program in Beijing at Shen Shaomin Studios on 8 October 2012 if you’re in town. Download the invitiation.
4A is a non-profit organisation established in 1996 to support Asian and Australian cultural dialogue. We are passionate about creating opportunities for artists and facilitating networks between Australia and the art of the Region. We think this is important, do you?
Associate Members form an essential support base for the organisation. Our members are comprised of artists, curators, collectors, and people interested in contemporary Asian art and culture. 4A members contribute to our future success.
As an Associate Member you will receive regular e-newsletters, exclusive benefits and discounts, invitations to all exhibitions and members only events, an opportunity to exhibit in our Annual Members Exhibition, and the knowledge that you are contributing to vital cross-cultural dialogue.
Memberships are valid for one year from date of joining. Why not join up today?
Benefits for 4A Members include:
-Exclusive invitations to 4A Members’ Program events throughout the year
-Behind the scenes previews of selected 4A programs
-Hardcopy invitations to major 4A exhibitions
-10% discount on all 4A publications
-Subscription to 4A’s newsletter and members only competitions
How to Join
Apologies our online payment system is currently down. To become a Member you can either:
DOWNLOAD THIS FORM and send it to pedro.de-almeida@4a.com.au or 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, PO Box K1312, Haymarket, NSW 1240.
OR call us on 02 9212 0380
OR you can sign up in our gallery.
Thanks for becoming a Member of 4A, we hope to see you really soon!
4A, SYDNEY PAVILION, SHANGHAI BIENNALE ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENT
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the official artist selection and curatorial concept for the Sydney Pavilion, to be presented at the 9th Shanghai Biennale, opening on 1 October 2012.
4A has been selected by the Shanghai Biennale to present the Sydney Pavilion, as part of the inaugural City Pavilions project, a new artistic component at this year’s Biennale. 4A’s curatorial framework and artist selection for the Sydney Pavilion is under the direction of Aaron Seeto (Curator, Sydney Pavilion), with Sharon Chen, (Curatorial Project Manager) and Toby Chapman (Assistant Curator).
Seeto announced today that the Sydney Pavilion will be titled The Floating Eye. The exhibition will take as it’s starting point the reorientation of geography in Australia, as a result of understanding recent history in the context of global and cultural connection, and the shifting unstable references at play in Australia’s oldest settler city.
Seeto states as his curatorial vision, that “in a location like Sydney, Australia, with its Aboriginal history, colonisation, waves of mass migration, shifting economic bases and trade, awareness of the natural environment, natural disasters there is no single narrative and straightforward representative space of its history. As people come and go, so does the routes of its capital and ideas shift – new narratives emerge and recede.”
The Sydney Pavilion will showcase new and commissioned works by six internationally recognised contemporary Australian artists with strong connections to Sydney. The 6 artists selected are:
Brook Andrew
Shaun Gladwell
Bababa International
Shen Shaomin
Raquel Ormella
Khaled Sabsabi
Together the work presented in The Floating Eye illustrates the layering of histories, social and diverse cultural experience which is a reflection of contemporary life in global cities like Sydney.
The Floating Eye considers the personal accounts generated by individual artists, to mark out the engagements and the discontinuities they each experience as they attempt to negotiate ideas of locality and culture in globalised, diverse contexts.
In this way, The Floating Eye might exist as a point of opposition to an idea of cultural safety. The artists in this exhibition ask, ‘How do I belong here? How am I connected elsewhere? Do I still belong here or there?’
This is an edited transcript of John Choi’s talk that was accompanied by a slideshow presentation given at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on 21 October 2011 for the forum New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney. Copyright of this text remains with the author.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
An opportunity exists for the development of a new public artwork on Thomas Street in Chinatown, which runs between Hay Street (at the southern end of Sussex Street) and past Quay Street to the rear of the ABC Building in Ultimo. The area of Thomas Street that has been identified will in future be a pedestrian thoroughfare.
In thinking about this site Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan, Aaron Seeto, is drawn to the idea of installing a garden or to work with artists working with vegetation. There are reminiscences around ideas of more traditional sculpture gardens, but transformed for a 21st century context. In creating a garden space, this area for public art could house a number of permanent smaller works and become a public meeting area as well as becoming a space for temporary projects and presentations. The garden itself would be a public artwork in its own right, created through a process of collaboration and research amongst a team of artists, designers, architects and other professionals.
More than just a garden, the site on Thomas Street will operate as a junction of a range of disciplines and positions, including art and design, social and cultural history, feng shui principles and the community’s needs from this public space. In this sense, Thomas Street will operate as a curated space, using the idea of a garden to structure a range of positions around history, tradition, and the social and cultural aspirations for the future. Furthermore, in the past, public art in the area has been formulated within a representational mode that used a recognisable palette of Chinese elements – such as lanterns or red lighting – to locate the Chinatown area. However, Contemporary Asian cultures around the world are constantly evolving this outwardly representational mode and future projects should embrace this dynamic to broaden the cultural, conceptual and technological parameters of thinking about what public art can be in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Guest speakers
John Choi is Founding Partner of Choi Ropiha Fighera architects with an international profile for innovative projects that bring together architecture, planning, branding, public space and tourism.
Felicity Fenner is Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Education at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.
Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist, playwright, former Cultural Counsellor to the Australian Embassy in Beijing, and is currently a Professor at the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Dr Xing Ruan is an author and Professor of Architecture at the University of New South Wales.
Aaron Seeto is Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan.
Bridget Smyth is Design Director at the City of Sydney and leads the City’s urban design and public art team.
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage who has been commissioned for a public art project in Chinatown’s Kimber Lane.
This is an edited transcript of Dr Xing Ruan’s talk that was accompanied by a slideshow presentation given at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on 21 October 2011 for the forum New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney. Copyright of this text remains with the author.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
An opportunity exists for the development of a new public artwork on Thomas Street in Chinatown, which runs between Hay Street (at the southern end of Sussex Street) and past Quay Street to the rear of the ABC Building in Ultimo. The area of Thomas Street that has been identified will in future be a pedestrian thoroughfare.
In thinking about this site Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan, Aaron Seeto, is drawn to the idea of installing a garden or to work with artists working with vegetation. There are reminiscences around ideas of more traditional sculpture gardens, but transformed for a 21st century context. In creating a garden space, this area for public art could house a number of permanent smaller works and become a public meeting area as well as becoming a space for temporary projects and presentations. The garden itself would be a public artwork in its own right, created through a process of collaboration and research amongst a team of artists, designers, architects and other professionals.
More than just a garden, the site on Thomas Street will operate as a junction of a range of disciplines and positions, including art and design, social and cultural history, feng shui principles and the community’s needs from this public space. In this sense, Thomas Street will operate as a curated space, using the idea of a garden to structure a range of positions around history, tradition, and the social and cultural aspirations for the future. Furthermore, in the past, public art in the area has been formulated within a representational mode that used a recognisable palette of Chinese elements – such as lanterns or red lighting – to locate the Chinatown area. However, Contemporary Asian cultures around the world are constantly evolving this outwardly representational mode and future projects should embrace this dynamic to broaden the cultural, conceptual and technological parameters of thinking about what public art can be in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Guest speakers
John Choi is Founding Partner of Choi Ropiha Fighera architects with an international profile for innovative projects that bring together architecture, planning, branding, public space and tourism.
Felicity Fenner is Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Education at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.
Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist, playwright, former Cultural Counsellor to the Australian Embassy in Beijing, and is currently a Professor at the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Dr Xing Ruan is an author and Professor of Architecture at the University of New South Wales.
Aaron Seeto is Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan.
Bridget Smyth is Design Director at the City of Sydney and leads the City’s urban design and public art team.
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage who has been commissioned for a public art project in Chinatown’s Kimber Lane.
This is an edited transcript of Nicholas Jose’s talk that was accompanied by a slideshow presentation given at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on 21 October 2011 for the forum New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney. Copyright of this text remains with the author.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
An opportunity exists for the development of a new public artwork on Thomas Street in Chinatown, which runs between Hay Street (at the southern end of Sussex Street) and past Quay Street to the rear of the ABC Building in Ultimo. The area of Thomas Street that has been identified will in future be a pedestrian thoroughfare.
In thinking about this site Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan, Aaron Seeto, is drawn to the idea of installing a garden or to work with artists working with vegetation. There are reminiscences around ideas of more traditional sculpture gardens, but transformed for a 21st century context. In creating a garden space, this area for public art could house a number of permanent smaller works and become a public meeting area as well as becoming a space for temporary projects and presentations. The garden itself would be a public artwork in its own right, created through a process of collaboration and research amongst a team of artists, designers, architects and other professionals.
More than just a garden, the site on Thomas Street will operate as a junction of a range of disciplines and positions, including art and design, social and cultural history, feng shui principles and the community’s needs from this public space. In this sense, Thomas Street will operate as a curated space, using the idea of a garden to structure a range of positions around history, tradition, and the social and cultural aspirations for the future. Furthermore, in the past, public art in the area has been formulated within a representational mode that used a recognisable palette of Chinese elements – such as lanterns or red lighting – to locate the Chinatown area. However, Contemporary Asian cultures around the world are constantly evolving this outwardly representational mode and future projects should embrace this dynamic to broaden the cultural, conceptual and technological parameters of thinking about what public art can be in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Guest speakers
John Choi is Founding Partner of Choi Ropiha Fighera architects with an international profile for innovative projects that bring together architecture, planning, branding, public space and tourism.
Felicity Fenner is Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Education at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.
Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist, playwright, former Cultural Counsellor to the Australian Embassy in Beijing, and is currently a Professor at the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Dr Xing Ruan is an author and Professor of Architecture at the University of New South Wales.
Aaron Seeto is Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan.
Bridget Smyth is Design Director at the City of Sydney and leads the City’s urban design and public art team.
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage who has been commissioned for a public art project in Chinatown’s Kimber Lane.
We’ve had a fantastic interest in What the Birds Knew from Australian media this past week. Here’s a highlight of interviews, previews and comments from the press lately. Read some of the reactions to the (slightly) radioactive works :
4A is proud to be a Festival Partner at this year’s 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia which runs from 22-28 August in Sydney. Featured in this year’s line up is Auteur Director, Kim Ki-duk ‘s return to the silver screen with Arirang (2011) a thought provoking documentary which follows on from an accident on set during his film Dream where an actress comes close to death. After retiring to a remote house, Kim begins to record his thoughts and feelings, which results in a startling series of interviews with himself.
To celebrate we’re giving away two double passes* to the Sydney screening of Arirang at 430PM, Saturday 25th August 2012. We’re got a double to giveaway to a current member of 4A and another to the first new member to join up online.
This competition has now closed. Thank you for entering. Congratulations to our winners M.Maurinelli and M. Sampson.
*Tickets are non-transferable and only available for the screening of Arirang in Sydney
*You must be a current or a new member of 4A to enter
What the Birds Knew Artist Talk: Ken + Julia Yonetani
from 12.30PM, Friday 17 August 2012
RSVP: info@4a.com.au
Exhibition dates: 3 August – 3 November 2012
What the Birds Knew is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
The artists are supported by The NSW Artists’ Grant. The NSW Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the support of Arts NSW and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
We’re just a month away from the Shanghai Biennale now and we’re inviting you to our upcoming Members’ Event to send off our Sydney Pavilion Team.
We would like to invite you and your friends to join us for drinks as we celebrate with the artists and curators of the Sydney Pavilion at this year’s Shanghai Biennale. Whether you are a Member or haven’t yet joined, come along and get a taste of our future Membership program. It’s a great chance to hang out with the team and have a chat about their plans for the exhibition. Because we love our Members, discounts on drinks will be on offer to all current 4A Members.
Drinks at Grasshopper Bar, 1 Temperance Lane, Sydney, 6-8pm on Wednesday 12 September.
Coming up 4A will have a number of events as part of the 4A Members Program. This will include a Members’ Only curated program of talks, artist studio visits, and tours of other Sydney-based exhibitions and projects giving you a look behind the scenes and direct access to artists and their work. We’ll also be offering more discounts and competitions throughout the year, and of course, you will still have the opportunity to exhibit your work in our Annual Members’ Exhibition. Membership is valid for a year and is just $33 or $16.50 for a Concession.
Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A will be speaking on the panel, Contemporary Asian Art Exhibitions: Curatorial strategies in the wake of the “Asian Century” at the Melbourne Art Fair from 11.30AM-1PM on Thursday 2 August 2012, which will look at current issues faced by curators and artists working in the Asia-Pacific region. The panel session includes Bala Starr (Convener), Alexie Glass-Kantor, Natalie King, Miao Xiaochun. To make a booking, click here
“At the dawn of the Asian century, how can we develop enduring curatorial methodologies within the Asian region? What is the impact of government agendas on funding models? Does cultural diplomacy play a role in shaping cross-cultural relationships? This panel unravels these pertinent questions by pausing to reflect on the broader Australian–Asian relationship through the prism of exhibition practice.” Further details
Event: Contemporary Asian Art Exhibitions: Curatorial strategies in the wake of the “Asian Century”
Date & Time: 1130AM-1PM Thursday 2 August 2012
Venue: Melbourne Museum Theatre
Free but bookings essential. To make a booking, click here
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is proud to present a keynote lecture by Qiu Zhijie, one of China’s leading artists, critics, curators and educators.
The lecture is free and will be held at 630PM, Tuesday 7 August, at the Veolia Lecture Theatre, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.
A recording of this lecture will soon be available on 4A’s website.
Qiu Zhijie is the Chief Curator of this year’s 9th Shanghai Biennale, and is leading 4A’s inaugural Emerging Curators’ Intensive.
International – Inter-cities – Inter-individuals will encompass a number of Qiu’s current research areas, looking at the relationships between people in the formation of cities and our understanding of the international. It is an opportunity to participate in a lively discussion with a leading contemporary art figure.
Qiu Zhijie is a Professor at the School of Intermedia Art, a member of the supervisory team at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, and Director of Total Art Studio at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. He is also an esteemed artist, curator and writer. As a conceptual artist, Qiu Zhijie’s practice includes painting, photography, video, installation and theatre. His works have been exhibited and are collected by individual and institutional collectors both in China and internationally. His solo exhibitions include Haus of World Culture in Berlin (2009), Ullens Contemporary Art Center in Beijing (2009) and Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai (2008). He has also exhibited in international art shows including 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), 25th Sao Paulo Biennale (2010) and New Art in China, Post-1989.
This initiative is supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and ARNDT Fine Art.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art wants to know what you think about us. We would even like to spend a bit of time with you to hear your thoughts about our programs and membership. All you have to do is give us an hour and a half or your time and we’ll even give you a free 4A catalogue and provide free food and drink.
For further information and to sign up please complete this online survey. It just takes 2 minutes.
With three days left until the end of the Financial Year,
now is the time to support 4A by making a donation!
Donations come in all shapes and sizes!
Give us your change and make a small donation,
Become a Friend ($888) or Benefactor ($2888)
If you would like more information or you are able to support us in other ways please contact Aaron Seeto on 02 9212 0380
By becoming a 4A donor you help us to continue to expand our work in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Your support provides direct opportunities for artists and contributes to developing understanding and insight into the contemporary art of the Region.
The Australian Taxation Office recognises the importance of donations to charitable organisations and provides incentives to encourage them. The Asian Australian Artists Association Inc (4A) is a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) listed on the Register of Cultural Organisations. All donations of $2 or more will be fully tax deductible and will be received by the AAAA INC FUND. ABN 31 013 253 308
Artists: Tony Albert, Brook Andrew, Melissa Howe, Roslisham Ismail (ISE), Michael Lee, Greg Semu, Alexander Seton, Tim Silver, Tony Twigg
Variable Truth examines alternative aesthetic and conceptual trajectories in contemporary art based upon close readings of Australian art and social history. The exhibition includes Australian and international artists who examine the Asia-Pacific Region to inform an expanded understanding of their own historical trajectories.
In recent history, Australia’s cultural environment has experienced drastic shifts due to increased awareness of cultural diversity, globalisation and the impact of emerging economic powerbases. Alongside these significant changes, are the precedents of artists such as Ian Fairweather, who looked internationally for cross-cultural fertilisation.
The works presented in Variable Truth reflect the conceptual approach of artists like Fairweather, offering alternative perspectives on internationalism in contemporary Australian art and society.
MEDIA COVERAGE
Download and listen to Director of 4A and Curator of Variable Truth, Aaron Seeto’s recent interview on Arts Thursday, Eastside Radio 89.5FM by Maren Smith before you visit 4A.
Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan have a new solo exhibition, In-Habit: Project Another Country which has just opened at Sherman Contemporary Foundation. Their gallery space has been transformed with cardboard sculptures reminiscient of shanty towns and hillside favelas alongside video installations. You might recall Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s show stopping, silver jeepney exhibited in 4A’s ground floor gallery in July 2010 as part of our Last Words exhibition. We hope you will join us in congratulating these artists on their new show by a taking a visit! Further information
Here are some of our instagram snaps from the opening, you can follow us @4a_sydney
What the Birds Knewfeatures new large scale works by internationally renowned Australian artists Ken + Julia Yonetani.
What the Birds Knew includes new sculptural works made from radioactive uranium glass. A 6-metre long green ant will threateningly loom over visitors to the gallery, and a large scale chandelier will be visible 24 hours a day. The use of UV lights will make the uranium glow green, giving the works an ominous energy.
These new visually stunning and highly provocative works arise out of the artists’ concerns over the recent nuclear tragedy in Fukushima. The title of the exhibition refers to the alternative title for Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 post-war film I Live in Fear, in which the central character declares that the birds would flee if they knew of the impending environmental threats.
