Eastern promises
In
case you missed it, this month marks the passing of the Chinese
New Year. As from February 7, we enter the Year of the Rat. In
Chinese astrology, people born in the Year of the Rat are sometimes
considered leaders or pioneers. So it’s appropriate that
to mark the occasion, the Australian Centre for Photography is
presenting two groundbreaking exhibitions with Chinese connections
in support of the City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year Festival.
The first and larger of the two is Generation C:
New Chinese Photomedia in an Age of Change. Taking up galleries
1, 2 and 4 at the ACP, the exhibition is curated by Alisdair Foster.
The complex, contrary and creative exhibition showcases work by
young photomedia artists from mainland China who reflect the ambivalence
of their times.
Born in the seventies they are the first “me”
generation – consumerist, connected and self-aware. They
are vain yet vulnerable; wired yet lonely. They ride the rollercoaster
of “progress” while wistfully dreaming of the past.
Abandoning any notion of the photograph as a document of the real
each work is a performance, a visual fable that finds its truth
in imaginative resonance rather than hard evidence.
Playful yet earnest, while some artists wield satire
like a sword others evoke a quiet melancholy for lost tradition.
Others still, weighed down by the burden of duty to family, ancestors,
community, state and the competitiveness born of consumerism,
simply imagine what it would be like to fade into another world
or fly away like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.
Accompanying
Generation C is a new exhibition from renowned Australian artist
William Yang, entitled Claiming China.
Yang was brought up as an assimilated Australian,
with his Chinese heritage unacknowledged and denied. Here, in
a series of acutely perceptive images with text, he reflects upon
his experience of being an openly gay Australian and “reclaiming”
his Chinese heritage. While laced with the dry wit and incisive
observations that are his signatures, Yang's new work balances
irony with a profound spirit of the Taoist philosophy he has come
to embrace.
Both exhibitions aim to open a door into China,
both as a historical entity and as a modern superpower. Of course,
China will be the focus of the world’s attention come 8
August with the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing. These
exhibitions provide a sneak peak inside this fascinating and intoxicating
nation.
David Edwards
