Transit, a sea change.

The seven artists in this exhibition exemplify the complexity that enriches Australian culture today.  Each of them responds differently to the diasporic nature of Australian life and to the region as a whole.

Like most Australians today they have cultural and family ties in other places.  While all of them work within the expanding contemporary mainstream of Australian art their interest in identity and cross cultural reference is manifested in differing degrees.

William Seeto is exploring the optical qualities of light and space.  His experiment in this installation seeks to find the particular resonance of light in a space when the brain of the observer registers the whiteness of the reflected light as if it were a material haze in space.  This kind of experimentation deals with the most immediate psychic location of the artist and the viewer, creating an epiphany that disrupts our experience of interior and exterior space.  John Young by contrast makes reference to the geographical displacement of diasporas.  Castiglione’s Dream is a layered painting that introduces the double diaspora of His own Chinese background and Castiglione’s displacement in the Chinese court in the 18th century.  It was Castiglione who introduced perspective and chiaroscuro into Chinese painting.

The layering of references in Young’s painting is informed by strategies from late twentieth-century European painting including the influence of  Gerhard Richter on a younger generation of artists.  Simryn Gill also employs contemporary strategies making use of sites, found material and photo media in a conceptual practice that none the less emphasises the specific location of the artist against a free flow of cultural exchange.  In this work literary texts including classics of European and Asian origin are fragmented into specific sites and photographed suggesting the rise of culture from the natural world, culture’s speculation upon nature and its final reabsorption.

Hou Leong first came to the attention of Sydney audiences with his series of photographs which he modified to insert his own face into celebrated groupings of Australians.  This was a very direct and witty way of addressing the psychic difficulties associated with being uprooted and finding a place in a new culture.  His recent scroll paintings throw the history of modernism into reverse allowing us to see abstract expressionism as a response to traditional Chinese painting.  Xiao Ping presents her calligraphy as contemporary painting without any attempt to change the format, displaying them as traditional scrolls.

Savandary Vongpoothorn’s paintings are subtle and meditative and could easily be discussed in terms of repetitive processes resembling mantras and yet while they do this they invert the association revealing an affiliation of Oriental and Western philosophies as expressed, for example, in the work of Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse. 

Akio Makegawa is a craftsman with a background in sail making.  When he first came to Australia he converted these skills to create aerodynamic sculptures.  Today he is better known for the earthly weight of his stone carvings.  The forms however still tend to soar suggesting the movement between earth and heaven.  In this installation the circle of stone columns brings intimations of spiritual beliefs and cosmologies from both Oriental and Western antiquity.  The full bowls of water reflecting the sky once again mark the divide between the here and now and our memories of past and future existence.