fluktor -|||- study - office - newsletter April 21, 2004

The National, Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Tiananmen exiles flourish on Australian art scene

SYDNEY: In a Sydney garage that Chinese artist Guo Jian calls home, pictures of half-naked women hang alongside communist propaganda posters while unfinished works lie on the floor.
Guo, 40, is one of many avant-garde Chinese artists who moved overseas after Chinese troops crushed the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989.
Nearly 15 years after the massacre, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, the works of these exiles have given Australian art an Asian flavour.
“It was an incredible cultural coup for Australia to get the sort of intellectual input that New York got with the Second World War,” said Sydney art gallery-owner Ray Hughes.
Guo, one of the many hunger strikers during the Beijing protests and a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, said images of students gunned down by soldiers still haunt him.
“I demonstrated from the beginning to the end. I did the hunger strike and I was the last one left in Tiananmen Square,” said Guo, now an Australian resident.
Guo was blacklisted for his participation in the Tiananmen protests, that ended with a military crackdown June 3 and 4.
“My passport approval did not come until three years later and I could not find any work during those three years,” said Guo, who came from Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces in the southwest.
“I am still nervous whenever I return to China. I feel like I am constantly being watched,” he said.
Cluttered with paintbrushes and magazines, Guo’s lock-up garage features a work in bold colours portraying a bunch of grinning Chinese soldiers in their uniforms, smoking and frolicking with scantily clad female companions.
The painting stands in sharp contrast to a fairly recent, but dog-eared, propaganda poster of Chinese fighter planes and tanks. In bold Chinese characters, the poster reads: “Let’s show off our military might.”
An erotic and satirical portrayal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is everywhere in Guo’s art.
“China has a very strong military culture. If you walk on the streets in Australia, how many soldiers would you see in a day? Probably none. In China, they are everywhere,” said Guo.
The PLA, with 2.5 million troops, is the world’s largest standing army.
Guo’s three-story-high “Trigger Happy” painting, displayed on a Melbourne street corner just after the Sept 11 attacks of 2001, outraged many who said his work was offensive.
“Trigger Happy” portrayed half-naked Chinese soldiers with toy guns, laughing in a war-like scene of exploding planes, with a naked couple embracing in the middle of the painting.
Guo sold his latest painting for Aus$30,000 compared with the A$50 each he earned for his early works, but he is not the only Chinese artist of his generation who is now making waves in Australia with provocative and controversial work.
Among the best-known are Ah Xian, Guan Wei and Shen Jiawei, all of whom survived Mao Zedong’s 10-year Cultural Revolution in which hundreds of thousand were killed, works of art and monuments destroyed, and intellectuals and artists humiliated.
All three chose to leave their homeland after the Tiananmen massacre and settle in Australia.
Guan, whose father was in the famous Peking Opera, said he moved to Australia because he was disappointed with the Chinese authorities after Tiananmen. “Before that I had no thoughts about leaving China,” he said.
One of Guan’s most famous works, “Dow Islands,” is a whimsical and almost animated display of three land masses in a vast expanse of blue, spread across 48 panels with numerous boats carrying people struggling to reach land.
“It is about migration, voyage and refugees looking for a safe haven,” said Guan, who recently sold the painting for Aus$100,000 to the National Gallery in Canberra.
Ah Xian, who was granted political asylum in Australia in 1990, has won awards with his expressionless porcelain body-casts, each tattooed or painted with traditional Chinese motifs, such as the imperial dragon.
Gene Sherman, director of Sydney’s Sherman Galleries, said the post-Tiananmen diaspora did not just benefit Australia.
“They are everywhere, some travelled to Germany, others to the US, Paris and Japan.”
Most Chinese artists started their careers painting images of beaming peasants and model workers for the propaganda posters popular during the heady days of Maoism.
Many are aware that the Chinese influence in their work is a powerful source of appeal to a largely Western audience.
Gallery owners in Australia said in today’s China, where many have become property moguls, stockbrokers and flashy millionaires, Chinese authorities have displayed tolerance for abrasive urban art.
But some artists still hesitate to show their work in China. “China’s economy is booming but politically China has not progressed,” said Wang Xu, famed for his traditional brush and ink paintings.
Gallery-owner Hughes, who travels to China fairly frequently, said art works that were too political would fail to win the Communist Party’s approval, even today. –– Reuters
http://www.thenational.com.pg/0420/region2.htm

**********************

Uzbekistan's best kept secret
By Monica Whitlock
BBC Correspondent, Uzbekistan

Kampyr-Tepe, in southern Uzbekistan, was built at the time of Alexander the Great's empire and occupied for about 500 years until it fell into decline.