What the Birds Knew reflects shared cultural expressions of environmental anxieties within Indigenous Australian and Japanese culture, and whether these function as either warnings or premonitions.
Ken and Julia Yonetani have exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Ken Yonetani represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (SA) in 2008. Together they have exhibited at GV Art (London), Kone Foundation (Finland), NKV (Germany), Artereal Gallery (NSW), Art Gallery of New South Wales (NSW), Campbelltown Arts Centre (NSW), La Trobe University Museum of Art (VIC), Object Gallery (NSW), Gold Coast City Gallery (QLD), Jan Manton Art (QLD), and Rio Vista, Mildura (VIC).
What the Birds Knew is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
The artists are supported by The NSW Artists’ Grant. The NSW Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the support of Arts NSW and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
4A EDITION
VOL 2, #1
JAE HOON LEE Area of Maya (2012)
C-type print
60cm x 85cm
Jae Hoon Lee (b.1973) is a Korean artist who lives and works in New Zealand. His artistic practice explores the interplay between real and virtual experience, investigating the boundaries of cultural and physical space. Through extensive travelling, Lee amasses images of different cultural territories and geographical locations, which he then digitally fuses together to create new landscapes that blur real and imaginary experience. By utilising digital media in this manner, Lee’s work transcends spatial boundaries, suggesting possibilities of simultaneity, transformation and boundlessness that reinforces his highly personal Buddhist philosophy.
Area of Maya depicts a map containing animals known to exist at the time of the ancient Mayan civilisation. By superimposing a Polar Bear into the original composition, Lee disrupts the nature of the work by creating a sense of alienation and timelessness: a satirical and analogous comment on the artist’s position as a cultural wanderer, caught in a perpetual state of dislocation.
Jae Hoon Lee was born in 1973 in Seoul, South Korea. Lee’s solo exhibitions include Ground Zero, Starkwhite Auckland (2010), Nomad, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2010), and Skin Projection, Ramp Gallery, Hamilton New Zealand (2003). Selected group exhibitions include Present Tense, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia(2010); Taste: Food and Feasting in Art, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2009); Jae Hoon Lee and Daniel Crooks, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
(2008).
For details visit the 4A SHOP
For further enquiries please contact 4A on 02 9212 0380.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has been selected to present the Sydney Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale, which will run from October 1 at the brand-new Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, formerly the Pavilion of the Future at World Expo 2010.
This year’s Shanghai Biennale is under the artistic direction of curators Qiu Zhijie (Chief Curator), Boris Groys, Jens Hoffman and Johnson Chang, with the curatorial theme of ‘Reactivation’. This theme looks at the vitality of contemporary art, but also focuses on the topics of art, urban space, communities, daily life and cultural exchange.
One of the platforms which the curatorial team is investigating for the first time this year is ‘City Pavilions’, inviting leading arts organisations from cities around the world to work with them to develop a component of the Biennale.
4A has been invited by the Shanghai Biennale as a co-organising institution to develop Sydney, as a Pavilion, to explore the dynamic relationships and histories shared between Sydney and Shanghai, and the role that cities play within global cultural exchanges.
This is an exciting official collaboration between an Australian arts institution and the Shanghai Biennale, and is a major strategic international opportunity for 4A. This collaboration recognises the significant position 4A holds as one of the leading contemporary Australian art institutions working closely with the Asia-Pacific Region, and the contribution that 4A has made over the years in connecting Australia with the international Asian arts community.
“There are many elements in all, each an individual but also a member of the group, sharing common characteristics that define it and its heritage. Regardless of where it faces, it dances and greets – that’s what each must do – a responsibility to itself and to the group. The fragility of the entire system is mirrored in the individual and each layer of its being. To fit in requires effort – balancing – and a certain understanding of the space one inhabits and of those sharing it.” – Luff
When we think of exotic species it is within a biological context: animals, microorganisms, and plants alien, unpredictable in their proliferation, and insidious – simply ‘different’. It is synonymous with non-native. This factor-driven classification is sadly mirrored in our 21st century desire for neat box-ticking and a plague of fear with its subtext of boarder control, asylum seekers, quarantine and removal. The exotic slowly takes on an unpalatable tone that creeps into a collective conscious like weeds or vines with their complex entanglements. The rubric of control sits duplicitous with the expectation of social assimilation. The metaphor splits. The exotic species must become hybrid, grafted to its new environment to survive.
Living in regional New South Wales, Tracy Luff is like that exotic species transplanted from tropical Malaysia to the cold arid climate of Goulburn – the different one – constantly existing within parenthesis. While Luff does not subscribe to cultural politics as a platform for her artmaking, she is however interested in exploring the boundaries of physical and psychological space and to question her own sense of displacement through the metaphor of recycled cardboard, her chosen material.
These ideas come together in her installation, Tip-toe-tip-toe where can I go? (2011), 22 cardboard forms sprouting in the lower gallery of 4A, observed from the street like a specimen rare and somewhat contagious, controlled in its room-sized vitrine. One is witness to something emerging.
An interesting precursor to this piece was the outdoor work, The Different Ones (2009). Taking its cue from carnivorous plants, this small group of vertical forms sat ‘introduced’ to the Wollondilly planes like wild grasses with a resilience to survive. The physicality of the landscape posed a great challenge to the cardboard: Would it hold up? How would its character be altered? While clearly out of place, there was a beauty, a synergy in Luff’s cardboard forms as they sat in conversation with the rural setting. She is also of this place.
Artists have long inserted artworks into the landscape, artists such as Walter De Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson who during the 1960s and 70s co-joined the environment and human activity by employing non-indigenous, man-made materials as an interruption, questioning the definition of what is ‘natural’ and acceptable practice. Bringing materials unfamiliar to the museum, piles of dirt, sticks, gravel, grass into its venerated space, ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ were ascribed to these materials outside aesthetic conventions. While such practices have become de rigueur, one might consider Smithson in relation to Luff. “His was an art which engaged the natural in an intimate, physical way but only to bring us closer to a disclosure of our always unstable, always mediated relation to it. This was an important realization, an understanding of nature would require a reflection on the nature of understanding.” 1.
Luff’s use of cardboard is more than mere visceral seduction or crafty obsession. As a recycled material its layered histories are inscribed and spatially extended. To paraphrase: an understanding of the material would require our material engagement to understand. A level of subterfuge is at play, like fashion-wear that uses combat camouflage in varying shades of pink we register the language – the material – but it has become feral, ascribing its own parameters of definition. Placed in the gallery Luff’s cardboard environments, deeply sophisticated in their rendering, are convincing in their rightful place.
Luff overloads the viewer with textural stimuli but denies the physical experience of walking through Tip-toe-tip-toe where can I go?, once removed by its island platform. It’s a restricted zone. Luff plays out the complexity of prescribed boundaries, the island’s sombre black maintaining an officious backdrop. The rogue exotic has been contained. Corralled and clustered, the top-heavy forms teeter on turned-wood stilettos, reaching, looking for their place. Its very title alludes to the egg-shell navigation required by a non-local.
“I have lived in Australia longer than any other country. I am not so aware of it here, but whenever I travel back the changes in me become more apparent and in some cases conflict with the norms of my birth culture. I have the feeling of not belonging there either. Even in Malaysia I am alien. I am still Chinese. This constant switching becomes a burden and heavy responsibility, and as time pass, I became the other, loosing myself, my own heritage.”
Does ‘identity’ still take precedence? As the production and consumption of ‘difference’ has become increasingly mainstream, the ‘exotic species’ has become domesticated. Cardboard plays out that role for Luff. The utilitarian sheet-character of the cardboard becomes whimsical, sensual, almost ethereal in her hands, casting shadows and gently moving, grasping at life. Tip-toe-tip-toe where can I go?, in that respect, had a performative role, a flirtation that masked a longing. The forms had a precariousness seemingly defying gravity, tenuously rooted. It underlined their impermanence.
“They stand up and sway – they are alive – they take charge. When something stands up, it is conscious and aware. The material has become part of me. I feel how it felt and they move how I move.”
Luff’s sculptures sit at the edges of realty, not unlike John Wyndham’s carnivorous mobile Triffids ever encroaching, exotic, menacing, entering our collective visual vocabulary. The denial of reality is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol.Our compulsion to filter meaning wants us to read Luff’s use of recycled cardboard for its environmental calculability, its fragility, its supply, reuse – Its meaningful message.
That idea of renewal for Luff, however, rests more within Buddhist underpinnings of the cycle of birth and rebirth. It takes us full circle to the introduced exotic species and notions of passage, albeit the ‘new beginnings’ of migration or enlightenment through meditative mechanical repetition of making practiced by Luff. Tip-toe-tip-toe where can I go? then can only describe an elegant evolution, assured and firm footed in its spatial inhabitation.
Notes:
All quotes take from email conversation with the artist while in Malaysia, 16 September 2011.
1. David Campany, “Survey”, introductory essay “Art and Photography”, published by Phaidon 2003, pg. 39
Gina Fairley is an independent writer and curator based across Sydney and Manila, Philippines. She is the Regional Contributing Editor for Asian Art News and World Sculpture News (Hong Kong), and writes essays and reviews for international magazines. She has a special interest in the contemporary art of Southeast Asia. Her latest book Effective Art Writing will be published in 2012 with Ateneo de Manila University Press
BlogdelNarco.com is a narcocultura blog that insalubriously reports on drug-related violence in Mexico. Anonymous bloggers established the site in 2010 after several journalists had been murdered for reporting on narco activities, thereby attracting global notoriety by sensationalising an inordinate number of gruesome drug war crimes gripping the country. Torture and public executions are commonplace in this context with such blogs capitalising on our long standing fascination with the spectacle of publicly staged violence – both real and represented. Mexico has a long established culture of death, albeit one that has been romaticised within art history and popular culture. To an outsider looking in, the proliferation of blogs and social networking sites reporting on the drug trade would seem an extreme and deeply disturbing consequence of narcocultura. Aside from its online manifestations it is also evidenced ‘in the mausoleums and the music and the baseball caps embroidered with marijuana leaves in Swarovski crystals,’ as historian Froylán Enciso points out. Such expressions of death he claims, merely refer to ‘the array of symbols they surround themselves with in order to ward off that fear.’1
Describing himself as an ‘anti-disciplinary artist’, Sumugan Sivanesan’s work interrogates Achille Mbembe’s theory of ‘necropolitics’ and its various developments. Sivanesan spent more than three months undertaking a residency at SOMA in Mexico, his ensuring research into narcocultura informing the four-channel video installation Dos Sicarios… (2011). Having mined the BlogdelNarco.com site for content, Sivanesan selected a one-minute grab of surveillance footage showing a man being shot dead in a public lobby, presumably a drug trade casualty. Typical of surveillance imagery, the camera is static and banal, detached from the horror it depicts. Narcocultura has become so normalised that it has inevitably become a facile part of everyday life in Mexico. Narco imagery is consumed as comedy – terror emptied out and replaced with absurdist shlock, an advertisement for the pervasive drug-related economy of death it depicts. The BlogdelNarco.com branding on the clip, along with the retail-like display Sivanesan creates with his arrangement of screens and headphones in the gallery, reads like a droll commercial for murder. More a comedy of errors than a clean kill, the victim is murdered after the gun jams and is thrown across the floor to an accomplice who together bumble but succeed in the execution. It’s the kind of bamboozled violence familiar in Hollywood and exploitation movies alike.
Sivanesan recontextualises the found footage as art by presenting four different ‘takes’ of the same footage to augment its comic value through sound or the lack thereof. The first screen uses video effects to sonify the visual signal; cartoonish sound effects imbue the action with broad slapstick punch in the second; the disembodied voiceover of a film director is ironically heard obsessing about the violations of OH&S in the third take; the fourth ‘applies’ silence yet headphones are plugged into each of the monitors (it only lasts for one minute, but recalls the same kind of silence John Cage constructs in his avant-garde masterpiece 4’33”). The serial killing on screen becomes a serial artwork; each screen synced and repeated in image but not meaning.
More than simply pointing out the malleability of the image, Sivanesan responds to a culture of user-generated media that negates encoded dominant meanings through oppositional tactics. Such is the democratic power of a more mainstream site like YouTube for instance, where users can upload ‘video responses’ that often remix and mash content already on the site in ways that construct entirely new understandings. Narco blogs, however, are in and of themselves oppositional, using dark humour to amplify shock value. Sivanesan notes: ‘a generation of narco youth raised on social media court celebrity by posting dispatches, threats and trophy videos that drive an emerging trend of watching real deaths online – a nefarious spin on prosumer net culture.’2
The aesthetics of surveillance already have a grubby lackluster quality, especially when remediated at low resolution on ‘prosumer’ blogs and gore galleries that are typically viewed on hand held devices and presumably shared virally through any number of social networking sites. Yet we are trained to believe surveillance is a truthful and unmediated trace of the real: the panoptic gaze of the camera regulates our behavior socially, capturing evidence, catching out a crime. By tinkering with the clip through value-added effects and soundtracks, Sivanesan exposes as connotation the supposed indexicality and truth-value of surveillance. No longer are we certain whether the scene is real or staged. Authenticity reveals itself as a construct.
Sivanesan plays with what viewers are willing to believe. When exhibited in an Australian gallery far removed from its Mexican narco context, the work inevitably becomes a critical exercise inviting potentially messy and irresolvable debates about mediation, affect, ethics, and politics. This doesn’t mean that the experience of watching is entirely devoid of visceral impact for an untrained viewer, especially if a viewer is to discount the artist’s use of sound (arguably it only becomes mordantly humorous when you pick up the headphones for two of the four screens). Sivanesan succeeds in trading off horror for banality in keeping with the way narcocultura is produced and consumed in Mexico and disseminated globally online. Sivanesan punctures perceptions of narco economies as airtight and culturally specific, exposing how drug worlds intersect with art worlds, all kinds of worlds. As drug money circulates volubly artists toying with narco and/or necropolitics unmask their complicity. And ours.
1 Froylán Enciso cited in Alma Guillermoprieto, ‘Days of the Dead’, The New Yorker, November 10, 2008: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_guillermoprieto
2 Sumugan Sivanesan, ‘The Politics of Ass’ (artist statement), 2011
Thai-na-town – Little Oz is a project by Vipoo Srivilasa that celebrates Australia’s diverse migrant populations by inviting people to be part of an international project creating sculptural objects with the artist that represent a person, place or thing that they miss about their home. Thai-na-town – Little Oz stems from a personal desire from the artist to engage with the multitude of stories of migrant experiences.
The artist conceived this as an ongoing project, of which Sydney is the first iteration. Participants will work collaboratively with the artist in producing a sculptural memento of their experience migrating to Australia. These objects will then be sent to their friends or family back home so they will become part of the project. The recipient will then be asked to photograph the object for it’s final chapter, an exhibition, Little Oz to be held at Chulalongkorn Art Centre, Bangkok.
Vipoo Srivilasa is a Thai artist who has lived and worked in Australia for almost fifteen years working predominantly in ceramics. Srivilasa creates elaborately patterned sculptures influenced by the cultural heritage of Thailand, and Australia.
From 14-17 June 2012 Srivilasa will host workshops at different Thai restaurants along Campbell St in Haymarket turning them into pop up art studios. Each workshop will take between 15-20 minutes and is free.
Dates and Locations:
@Bangkok Restaurant, Capitol Theatre Arcade – Thursday 14 June, 2-6pm
Chon Siam, 38 Campbell St, Haymarket – Friday 15 June 12-5pm
House Restaurant, 202 Elizabeth St, Haymarket – Saturday 16 June, 12-5pm
House Restaurant, 202 Elizabeth St, Haymarket – Sunday 17 June, 12-5pm
An artist talk will be held at Chon Siam Restaurant, 38 Campbell St, Haymarket MAP LINK at 12.30pm Friday 15 June as part of 4A’s Lunchtime Talks.
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Thai-na-town
Little Oz เป็นโปรเจคจากการรังสรรค์ของ ศิลปินชาวไทยนามว่า วิภู ศรีวิลาส เพื่อประกาศความมีชื่อเสียงของความหลากหลายทางเชื้อชาติ จากผู้คนที่ย้ายมาอยู่ในออสเตรเลีย โดยเชื้อเชิญผู้คนมาเป็นส่วนหนึ่งในการสร้างประติมากรรมระหว่างประเทศนี้ร่วมกับศิลปิน ที่จะสื่อถัง บุคคล สิ่งของ หรือสถานที่ที่พวกเขาจากมา
Thai-na-town – Little Oz ได้ริเริ่มจากความปรารถนาของศิลปิน ที่จะมีส่วนร่วมกับความหลากหลายของเรื่องราวในประสบการณ์การย้ายถิ่นฐานบ้านเกิด
หรือ 02 9212 0380 Thai Na Town – Little Oz is supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-Thailand Institute of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.\
Roslisham Ismail aka Ise describes his practice as ‘hanging out and making friends’. However this humble statement conceals the deeply-rooted and long standing relationships that the artist forms with his collaborators and project participants. Since 2006, Ise has worked with various groups of Malay migrants across South-East Asia, attempting to draw into and focus upon the experience of migrant populations in their new countries.
Ise’s practice often begins with the smallest observations. When he first arrived in Sydney he noticed a small group of vegetable sellers from Paddy’s Markets who spoke to one another in Malay. Immediately intrigued, Ise decided that he wanted to work with this sub-community of Chinese-Malaysian workers from the nearby marketplace.
