Coronavirus strikes art exhibition at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse
Chinese mythology and other often overlooked themes are central to an exhibition in western Sydney
It takes an hour or so on the train to get from the centre of Sydney to Casula, a few stops past Cabramatta. For most of the journey, the train travels through the western suburbs of the city, which like other suburbs are unfamiliar to those who do not live in them, since the populations of cities tend to gravitate to the centre in search of culture and entertainment. Visitors, of course, remain exclusively in the centre. And the centre of a city is defined by history, not by abstractions like population spread; which is why no one will go to Parramatta to visit the Powerhouse Museum when it is moved there.
Arriving at Casula, after passing through suburban sprawl, is rather surprising, because the train seems to stop in the middle of nowhere. You go down a long staircase from the station to what looks like spreading parkland, in the middle of which is a large and undistinguished building, a former power station. It somehow feels rather like a film set. There are also two enormous silos covered in graffiti, and as I arrived two graffitists were debating the choice of a background colour.
What made the place feel even more like a film set was that it appeared otherwise to be entirely deserted, even though it was early on a Saturday afternoon. But this was the back of the museum. Walking around the front I discovered a carpark, and a restaurant with a number of people finishing lunch. Inside, the main hall of the museum is a vast and impressive space, but it too was almost deserted.
There was a small exhibition devoted to those sports shoes made entirely of synthetic materials, generally in lurid colours, which have become a huge consumer product and also, it seems, the object of an almost obsessive interest among people with few other cultural resources. Another exhibition was devoted to a second subculture: costumes designed to be worn at disco parties, expressions of narcissism combined, as so often, with self-abasement.
The main exhibition is one that brings together Chinese-Australian artists with others from China itself, and I happened to be visiting on the first day it was open to the public. But unfortunately all special activities and programs associated with the show had been postponed because the Chinese artists were, on account of the coronavirus crisis, unable to leave China.
There was thus a certain irony in discovering, at the beginning of the exhibition, a video work entitled Prolonging life. But the focus of the show is, as its curators Guan Wei and Cang Xin declare, “themes of religious witchcraft, mythology, folk art and folk culture”. They are thus emphasising aspects of Chinese culture not always prominent in the contemporary Chinese art that dominates the market, but which have far deeper roots in the history and traditions of the Chinese people.
The expression “religious witchcraft”, for example, may sound almost oxymoronic to Western ears, when we remember the hostility of the Church to witches, especially during the witch crazes of the 17th century, which we can see in hindsight as connected to anxiety about the beginning of the decline of faith. But if we think of the word magic rather than witchcraft, we may recall that many magical practices were tolerated in earlier centuries, especially during the Renaissance, when the borders between science and magic had not yet been firmly drawn.
In China, magical traditions go back to the philosophy of Taoism, and even further to very ancient practices of divination with bones and shells, and to the I Ching, which was already regarded as a venerable classic by Confucius in the 6th to 5th century BC.
The most important thinker of the Taoist tradition, Lao Tzu, is said to have lived around the same time.
Buddha in India and the early Greek philosophers belong to the same period; it seems for some reason that is hard to explain, the human mind took a great leap forward around 2500 years ago.
The system of the I Ching is explicitly referred to in the second part of the exhibition, with a floor installation including the interlocking forms of the Yin and the Yang, and the hexagrams that are used in divination.
But the video work already mentioned is full of more spontaneous forms of folk magic and ritual, speaking of an ancient and pre-rational sense of connection to the natural environment – alternating here, in a series of rapid cuts, with evocations of the destruction of that environment as the new industrial China is constructed.
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“The expression ‘religious witchcraft’, for example, may sound almost oxymoronic to Western ears.”
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Many works evoke the occult, including a series of mysterious paintings, all executed in gold on black, by the show’s co-curator, Cang. In one, a group of figures with animal heads sits around a table at a seance. In another, four pairs of hands form a circle, each with two fingers pressed into the palm of the opposite hand, and bearing images of insects on their wrists. In a third, a headless figure holds a staff in one hand while his other four arms reach up to hold a serpent aloft; on the figure’s breast is a medallion in the form of a heptagon and the image of a winged man with three legs. A video work by Cang is even more overtly connected to ancient and certainly pre-Confucian shamanistic beliefs. The opening shots of the video reveal the set-up from the air and by daylight, although the ritual performance is held after dark. At the culmination of the ritual, the artist himself sits in a hole dug in the ground, surrounded by circles of fire and a ring of torchbearers, while above him a huge Star of David burns against the night sky. The Star of David appears several times in his other works, in one case accompanied by a Hebrew inscription, as well as pentagrams and heptagrams, as already mentioned.