Since it was discovered, a generation ago, it has been closed to the public because it stands in a sensitive and tightly guarded military zone, right on the Afghan border.

The city perched on a high shelf of land - cut into clay walls that dropped sheer into the plains below.

Caught in the light of a winter afternoon, an entire city spread as far as we could see, the dun-coloured dust touched with gold.

It was here that Alexander raised his capital more than 2,000 years ago. This was the furthest conquest, then, of the Greeks in Asia.

>From our vantage point, we could see why. Far below, beneath a swirl of starlings, we could see the plains melt into those of Afghanistan, Alexander's route here from Persia.

At our feet spread the whole of the south.

Relics

There was not a sound but the birds flocking and turning across the precipice, wheeling and turning back.

The small houses were in the nearest part of the city. Square rooms opened on to a grid of narrow passages, criss-crossing to make streets.

Stacks of pots and plates sat outside, as though the people of Kampyr-Tepe had left the washing up one evening after dinner.

Great round platters and bowls, made of the same ochre dust as the plain.

At first we were amazed. Why had they not been taken off to some museum? Dated, labelled... or stolen even?

But the more we looked, we realised there were just so many, they were ordinary, just part of the land.

When two boys - hard and tough as men - drove their handful of sheep through the city, they did not waste a glance on the pots. Why would they?

Foreigners though, now that was interesting; they spend the rest of the day following shyly and smiling.

Security

Kampyr-Tepe was a fortified city in Alexander's time, and remains a military base to this day for a reason as old as the land - its special position at this crossing between central and south Asia.

It is patrolled by the army of modern Uzbekistan.

Special permission to visit can only be granted by the government in Tashkent.

The way in is through a military checkpoint, at the time specified.

Turn up late and the soldiers will bar the way and you will never see Kampyr-Tepe, just the plain around pitted with pill-boxes and fenced with barbed wire.

The deep south of Central Asia has a feel all its own.

It has a special stillness and a scent of new bread from the intense sun beating on the straw, that, mixed with mud, is the building material used 1,000 years ago... and now.

Buried treasure

It wears its past casually. Kampyr-Tepe is just one of its treasures.

There are sights here, in this quiet and private place, that almost anywhere in the world would have bus-loads of visitors trooping to and fro, buying souvenirs and cups of tea.

"You see that big pit there," said an old farmer, Hamrah Baba, living on the plains to the north of Kampyr-Tepe.

"When I was a boy, we used to lower each other down there in turns, hanging on a rope. We did not think it was special.

There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets

"Then, these men came from Tashkent and found all sorts of things. They found gold and those chessmen."

The gold was 35kg of solid gold jewellery, set with turquoises. The chess pieces may be the oldest on earth.

The pit where Hamrah Baba once played is in the citadel of Dalverzin-Tepe. Capital of the Kushan empire, it was one of the richest on the planet.

There was not a sound but the starlings, wheeling and flocking, wheeling and turning over the edge of Afghanistan.

Unearthed

There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets, and recent political secrets.

One night in the Soviet time, archaeologists got a call at their dig at a sunken palace right on the Afghan frontier by the river Amu, that some people call Oxus.

It was an urgent order from Moscow. "Move fast," they said. "Get the stuff out, now."

They dug as fast as they could, grabbing from the ground a frieze of marble musicians, and a hoard of daggers - relics of an army that had once passed that way.

They were right to feel that something was up.

It was the winter of 1979 and a few days later, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, across the palace, crunching what was left.

Inhabitants

Long before the Arabs came here with their new religion of Islam, Buddhist monks lived in Central Asia, the conduit through which Buddhism travelled from India to the East.

The giant Buddha statues at Bamian in Afghanistan lay on the same road.

They have been destroyed, but a wonderful sleeping Buddha, 16m long, still lies peacefully in Tajikistan.

And near Kampyr-Tepe, we were invited to the site of a Buddhist lamasery, where the mendicant monks lived underground in a labyrinth, to protect them from the terrible heat and cold of the plain.

One could almost feel their soft steps in their sunken corridors and imagine them rinsing their begged rice at the stone bowl that still stands in their kitchen.

They left no gardens, no orchards, no grand palaces.

What they left was something simpler.

"They left some very special papers," said our guide excitedly. "We found them in sealed jars."

"What did they say?" I asked.

"Oh they said that we too lived here."

