Dialogues of Diaspora: Six Chinese Australian Artists

AN ESSAY BY LUISE GUEST

Complex interwoven threads of diasporic and Australian history create rich patterns of memory in the work of each Chinese Australian artist in Our Journeys | Our Stories

Their own stories are as diverse as their artworks: Lindy Lee and Jason Phu were born in Australia and raised here by immigrant parents; Malaysian-born Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen arrived as a small child; Guan Wei first visited in January 1989 to take up a residency in Hobart at the Tasmanian School of Art; Guo Jian and Xiao Lu were post-Tiananmen arrivals. Each has made work for this exhibition inspired by connections between museum artifacts, archival photographs, and their own life stories. Their work is also underpinned by responses to the landscape of the Georges River and its long history of habitation by the Biddegal people of the Eora Nation, by the narratives of Chinese immigration to Australia, and by their personal experiences of diaspora.

The history of the Chinese in Australia is a long one, from fishermen trading with Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land before colonisation, to those who came seeking their fortune on the 19th century goldfields, to recent arrivals from Hong Kong and mainland China. Sydney’s first recorded Chinese immigrant was Guangzhou-born Mak Sai Ying, who arrived as a free settler in 1818 and bought land at Parramatta. In an astute – and quintessentially Australian – move, he opened a pub. Over the next century, immigrants from China opened restaurants and small shops, and started successful market gardens, including those around the Rockdale, Kogarah, and Hurstville areas.

Water plays a large part in these immigrant stories and in the exhibition – in the histories of trade, exploration, colonisation, and the arduous journeys across oceans into safe harbours undertaken by so many new arrivals to this country. But there is also the story of a river, winding from its catchment at Appin through suburbia to meet Botany Bay at Taren Point. The Georges River, and the indigenous and settler people living around it, are present in many of these works too.

Guan Wei, for example, has painted a double-sided folding screen, The Georges River, riffing on a traditional form that represents his Chinese (Manchu) ancestry: decorative folding screens made from wooden panels were a feature of wealthy Chinese homes from as early as the Han Dynasty. A successful market gardener named Tiy Sing is the central subject of his work; Guan examined museum documents and archival photographs and chose twelve images that represent aspects of Tiy Sing’s life in Australia. Painted onto a flat background, his stylised technique recalls the ‘floating world’ of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and the precisely delineated figures in Chinese gongbi court painting.ii Chinese-inspired motifs of clouds and curling waves are juxtaposed with the tiny silhouettes of Aboriginal, Chinese, and European figures. A dark ship in full sail enters Botany Bay, symbolising both the coming violence of British settlement and the arduous journeys across dangerous oceans undertaken by Tiy Sing and his fellow Chinese immigrants.

Guan Wei alludes to colonial dispossession with the inclusion of Aboriginal figures at the top of the composition, and racist injustices suffered by immigrants from Asia are represented by the silhouette of a western figure chasing a pig-tailed Chinese labourer. Tiy Sing’s portrait, based on an archival photograph of the vegetable grower from the certificate exempting him from the notoriously racist Dictation Test, is placed beside the official seal of the Commonwealth of Australia Customs authority. It makes the dark shadows of colonial history inescapable: we see them in the copperplate handwriting of Tiy Sing’s 1906 ‘Exemption from Dictation Test’ certificate, in portraits of the be-whiskered colonial Premier and Governor General and, most disturbingly, in a detail from sheet music published in 1910 – a red ribbon with the chilling inscription, ‘Australia the White Man’s Land’.

Fascinated by Australian history and geography, Guan Wei incorporates mountains, rivers, coastlines, oceans, and other cartographic symbols into his work, exploring ideas about empire, trade, and colonisation. Combining real and imagined histories with recent discourses around immigration and the contested ideological territory of border protection, Guan’s visual references range from map coordinates to meteorological patterns, from Chinese astrology and traditional medicine to Daoist cosmology, and from geopolitics to science. His constant subject, however, is universal: the traveller, journeying far from home. It recalls imagery of lonely scholars wandering through mist-wreathed mountain landscapes found in Chinese literati painting, but also references the plight of the contemporary refugee. Guan Wei’s imagery reflects his own life experience, too, of traversing parallel worlds as he moves back and forth between his home in south-western Sydney and his home and studio in Beijing.