Jalan Jalan Makan Angin, or ‘walking around and eating the clouds’ draws on the daydreaming and aspirations of one Chinese-Malaysian couple from Paddy’s as the basis for a new way of seeing Sydney. Calvin and Ahmei migrated to Australia three years ago from Malaysia. They both work as fruit and vegetable vendors at the market. Yet despite their proximity to the city, have never ventured to Sydney’s most iconic locations. As such, Ise adopted the role of local guide and created a tour that includes popular sights, the Opera House, Taronga Zoo and Manly. By creating a temporary travel agency for this couple, Ise questions the positions of ‘local’ and ‘tourist’ when navigating a city.
Through collage, drawing and photography, Jalan Jalan… reconfigures Sydney – if only for one, and two people – as a city without it’s previous social and economic boundaries. To follow Calvin and Ahmei, on their tour of Sydney go to jalanjalanmakanangin.tumblr.com
Tune into Ise speaking about his project recently on Canvas on FBi Radio 94.5FM alongside Mark Feary from Artspace available on podcast
Jalan Jalan Makan Angin is an initiative of the 4A Chinatown Mapping Project and has been supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
EVENT: Art Forum with Roslisham Ismail ‘Ise’ VENUE: Cell Block Theatre, National Art School Gallery DATE & TIME: 16 May 2012, 1-2pm
Malaysian artist Roslisham Ismail aka ‘Ise’ will discuss his current project Jalan Jalan Makan Angin commissioned by 4A.
During a previous visit to Sydney, he noticed from his weekly grocery-shopping trips at Paddy’s Markets that these retailers habitually spoke Malay amongst each other. Immediately intrigued, Ise decided that he wanted to work with this sub-community of Chinese-Malaysian workers. This micro-community of Chinese-Malaysians illuminated how a ‘secret’ language could be used as an identifying factor and is particularly interested in examining and looking further into the lives and habits of these vendors; their families, their homes, hopes and dreams, as new migrants. Here, the ‘secret language’ that was initiated through maritime Southeast Asia, is invested with a new agency and purpose, becoming a means of camaraderie adopted to stand for a communal sense of belonging that layers their multiple identities as Chinese, Australians, Malaysians and Singaporeans.
Ise describes his modus operandi as ‘making friends and talking to people’ or ‘hanging out and making friends’. However this humble statement conceals the deeply-rooted and long standing relationships that the artist forms with his collaborators and project participants. Since 2006, Ise has worked with various groups of Malay migrants across South-East Asia, attempting to draw into and focus upon the experience of migrant populations in their new countries and utilising an extensive network of collaborators all over the world he calls his ‘superfriends’ and often deals with the personal experience of urban communities through his interactions with different participants.
Jalan Jalan Makan Angin, or ‘walking around and eating the clouds’ draws on the daydreaming and aspirations of one Chinese-Malaysian couple from Paddy’s as the basis for a new way of seeing Sydney. Calvin and Ahmei migrated to Australia three years ago from Malaysia. They both work as fruit and vegetable vendors at the market. Yet despite their proximity to the city, have never ventured to Sydney’s most iconic locations. As such, Ise adopted the role of local guide and created a tour that includes popular sights, the Opera House, Taronga Zoo and Manly. By creating a temporary travel agency for this couple, Ise questions the positions of ‘local’ and ‘tourist’ when navigating a city.
Through collage, drawing and photography, Jalan Jalan… reconfigures Sydney – if only for one, and two people – as a city without it’s previous social and economic boundaries. To follow Calvin and Ahmei, on their tour of Sydney go to jalanjalanmakanangin.tumblr.com
Tune into Ise speaking about his project recently on Canvas on FBi Radio 94.5FM alongside Mark Feary from Artspace available on podcast
Ise’s recent installation project for Singapore Biennale 2011 explored a cross section of Singaporean domestic lives through an installation of six refrigerators storing groceries that the participating families would normally buy. The project provides an intimate portrayal of the way people live that is reflected through what they buy and eat.
Ise has participated in the Singapore Biennale, 2011; Asia Triennale, Manchester, 2011; Jakarta Biennale, 2009; Istanbul Biennale (with Ruangrupa), 2005. In 2006 he was the Australian High Commission resident at the Gunnery Studio, Art Space, Sydney and held his first solo exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2007.
Jalan Jalan Makan Angin is an initiative of the 4A Chinatown Mapping Project and has been supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is pleased to announce the introduction of its Emerging Curators’ Intensive, a new initiative developed by 4A to encourage professional advancement amongst emerging curators with an interest in curatorial practice within the Asian contemporary art context.
4A invites Expressions of Interest from curators at the beginning of their careers who would benefit from direct access to industry professionals to progress their curatorial vision. As part of the application process, respondents will be required to submit an overview of their current curatorial research which, if successful, will be the central focus for critical development throughout the program.
Taking place over two sessions between July and December 2012, this strategically developed framework will critically engage around 10 participants through a range of activities based on curatorial concepts, contexts and methodologies, and will be presented by key industry professionals. Participants are provided with the opportunity to develop their individual curatorial ideas and practice as well as broaden their professional networks in a constructive and nurturing environment.
In its inaugural year, the Emerging Curators’ Intensive will be led by Qiu Zhijie – an internationally renowned artist, curator and educator. Qiu is a professor at the School of Inter-media Art at the China Art Academy, the Director of Total Art Studio and member of the supervisory team at the Art and Social Thoughts Institute. As an active artist, Qiu’s artworks take a variety of forms such as calligraphy, painting, photography, video, installation and theatre and have been shown at a large number of art museums across the world. Appointed the Chief Curator of 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, Qiu will draw on his extensive experience and lead the group with his critique of contemporary curatorial practices and issues currently relating to them.
Qiu’s works are collected by individual and institutional collectors home and abroad. His solo exhibitions are held in art museums such as Haus of World Culture in Berlin 2009, Ullens Contemporary Art Center in Beijing in 2009 and Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai in 2008. He participated in exhibitions such as the 53rd Venice Biennale, 25th Sao Paulo Biennale and “New Art in China, Post-1989”. Qiu has previously curated “Phenomena and Image” in 1996, a series of exhibitions with the theme of “Post-sense Sensibility” between 1999 and 2004, “Long March, A Walking Visual Display” in 2002, the video part of the First Guangzhou Triennial and “Archeology of Future: The Second Triennial of Chinese Art” in 2005. He is also a prolific and influential writer and has published many art theory books such as “Image and Post-modernism”, “Give Me A Mask”, “The Boundary of Freedom”, “The Scene is Most Important”, “Photography After Photography”, “Basic Course in Total Art Creation”. His latest book “On Total Art” will be published soon.
PROGRAM ELEMENTS
Keynote lecture
Workshops and seminars led by Qiu Zhijie and supported by industry professionals providing broad perspectives on curatorial practice and ideas
Gallery, museum and studio visits led by Qiu Zhijie and supported by industry specialists
Roundtables and peer group work
Delivering a presentation during stage 2 of current research to select group of Australian industry professionals.
KEY DATES FOR 2012
14 May – Applications to be submitted in full by close of business
1 June – Successful applicants notified and provided with a preparatory reading list relating to the program and detailed program schedule.
10-14 July- Stage 1 of the Program*
3-5 December – Stage 2 of the Program*
*Please note successful applicants must be available for these dates.
HOW TO APPLY
As part of your submission you will need to include:
1. A Cover Page with your name, address, phone number and email
2. A Letter of Intent addressing:
· Reason for interest in the program
· What you hope to take away from the experience
· Describe your understanding of the role of the curator and expand on your aspirations, and what you hope to bring to the field
· Demonstrate this rationale through a previous visual arts project that you have either curated or participated in.
Please provide no more than a page.
3. Statement of current curatorial research:
Please provide us with a concise insight into your current curatorial research and interests. This may relate to particular concepts, artists, curators or theoretical ideas and should help further define what you believe the role of the curator is. Please provide no more than a page.
4. CV
Please provide a one page CV showing relevant curatorial projects or work experience
4A welcomes interstate applicants and will provide one travel stipend for an outstanding application from outside NSW.
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION
Applications for the Emerging Curators’ Intensive have now closed. Sign up to our newsletter on the side bar to be one of the first to hear about future opportunities.
This initiative is supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and ARNDT Fine Art.
4A’s upcoming Community Morning Tea held at 10am Friday 20 April is an informal get-together held every quarter for contemporary artists, cultural workers and local community members. Our aim is to build beneficial and long-term community relationships, encouraging creative expression and cultural exchange and understanding. 4A is a unique organisation dedicated to promoting contemporary Asian cultural thinking and promoting cultural diversity in the arts.
This morning tea offers an opportunity for participants to find out more about the projects 4A is developing as well as gain insights into Chinatown’s socio-cultural make up.
For this morning tea, we would like to invite you to meet Sydney based Teik-Kim Pok who will speak about The Urban Co-Apprentices Project, a series of match made creative collaborations between a local expert and a community participant which will take place in 2012. These pairs of individuals will meet and research ways of repackaging their cultural skills or expertise, and discuss ways of sharing them within the greater community. Each collaboration is a chance to examine how social arts practice, through curated collaborations, can spark new conversations.
We also hope you will be able to bring along any information (flyers, brochures, media kit, catalogues) about your organisation or projects that you would like to share with other attendees. The morning tea presents a great networking opportunity and chance to meet other like minded individuals in the local community.
Please feel free to invite you friends along via Facebook as well or share on Twitter.
If you are able to join us please RSVP to yuye.wu@4a.com.au
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art invites you to the first of our monthly lunchtime curator’s talks at 12.30PM on Friday 20 April presented by 4A Director Aaron Seeto who will introduce key ideas behind our current exhibition, Cola Project.
On for only a short time at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Haymarket, this is the first solo exhibition in Australia by this provocative, 25 year old Beijing artist He Xiangyu. Developed in 2008, Cola Project is an audacious and ambitious work that investigates material transformation, the products of global capitalism and the impact that its images have upon human culture. In 2008, the artist worked with factory workers to boil up thousands of litres of cola drink over a period of a year. It’s an exciting opportunity to see contemporary art and ideas being produced in Beijing, by a younger generation of artists.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is located in Haymarket, on Hay Street, between Pitt and George Streets.
Free event. Bring a small group along or just yourself. Light refreshments will be provided.
RSVP by email to yuye.wu@4a.com.au or contact 02 9212 0380
Cola Project – He Xiangyu
Exhibition Dates: 16 March – 5 May 2012
Lunchtime Curator’s talk: 12.30PM Friday 20 April
Venue:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181-187 Hay Street, Haymarket Map
EDITION is 4A’s annual subscription project in which subscribers receive three signed and numbered limited artworks created exclusively for 4A by leading Asian and Australian artists.
But we’re keeping the line up of artists a secret. Three times a year you will receive something unexpected and exclusive. All will be revealed when the artwork arrives on your doorstep every few months!
Register online at 4A SHOP
For enquiries please contact us on 02 9212 0380 or email info@4a.com.au
We ship internationally, please contact us for a quote.
Performance: August 12, 2009
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney
The title of this performance refers to the repressive and anti-democratic legislation enacted by the Suharto regime in 1990, ‘Litsus’ required all prospective members of parliament to undergo a test to determine whether or not they held ‘communist sympathies’. Christanto performed Litsus underneath his 2009 installation, Cost of Dreams.
4A will be open late this Friday 23 March until 8pm as part of the Art Month, Art at Night Precinct Party in Surry Hills. Then head to the Audi Art Bar afterwards at Chalkhorse for drinks and music from FBI DJs from 8-10 pm.
Go gallery hopping with friends and take a DIY tour of local galleries all within walking distance of eachother. At 4A you’ll see He Xiangyu’s Cola Project exhibition after dark, let the cola guide you in from the street.
Developed in 2008, Cola Project is an audacious and ambitious work that investigates material transformation, the products of global capitalism and the impact that its images have upon human culture.
In 2008, He Xiangyu worked with factory workers to boil up thousands of litres of cola drink over a period of a year. This ubiquitous material was slowly transformed into a syrupy black sludge and finally into lumps of gleaming coal-like crystals. These crystals were later ground down and turned into ink, which the artist then used to create Song dynasty style ink paintings, in the age-old manner of artists reproducing the landscape and sentiment of master paintings. He Xiangyu is a young artist whose work is representative of a kind of minimalism embued with a strong conceptual foundation based upon Chinese cultural thinking.
The exhibition includes a large quantity of the black crystals, together with examples of the artists paintings, and a human-scale jade skeleton, which has had the corrosive properties of the black crystal material applied to its precious surface.
Although simple in form and material, Cola Project is weighed with both modern and ancient history. At once examining the colonising impact of global advertising and the foundational cultural history of Song Dynasty Painting, Cola Project represents a conception of history and time that is very different from a Western perspective, and a young artist making sense of our contemporary times within the context of a thousand years of cultural history.
Header Image: He Xiangyu: Cola Project, exhibition view. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Exhibition documentation
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Resin, 2009-10, cola. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Antique Series, 2011, Chinese ink and coke resin on silk. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Production Photographs, 2009-10, C-print photographs. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Antique Series, 2011, Chinese ink and coke resin on silk. Private collection, Taiwan. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Tools, 2009-10, pots and induction cooker. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Tools, 2009-10, shovels and gloves. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Tools, 2009-10, cover cloth, rectangle pot, cola-boiled small jade pieces. Courtesy the artist and White Space, Beijing. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu: Cola Project exhibition view. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
He Xiangyu, Skeleton (detail), 2010, jade. Courtesy Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
The Public Life of a Private Collection – Asian Art Collectors in Focus
What role have collectors played in the formation of a contemporary Asian art discourse in Australia? This panel discussion brings together a number of collectors who have been broadly involved in the development of contemporary Asian art in Australia, from the 1980s through to the present.
Do private collections have a public role?
What motivates a collector to share their collections? How important is it for a collector to engage in a relationship with institutional bodies to ensure that their collection plays a wider role in serving the cultural life of a city?
How do private collections intersect with institutional agendas?
How can they nurture, benefit or antagonise the artistic process?
These are a number of questions to be discussed. The panel will look at ways in which collectors have supported and nurtured a discussion of contemporary Asian art in this country, and to speculate their future role in shaping its history.
Panel includes:
Pamela Adams, former Director Fire Station Gallery, Rozelle, one of the pioneering galleries focusing on contemporary Asian art in the 1990s
Daniel Droga, collector of contemporary Chinese Art and philanthropist
Dr Dick Quan, collector and philanthropist
Zhang Di, Director WHITE SPACE, Beijing
Chair: Aaron Seeto, Director, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
On Wednesday 15 February from 3-6pm, the Australia Council for the Arts will be hosting a small celebration for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s current exhibition on display in the foyer of the Australia Council.
The exhibition presents a selection of emerging, mid-career and established artists including Eric Bridgeman, Will French, Shen Shaomin, Cyrus Tang, Jason Wing and Soo Joo Yoo who examine the shifting cultural alignments between Asia and Australia.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s curatorial approach has been to look at shifts in contemporary visual arts practice due to the increased mobility of ideas, skills and exchanges that occur within the vast socio-cultural networks of Asia and Australia. The artists’ work in this exhibition reflect these shifts. No longer is identity articulated simply from a position of cultural background and migration. It is also formed through technology, history, globalisation, economy, industry and the accumulation of cultural knowledge.
If you are in the area we hope you will join us for a drink. There will be brief talks about the show by curator Samuel Zammit and some of the participating artists.
The exhibition continues until 21 March 2012. The opening Hours for this exhibition are 8.30-5.30 Monday – Friday.
4A Exhibition at the Australia Council
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art exhibition at the Australia Council
Venue: Foyer of the Australia Council
Address: 372 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, Sydney
Opening Hours: 8.30-5.30 Monday – Friday
It is with sadness that we hear of the recent passing of Boitran Huynh-Beattie.
Boitran Huynh-Beattie was a curator, writer and critic with a specialisation in contemporary Vietnamese-Australian art. Many will remember her recent project Nam Bang! which charted the ongoing complexities of Australia’s engagement during the Vietnam War. Most of her work and projects related to Vietnam’s Diaspora. Her work with the community and with Vietnamese artists in Australia was remarkable and she will be missed . She had recently been an Asialink resident at the Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts.
4A would like to extend deepest condolences to Boitran’s husband Ray Beattie and family.
A public memorial will be held at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on 11 February at 11am.
The City of Sydney is looking for an artist to develop an overarching concept to guide the design a new public space in Thomas Street, Chinatown.
Come up with an idea in the first place and become part of a collaborative team with landscape architects and designers to create a ‘counter point of respite’ for this new space in Chinatown.
New Century Garden
Thomas Street, Chinatown
EOI number 1411
The City of Sydney invites artists to develop an innovative public art approach to guide the design of a new public space in Chinatown. Artists are asked to respond to the idea of a ‘New Century Garden’ developed by curator Aaron Seeto to provide a ‘counter point of respite’.
Submission Deadline 11.00am Tuesday 7th February 2012
The following background information is provided for artists:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
14 January – 3 March 2012
Campbelltown Arts Centre
14 January – 18 March 2012
In the final instalment of Edge of Elsewhere, leading international and Australian artists have been commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to produce new work in partnership with Sydney’s communities. For the past three years, thirteen artists from across Asia, Australia, and the Pacific have developed significant projects that challenge how we think about contemporary community-engaged practice. Edge of Elsewhere in 2012 includes Brook Andrew, Arahmaiani, Richard Bell, Dacchi Dang, Newell Harry, FX Harsono, Shigeyuki Kihara, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Lisa Reihana, Khaled Sabsabi, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Michel Tuffery and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.