>From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 17 April, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3630167.stm

Published: 2004/04/18 05:02:38 GMT

____________________

Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

Phone: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 75
Fax: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 39

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de

www.fluktor.de
www.zhaomo.de.vu


	April 21, 2004: [achtung! kunst] exil in australien - "erweckt" in usbekistan

	The National, Tuesday, April 20, 2004 Tiananmen exiles flourish on Australian art scene SYDNEY: In a Sydney garage that Chinese artist Guo Jian calls home, pictures of half-naked women hang alongside communist propaganda posters while unfinished works lie on the floor. Guo, 40, is one of many avant-garde Chinese artists who moved overseas after Chinese troops crushed the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989. Nearly 15 years after the massacre, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, the works of these exiles have given Australian art an Asian flavour. “It was an incredible cultural coup for Australia to get the sort of intellectual input that New York got with the Second World War,” said Sydney art gallery-owner Ray Hughes. Guo, one of the many hunger strikers during the Beijing protests and a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, said images of students gunned down by soldiers still haunt him. “I demonstrated from the beginning to the end. I did the hunger strike and I was the last one left in Tiananmen Square,” said Guo, now an Australian resident. Guo was blacklisted for his participation in the Tiananmen protests, that ended with a military crackdown June 3 and 4. “My passport approval did not come until three years later and I could not find any work during those three years,” said Guo, who came from Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces in the southwest. “I am still nervous whenever I return to China. I feel like I am constantly being watched,” he said. Cluttered with paintbrushes and magazines, Guo’s lock-up garage features a work in bold colours portraying a bunch of grinning Chinese soldiers in their uniforms, smoking and frolicking with scantily clad female companions. The painting stands in sharp contrast to a fairly recent, but dog-eared, propaganda poster of Chinese fighter planes and tanks. In bold Chinese characters, the poster reads: “Let’s show off our military might.” An erotic and satirical portrayal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is everywhere in Guo’s art. “China has a very strong military culture. If you walk on the streets in Australia, how many soldiers would you see in a day? Probably none. In China, they are everywhere,” said Guo. The PLA, with 2.5 million troops, is the world’s largest standing army. Guo’s three-story-high “Trigger Happy” painting, displayed on a Melbourne street corner just after the Sept 11 attacks of 2001, outraged many who said his work was offensive. “Trigger Happy” portrayed half-naked Chinese soldiers with toy guns, laughing in a war-like scene of exploding planes, with a naked couple embracing in the middle of the painting. Guo sold his latest painting for Aus$30,000 compared with the A$50 each he earned for his early works, but he is not the only Chinese artist of his generation who is now making waves in Australia with provocative and controversial work. Among the best-known are Ah Xian, Guan Wei and Shen Jiawei, all of whom survived Mao Zedong’s 10-year Cultural Revolution in which hundreds of thousand were killed, works of art and monuments destroyed, and intellectuals and artists humiliated. All three chose to leave their homeland after the Tiananmen massacre and settle in Australia. Guan, whose father was in the famous Peking Opera, said he moved to Australia because he was disappointed with the Chinese authorities after Tiananmen. “Before that I had no thoughts about leaving China,” he said. One of Guan’s most famous works, “Dow Islands,” is a whimsical and almost animated display of three land masses in a vast expanse of blue, spread across 48 panels with numerous boats carrying people struggling to reach land. “It is about migration, voyage and refugees looking for a safe haven,” said Guan, who recently sold the painting for Aus$100,000 to the National Gallery in Canberra. Ah Xian, who was granted political asylum in Australia in 1990, has won awards with his expressionless porcelain body-casts, each tattooed or painted with traditional Chinese motifs, such as the imperial dragon. Gene Sherman, director of Sydney’s Sherman Galleries, said the post-Tiananmen diaspora did not just benefit Australia. “They are everywhere, some travelled to Germany, others to the US, Paris and Japan.” Most Chinese artists started their careers painting images of beaming peasants and model workers for the propaganda posters popular during the heady days of Maoism. Many are aware that the Chinese influence in their work is a powerful source of appeal to a largely Western audience. Gallery owners in Australia said in today’s China, where many have become property moguls, stockbrokers and flashy millionaires, Chinese authorities have displayed tolerance for abrasive urban art. But some artists still hesitate to show their work in China. “China’s economy is booming but politically China has not progressed,” said Wang Xu, famed for his traditional brush and ink paintings. Gallery-owner Hughes, who travels to China fairly frequently, said art works that were too political would fail to win the Communist Party’s approval, even today. –– Reuters http://www.thenational.com.pg/0420/region2.htm ********************** Uzbekistan's best kept secret By Monica Whitlock BBC Correspondent, Uzbekistan Kampyr-Tepe, in southern