25 March – 15 May 2010
Artists: Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe
Make-do Garden City examines the past histories of the Haymarket precinct and imagines its possible futures in the context of food crisis and urban sustainability. Artists Zettle and Khoe seeks to plant a new type of temporary garden on the site of 4A, where over six weeks, the Make Garden mobile workshop will grow a variety of edible plants for distribution to participants and to feed gallery staff.
17 December 2010
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.
29 October – 11 December 2010
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.
Phase 1: 16 July – 28 August 2010
Artists: Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan, Eric Bridgeman, Zhang Ding, Hikaru Fuji, Archie Moore, Shen Shaomin
Phase 2: 3 September – 16 October
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.
21 May – 3 July 2010
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.
13 May 2010
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.
19 – 20 March 2010
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
26 March – 8 May 2010
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.
26 March – 8 May 2010
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.
19 February 2010
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.
12 February – 20 March 2010
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.
16 January – 6 February 2010
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.