A large work by the other curator, Guan, also collects a variety of occult and philosophical symbols, although less in a spirit of ecstatic mysticism than of detachment and even irony. The massive polyptych that occupies the first wall on the left in the second room of the exhibition includes Taoist and other Chinese imagery, including diagrams of Chinese palmistry, but also an anatomical illustration in which the figure appears to be squatting or sitting; this may have been the format of anatomical diagrams of antiquity, for they were copied and adapted during the Middle Ages by Islamic scholars, and no doubt made their way along the Silk Road to China, yet another example of East-West exchange.
The zodiac symbols in the upper left of the work tell a similar story: some of the constellations were identified by the Mesopotamians, and several, although not the zodiac constellations, are mentioned in Homer and the Old Testament. It was the Hellenistic Greeks who first made astrology into a quasi-rational system based on the knowledge that the world was round and the assumption that the heavens were also spherical. The course of the sun could thus be divided into 12 segments of 30 degrees each. This system in turn, with its many philosophical ramifications, spread east to Persia and India and even to China, and was eagerly taken up by the Islamic thinkers of the medieval period. Other elements in this eclectic or encyclopaedic collection of scientific and esoteric knowledge include an adaptation of a diagram by Leonardo da Vinci showing how sight works, physiognomic illustrations of the shapes of the eye, an example of Western perspective and even an Aboriginal X-ray image of a crocodile.
The most striking work as you enter the exhibition is a huge scroll by Jiang Zhe, suspended in the air on a diagonal so that its lower part rests on a platform at ground level. From a distance, the general shape and the patterns recall sacred Buddhist imagery with mandalas and images of the various heavens and other regions of the afterlife, populated by countless figures. Here there are indeed countless figures, and in fact all the other imagery is composed of them in various patterns. These figures in turn are cut out of printed paper and retain fragments of words and images, but merge into imagery that, on closer inspection, seems more animistic than Buddhist.
Not all the works are overtly occult, although most have some sense of mystery, like Yang Jinsong’s Home Journal pages, a folding rice-paper book displayed open in a cabinet. The pages are sparsely occupied by images and calligraphic inscriptions, like a diary, alternating between familiar Chinese motifs and others that belong to the Western world. Thus one page has a group of mountains painted in a consciously stylised Chinese manner, while the following one has an umbrella, as though we had moved into the world of Magritte.
There are two notable sets of paintings in the second room, both on a very big scale. Two pictures are by Yang Jinsong again, working in oil paint but very diluted, allowing him to achieve a lightness and freedom more akin to Chinese ink and watercolour painting. One of these is a massive image of a cut watermelon. The other is an equally huge image of a fish that has been cut into several pieces, the whole painted with tremendous speed and energy.
Next to these paintings is a video interview with the artist, sitting in front of a mural painting of trees in black and white. The questions posed to him appear on the screen and are followed by his answers, and they are interesting questions; unfortunately, he answers in Chinese and the subtitles that accompany these answers are also in Chinese.
Finally, there are four enormous paintings of lotuses, in black ink on rice paper. The lotus is a sacred plant in the Buddhist tradition; with its roots in the mud at the bottom of a pond and its pure flowers floating on the surface of the water, it symbolises the capacity of transcendence of the human soul, attached to a world of base matter but capable of rising to pure consciousness.
These works are probably rather bigger than they need be – reminding us of the painful difficulty contemporary audiences seem to have in attending to anything of normal scale – but they are undoubtedly painted in the authentic tradition of Chinese ink painting, which emphasises freedom and rapidity of execution. This is not a medium that allows for second thoughts or corrections: the aim is to become one with the ch’i, the breath of life that animates all things, so that the resulting image represents less the outward appearance than the inward movement and energy – the pulse, one might say – of the subject.
Pulse of the Dragon. Casula Powerhouse, until April 22
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