Edge of Elsewhere is co-curated by Dr Thomas Berghuis, Lisa Havilah, and Aaron Seeto, and will be presented across two venues Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Edge of Elsewhere is produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Board and Community Partnerships, and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
Since 2011 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art has been working with Indonesian artist FX Harsono and a group of emerging artists, writers, historians and curators to form the curatorium, In Memory of A Name for Edge of Elsewhere 2012.
This group was asked to consider Harsono’s work, Rewriting the Erased (2009) as the springboard for a series of discussions into the social, political and historical impact of changing one’s name.
On Saturday 18 February 2-4pm as an outcome of their research and discussions the curatorium will present a series of public programs including a roundtable discussion with Harsono and conversation projects, that ask questions of the circumstances and contexts in which people change their names.
In Memory of a Name Mini-Symposium
In Memory of A Name will present a series of interviews, stories, discussions and performance as a mini-symposium during the afternoon. The ‘symposium’ will be held in the gallery space of 4A, and will simultaneously be recorded and podcast. Included is the following lineup of presentations from participants:
1) Macushla Robinson speaks to participants from Celebrate-Obliterate-Recreate, focusing on how each person felt about having their personal stories and objects overwritten and how they in turn felt about overwriting someone else’s story.
2) Andreas Jaka Pratama translates the names of 3 to 4 volunteers into Indonesian in Name Filtration System. He will also proceed to teach them the correct way to pronounce them and lead them through a discussion of what they think about the names they are given.
3) Helen Fong ponders on the big question – can changing your name change your destiny? She interviews pranic healer/lawyer Yasaiah Ross and will have him analyse the names of two volunteers.
4) Angela Stretch produces a radio documentary on a man who named his race horse 5 dollars based on the advice of a fortuneteller and his misadventure of trying to register that name.
5) A roundtable discussion featuring FX Harsono, Macushla Robinson, Elly Kent and Toby Chapman, Assistant Curator, Edge of Elsewhere.
PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
Thanks to all who made it down for the In Memory of a Name Mini-Symposium. Photos from the event are now up on the EDGE OF ELSEWHERE BLOG.
PODCASTS
A complete list of podcast recordings from the event are now available on the EDGE OF ELSEWHERE BLOG.
We have organised a bus to go from 4A to Campbelltown for the Campbelltown launch on Friday night and also for the public programs on Saturday. Seats are limited. If you would like to join the bus, email media@4a.com.au with your name and a contact phone number.
Friday 13 January for the Campbelltown Launch
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – Campbelltown Arts Centre
Departs 4A at 530PM
Departs Campbelltown Arts Centre at 9PM
Saturday 14 January for the Public Program Day
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – Campbelltown Arts Centre
Departs 4A at 9AM
Departs Campbelltown Arts Centre at 3PM
The bus will depart and return to 4A on Parker St (adjacent to the gallery).
4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART
14 January–3 March 2012
Exhibition launch Thursday 12 January, 6pm
181–187 Hay Street, Haymarket CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE
14 January–18 March 2012
Exhibition launch Friday 13 January, 7pm Artists in Conversation
Saturday 14 January, 10am–2pm at Campbelltown Arts Centre
Art Galley Road, Campbelltown
Venue: Campbelltown Arts Centre, Art Gallery Road, Campbelltown
Join the Edge of Elsewhere artists for a series of talks and discussions about their work and process.
Over the last three years, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre have been collaborating on a major series of projects and exhibitions, presenting major new works by international and Australian artists. Artists have been commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to produce new work in partnership with Sydney’s communities. Thirteen artists from across Asia, Australia, and the Pacific have developed significant projects that challenge how we think about contemporary community-engaged practice. Participating artists include Brook Andrew, Arahmaiani, Richard Bell, Dacchi Dang, Newell Harry, FX Harsono, Shigeyuki Kihara, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Lisa Reihana, Khaled Sabsabi, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Michel Tuffery and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. Co-curators: Lisa Havilah, Aaron Seeto and Thomas Berghuis (2010/2011).
This is an opportunity to hear the artists and curators talk about this important series of projects.
The day will include a number of artist talks between 10am – 2pm. A number of faciliated discussions will be presented including:
1045AM Dr Thomas Berghuis and artists YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, Khaled Sabsabi and Arahmaiani on their different perspectives on what constitues community engaged practice
1.15 PM Richard Bell in conversation with film maker Madeline McGrady on the premier of the work about the 1982 Musgrave Park Protest
4A EDITION
VOL 1, # 4
FX HARSONO Per Memoriam ad Spem (2011)
Offset Lithographic Print
Paper size 60 x 40 cm
FX Harsono (b. 1949, Indonesia) is recognised for playing a pivotal role in the development of contemporary art in Indonesia. FX’s shifting practice includes his involvement as a leading member of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) in the mid-seventies; creating politically-charged performance and installations in the nineties.While his work deals directly with the trauma of Indonesia’s modern history, it has far reaching consequences, in its exploration of diaspora, cultural memory and personal histories. In 2010, a mid-career survey of his practice, Testimonies, was held at Singapore Art Museum.
FX Harsono was born in East Java, Indonesia in 1949. He studied painting at STSRI ‘ASRI’ Yogyakarta, Indonesia (1969 – 74) and at Jakarta Art Institute, Indonesia (1987 – 91). He has been included in a number of major exhibition projects, including Testimonies (2010) at the Singapore Art Museum; the 3rd Kwangju Biennale (2001, Kwangju South Korea); Tradition/Tension (1996, Asia Society, New York); The Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane). He currently lives and works in Jakarta.
For details visit the 4A SHOP
For further enquiries please contact 02 9212 0380.
In October, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba completed a stage of his ongoing project, Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 in Canberra, ACT commissioned for Edge of Elsewhere. The performance was part of am ongoing project in which the artist aims to run the diameter of the Earth, 12,756.3 km, in a series of performances that will be documented in still and video photography, along with topographical maps that track the artist’s movement via GPS.
Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s performance in Canberra was commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the final installment of Edge of Elsewhere, 2012.
Jun’s performance in Canberra traced the perimeter of Christmas Island, a territory of Australia located in the Indian Ocean, that entered the collective consciousness in recent history. In 2001, Christmas Island was the site of what became known as the Tampa controversy, in which the Australian government stopped a Norweigan ship, MV Tampa, from disembarking 438 rescued asylum seekers at Christmas Island. The ensuing standoff and the political remifications for the Australian government were a major issue in the 2001 Australian federal election.
For more photographs of Jun’s performance, check the Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 – Canberra Facebook page here.
Edge of Elsewhere is produced for Sydney Festival by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, through Community Partnerships and the Visual Arts Board, and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
Throughout 2011, the Edge of Elsewhere team was working with Indonesian artist FX Harsono and a curatorium of emerging cultural producers – artists, writers, curators, academics – as part of the artists contribution to Edge of Elsewhere. Through a series of workshops, online discussions, meetings and individual research the group has conisdered the implications of, and decisions tha lead to changing one’s name.
In late October, 2011 Harsono returned to Sydney to participate in the third In Memory of a Name curatorium workshop. The workshop was a chance for participants to come together to share their individual research and begin discussions about how the outcomes of their progress so far.
The curatorium will present a selection of outcomes from their individual and collective research as part of the 2012 Edge of Elsewhere exhibition program. These outcomes are still in development, but stay tuned for more details closer to January!
Edge of Elsewhere is produced for Sydney Festival by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, through Community Partnerships and the Visual Arts Board, and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examined the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
In his introduction Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, articulates his principle aim for the forum as a means to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art – and specifically the idea of a ‘new century garden’ in the proposed site of Thomas Street – particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts. In addition, Aaron touches upon the cultural context of Chinatown, its inhabitants, topography, and his personal connections to the area.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown was presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011
Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, talks about his curatorial vision for a multidisciplinary, experimental public garden work for Sydney’s Chinatown.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
Bridget Smyth, Design Director at City of Sydney, on the City’s plans to revitalise the city centre by testing new approaches to shaping public space.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown is presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examined the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
Guest speaker Dr Xing Ruan’s presentation explores the relationship between garden and house in pre-modern Chinese architecture, and asks whether or not the Chinese idea of a garden possesses the necessary ‘anatomy’ to be transformed into a civic place.
Dr Xing Ruan is an author and Professor of Architecture, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown was presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011
Guest speaker Nicholas Jose’s presentation, What is a (Chinese) Garden?, explores the art of gardens in Chinese culture that continues long, rich, highly evolved traditions of philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and everyday practice. A garden is a conceptual as well as a physical space, a constructed environment, a zone of play or meditative transcendence. The experience of the garden through the body, mind and heart of the person who enters it is central to understanding what a garden can be. In Chinese tradition this takes distinctive forms: a space apart, a space within. As these concepts are translated and adapted to a new context, urban, 21st century, Australian, public, they are reinvented by transnational citizens of the present who give new potential to civic space. Art is an agent in this transformation, including the writing of the garden by scholars and imaginative authors, as they create what critic Wang Guanglin, speaking of Brian Castro’s novel The Garden Book, has called ‘the garden of transcultural life’.
Nicholas Jose is a novelist and Professor, Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown was presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examined the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
Guest speaker John Choi’s presentation posits that public art is increasingly embedded to place making and urban renewal strategies, and that this tactic brings to the fore, the complex fertile ground that exists between art, public space, economy and identity. In his talk John explores these thoughts through the lens of ‘new century garden’ and his personal connections and observations of urban areas in Seoul, Korea.
John Choi is a Founding Partner of Choi Ropiha Fighera architects.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown was presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examined the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
Felicity Fenner is Chief Curator, National Institute for Experimental Arts, and Senior Lecturer, School of Art History and Education, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown was presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Friday 21 October 2011
Each year 4A presents the work of our Members to bring diverse practices together, and celebrate their support of 4A throughout the year. It is a unique opportunity for Members to share their talents with 4A’s creative community, and have their work seen by artists, curators, and other industry professionals.
Participating in 4A’s membership program is a unique way to connect with people who share a common interest in contemporary Asian and Australian art and culture.
The artists on exhibition include; Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, Robert Bennetts, Shoufay Derz, Helen Yip, Gabriella Courtenay, Jessica Bradford, Leone Burridge, Ayako Muyarajima, Liu Yi, John Lee, Pirapa Prathuangsukh, Tiali Zo, Jaime Khamphet, Kath Fries, Hong Tong, Phatawan Suwannakudt, Goran Tomic, Hyun-Hee Lee, pauline Plumb, Desmond Kok Hui Ong, Baiou Tang, Shuxia Chen, Michael J. Wright, Biron Vailer, Sarah Park, Li Cui, Akira Toyama, Jenny Yajun Wassell, Yiwon Park, Jacqueline Rose, Rone Waugh, Suey McEnnally, Sumugan Sivanesan, Jing Feng, Nicole M Barakat, Naomi Shedlezki, Karl W. Lu, Mandy Ridley, Mary costello, Vipoo Srivilasa, Jason Wing, Fx Harsono, Vernon Ah Kee, Catherine Cloran, Ellen Kent, Jim Peng, Monica Levy, Rhondda Xiao, Shazia Khabim, Digby Duncan, Jason sims, Melissa Ramos, Katherine Corcocra, Yeehwan Yeoh, Mari Kamolvutana, Craig Loxley, Paula Latos-Valier, Pamela See, Janet Haslett, Hidemi Tokutake, Trevor Fry, Chen Ying Ying, Mikyong Jung, Mike Turer, Petra Svoboda, Jayanto Damanik, terri Tang, Claudia Nichelson, Chloe Kang and Peter Fray.
4A EDITION
VOL 1, #3
VIPOO SRIVILASA
Coral Jug (2011)
Southern Ice Porcelain
12 x 9 x 8 cm
Produced at Claystone Pottery
Vipoo Srivilasa was born in Thailand and is currently based in Melbourne. He works primarily in ceramics, using age-old techniques of pinching and blue and white painting as the basis for his work. His hand-formed pieces are often irreverent, witty and personal, with detailed drawings and unexpected decoration.
Srivilasa’s Coral Jug is a personal response to the significant impact that changing environmental conditions is having on coral reefs. Srivilasa crafted the piece to resemble the texture of coral and glazed its interior to create a functioning jug. The artist encourages us to use this jug daily to remind us of the impact humans have on the fragile natural world. Many of you will remember Vipoo’s fantastic Roop-Rote-Ruang (Taste-Touch-Tell) dinner projects from 2008.
For details visit the 4A SHOP
For further enquiries please contact Summar Hipworth 02 9212 0380.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is proud to launch a residency program in Beijing supported by the renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin.
In 2012, 4A will offer a month long residency program in China. This is 4A’s first international initiative for an artist from Australia. Selected through a competitive application process, the artist will be based at the artist studios of Shen Shaomin located in Beijing, presently China’s most vibrant epicentre for contemporary art.
Shen’s studios were set up a decade ago when he moved back to Beijing after years spent abroad in Australia. The expansive complex served as the site for contemplation and reflection on his cross cultural experiences. It is where he conceived much of the experimental and audacious installations which have been presented throughout the US, Europe, China and Australia in the past decade including his ‘Bonsai’ series and silica gel figures of former communist leaders at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.
Shen is now keen to nurture creative experiences and new opportunities for Australian artists in his studio complex in Beijing. He is keen to give younger Australian artists access to new cultural networks as well as establishing productive connections between China and Australia. Director Aaron Seeto says “Since 4A’s inception we have been dedicated to facilitating creative networks between Australia and the Asia-Pacific. We are proud to be working with one of the key Chinese-Australian artists who has been involved with 4A’s activities for over a decade. Since returning to Beijing, where he has developed a significant international profile, Shen Shaomin has been thinking very deeply about the type and quality of support that can be offered to Australian artists, and he has very generously offered his own studio as this cultural bridge. As we move through the Asian Century, it is important for artists and the cultural sector, as it is in other industries in Australia to have the opportunity to witness some of the big cultural changes taking shape in the region.”
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The Day After Tomorrow is the first solo exhibition in Sydney in over a decade by renowned Chinese-Australian artist Shen Shaomin. The Day After Tomorrow takes a critical approach to human society and articulates a world in flux, dramatising the impact of human evolution and culture, and the damage inflicted upon the natural world and amongst its own species, in the pursuit of human freedom and progress. Featured are new work created especially for this exhibition including hyper-realistic sculptures of animals presented in mounds of salt.
Originally trained as a woodblock printer during the Cultural Revolution, over the last 20 years Shen has forged an important international career. Shen Shaomin is one of a handful of Australian-Chinese artists who moved to Sydney in the 1990s. Since returning to Beijing, this experience abroad has been a key impetus in his shifts in thinking towards experimental, forward-thinking and audacious work. Shen has presented work across the US, Europe, China and Australia including at the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Platform China, Beijing; Urs Meile Gallery, Switzerland; Osage Kwun Tung, Hong Kong; Shanghai Zendai Moma, Liverpool Biennial, Groniger Museum, Holland; ZKM Museum Karlrusch and the Millennium Park, Chicago.
Who would’ve thought curating and programming could be a dangerous profession? John Kirkman, Aaron Seeto and Lisa Havilah give us their perspective on what drives their work, the processes and challenges behind programming for an art gallery or cultural institution including the role of the artist and captivating your audience.
They discuss strategies that engage artists with local communities through specific projects like the Edge of Elsewhere, a collaborative curatorial program produced for the Sydney Festival by Campbelltown Arts Centre in partnership with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
These interviews were recorded at COFA on the 5th April as part of the free COFA Talks public lecture series.
In a highly competitive field of Australian cultural organisations, 4A was one of two new organisations elevated to Key Organisation status. This is an acknowledgement of the important national role that 4A plays. Professor Ted Snell, Chair of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board states: “4A is a dynamic organisation at the cutting edge of contemporary practice and after many years of hard work it is now in a good position to offer its adventurous and ambitious program of exhibitions and activities to a wider audience.“
Established in 1996 to present and promote cultural dialogue between Australia and the Asian region. It’s membership has included some of the key Asian-Australian artists, critics, curators and collectors as well as working with key artists from the region. The increase in funding will allow 4A to continue its work, to create broader Asian cultural networks and to raise awareness amongst Australian communities of contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region.
“4A is a pioneer Australian cultural organisation, and is ideally located within the Asian and Australian context,” says Daniel Droga, a philanthropist, collector of Contemporary Chinese art and the Chairman of the 4A Board. “The current national focus on Australian and Asian relations and the growing global interest in contemporary Asian art, reinforces 4A’s ongoing national and international relevance. This is timely recognition of the consistent and hard work that 4A has undertaken throughout its history.”
Since 2008, under the direction of Aaron Seeto, a curator and artist, the organisation has undergone a number of program and organisational shifts. “4A has as important legacy as a leading contemporary Asian arts organisations not only within Australia but within the Asia Pacific Region,” says Seeto. “As Australia considers its role within what has been termed the Asian Century, knowledge of the cultural shifts occuring in the Asia Pacific region, where we are located, is vitally important to this countries’ future. Key Organisation status, will allow 4A to further facilitate its work in the Asian region by encouraging artist to artist collaborations and create pathways for greater cultural awareness and Asian cultural literacy.”
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown
What will public gardens look like this century and what will be their purpose? How can public space and art function in relation to one another? What are the benefits and limits of multidisciplinary approaches to public art?