Uzbekistan, was built at the time of Alexander the Great's empire and occupied for about 500 years until it fell into decline. Since it was discovered, a generation ago, it has been closed to the public because it stands in a sensitive and tightly guarded military zone, right on the Afghan border. The city perched on a high shelf of land - cut into clay walls that dropped sheer into the plains below. Caught in the light of a winter afternoon, an entire city spread as far as we could see, the dun-coloured dust touched with gold. It was here that Alexander raised his capital more than 2,000 years ago. This was the furthest conquest, then, of the Greeks in Asia. >From our vantage point, we could see why. Far below, beneath a swirl of starlings, we could see the plains melt into those of Afghanistan, Alexander's route here from Persia. At our feet spread the whole of the south. Relics There was not a sound but the birds flocking and turning across the precipice, wheeling and turning back. The small houses were in the nearest part of the city. Square rooms opened on to a grid of narrow passages, criss-crossing to make streets. Stacks of pots and plates sat outside, as though the people of Kampyr-Tepe had left the washing up one evening after dinner. Great round platters and bowls, made of the same ochre dust as the plain. At first we were amazed. Why had they not been taken off to some museum? Dated, labelled... or stolen even? But the more we looked, we realised there were just so many, they were ordinary, just part of the land. When two boys - hard and tough as men - drove their handful of sheep through the city, they did not waste a glance on the pots. Why would they? Foreigners though, now that was interesting; they spend the rest of the day following shyly and smiling. Security Kampyr-Tepe was a fortified city in Alexander's time, and remains a military base to this day for a reason as old as the land - its special position at this crossing between central and south Asia. It is patrolled by the army of modern Uzbekistan. Special permission to visit can only be granted by the government in Tashkent. The way in is through a military checkpoint, at the time specified. Turn up late and the soldiers will bar the way and you will never see Kampyr-Tepe, just the plain around pitted with pill-boxes and fenced with barbed wire. The deep south of Central Asia has a feel all its own. It has a special stillness and a scent of new bread from the intense sun beating on the straw, that, mixed with mud, is the building material used 1,000 years ago... and now. Buried treasure It wears its past casually. Kampyr-Tepe is just one of its treasures. There are sights here, in this quiet and private place, that almost anywhere in the world would have bus-loads of visitors trooping to and fro, buying souvenirs and cups of tea. "You see that big pit there," said an old farmer, Hamrah Baba, living on the plains to the north of Kampyr-Tepe. "When I was a boy, we used to lower each other down there in turns, hanging on a rope. We did not think it was special. There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets "Then, these men came from Tashkent and found all sorts of things. They found gold and those chessmen." The gold was 35kg of solid gold jewellery, set with turquoises. The chess pieces may be the oldest on earth. The pit where Hamrah Baba once played is in the citadel of Dalverzin-Tepe. Capital of the Kushan empire, it was one of the richest on the planet. There was not a sound but the starlings, wheeling and flocking, wheeling and turning over the edge of Afghanistan. Unearthed There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets, and recent political secrets. One night in the Soviet time, archaeologists got a call at their dig at a sunken palace right on the Afghan frontier by the river Amu, that some people call Oxus. It was an urgent order from Moscow. "Move fast," they said. "Get the stuff out, now." They dug as fast as they could, grabbing from the ground a frieze of marble musicians, and a hoard of daggers - relics of an army that had once passed that way. They were right to feel that something was up. It was the winter of 1979 and a few days later, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, across the palace, crunching what was left. Inhabitants Long before the Arabs came here with their new religion of Islam, Buddhist monks lived in Central Asia, the conduit through which Buddhism travelled from India to the East. The giant Buddha statues at Bamian in Afghanistan lay on the same road. They have been destroyed, but a wonderful sleeping Buddha, 16m long, still lies peacefully in Tajikistan. And near Kampyr-Tepe, we were invited to the site of a Buddhist lamasery, where the mendicant monks lived underground in a labyrinth, to protect them from the terrible heat and cold of the plain. One could almost feel their soft steps in their sunken corridors and imagine them rinsing their begged rice at the stone bowl that still stands in their kitchen. They left no gardens, no orchards, no grand palaces. What they left was something simpler. "They left some very special papers," said our guide excitedly. "We found them in sealed jars." "What did they say?" I asked. "Oh they said that we too lived here." >From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 17 April, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3630167.stm Published: 2004/04/18 05:02:38 GMT ____________________ Matthias Arnold M.A. Digital Resources Institute of Chinese Studies University of Heidelberg Akademiestr. 4-8 69117 Heidelberg Germany Phone: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 75 Fax: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 39 http://www.chinaresource.org http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de www.fluktor.de www.zhaomo.de.vu