Dreaming and dragons

Touing exhibitions are building a bark bridge between Australia and China.

Detail from Wititj the Galpu Snake, 1967, by Mithinarri Gurruwiwi, National Museum of Australia. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency

There may be tension in the Australia-China relationship but indigenous art is helping to build bridges between the two countries.

Australia’s ambassador to China, Jan Adams, notes China’s strong interest in traditional art and craft forms and the success of exhibitions of Aboriginal culture and history.

“We have been able to tap into that curiosity with the indigenous exhibitions we have supported, such as the current Old Masters touring exhibition of Australian bark paintings,” says Adams.

That exhibition — The National Museum Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists — comprises more than 120 bark paintings. It is now showing in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on one of the final legs of a year-long tour of China. The paintings were made by indigenous artists from Arnhem Land between 1948 and 1985 and include some that are extremely rare and fragile. The exhibition has been in Beijing and Shanghai and will also go on show in Chengdu. Some 200,000 people are expected to see the collection by the time it heads home at the end of August. A social media campaign on the Australian embassy’s Weibo account, which features the National Museum of Australia’s culture ambassador, Guo Degang, has been viewed 2.2 million times.

The NMA exhibition is the latest of a series of indigenous arts events in China that has included a visit by the Northern Territory’s Karrabing Film Collective, which travelled to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou last year to participate in a group exhibition called Let’s Talk about the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis.

The Warburton Arts Project’s Tudi Shenti — Our Land, Our Body toured China in 2011 and again in 2013-14, attracting an estimated 500,000 visitors. In 2012-13, the Australian Centre for Photography/UNSW Art and Design exhibition Making Change, attracted 90,000 visitors to the National Art Museum of China. And in 2010, an earlier NMA exhibition, Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Deserts, attracted 170,000 visitors.

Catherine Croll, the founding director of Cultural Partnerships Australia, which was established in 2010, has had a long experience in connecting indigenous art and communities with China from her base in Newcastle. Croll, who is also director of special projects at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, founded by Australian Brian Wallace, has worked on many projects including the Yiban Yiban Fellah tour to Guangzhou, Kunming and Chongqing in 2014 . It showed work by Aboriginal artists who were exploring their own Chinese heritage. Croll also organised a Northern Territory tour in 2015 of Chinese curators to art sites and centres and Aboriginal communities.

“I have been working for the past 12 years to strengthen ties between Australian indigenous artists and communities and increase understanding of the diversity and depth of Australian Aboriginal art and culture amongst Chinese audiences,” Croll tells The Deal.

Chen Hong, the director of the Australian Studies Centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai, says there are similarities between the Chinese culture and the Australian indigenous culture. He says Chinese viewers empathise easily with the long tradition and spiritual elements in Australian indigenous art.

“The Rainbow Serpent reminisces with the Chinese dragon,” he says. “The Chinese have a similar attachment to the land and flora and fauna which holds intrinsic spiritual kinship with mankind.”