These are some of the questions examined in New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, a forum that explores ideas, approaches and concerns around public space and public art within the social and historical context of Sydney’s Chinatown.
Engage with an impressive line-up of guest speakers from professional backgrounds ranging from art, architecture, design, curation, literature and cultural management to unravel approaches toward a proposed new public art project focused on the idea of a garden in Chinatown’s Thomas Street.
Guest speakers
John Choi is Founding Partner of Choi Ropiha Fighera architects with an international profile for innovative projects that bring together architecture, planning, branding, public space and tourism.
Felicity Fenner is Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Education at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.
Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist, playwright, former Cultural Counsellor to the Australian Embassy in Beijing, and is currently a Professor at the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Dr Xing Ruan is an author and Professor of Architecture at the University of New South Wales.
Aaron Seeto is Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan.
Bridget Smyth is Design Director at the City of Sydney and leads the City’s urban design and public art team.
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage who has been commissioned for a public art project in Chinatown’s Kimber Lane.
Forum details
Date: Friday 21 October 2011
Time: 12.00 pm lunch for 1.00 pm start. The Forum will run from 1.00 – 4.30 pm followed by refreshments.
Venue: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 81-187 Hay Street, Sydney NSW 2000
RSVP
FREE event. Bookings are essential as places are limited.
New Century Garden: Talking About Public Art in Chinatown, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with City of Sydney, examines the role of public space in Chinatown, using the specific idea of a garden as an initial proposal for a public art project.
The principle aim of the forum is to begin a public discussion on ideas, processes and concerns regarding new approaches to public art, particularly in regards to multidisciplinary ways of working that may allow for artists, designers, architects, planners and communities to come together in innovative and mutually rewarding contexts.
An opportunity exists for the development of a new public artwork on Thomas Street in Chinatown, which runs between Hay Street (at the southern end of Sussex Street) and past Quay Street to the rear of the ABC Building in Ultimo. The area of Thomas Street that has been identified will in future be a pedestrian thoroughfare.
In thinking about this site Public Art Curator for City of Sydney’s Chinatown Public Art Plan, Aaron Seeto, is drawn to the idea of installing a garden or to work with artists working with vegetation. There are reminiscences around ideas of more traditional sculpture gardens, but transformed for a 21st century context. In creating a garden space, this area for public art could house a number of permanent smaller works and become a public meeting area as well as becoming a space for temporary projects and presentations. The garden itself would be a public artwork in its own right, created through a process of collaboration and research amongst a team of artists, designers, architects and other professionals.
More than just a garden, the site on Thomas Street will operate as a junction of a range of disciplines and positions, including art and design, social and cultural history, feng shui principles and the community’s needs from this public space. In this sense, Thomas Street will operate as a curated space, using the idea of a garden to structure a range of positions around history, tradition, and the social and cultural aspirations for the future. Furthermore, in the past, public art in the area has been formulated within a representational mode that used a recognisable palette of Chinese elements – such as lanterns or red lighting – to locate the Chinatown area. However, Contemporary Asian cultures around the world are constantly evolving this outwardly representational mode and future projects should embrace this dynamic to broaden the cultural, conceptual and technological parameters of thinking about what public art can be in Sydney’s Chinatown.
SEE PREVIEW VIDEOS BY KEY SPEAKERS HERE AND STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES ON THE FORUM INCLUDING VIDEOS AND PAPERS ON THE GUEST SPEAKERS’ PRESENTATIONS.
Image credits:
Bridget Smyth, Design Director at City of Sydney. Photo by Nick Garner
Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Photo by Nick Garner
Jason Wing, commissioned artist for Chinatown’s Kimber Lane. Photo by Nick Garner
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art hosts Caochangdi 404, a performance by Beijing-based American artist An Xiao. Caochangdi 404 is the second in the series of social media performances presented by Portal – an international, cross-platform project curated by Janis Ferberg (Sydney) and Stephen Truax (New York).
An Xiao’s Caochangdi 404 is an online performance and installation connecting a Sydney audience with local residents and artists in Caochangdi, one of Beijing’s more famous art villages.
Drawing from the conceptual art tradition of Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, Zhang Peili and Fluxus, Xiao will provide a set of simple instructions in both Mandarin and English for a conversational exchange between participants in both locations, utilising social media platforms.
In constructing this conceptual framework for exchange, Xiao seeks to address issues of connectivity in the 21st century by considering two barriers to contemporary communication: technological constraints and the basic, but ancient problem of language barrier.
We welcome you to join us in the gallery or online to participate in this performance.
What happens when media and technology are no longer new, but the stuff of everyday life? What happens when the technologies we grew up with become trash and treasure? 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents its new exhibition, After Effectcurated by Olivier Krischer, which ponders the complex time and space in which we live. The exhibition includes eight artists from Japan, Europe, America and Australia whose works integrate technology into their practice and demonstrate a shift in our relationship to so-called new media, no longer simply nostalgic nor futuristic, but as an element of everyday experience.
Artists have often oriented their encounter with media technologies and concepts as pioneering explorations of a bright, uncertain future. For the artists in this exhibition, “new media” are no longer new, they are the stuff of everyday life. Technologies we grew up on are now displayed in museums, or found littering op-shops and eBay; as trash and treasure, or just spare parts.
The practices represented in After Effect speak very much to the present—to presence: what it constitutes to be here, now. To create is no longer conceived of as adding space to the known world; perhaps more than ever before creation means giving new meanings to things, proposing alternative arrangements, revisiting abandoned trajectories, and revealing possibilities. This is about finding additional ways of being with/in the same old world.
The artists in After Effect highlight the effective presence of a human subject in diverse media. Their work revisits the inherent contingency of media, not simply as the object of an abstract critical discourse, but rather as the site of renewable social formations.
After Effect includes works by Aikawa Masaru (Japan), Jason Kofke (US), Kawachi Koshi (Japan), David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton (Australia), Mateusz Herczka (Poland/Sweden), Sumugan Sivanesan (Australia), and Kehara Hiroki (Japan).
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary Asian and Australian culture through research, documentation, development and presentation of contemporary visual art from the Region.
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art is Australia’s peak national body for contemporary Asian art and cultural thinking. 4A is an initiative of the Asian Australian Artists Association, a non-profit organisation established in 1996 to present and promote the work of Asian and Asian-Australian artists. This organization was established by a group of artists who were keen to address the cultural contribution of Asian migration to Australia and further to develop Asian and Australian cultural relations.
4A is a highly regarded organisation that fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary Asian and Australian culture through research, documentation, development, discussion and presentation of contemporary visual art. We believe that Asian cultural thinking will have an important impact on the future. We are passionate about creating opportunities for artists and facilitating networks between Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region. 4A’s aim is to ensure contemporary visual art plays a central role in understanding the dynamic relationship between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
The fundraising committee and the Board Of 4A invite you to bring your tortured minds and souls for a night of dreams…
The Fundraising Committee and the Board of 4A invite you to bring your minds and souls to a festival where dreams and ghoulish visions come to life… step into Midnight Matsuri
Live art auction by auctioneer Ronan Sulich of Christe’s Australia, of work by leading and emerging Asian and Australian artists, silent auctions of fabulous prizes, live performance and raffles.
All proceeds raised on the night contribute to the activities of 4A, Australia’s most respected and innovative non-profit visual arts organisation dedicated to Asian and Australian contemporary art.
Grasshopper Bar and Eating House
Time Cocktails served from 7pm
Date Saturday 8 October
Price $100pp (incl. GST)
Dress code Asian Horror
Book your tickets online at http://midightmatsuri.eventbrite.com or phone 02 92120380
Jason Wing Double Happiness (2011)
Offset lithograph
70 x 50 cm
Printer, Big Fag Press
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist whose Chinese and Aboriginal heritage has played an important part in his artistic development. The strong influence of street art in Wing’s practice is referenced in Double Happiness through the use of bold outline and colours, and the often less than perfect registration that occurs when stenciling on the streets.
The image of the boy is a reoccurring motif throughout Wing’s work. Nestled in the middle of a two-headed deer, the figure represents the transitional phase from innocence, or the point of intersection when making significant life decisions. The deer is based on an image the artist found in a grocery store in Chinatown, and is said to bring long-life and prosperity. The reuse of imagery is typical of Wing, rebirth and recycling being thematic concerns throughout his practice.
About EDITION
An initiative of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian, EDITION is a yearly subscription project of specially commissioned limited edition artworks. It is a unique opportunity to begin or expand your collection of works by some of the leading international, national or emerging contemporary Asian and Australian artists. The commissioned artists are kept secret until they arrive on your doorstep.
For details visit the 4A SHOP
For further enquiries please contact 4A on 02 9212 0380.
The Way You Look At Me, takes place over two floors over 4A with new work developed especially for this exhibition. Central to the show are ideas of looking and being looked at and feelings of invisibility in adopted spaces. The ground floor galleries will come alive with site-specific works, including a digitally printed large scale wallpaper, and a new work by Naeem Rana commissioned specifically for 4A’s front window (the Urdu text translates as: ‘my shadow will be with you’ ) This work is constructed entirely within the digital space, incorporating poetry based on classical Urdu poems to express loss and the experience of living in adopted places.
The exhibition will also include a 13 metre digital print by Nusra Qureshi’s 25 x 1333 cm digital print, combining the eyes of women from Mughal miniature painting, advertising and women from her own circle of friends. The eye is a central motif in her work, one which relates not only to superstition and omens but intimacy, metaphors of love, surveillance and vision, trickling down to the doe eyed heroines in twentieth century Indian cinema.
Naeem Rana and Nusra Qureshi are Melbourne-based artists who trained in sculpture and the Mughal miniature tradition at the National College of Arts in Lahore. Nusra Qureshi is part of a generation of traditionally trained artists who have revived and innovated Mughal miniature painting traditions through the incorporation of contemporary ideas, a transition in scale and new subject matter. Naeem Rana combines traditional Urdu calligraphy, popular culture and advertising within a digital space. Both of their practices reflect on contemporary society, culture and politics.
Nusra Qureshi and Naeem Rana have been included in major international exhibitions as well as seminal surveys of contemporary Pakistani Art. Nusra Latif Qureshi has exhibited in the 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2009), 5th Asia Paci c Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery (2006), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (2005) Her work has been shown internationally across Europe, US and India and is held in the collection of the MCA Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery. Fukuoka Art Museum among others. In Sydney her work has been shown at Sherman Galleries and Gallery Barry Keldoulis. She completed a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002.
Naaem Rana trained in the Nastalique style in Urdu calligraphy, traditional techniques passed down from his father. He has exhibited at the OZAsia Festival, Adelaide, UTS Gallery. His work is held in private collections in Pakistan, India, Australia, USA and UK. He completed a Graduate Diploma in Visual Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001.
Three solo exhibitions by emerging artists, Shalini Jardin, Tracy Luff, and Cyrus Tang explore the transformative potential of diverse materials including human hair, cardboard and living protozoa. By manipulating these sometimes strange materials, the artists question the fragility of self, family, and the value systems which define ourselves and others.
Sydney based artist, Shalini Jardin, includes live protozoa which interact with images of her own drawings. Based on her readings of vedic texts, these delicately rendered drawings of hybrid human and animal combinations have been scaled down to fit on microscopic slides onto which droplets of living protozoa are added. The installation presents a large-scale projection of these living beings engaging with Jardin’s drawings. The work is playful, and the audience experiences the chaotic interaction between real and constructed forms. Jardin creates a microscopic view of how human, animal and non-animal entities interact and influence our values and belief systems.
Based in Goulburn, Tracy Luff transforms the mundane material of cardboard into beautiful otherworldly objects and environments. Her large-organic forms are both familiar and strange, and enable Luff to transcribe her personal experiences into an environment that an audience can literally walk through. On first arriving to Australia from Malaysia and moving to NSW, Luff became immediately aware of the difference in flora and landscape. Her cardboard forms are in part an emotional response to the constantly changing social, emotional and natural landscapes surrounding her.
Born in Hong Kong and now working in Melbourne, Cyrus Tang’s object-based works usually self-destruct over time due to the fragility of their material. For her exhibition at 4A, includes Momentary Gleam, a length of hair made from combining strands of her family’s hair with her own. Hair is seen as both abject and protecting, and sometimes sexual. It also continues to grow after death whilst the rest of the body begins to perish and decay. Tang’s use of hair is a way to connect with her own family – to understand their separation over distance and the complex emotional ties that bind them. To the artist, this is a symbolic process of purification. Once removed from the solution, the residue hardened around the 4-metre strand of hair forming a jewel-like encasing.
Speakers: Michael Dagostino, Brianna Munting, Anna Davis, Ken Yonetani
Are you an artist at the beginning of your career and want to know more about how the art world works?
How do you get your work seen and who sees it anyway?
What opportunities are out there and what support systems can you rely on?
Is the situation different in South-East Asia and are there opportunities or things to be learnt from the region?
A panel of professionals including curators, residency operators, publishers and professional development organisations will address these pertinent questions.
People change their names under different circumstances and in different places. Often there are historical reasons as well as sociocultural implications that underpin such motivation. What can we learn about representation and identity from this process? What are the complications when a person acquires a new name?
4A is seeking emerging artists, curators, critics and other cultural practitioners (sociologists, writers, urban planners, architects, historians) to collaborate with FX Harsono’s project In Memory of a Name to develop new work for Edge of Elsewhere 2012.
The project contributes to the growth of critical culture by seeking to develop a framework for social research. It provides emerging practitioners with a unique professional development opportunity to gain invaluable insight into a creative methodology for art making and thinking.
Led by Indonesian artist FX Harsono, participants will be invited to form a curatorium, which will embark on a research project which centres on the changing of one’s name in relation to the socio-historical contexts of migration in Australia and Asia. In the process, the project extends to consider the articulation of memory structure and the past, as well as the performance of identity and its political implications.
Edge of Elsewhere is a major three-year project that brings together some of the most exciting contemporary artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific to develop new artworks in partnership with Sydney communities. It is the flagship contemporary art project in Sydney Festival’s program over three consecutive years in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Edge of Elsewhere is produced for Sydney Festival by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
To apply, please send us your CV and an expression of interest stating in no more than one page what you hope to gain from this workshop to simon.soon@4a.com.au
Places are limited. 4A will be able to cover traveling costs and accommodation for two interstate participants. Applications closes at 5pm, Friday 29th April 2011
2 Day Workshop: 27 – 28 May 2011 (Fri-Sat) Research Phase: June – November 2011
Follow-up Workshop: End of November 2011 Project Presentation: Edge of Elsewhere (January 2012)
Constellation is a group exhibition bringing together work of four Korean artists who live and work outside of Korea. It is an exploration of experiences of diaspora amongst a 30-something generation of artists. The artists in Constellation are based in Sydney, Auckland and Berlin and explore new communicative possibilities through diverse mediums such as performance, new media, video and drawing. These artists enable us to witness our nuanced relationship with objects, materials, other people and ourselves through playful use of material and form.
Seung Yul Oh transforms childhood memories into surreal large-scale installations. His whimsical works experiment with colour, material and movement as he reanimates toys and games by exaggerating their familiar scale. He presents two oversized inflatables squashed into 4A’s street front gallery. In Rain, a large projected interactive computer game, the audience can create an onscreen kaleidoscope of rain, vegetation, and animals through the speed of their own movements.
Sydney based artist, Soo-Joo Yoo, challenges the traditional definition of drawing as a two-dimensional process. Yoo draws with materials which stretch out from the wall to intersect space, creating sculptural environments.
Kijeong Song, also working in Sydney, employs photography as a means of observing the nuances and intimacies of others’ lives. In her earlier work she photographed couples in intimate settings. Her new work for Constellation is an extension to her earlier practice with a focus on intergenerational relationships. Jajangga is a very personal video work that documents the artists’ nightly ritual of singing her child to sleep.
The exhibition will be opened with ‘It Without A Blink,’ a performance by Berlin based artist Eunhye Hwang. Hwang’s performances investigate communication through public interventions that draw on participatory engagement by an often unexpecting audience. Members of the audience are invited to register their names that will then be orchestrated into a complex arrangement of movement and vocalisation by the artist and an eclectic group of singers and dancers, and performed back to them.
It Without A Blink is a major performance by Berlin-based artist Eunhye Hwang. The performance marked the opening of Constellation, an exhibition that brings together four Korean artists who live and work outside of Korea.
Hwang’s performances investigate communication through public interventions that draw on participatory engagement by an often unexpecting audience. For It Without A Blink, members of the audience are invited to register their names that will then be orchestrated into a complex arrangement of movement and vocalisation by the artist and an eclectic group of singers and dancers, and performed back to them.
Huang’s previous notable performances include PS1 at MOMA, New York in 2010, Body and Eros Venice Biennale, SONAR Kunstmuseum Celle, Germany and Insomnia Le Generateur, Paris in 2007.
Cinema Alley is a one-night only street cinema that showcases significant video works by contemporary Asian and Australia artists. It is an annual event that takes place during City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival.
In 2011, Cinema Alley’s curated program explored the ideas of the city – their transformation, experiences of alienation and the effects that history and tradition place on the individual. The selection of works include leading artists Chen Chieh-Jen, Jun Yang, Ou Ning, Cao Fei, Wang Qingsong, Yuan Goang-ming. A selection of short animation works from local artists were also presented as a preview to the main screening.
