2010

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Constructed landscapes: Australian connections, Me Photo Gallery, 798 Art District Beijing 19 June – 30 July 2010

Artists: Huang Xu, Tony Scott; Jayne Dyer; Hu Qinwu; Anne Graham, Allan Chawner

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The physical and social landscape of China is re-forming at an unprecedented rate – a phenomenal growth of cities and concomitant wealth, unevenly distributed. Traditional communist and recent capitalist economic and political practices collide – to impact dramatically on the lives of people. Constructed landscapes’ works interpret issues and situations with incongruent juxtapositions – they construct alternative readings of reality with surreal embodiments or poetic license.
The irony, wit and sardonic humour the artists infuse into the work, offer deeper perspectives of social realities. The exhibition will form part of the larger program of cultural events associated with the Imagine Australia: Year of Australian Culture in China, 2010-2011.

 

Reg Newett Beijing June 2010

 

 

 

 

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postEDEN Today Art Museum, Beijing, September 2010

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Curated by Reg Newitt as a project for China Art Projects @ the Today Art Museum, Beijing one wonders what Beijing audiences made of these various visual artists whose lives, though strongly connected to this city, hail from sundry points abroad. Here in the Chinese capital Eden was never much on the cards. Utopian visions however, whether recently proletarian in nature or alternatively spiritually attained seem both to have suffered of late. If however, a crisis of belief is a condition that unites our world today, and certainly for many it is so, then the artists in this exhibition strike a chord of considerable worth. That said, the further dimension of this project, the likes of which is perhaps only alluded to in its title, is not so much the fashion in which loss or doubt is framed, but more the manner that each of these artists negotiates their response to an uncertain world. If this be post-Eden personified then it is one where creativity, and knowledge and scepticism are the tools that might in the end see us through.

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Damian Smith Melbourne / Beijing 2010