White Rabbit

The piece of art work that I liked the least was “Valliant Struggle No.11” by Chen Wenling in 2006 I think that it was a bit too over the top and was too extravagant. I like the meaning behind it and the message that it portrays is well portrayed and easy to understand but it was unfortunately not easy on the eyes.

Chen Wenling says he was a playful child, “always monkeying around”. His parents were so poor that he had to make his own toys—of which his sculptures are, in a sense, grown-up versions. He shot to artistic fame with his Red Memory series (2001-07): more than 100 outsized figures of naked boys at play, all covered in shiny red car duco. While the red boys (a colloquial expression for newborn sons) were bursting with innocent fun, Chen Wenling’s focus has since shifted to adults and their vices. Many of his more recent works involve pigs, which he finds a perfect metaphor for Chinese people today. In Chinese tradition, he says, pigs are seen as “gluttonous, lazy, dirty, horny and stupid as well as content and happy, while science has shown that pigs are very clever. In my eyes, the pig also symbolises speed … and enormous productivity.” Chen Wenling depicts pigs as human and humans as pigs, interdependent almost to the point of fusion. In Happy Life—Family (2005), a mother stands on a pig’s back holding her baby; in Valiant Struggle No. 11 (2006), a couple cling desperately to a giant golden sow of success.

There was more than one piece that was the stand outs for me and they were “Appeals without words” and “Blue 750”. The people with their backs against the wall made by Jin Feng in 2006was a stand out for me because I felt that the message behind it was so strong and there was nothing abstract about it the message was a clear one. The wire vehicle by Shi Jindian in 2008 was a stand out for me because of the detail included and it something that you are left pondering on how this particular piece was made.

Jin Feng is as much a social activist as he is an artist—he even refers to his works as “cases”. His goal is to bring before people’s eyes “the many problems in this society which are almost impossible to solve” and the ethical failures that underlie them. In 2006 he stirred outrage and some public soul-searching with twin statues of the ancient philosopher Confucius, crying so hard that his face melts away. “What would Confucius say about today’s education and morality if he were still alive?” Jin Feng says. His fifteen-metre-long photograph Appeals Without Words (2006) shows, at half life size, eighty-nine rural villagers queuing to present shang fang—petitions to the authorities. Standing or crouching with their backs to a wall, they are covered in a mix of black and gold paint, conveying their ties to the land, their poverty, and the idea that their long wait has turned them to statues. But their grubby squares of cardboard and paper are empty. Their patience is pointless, the artist suggests; no one is listening.

Shi Jindian’s sculptures are made of steel, yet they are light, transparent, almost ethereal. After searching for years for “a material that was brand new, completely untraditional”, he settled on steel wires. By trial and error, he learned how to crochet the two-dimensional strands into three-dimensional forms, using tools of his own devising. His wire meshes start out as wrappings around some common object. When the mesh is complete, Shi Jindian destroys or extracts the object, leaving only its steel exoskeleton. The result, he says, is a kind of fiction, a virtual reality that can be walked around and touched. Surrealist René Magritte painted a pipe along with the words: “This is not a pipe.” Shi Jindian does something similar in sculpture, making not-quite-replicas of items from musical instruments to machines. His Blue CJ750 (2008) is a replica of the Chiangjiang [Yangtze] 750, a military bike based on a pre-World War II BMW. It took him three years to make, but he found deep serenity in the toil. When people touch his sculptures, he says, they also touch “the state of mind that emerges from the labour of my hands: tranquillity and calm”.

The origins of the Collection go back to the late 1990s, when Judith Neilson engaged Wang Zhiyuan, a Chinese artist then living in Sydney, as her art tutor. He introduced her to the astonishing explosion of creativity taking place in China in the wake of the “Opening Up” that had begun in 1989. Mrs Neilson began buying works, but soon ran out of space to hang them. She and her husband then decided to open a gallery that would make the exciting world of contemporary Chinese art available to all Australians. Only a fraction of the Collection is on show at any time. The entire contents of the gallery are rehung twice a year.

This outing to “White Rabbit” I believe was essential as I now have a further understanding or art and have come out with an appreciation for the work that goes into making art works like the ones I saw at the gallery. I saw techniques used in some paintings that I can take and use in my designs e.g. there was a painting that was dark on the sides but was light in the middle and this makes the viewer focus on the center of the painting and is where the viewer first looks.