San Yuan Li (2003)
Ou Ning and Cao Fei
San Yuan Li is a self-titled film about the small suburb of San Yuan Li in Guangzhou, China, directed by Ou Ning and Cao Fei in collaboration with young artists and filmmakers from the U-theque group. The film formed part of the Canton Express exhibition curated by Hou Hanru for the Venice Biennale in 2003. San Yuan Li was once a rural suburb on the outskirts of Guangzhou; however, with the expansion of the city, the suburb now finds itself at the cutting edge of real estate development. In an attempt to preserve their way of life, the people of San Yuan Li have refused to forfeit their land, forcing urban developers to build around the suburb.
The film is a metaphorical journey through China’s rapid modernisation that explores the powerful juxtaposition between the old suburb and the modern city, capturing the essence of disappearing local culture in the face of modernisation and urban development. Shot in black and white, with no dialogue and rapidly edited scenes, the film gives the impression that modernity is an unnatural acceleration of development.
The Factory (2003)
Chen Chieh-Jen
The Factory is a film by artist and filmmaker Chen Chieh-Jen that reflects on the hardship faced by the factory workers of Taiwan. In 2003 seven years following its closure, Chen Chieh-Jen invited a group of ex-textile workers to return to the Lien Fu garment factory; a place where many members of the group had worked for over two decades.
Taiwan was once one of the world’s major manufacturing centres. However, during the 1990s many manufacturing companies in Taiwan began to move offshore in search for cheaper labour. As factories began to close, employees found themselves without work, laid-off by company owners who refused to pay retirement pensions and redundancy fees.
Many of the abandoned objects in the Lien Fu garment factory remain untouched since its closure in 1996, possessing, as Chen Chieh-Jen describes, a dual sense of time. This element of simultaneous time forms the narrative structure of The Factory. The film features women returning to work after seven years of absence, using their abandoned tools as though they had never left. As the camera scans the women at work, Chen Chieh Jen intermixes documentary footage of factory workers produced by the Taiwanese government during the 1960s. The women of the film chose not to speak. To emphasise the impact of this gesture, Chen Chieh-Jen decided to remove all sound from the film.
Floating (2000)
Yuan Goang-ming
Floating is a film by artist Yuan Goang-ming that presents the harrowing experience of a man adrift on a boat at sea. The film is an existentialist metaphor that reflects on human experience, investigating the consequences of temporal displacement, and the associated feelings of insignificance and emptiness that people encounter when confronted with a loss of orientation.
A Short Story on Forgetting and Remembering (2007)
Jun Yang
The film follows a man voicing his thoughts as he wonders the streets of Taipei at night. The film’s concept is based on implanted and collective memory (essentially, a process of brainwashing that involves the fabrication of an image or story, recited over-and-over again to the extent that one begins to believe that the image or story is an event that actually occurred) and the manipulative power this psychological condition endows on reality. The man reflects on his past experiences and life in the city, which he then uses as an analogy to explain the contemporary condition of Taipei and its historical relationship to Mainland China. A Short-Story on Forgetting and Remembering investigates how individuals and their localities are shaped through collective history and memory.
Skyscraper (2008)
Wang Qingsong.
The installation featured in the video is about 35 meters high, with a diameter of 45 meters, built by 40 workers within a month or so in Changping County, 30 miles north of Beijing. The scaffolding iron bars are painted with gold colour to make them look shiny and golden under the sunshine. This golden scaffolding signifies the glory/wonder of drastic changes in urbanisation drive. The soundtrack dubbed at the end of “Silent Night” melody together with colourful fireworks celebrating the Chinese New Year creates a very peaceful while melancholy world.
“Through this video piece, I want to analyse how dramatic social changes, in particular, in terms of skyscraper, happens in China and how it has nothing to do with humanity . This ‘Skyscraper’ is like a Greek genie that grows from a smoky ground and pops up drastically. The whole process of this scaffolding construction emulates the process of beginning to end construction of a potential building.”
-Wang Qingsong
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
15 January – 12 March 2011
Campbelltown Arts Centre
15 January – 17 April 2011
Edge of Elsewhere is a major three-year project that was launched in January 2010 as a partnership between 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre.
The project brings together 13 contemporary artists from Australia, Asia and the Pacific who have each chosen to collaborate with a different local community in the Greater Sydney region in order to create their work including Brook Andrew, Arahmaiani, Richard Bell, Dacchi Dang, Newell Harry, FX Harsono, Shigeyuki Kihara, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Lisa Reihana, Khaled Sabsabi, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Michel Tuffery, and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.
Edge of Elsewhere is co-curated by Dr Thomas J. Berghuis, Lisa Havilah, and Aaron Seeto, and was presented across two venues Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Edge of Elsewhere is produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Board and Community Partnerships, and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
Nomad by New Zealand based Korean artist, Jae Hoon Lee is a solo exhibition of large-scale photography and video work of landscapes that the artist has developed over the past few years. As the artist traveled through India, Nepal and Korea he collected images that were subsequently digitally stitched together to create new, and fantastic landscapes.
These photographs appear as if from a vivid memory, where the artist has projected lived experience into an imagined time and space. As an observer of environmental and social nuance, Jae Hoon Lee has been fascinated by the movement through different cultural territories highlighting the relationship between human culture nature and the impact of the digital world.
His immaculately manipulated surfaces dissolve physical and cultural boundaries, creating relationships between otherwise disparate blurring real and imagined experiences.
Jae Hoon Lee is currently based in Auckland. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998. He has exhibited at the Auckland Art Gallery; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; Artspace, Auckland; City Gallery, Wellington; Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, as well as the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. This is his first solo exhibition in Australia.
Artists: Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan, Patty Chang, Will French, Young Sun Han, Meiro Koizumi, Tatsumi Orimoto, Shen Shaomin, Sumugan Sivanesan, Kiran Subbaiah, Tintin Wulia
Split over two exhibition periods and featuring artists from Australia and the Asia region, Last Words is a group exhibition that explores language, knowledge and communication in an age of cultural diversity and globalisation. It is the culmination of a series of mid-career solo exhibitions and performances, which 4A has undertaken throughout 2010 that tackle ideas of communication.
These artists articulate that it is no longer straight forward to answer questions such as who are you? where are you from? how do you fit in? As our ideas and experiences of place and locality are increasingly defined by the intersection of local, national and global references – colliding histories, traditions and politics are what define our contemporary experiences. It is a world that is undergoing constant change and expansion, where culture, geography and traditional forms of identification are neither consistent or certain. What happens when our boundaries – geographical, psychological, physical and cultural – dissolve? How, then do we articulate history, politics, where and how we live?
Last Words aims to set up a discourse around the ways in which meaning is constructed in a time of uncertainty, through artworks which act as a catalyst for reflection on the contemporary world.
Technology, economics and global politics have changed our understanding of geography and other cultures. We can talk instantaneously with our friends around the world, we have an understanding of society and politics in different parts of the globe and we are exposed to multinational global brands and their ideologies. Within these cross-cultural, cross-national and consumer movements, where does the individual fit? How does the individual articulate their own position and their own history?
Last Words explores language, knowledge and communication in an age of cultural diversity and globalisation. We have entered a period where traditional forms of identification are neither consistent or certain. Last Words highlights the need to find new ways of thinking and talking about culture.
Catching the Moment; Each Step is the Past is an exhibition of major new work by Thai-Australian artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt.
Catching the Moment; Each Step is the Past is an ephemeral installation using silk and hand-woven fabric, layered with delicate drawings and Thai texts.The softness of Suwannakudt’s work is underpinned by a serious meditation on communication. Her work is imbued with allegorical and everyday references, resonating with personal memory and experiences.
Suwannakudt migrated to Australia in 1996. She describes her entry into Australian culture as both shocking and disorientating. The tactility of the materials used in her works evoke a shared need to connect and allows a space to contemplate the dual existence of living both here and elsewhere.
Suwannakudt trained as a temple painter in Thailand. After rising to a respected status within a traditionally rigid, patriarchal tradition, Suwannakudt continued to challenge her practice by migrating to Australia. She has exhibited widely internationally in Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo, Melbourne, Manila, and recently completed a residency with Womanifesto in Thailand.
Oil Can is a performance by Tatsumi Orimoto taking place on Thursday 13 May at 12:30pm. Oil Can involves the artist and 15 volunteers standing solemnly in 44 gallon steel drums. Employing humour, often to the discomfort of the viewer, Tatsumi Orimoto’s artistic practice examines forms of communication. Throughout the duration of this performance, the absurd gives way to a tender and serious existential questioning. Neatly in rows, people appear marooned and isolated by their steel confines. Though physically close and in the same situation as their neighbour, no one is able to connect to another.
Tatsumi Orimoto was born in 1946 in Kawasaki, and studied at the Institute of Art, California. In 1971 he moved to New York, where he worked as an assistant to Nam June Paik and was introduced to Fluxus. In 1977 he returned to Kawasaki where he currently lives and works. His performances have been presented in several countries including the Biennale of Sydney, Sao Paulo Biennale and Venice Biennale.
Presented with the assistance of Galerie DNA, Berlin and Momentum Sydney.
Staged in 4A’s street front gallery, Sliding Mirror: 24 Hour Embrace by New Zealand-based, Korean artist Young Sun Han is a performance that involves the artist finding strangers matching his physical description through online listing services. At the stroke of midnight the artist and a stranger will embrace for 24 hours. Previously staged in Chicago, this will be Young Sun Han’s first presentation of work in Australia.
The embrace, silently endured, will take on the presence of a transient moving sculpture. Using solely the body as a medium, the performance raises questions about intimacy, our longing to connect with others and critically explores an art practice ambivalent to object making
In 2009, Brisbane-based artist Eric Bridgeman travelled through remote parts of the Chimbu (Simbu) Province, his mother’s country in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. As he was born in Australia, Bridgeman became increasingly conscious of his own ‘white’ Australian presence, and began to recognise the impact of photography on representations of national and cultural identity in PNG.
In this body of work, Bridgeman questions the methods of photographic capture of images of the land and indigenous people from PNG during the 20th century till now – from Irving Penn to National Geographic. New Photographs From Kokwara Trail are smart, witty and irreverent, creating alternative scenarios and archetypes resisting the ethnographic convention that aide in the promotion and consumption of PNG as Australia’s next frontier.
Eric Bridgeman New Photographs from Kokwara Trail has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, it’s arts funding and advisory body.
A founding member of the Indonesian artist-run collective Taring Padi, Aris Prabawa has been living on the North Coast of Australia for nearly a decade. Formed in 1998, and taking residence in an abandoned school at the fall of the Suharto Regime, the work of Taring Padi, is renowned for its raw and uncompromising social activisim in Yogyakarta, Central Java.
Since moving to Northern New South Wales, Aris Prabawa has continued with some of the environmental and political themes in his earlier work. In the Service of Nature is a new body of painting and drawings which takes nature and the rapacious abuse of the environment by people, governments and corporations as a central theme, expressed through a symbolic visual language.
For one night only, Parker Street, Haymarket is transformed into a street cinema screening animation from the 1960s by the Shanghai Animation Company and contemporary video art by one of China’s leading video artists — Yang Fudong.
This double billing showcases Yang’s celebrated, poetic film originally shot on 35mm, Estranged Paradise,as well as The Cowboy’s Flute, a short animation work from the Shanghai Animation Studio, one of the key animation studios established during the 1950s in China.
Yang Fudong is internationally renowned for his poetically challenging photography and film work, which lyrically captures modern life. Moments of intimacy: moods, dreams, feelings and aspirations embody experiences of alienation in urban life.
An Estranged Paradise, his first major film work, follows the character of Zhuzi, a young intellectual swept up in melancholy and the beauty of the world, who eventually finds contentment in life’s simple pleasures. Set in the beautiful southern city of Hangzhou, nicknamed ‘paradise’, Zhuzi’s restlessness is mimicked by Hangzhou’s relentless rain and languor. Blurring China’s traditional and contemporary cultures and landscapes, the film’s sense of timelessness is at odds with the bustling modernity that Zhuzi is deeply embroiled in.
The Cowboy’s Flute is an animation classic directed by Te Wei (b 1915) and produced by the Shanghai Animation Studio. The studio is renowned for its beautiful animation style incorporating ink and wash painting, ‘New Year’ style woodcuts, paper cutting and puppetry. The Cowboy’s Flute is about a young cowherd, with extraordinary flute playing abilities, and his faithful water buffalo. This film has no dialogue. Its narrative unfolds through the masterfully animated brush and ink painting and a whimsical musical soundtrack.
The Cast and Crew is based on Guo Jian‘s experience of living between the cultures of Australia and China. Guo’s pantings confront the difficulty that migrants face when trying to tell ‘us’ apart from ‘them’ in the contemporary world. The feeling is likened to being on a movie-set in between ‘takes’. Once the cameras stop rolling, actors playing heroes and villains lose their distinctions, all in on the joke together.
Guo’s satirical paintings draw upon his training as a poster artist in the People’s Liberation Army. His images meld kitsch and the erotic in a display that is both dazzling and frightening, drawing out the latent violence lurking beneath the surface of popular culture. By bringing the absurd side of life into focus, Guo exposes the politics that underpin contemporary society.
Shifting global politics have complicated our traditional way of perceiving the world. Through Guo’s paintings, the experience of the migrant is shown to be the experience of all individuals in the contemporary world. The Cast and Crew confronts recent history, showing us how it, too, plays out between takes rather than on the screen. By mapping its contradictions and scrambled referents, The Cast and Crew creates a space for questioning and reflection.
Guo Jian migrated to Australia in 1992. He currently lives in Beijing.
Kihara’s practice often develops platforms for inter-cultural discussion, by bringing together two musical or dance groups from different cultural backgrounds to develop performances in public spaces.
SHIGEYUKI KIHARA
TALANOA: WALK THE TALK #V PERFORMANCE
14 JANUARY, DIXON STREET MALL, CHINATOWN
Shigeyuki Kihara is a Japanese/Samoan artist based in New Zealand. Kihara recently embarked on an ambitious set of performances based on a Samoan concept of Talanoa which roughly translates as “to chat or converse” and is also a practice of talking through matters of cultural and social importance. Kihara’s Talanoa series develops a platform for inter-cultural discussion, by bringing together two musical or dance groups from different cultural backgrounds. For Edge of Elsewhere, Kihara was commissioned by 4A to develop her fifth Talanoa: Walk the Talk performance on Dixon St, Chinatown working with local Chinese and Pacific Island communities.
Photo credit:
Talanoa: Walk the Talk #V, Sydney Cook Island Dance Group and the Australian Yau Kung Mun Association. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by 4A
Edge of Elsewhere is a major three-year project that brings together some of the most exciting contemporary artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific to develop new artworks in partnership with Sydney communities including Brook Andrew, Arahmaiani, Richard Bell, , Dacchi Dang, Newell Harry, Shigeyuki Kihara, Kimsooja, Lisa Reihana, Khaled Sabsabi, Wang Jianwei, and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.
Edge of Elsewhere is co-curated by Dr Thomas J. Berghuis, Lisa Havilah and Aaron Seeto, and was presented across two venues Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
For further information on the Edge of Elsewhere projects, visit our blog edgeofelsewhere.wordpress.com 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
16 January – 6 February 2010
Campbelltown Arts Centre
16 January – 14 March 2010
Edge of Elsewhere is produced by Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Board and Community Partnerships, and the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
Sangeeta Sandrasegar‘s practice investigates identity and the formation of self through the motif of shadow. Her work represents the experiences of marginalised subjects, such as women and racial minorities, as re-imagined through her own personal experiences. By casting shadows onto walls and floors, Sandrasegar manipulates shadows to create images that are ephemeral, but also powerful.
For White Picket Fences in the Clear Light of Day Cast Black Lines, Sandrasegar presents a series of silhouettes, ornately decorated and crafted from diverse materials, that have mythologised culturally proscribed forms of identity through the juxtaposition of allegorical figures with contemporary social roles.
Sandrasegar’s frequent use of outlines and shadows in her work gives a voice to the identities of people caught on the margins of society. It is in these fluctuating shadows and ephemeral spaces that the ambiguous status of individuals caught in a complex social structure may be unearthed and questioned.
Her representation of contemporary narratives invites us to consider how stories are used to frame the beauty and brutality of the contemporary world. Weaving together theory with artistic motifs and techniques inspired by various cultures, Sandrasegar’s work demonstrates that political statements need not be made at the expense of poetry.
Gallery 4A’s group exhibition Speakeasy profiles Asian-Australian history entangled with an Aboriginal history of Australia.
Recently returned from representing Australia at the Venice Biennale, Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee presented work and curated an exhibition with Gallery 4A’s Director, Aaron Seeto.
Speakeasy draws its title from the illegal and underground bars which operated during the prohibition period in 1920s America – out of sight, below the radar, yet part of a vital cultural dialogue. In this exhibition, the title refers to the longstanding contribution of Indigenous and Asian history, often overlooked in Australia’s colonial history. This exhibition delves into previously untold stories in Australia and marked a fundamental shift in thinking about intercultural relationships, politics and geography.
In 2008, Gallery 4A hosted a symposium in which the artist and co-curator of this exhibition, Vernon Ah Kee presented a paper where he saw his own Chinese-heritage belonging within a ‘Black History’ of Australia. Following this trajectory, Ah Kee reverses a history of Australia which assumes all cultural difference in relation to a European (or white) imperative, which makes this exhibition potentially confronting for viewers.
The exhibition charts a range of relationships between Indigenous artists and Asian people and culture, through the familial, the political, the pre-colonial and periods of trade. Included are several key indigenous artists: Fiona Foley, Gordon Hookey, Daniel Boyd, Gary Lee, Zhou Xiaoping, Jason Wing and Mark Brown, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala and Vernon Ah Kee.
