2011

New Age: New Media – Australia-China connections

Artists:

Australia: Grant Stevens, Jess MacNeil, James Newitt, MerilynFairskye, TheKingpins, Richard Bell

China: Bu Hua, Miao Xiaochun, Zhang Xiaotao, Shen Shaomin, TseKal/YakTseTen, Han Bing

Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing); Songzhuang Art Museum (Beijing); Hangzhou International Art Expo (Hangzhou); Xiamen International Airport (Xiamen); Xi’an Tang Art Museum (Xi’an), The Art Space (Lhasa); Jinan International Art Center (Jinan).ArtsTas (Hobart); UTAS (Hobart & Launceston); QUT (Brisbane); Federation Square (Melbourne).

January – December 2011

NEW AGE: NEW MEDIA is a cultural exchange project consisting of exhibitions in twelve locations, a publication and a series of public programs – including artists’ talks and forums. It consists of video and digital artworks by 12 established contemporary artists – six from Australia; six from China. The artists and artworks selected showcaseda diversity of approaches in which they reveal and explore the concept of social environments, in particular the relationships between the values, beliefs and behaviours of people and the economic, political and structural environments in which they live and work.

Reg Newitt, Curator, Beijing 2010

Liu Zhuoquan HKAF11, Hong Kong Art Fair Hong Kong 2011

Liu Zhuoquan works with traditional craftsmen who have mastered the ancient art of ‘inside painting’, or ‘neihua’ once used on the beautiful snuff bottles dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties. In Liu Zhuoquan’s practice, however, they become ways of making a comment on many aspects of life in China today. The bottles, which in Liu’s practice are found objects, used bottles which have held a range of products, in varying sizes and shapes, are delicately and precisely painted on the insides. Precise technique and the use of fine brushes create immensely detailed and realistic representations of people, the natural world of plants and insects, as well as political imagery from the Cultural Revolution and contemporary events in China and the wider world. Barack Obama features on one bottle. Liu sees his work as suggesting a scientific laboratory, as the bottles (discarded and ‘found’ objects referencing the everyday) contain beautifully painted, miniaturized ‘experimental material’ relating to nature, biology, human society and also to politics.

Luise Guest Sydney March 2011

Jayne Dyer-The Butterfly Effect, Art HK 11,

Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Center, Hong Kong 2011

Jayne Dyer considers the veracity of individual and cultural assumptions about what constitutes permanence and endurance, offers a lens to multiple realities (states of suspension, rupture, dislocation) to reconsider – and potentially act upon – what we value. In the butterfly projects thousands of butterflies swarm into domestic and public spaces to draw attention to sustainability and our ecologically fragile environment and legacy.The butterfly represents metamorphosis and regeneration. A butterfly in flight suggests change, transience and migration. As a symbolic map of Hong Kong, the butterfly reflects Hong Kong’s history of Chinese and international population migration, a city of diverse traditional and contemporary society that rapidly responds to economic and cultural global change in the 21st Century.