Dadang Christanto’s Survivor brings together local participants from all walks of life, who sit silently occupying the gallery, covered from the neck down in mud and holding photographic portraits of over 100 individuals. The performance was previously staged in Jakarta in 2007, and this performance in Sydney, is it’s first presentation in Australia.
Originally born in Central Java in Indonesia, Christanto’s work is a powerful reminder of the human impact of disaster – the disaster of war, the trauma of disappearance and now the impact of the man made mud catastrophe in the Sidoarjo Region of East Java. Christanto’s interest in the mud disaster emerges from his previous work which deals with the trauma of his father’s disappearance, who disappeared along with multitudes of other Indonesians during the political purges of the mid-1960s. In the context of the mud disaster, the unrelenting build up of mud in the region, is making villages slowly vanish. As Gallery 4A’s Director, Aaron Seeto explains, “The entire history of a village, its livelihood and future is being buried beneath the mud. On one hand Christanto’s work is politically confronting but also a poetic experience that reminds us of human fragility and erasure in the face of disaster.”
Dadang Christanto was born in 1957 in Tegal, Central Java and studied painting in Yogyakarta. Over the past decade his work has gained recognition across Australia with solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sherman Galleries in Sydney, and at the Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory. Christanto has been included in two Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery as well he has exhibited in some of the key Contemporary Asian Art museums in the Asian region including Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Fukuoka of Modern Art, Fukuoka; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kwangju Biennale (2000) as well as at the Venice Biennale (2003) and at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. In 1997, in recognition of his long term artistic achievement, he has been a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Performance: August 12, 2009
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney
The title of this performance refers to the repressive and anti-democratic legislation enacted by the Suharto regime in 1990, ‘Litsus’ required all prospective members of parliament to undergo a test to determine whether or not they held ‘communist sympathies’. Christanto performed Litsus underneath his 2009 installation, Cost of Dreams.
Hogi Tsai’s Composition forms part of Gallery 4A’s Nightvision, sunset- sunrise video program. Nightly from 6PM the shop front window of 4A comes alive with pixelated blocks of colour, activated by the shadows and movement of passers-by. A melody of sound chimes as the rainbow-coloured blocks become animated by the audience’s shadows and movement. Tsai’s interactive new media artwork enables the audience to become part of the art making process, and to create their own visual and musical composition.
Examining the role of art and the spectator in contemporary digital society, this exhibition presents a unique social space for musical experimentation and shape shifting entertainment.
Hogi Tsai is an emerging media artist, musician and computer programmer interested in the interplay between video, multimedia and interactive installation art. Originally from Taiwan, he is currently based in Sydney and is a doctorate candidate in Media Art, Faculty of Society Science at the University of Technology. Tsai’s research focuses on game aesthetics, philosophy and contemporary art in Taiwan. Recent work has investigated the relationships between video games and art and exploring authorship and viewer behaviour in a digital society.
Integration, Assimilation and a fair go for All is the latest project in Khaled Sabsabi’s ongoing body of work that addresses ideas of contact and conflict. Sabsabi is an artist who is not only engaged politically, but an artist who offers us different ways of thinking through relationships and place in the world.
The multi-channel video installation occupies both levels of 4A, and comprises work made over the last three years which invert our expectations and questions viewer’s level of engagement. The three-channel video installation titled Left-Centre-Right, depicts an ominous storm sequence over the suburbs near Newcastle. This natural event was documented by the artist in 2007, and has an eerie similarity to news imagery of war offensives in other countries. The video installation Australian is a 12 channel video installation of oscillating human faces, fragments of noses, eyes and mouths, collaged from various faces across many different cultures, and is visible 24 hours a day.
Born in Lebanon, Khaled Sabsabi migrated to Sydney in the 1970’s. He has worked across sound, music production and the visual arts in Australia for the past 16 years. From 2002-2004, he completed an Australia Council fellowship in Beirut. Internationally he has participated in exhibitions in Beirut, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland; Zendai MoMA Shanghai and recently Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin. Working across Western Sydney he has exhibited at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Casula Powerhouse and Blacktown Arts Centre.
Koji Ryui and Huseyin Sami are both Sydney-based artists who have been making work for more than a decade. Their practice encompasses performance, installation, painting and sculpture and their work has several points of similarity. Both are driven by a desire to question our rational expectation of what a painting, or a sculpture is and how it operates as a work of art.
For the exhibition both artists created new work that respond specifically to the site and context of 4A gallery. The result is two large individual installation projects that will occupy both levels of the gallery.
Huseyin Sami’s, Painter I Am Why Not, presents a new painting machine (Painting Machine No.5) from his ongoing series. Creating a space within a space, this large scale structure resembles a production line for the construction of individual paintings. Sami’s Painting Machine #5 becomes both a practical arena for activity and performance as well as an analytical environment to consider chance and control; harmony and deconstruction; and the role of the artist among this spectacle.
Koji Ryui’s Moai considers the idea of portraiture shrouded in mystery. The exhibition takes its title from the monumental physical presence and speculative origins of the enigmatic sculptures found on Easter Island. In contrast, Ryui’s sculptures are abstract and playful, he seeks to animate the moment that something becomes recognisable or unrecognisable in a similar way to hallucination or daydreaming. The work is composed from banal, mass-produced common place materials such as foil, plastic bags, household mops, chosen by the artist for their paucity and ephemeral qualities. Only partially resembling human faces, Ryui fuses light and simple gestures with these ordinary banal materials.
Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in 2000 Huseyin Sami has exhibited extensively across Sydney, Greater Western Sydney and Australia. He was highly commended in the Helen Lempriere Traveling Scholarship exhibitions in 2002 and 2005. In recent years he has completed several residencies in Sydney including in Artspace, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Parramatta Artists Studio and Internationally at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Japan.
Born in Kyoto, Japan, Koji Ryui moved to Sydney in 1992. He is a graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts. Ryui has exhibited in a range of exhibitions in a range of venues in Australia and New Zealand including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Space, Sydney; Firstdraft, Sydney; MOP Projects, Sydney; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and Michael Lett, Auckland, New Zealand
Vain Efforts is a solo exhibition of recent work by Ming Wong, and is his first solo exhibition in Australia. Timed to coincide with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, Vain Efforts is a key element of 4A’s 2009 program of international contemporary Asian art. Vain Efforts also includes a one-night only screening of key video works by Ming Wong as part of 4A’s Cinema Alley, an offsite street ‘cinema’ initiative for contemporary video art.
Wong lives between his native Singapore and Berlin, working mainly in video and photography. He creates works that have both irreverent and serious outcomes, exploring slippages in language, cross-cultural experiences and gender stereotyping through appropriation of iconic 20th Century cinema, including influential German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf / Fear Eats the Soul (1973). Wong’s Angst Essen / Eat Fear (2008) is a rendition of the Fassbinder film, as Wong plays both leading characters, a sixty year old German woman and a Moroccan immigrant who are involved in an ill-fated romance. Wong’s reworking of the film emphasises its themes of racial prejudice and economic inequality, whilst recontextualising the narrative within the contemporary experiences of people living in ethnically diverse societies.
Vain Efforts also included Wong’s Filem-Filem-Filem (2008), a major work commissioned by the Singapore Fringe Festival that was developed from the artist’s research into old cinemas built during the sixties in Malaysia and Singapore. The work features Polaroid shots of ‘grand’ and ‘modernist’ buildings which were at the heart of a growing film industry in the two countries. The images present an unusual insight into cultural pluralism in the days pre- and post-independence in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ming Wong: Vain Effots has been sponsored by the City of Sydney and supported by the NSW Government through ARTS NSW. The project has been made possible by the support of the National Arts Council Singapore, ARTCELL and is an event of the 2009 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Born in 1971 in Singapore, Ming Wong trained in Chinese Art at the Nanyang Academy from 1992 to 1995. He obtained a Masters of Fine Arts at the Slade School of Arts at the University of College London in 1999. Wong currently lives and works between Singapore and Berlin, having featured in numerous group exhibitions in both countries as well as in the United Kingdom. In 2008 alone, he was featured in solo exhibitions at Mkgalarie in Berlin, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and the Singapore Fringe Festival, Singapore. Ming Wong is an exhibitor at the 2009 Jakarta Biennale in Indonesia.
Header Image: Ming Wong, Four Malay Stories (still), 4-channel digital video installation, black/white, looped DVD, 25 minutes.
Exhibition documentation
Ming Wong, Four Malay Storeis, 2005, poster.
Ming Wong, Four Malay Stories, 2005, 4-channel digital video installation, black/white, looped DVD, 25 minutes.
Ming Wong, Filem-Filem-Filem, 2008, instant colour photographs
Ming Wong, Whodunnit, 2003-4, digital video installation, 32 minutes
Ming Wong, Angst Essen/Eat Fear, 2008, digital video installation, exhibition view.
Ming Wong: Vain Efforts exhibition view.
Ming Wong, Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (Learn German with Petra von Kant), 2007, digital video installation, 10 minutes, exhibition view.
In Shanghai-based artist Qiu Anxiong‘s new series of work Nostalgia, the artist moves fluidly between his black and white ink-wash sketches in a style recalling traditional scroll painting, and the use of new media such as animation, real time video and installation. Nostalgia illustrates the passing of time against the frenetic movements of the contemporary world, heightening our sense of yearning for time past. Nostalgia illuminates the plight of the human condition in the characteristically meditative quality of the artist’s work.
Qiu’s work will also be presented at an off-site venue in Haymarket, as part of Cinema Alley, Gallery 4A’s street-cinema project for next year. Scheduled for screening is Qiu’s critically acclaimed The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Oceans, a mythological depiction of the evolution of the industrial world. Based on the ancient Chinese manuscript, Classic of the Seas and Mountains, the animation consists of 6000 of Qiu’s own original ink-wash drawings, many of which ominously depict the invasion of idyllic villages by high-rises and monstrous machinery. Screened for the first time in Australia, the work was previously exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale to wide appeal and critical success.
Qiu Anxiong was born in Sichuan, the south-western region of China in 1972. He currently lives and works in Shangai. Graduating from the Sichuan Art Academy in 1994, the artist undertook further training at the University of Kunsthochschule, Kassel, Germany in 2003. Qiu has had solo exhibitions both in his native China and in Switzerland and Japan. In 2007 alone, he was selected to participate in group exhibitions at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Switzerland, the Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Noga Gallery in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and Yokohoma Zaim Art Centre, Japan and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide. In 2006, he was awarded an Honourable Mention at the biannual Chinese Contemporary Art Awards placing him among the ranks of artists such as Cao Fei and Zheng Guogu.
Qiu Anxiong: Nostalgia is an official event of the 2009 City of Sydney Chinese New Year Festival. This project has been made possible by the generous support of Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, ARTCELL and Gary Carsley.
Header image: Qiu Anxiong, Nostalgia, six channel digital video installation with 5.1 surround sound. Soundtrack: Ou Bo.
Each year 4A presents the work of our Members to bring diverse practices together, and celebrate their support of 4A throughout the year. It is a unique opportunity for Members to share their talents with 4A’s creative community, and have their work seen by artists, curators, and other industry professionals.
Participating artists include Annette Wiguna, Aaron Seeto, Biron Valier, Bonita Ely, Carolyn Whan, Catherine Cloran, Craig John Loxley, Dominic Golding, FOTOMODA, Garry Trinh, Gary Smith, Gemma Cuneo, Genevieve McCrea, Graeme David Endean, Heesco, Helen Mak, Helen Yip, Hogi Tsai, Hong Tong, Ioana Anagnos, Iris Siyi Shen, Jason Wing, Jayanto Damanik, John Lee, Juliana O’Dean, Julie Petersen, Jumaadi, Karl Logge & Tessa Rapaport, Kasane Low, Kevin Hegarty, Koji Ryui, Kristine McCarrolll, Lainie Cann, Liping Chiang, Louise Cox, Manfred Lai, Megan Won, Michelle Cox, Mini Graff, Monica Epstein, Muzi Li, Natasha Allen, Ngoc Nguyen, Nidan Cao, Pamela See, Pauline Plumb, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Sally Shuk Mann Poon, Sarah Mufford, Shen Wednesday, Shuxia Chen, Sue Pedley, Tianli Zu, Tuyet Huynh, Vienna Parreno, Vladmir Ivanov, Yee Hwan Yeoh, Yiwon Park and others…
Thai-Australian artist Viruch Pikhuntod‘s latest exhibition Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet, takes its title from a line in T.S Eliot’s poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’
Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet brings together two related streams of Pikhuntod’s practice – painting and papier-mâché sculpture. In this exhibition of new work, Pikhuntod works with the concept of “masking”, based on his observations of people’s behaviour in contemporary society, who increasingly wear masks to play out their various roles. Pikhuntod’s papier-mâché masks are modelled after animals. These animal-like roles which we “wear” result in the “law of the jungle” – where the powerful can often be found bullying the weak.
Pikhuntod’s painting and sculptures are influenced by childhood memories of traditional Thai stage productions of the Ramayana, an important Hindu literary text, often recounted as masked performances. The repeated triangular form found in Pikhuntod’s paintings is a powerful motif which the artist describes as having Buddhist significance – as a symbol of a pagoda or a stupa, as well as a reference to the repeated patterns of behaviour within lifetimes, and from lifetime to lifetime.
“Pikhuntod’s practice brings together aspects of his complex cross-cultural experiences,” says Aaron Seeto, Director of 4A. “His paintings are fresh and lively – they bring an important Asian perspective to Australian painting, and comment on how we live in this contemporary world.”
Header image: Viruch Pikhuntod, Prepare a face 1, 2008, pencil and oil on canvas.
Same, Same is the first solo exhibition by artist Garry Trinh.
Trinh highlights life’s peculiarities through his photography. Same, Same is an installation derived from a project which Trinh recently undertook – dressed in a black polyester sweater, Trinh went around Sydney with his camera and photographed himself with strangers who happened to be wearing the same outfit as him.
Same, Same explores unspoken cultural rules – and how allegiance to these “rules” plays a part in constructing our sense of identity. Same, Same uses fashion as an artefact of culture to examine what is and is not acceptable in a consumerist, idol-worshipping age.
Trinh says, “I was intrigued by the idea of a fashion ‘faux pas’ which, in the extreme case of supermodel Naomi Campbell, resulted in her assaulting a friend who was wearing the same outfit.”
Same, Same will see 4A’s Ground Floor street-front space wallpapered with photos of Trinh and his lookalikes. Visitors will be able to try on identical sweaters and photograph themselves in the gallery. The Same, Same project will be expanded through these photos – visitors can email them back to 4A or upload them to 4A’s Facebook site.
Garry Trinh is a photographic artist. His artworks and photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications. He holds a BA in Psychology and a BA in Visual Communications/Photography and Digital Imaging from the University of Western Sydney. He was the winner of the Sydney Life prize in 2007. Trinh’s photography happens whilst he travels through life capturing the extraordinary in the everyday. Trinh lives and works in Sydney Australia.
Header image: Garry Trinh, Same, Same, digital photograph, installation view. Courtesy the artist.
Jamil Yamani‘s Family/Familiar involves videos and photographs centering around a large industrial sculpture in which a video projector is embedded. The videos and photographs depict scenes of Yamani’s family members preparing for religious rituals within their domestic spaces. In following these everyday moments, the beauty of its ordinariness will be brought to light. Yamani’s observations through the video camera are shaded by the artist’s negotiation of a personal crossroads, as he attempts to reconcile his love for his family members and acceptance of their practices whilst staying committed to his own choices.
While Family/Familiar is a personal encounter with Yamani’s family, it will also delve into complex issues affecting the community at large. The artist points to experiences of exclusion, racism and misrepresentation.
Jamil Yamani works mainly in the area of time-based art but was originally trained as a painter in Austria. He is currently the recipient of the RIPE: Art & Australia/ANZ Private Bank Contemporary Art Award, an award which commissioned the sculptural component of Family/Familiar. Yamani completed a Masters of Fine Arts in Video Production from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales where he also obtained his undergraduate degree. By 2003, he had been awarded the Western Sydney Artists Fellowship from Arts NSW and was earmarked as a finalist for the prestigious Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship. To date, his work has been exhibited at a wide range of cultural institutions from Casula Powerhouse, Sydney to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth. He has exhibited internationally in New York, USA, Vancouver, Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile.
Paperbark Leaflets is Jason Wing‘s first solo exhibition. The artist will be employing a paper-cutting technique on old advertising posters gleaned from telegraph poles to create a three-dimensional installation – transforming the Ground Floor of 4A into a forest of falling leaves and dancing cherubs.
The image of the cherub is based on a photograph of the artist as a boy and represents a child’s perspective on life before adulthood. Previously appearing in Wing’s other works such as A.B.C Aboriginal Born Chinese (2007), G.M.O Genetically Modified Organism (2007) and Year of the Snake (2006), in Paperbark Leaflets, it will adopt a half-animal form with long and elaborate tails. Emanating off the gallery walls and emerging from the old posters on their delicate skeletal frames, they will playfully interact with each other as well as gallery visitors.
Wing sees the act of removing posters from telegraph poles and collecting them for his work as a reference to the traditional Indigenous process of removing bark from trees for painting.
His work is concerned with the apparent contradictions which he sees in contemporary everyday life and in his mixed Chinese-Aboriginal heritage. Paperbark Leaflets will explore, in particular, the relationship between nature, man and the urban environment. Wing considers the process in which a tree is cut down, stripped of bark and placed back into the earth ironic, and a testament to the absurdity of contemporary life and times where respect for nature is forgotten by man.
Header image: Jason Wing, Paperback Leaflets, old advertising posters, glue, paint, installation view
Jumaadi‘s work retells stories based on personal memory and the folkloric tradition in the form of drawings, paintings, performance, weaving and installation. His exhibition, Home Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home, is based on the human-induced mud-flow disaster in the Sidoarjo region of the artist’s native East Java.
InHome Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home, the artist uses a mix of sculpture, photographs as well as multi-panel drawings and paintings to present a poetic encounter with the individual tragedies resulting from the mudflow disaster. The artist is known for his multi-panel work, which bring together micro-stories and events to form a larger narrative.
“Each figure takes a place within the space to create a story. Here I can hide and seek, confess and deny or tell you something about my father, my mother or about those villages buried by mud, robbed of their memories and history. Like a little bird, I pick up some of those stories and memories and give them another chance to live within my own story.” – Jumaadi
Mud began erupting from the ground in Sidoarjo in 2006 and continues unabated to this day, washing away the homes, schools, places of worship, paddy fields and factories. The disaster has been blamed on the mining work undertaken by a private gas and oil company and is also said to have been triggered by the strong earthquake in Yogyakarta and Central Java earlier that year. Jumaadi’s exhibitionHome Sweet Home Home is not Sweet Home will be a heartfelt and evocative elegy to lament this incident. It will be accompanied by an artist book with photographs by Jumaadi and text by Javanese poet Triyanto Triwikromo, available for purchase at Gallery 4A. The artist will officially open the exhibition with a story-telling performance.
Jumaadi was born in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia in 1973. He has been living in Sydney since 1996 where he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School and is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate. Winner of the John Coburn Art Prize for Emerging Artists as part of the Blake Art Prize, the artist is currently represented by Legge Gallery, where he has been exhibited numerous times. He has had solo exhibitions in the French Cultural Centre, Surabaya, Indonesia, and Mura Clay Gallery, Sydney and has exhibited in various group exhibitions internationally and nationally.
Soo-Joo Yoo‘s work negotiates tension and chaos through the use of tangible lines and colour, space and lighting.
Born in Korea, Yoo currently works and resides in Sydney. The artist works mainly with installation, using everyday materials which attract her emotionally.
So this is fxxking, beautiful our future..? will consist of an installation located on the Ground Floor of 4A. Visible 24-hours a day to 4A passersby, the installation will fill the gallery with the reflective light and colours which bounce off industrial materials such as vinyl, foil, plastic tubes, wire, aluminium pipes and rubber mats. The work exploits sensations of rapid movement and spatial confusion to present an optical dance of chaotic nature in contemporary life.
Yoo aims to confront viewers with the unpredictable, fragile reality of life, and questions of the unknown source of power, force and energy, inherent in every-day life. The installation references the structure and system of the urban and natural environments as well as human sensations of hope and desire.
Soo-Joo Yoo completed her Masters of Visual Art at the Victorian College for the Arts in 2006. Yoo had her first solo exhibitions in 2007 at West Space Gallery and Flinders Gallery and was recently shown at Linden Gallery and the Adelaide Fringe Festival where her exhibition was awarded Most Excellent Exhibition. She also won the 2007 The Age Melbourne Fringe Festival Visual Art Award, 2006 Flinders Lane Gallery Award and the 2001 Nokia Art Award.
Header image: Soo-Joo Yoo, So this is fxxking, beautiful our future..?, lights, vinyl, foils, clear tubes, wire, aluminium pipes, rubber mats, installation view.
Artists: Phutthipong Aroonpheng, Tin Tin Cooper, Sittsak Jiampojaman, Preeyachanok Ketsuwan, Momokomotion, Olarn Netsiri, Jakrawan Niltumrong, Sakarin Kru-on, Wit Pimpakul, Sathit Satarasart, Pramot Sengson, Michael Shaowanasai, Suchada Sirithanawuddhi, Manit Sriwanichpoom and Sutthurat Supaparinya
Michael Shaowanasai is internationally recognised as one of the leading multi-media and performance artists to emerge from the South-East Asian region over the last decade. Shaowanasai’s works such as The Adventures of Iron Pussy (co-directed by Apichatpong Weerasetakul) and The Artists of the Moments have developed a cult status as well as international distinction in major festivals such as the Venice Biennale 2003 and Berlinale 54.
An active figure in the LGBTQ+ arts scene, his work has highlighted a number of social and cultural issues particular to his native country Thailand such as the sex industry and globalisation.
Shaowanasai’s exhibition of 16 multimedia works comment on the arts scene in Thailand at present. The project, entitled LIFEBOAT #2551, will feature the works of emerging and mid-career media artists who are central and key names within the Thai contemporary arts scene. This list includes Araya Radsjarmrearnsook, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng and Tin Tin Cooper.
On the concept of the exhibition, Shaowanasai explains;
“Contemporary Thai media artists are like passengers in a lifeboat. Stuck together in a small vessel, they must work together to stay afloat and at the same time, they are trying to outlive one another. While lost at sea, they are waving and screaming in order to get any kind of attention, hoping to be rescued. Some of them were fortunate and have been ‘scooped’ by a passing European liner. The rest of them can only watch and hold on to what they have – their talents, their prides and their hopes.”
Somewhat outcast by their fellow artists for choosing an artistic medium which still struggles for recognition amongst the popular mass, this group of media artists decide to take the future into their own hands, and “go for broke” at sea.
LIFEBOAT #2551 highlights the new breed of South-East Asian artists who challenge the traditional way of seeing, creating and expressing their ideas. The exhibition will include one of Shaowanasai’s own works.
4A’s NIGHTVISION SUNSET TO SUNRISE VIDEO PROJECTION series continues with an interactive video work by artist Robert Iolini. This work, presented in partnership with d/Lux/MediaArts, will use mobile technology to engage a large range of audiences.
The Hong Kong Agent is an intimate and poetic exploration of contemporary Hong Kong culture. It is an edgy work which replicates the vitality and innovation of an ultra future/retro megapolis.
The work traces the journey of a main protagonist, The Hong Kong Agent, whose encounters with activists, side-walk shamans, a feng shui master, teenage hopefuls, artists, shopping arcades, ghost buses, psychedelic trains, and red bean dumplings become intriguing clues with which to de-code the city and its inhabitants.
The Hong Kong Agent also functions in a “bluezone”; the work has as a bluetooth component which allows passers-by to be tantalised with sneak trailers of the entire work. Daytime travellers, and nighttime audiences will be able to download 10 micro-sodes of THE HONG KONG AGENT to their mobile phones , MP3 players and other personal devices. These glimpses of THE HONG KONG AGENT will draw them back to Gallery 4A to see the entire work. In the meantime, the 10 micro-sodes can be collected and “mashed” to the users’ delight.
Vipoo Srivilasa works mostly in ceramics, exploring similarities between the cultures of his native Thailand and Australia, his adoptive home. Using blue and white glazes, he creates complex narratives through highly decorated images applied to the surfaces of ceramic forms. His work requires an intimacy in which the key elements of the drama are often found in unusual places within the forms themselves.
Vipoo Srivilasa’s upcoming project รูป รส เรื่อง Roop – Rote – Ruang(Taste – Touch – Tell) will take the form of both an exhibition at Gallery 4A and a series of dinner parties, hosted by the artist, at various private residences in Sydney and held throughout June. The gallery exhibition will focus on environmental issues such as coral reef damage. This will include a series of blue and white, intricately decorated ceramic hands. Visitors will also participate in the creation process by building their own pieces of coral from clay provided in the gallery. Those coral pieces will gradually come together to form a coral reef, growing larger as more people participate in the project.
Over dinner, Srivilasa will present a new ceramic dinner set over a four-course meal. The work will unfold as the meal is consumed. Images will gradually be exposed on bowls or plates and the full narrative will reveal itself as the dinner comes to its conclusion.
Through each element of รูป รส เรื่อง Roop – Rote – Ruang, Srivilasa allows his audience to experience his work on many levels. He embraces the Buddhist concept of “ayatana”, or the six channels of awareness. This means that sight (eyes), taste (tongue), smell (nose), hearing (ears), touch (hand) and mindfulness are all engaged. The artist is interested in creating opportunities for sharing between complete strangers and creating different, social ways of exploring complex ideas of his cross-cultural experience.
With thanks for Clayworks for the supply for clay for the exhibition.
Vipoo Srivilasa was born in Bangkok, Thailand and arrived in Australia in 1997. Since arriving in Australia he has developed a practice that is ceramics-based but with a strong social context, which can be seen in the many workshops he has developed with children.
Vienna Parreño is a Filipina artist based in Sydney. Parreño works in a variety of media, including performance, installations and digital video. Her most recent project, Fears of a Jaded Descent, was created during a residency at the Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, China. Her most recent project, Fears of a Jaded Descent, exhibition at Gallery 4A will be the first time this work will be presented to the public.
Fears of a Jaded Descent is a floor-to-ceiling installation which will dramatically transform the ground floor space of Gallery 4A. Parreño’s installation will be visible from the front window of the gallery to the multitudes of passerbys enroute in Chinatown’s Hay Street, where Gallery 4A is located.
Using strands of fine gold filament, a number of large red paint brushes will be suspended from the ceiling, stopping just a few breathtaking inches above the floor. The artist will leave an inscription made from pigment under the pointed ends of these paintbrushes. Parreño began this project as a part of a residency at Studio One at Red Gate Gallery, while reflecting on her own career as a young artist in the midst of Beijing’s flourishing arts scene.
The work transpired when she discovered an ancient tradition whereby Chinese emperors would have their tombs constructed out of jade and gold thread, believing that it would prevent their bodies from decaying after death. Parreño’s work will be an allegorical reference to this archaic ritual.
Vienna Parreño is a PhD Candidate in the School of Media Arts at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. She also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Time Based Arts from COFA in 2000. In 2006, Parreño was awarded the UNSW COFA Student Travel Conference Grant and performed at the 31st UNESCO International Theatre Institute World Congress and Art Olympics of the Nations. Parreño has exhibited and participated in performances at such venues as Don’t Look New Media Gallery, Sydney; Blue Room Art Gallery, Philippines; 975Howard Performance & Art Space, San Francisco, USA; and at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Australia.
Roy Ananda’s work Permission Slip is the most recent in a six-year-long series of sculptural constructions. Each work in the project uses the same materials, reinvented in response to the previous work and adapted to fit their environment. The works combine formal elements of high art with a humorous side of popular culture. Ananda’s larger-than-life sculptures are influenced by the exaggerated physicality of popular cartoons and movie personalities. Roy Ananda’s exhibition is supported by ArtsSA.
Roy Ananda lives and works in Adelaide. He has exhibited his work throughout Australia in art spaces including the Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne; Downtown Art Space, Adelaide; and The Project Space at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. In 2005 he was included in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Sydney-based artist Clara Chow’s exhibition Silverhand includes two video works, Angelica and Deconstructive Princess. Silverhand takes its name from a Cantonese phrase, which roughly translates to “having an itching arse”. This crude phrase is used to refer to someone who meddles in other people’s business. This pun sets the tone for the exhibition.
Angelica, Chow’s newest work, depicts an interview with the artist’s sister and mother about finding a pornographic video on her brother’s mp3 player. Deconstructive Princess is a seven-channel video of deconstructed scenes from a Peking Opera. The artist uses popular culture images to explore translation problems and language barriers. Subtitles act as a unifying visual theme in both videos-critical in one and frustratingly useless in another.
Clara Chow studied at the Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work at local venues including the University of Sydney and Silverspoon Gallery in Balmain.
Selling Out, by Sydney-based Taiwan-born artist Meng-Shu You, critically examines today’s culture of mass consumption. The ground floor gallery is transformed to resemble a commercial shop. Shelves are filled with hundreds of blue and white patterned china pieces and candles shaped like characters from popular culture. You has lived in Taiwan, America and Australia and her experiences of these cultures are explored in her ceramic and mixed media pieces. Selling Out not only comments on the impact of America on Taiwanese culture but also the cultural challenges arising from living in an age of globalisation.
Meng-Shu You was born in I-lan, Taiwan, studied fine arts at Michigan State University in the United States and currently lives in Sydney. She has shown her work around the world, participating in solo and group exhibitions in Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, China, Australia and America.
Fiction, Emotion and Obsession comprises new exhibitions by three Sydney-based artists Miya Hyunmi Roh, My Le Thi and Cecelia Huynh. The works of the three women artists share deeply introspective revelations into their lives and personalities using video, sculptural installa- tion and photographic media.
Sydney-based Korean artist Miya Hyunmi Roh sees her artwork My Subject Happy to be ‘I’ as a type of diary, in which she becomes her work’s primary subject and central theme. Roh uses a range of media, from video to mixed media installation.
Roh’s Red Tape, will be screened sunset-sunrise on the gallery’s front window as part of 4A’s NIGHTVISION series, while her exhibition will be accessible during the day, turning 4a into a 24 hour exhibition space.
Trust, Betrayal, The Light is an exhibition of new video work by Vietnamese-Australian artist My Le Thi. Her two new video works in this exhibition draw heavily on very personal experiences of loss, survival and renewal. The artist combines animation, and filmic narrative structures to convey memories which are fraught with trauma and pain.
Artist Cecelia Huynh has worked as a teacher of English as a second language. This experience as well as her background as a first generation Vietnamese-Australian, has made Huynh sensitive to linguistic aberrations in syntax and other rules that are used by immigrants and foreigners. In Moving Fictions, the artist has created an installation with text and photography displayed in light boxes and cardboard boxes which captures the struggle to articulate and express through language.
Heavenly Bodies brings together three Chinese-Australian artists from Sydney, Brisbane and Launceston. Including Suzan Liu, Pamela See and Greg Leong, these artists will be in Sydney at the beginning of February to participate in the celebrations. The exhibition is titled Heavenly Bodies, and explores very personal experiences of being Chinese in Australia, concepts of good luck and ideas of desire.
The exhibition includes Greg Leong’s extremely witty and subversive Waitress uniform at the Ding Kam Chinese Aussie Meat Pie Palace. A superbly crafted yellow cheongsam, this work is part of a series of costumes the artist made to address the idea of “putting on” or “dressing up” and the complex metamorphosis involving impossible changes of gender, sexuality and race and culture.
Suzan Liu, a young Sydney-based artist creates two large-scale clouds in the gallery, inspired in part by the whimsical cloud forms found in Chinese traditional painting. Using foam and pillow stuffing, the cloud forms become the surface onto which the artist will project video images.
Pamela See, a young artist from Brisbane, has created aluminium sculpture derived from traditional Chinese paper-cutting techniques. Included will be a new work consisting of thousands of pieces of paper-cuts, which the artist encourages visitors to the exhibition to take home with them, to continue the exhibition in their own environments. Pamela calls it a process of giving back to the community.
Heavenly Bodies in an umbrella event of the 2008 City of Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Header image: Greg Leong, Waitress Uniform at the Ding Kam Chinese Aussie Meat Pie Palace, 2008, installation view
Space Invaders brings together artists and works to examine the relationship between materiality and space, our relation to space and to explore the spatiality of art, art institutions and our interactions with them.
Croatian born Australian artist Biljana Jancic’s untitled work is a display of inflated everyday plastic bags. This work constructs the bags into a free formed sculptural assemblage structured around internal space. The air in the bags and their spread in the gallery investigates our relation to materials and hollow, empty space.
Sydney based artist Alex Davies‘s installation Puglist Series 449 he explores space as we are faced with a boxer moving at alternate speeds, slowly then all at once invading the exhibition space.
The installation Study in Chaos (aperiodic thought-factors) by Sydney based artist Suzan Liu explores the interconnectivity, narrative and interpersonal relationships we form to space. The work of twisting and turning cables allow for her exploration of space to take on a physicality as you follow it around the wall in the gallery space.
Japanese born Sydney based artist Koji Ryui’s installation Construction #2 explores space as the white molecular objects surge, intersect and rise in the space; contorting and controlling its own use of space and expressing the materiality of gallery spaces.
Australian artist Mimi Tong’s work Folding Interface directly challenges the perception of spatiality of art objects and art institutions. The contorted canvases that form a maze within the gallery challenge the way in which we interact with a more traditional medium in an art gallery and question how space is utilised by institutions and artists.
Sam Smith‘s Passage consists of a projected video onto a large scale, hand made aeroplane chair, reflecting on the in-flight viewing experience of long haul flights. Set in a strange post-cinema world, this work explores how we inhabit new media spaces, drawing on film history, the experience of cinema and the technical vocabulary of new media production.
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![Close-up of words handwritten in grey ink on a white wall. The words read, 'The lion for us Chinese is a sybol [sic] of good luck but if you are at a zoo and you are feeding a lion a cartoonishly large bit of raw meat don't stick your hand too far down but also did you know lots of people die using fireworks in China as I'm sure they do all over the world some fireworks are banned in some parts of the country but still, durining [sic] New Years everyone lets a few bangers off and most times walking home you see a rooftop or two on fire'](http://www.4a.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/4A-DOCUMENTATION-JUNE18-30-683x1024.jpg)
Megan Keating, Different Reds, 2001, exhibition view
Megan Keating, The Great March, 2001, installation view
Megan Keating, Wheel of Fortune [detail], 2001, installation view
Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001, installation view
Dacchi Dang, The Boat [interior], 2001, installation view