A different Australian/Chinese history has found its way into Jason Phu’s quirky homage to the home cooking of his youth – the story of how Chinese cuisine was reinterpreted for western tastes. Chinese food is inextricably part of Australian history – the Chinese on the goldfields in the 1850s ran cookhouses catering for both Chinese and European miners, and every country town in Australia has its Chinese restaurant serving a hybrid, not-quite-Chinese menu of spring rolls, prawn cutlets, sweet and sour pork, and chicken chow mein. Phu’s work is a video, zine, and cookbook entitled, with typical whimsy, There is only today to eat a meal we cooked today, tomorrow we can cook something different, and the day after who knows where we will all be. It was inspired by a recipe book, ‘Cooking the Chinese Way’, first published in Australia in 1948.

Food is such a powerfully emotive element of the migrant story; it can immediately return us to our earliest childhood memories. For Phu, it is bound up with his memories of feeling somehow inauthentic as a ‘Third Culture’ child born in Australia to Chinese parents and hearing their stories of home. He says, ‘I think the past is somehow important. Not only how you lived it, but how you remember it.’iii During the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 Phu stayed with his parents in Sydney and watched his mother in the kitchen as she re-learned the northern Chinese dishes she remembered from her own childhood. It made him think of his beloved grandmother, his lao lao, in Beijing. Having been thinking about the significance of food to cultural memory, Phu was interested to find ‘Cooking the Chinese Way’ in the list of objects for Our Journeys | Our Stories. When he returned to Melbourne, he came across a later edition of the cookbook owned by a friend, which he is lending to the exhibition to accompany his video work. In his video Phu prepares recipes from the 1948 cookbook for his housemates in Melbourne to show ‘that food and culture and the idea of “authenticity” can exist anywhere’.iv

Like Guan Wei and Jason Phu, Lindy Lee explores themes of diaspora, dislocation and belonging. Her parents arrived separately in Australia after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. With two small children (Lee’s siblings) in tow, carrying a suitcase with a false bottom hiding the family’s gold, Lee’s mother made the dangerous journey from China to join her husband in Queensland. Growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane, Lee felt not quite Australian and not quite Chinese. Her earliest exhibited works were altered photocopies of appropriated European Old Master paintings that examined her own sense of being a ‘bad copy’, a faded reproduction.v Later, Lee turned to manipulating images that connected her with her Chinese ancestry, including family photographs; she has returned to this technique with her work, The Market Gardener and the Restaurateur.

Lee, like Guan Wei, based her work on Tiy Sing’s official papers. But her moody, shadowy, much enlarged reproduction of Tiy Sing’s document is paired with a similar image of another man’s Dictation Test Exemption Certificate – her grandfather’s. Lee Foy, who owned a Chinese restaurant in Lidcombe, was a contemporary of Tiy Sing’s–he could have bought his vegetables from Tiy Sing’s market garden. The official documents bearing their photographs are paired with a handprint and thumbprint in place of signatures, providing us, more than a century later, with a palpable sense of their physical presence. The grave faces of Tiy Sing and his contemporary, Lee Foy, emerge from the mists of the past and meet our gaze, forcing us to face the fact, as Lindy Lee says, that ‘the tentacles of racism reach into our present era’.

The ragged, torn edges of their immigration documents, so redolent of the passage of time, are echoed in the patterns of perforations that are a characteristic idiom of Lee’s works on paper, and her sculptures in metal. These holes, sometimes made by burning the paper with a soldering iron, sometimes by piercing the surface, create tiny pinpricks of light that reference Daoist and Buddhist cosmologies of tian xia – everything under heaven existing in a harmonious relationship. They suggest maps of heavenly constellations, or diagrams of divination. Lee’s artistic practice celebrates her Chinese ancestry, and the contribution made by Chinese immigrants to Australia, but is frequently imbued with a sense of melancholy, loss, and longing.

Those ‘tentacles’ from the past are present in Guo Jian’s work, in the form of secret images hidden within a beautiful landscape. Guo’s work frequently relies on a kind of double coding – what you see at first sight shifts and alters; deeper meanings are revealed, slowly. Trained as a painter in China, Guo Jian is known for his savage social critique in the ‘Political Pop’ idiom. By about 2005, however, he had begun to explore digital photographic collage techniques, creating a series of works exploring the destruction of the natural environment. From a distance they appear to be peaceful landscapes or appropriated classical shan shui (mountain and water) ink paintings, but as you come closer, you realise each work is made up of a mosaic of thousands of tiny photographic fragments. On Guo’s return to his home province of Guizhou he had found scenic vistas and construction sites polluted with rubbish, once-beautiful ancient villages destroyed by overdevelopment. He inserted his photographs of the discards of consumer society into the landscape in a digital mosaic, documenting an ugly human secret hidden in the beauty of the natural world.

Guo Jian’s multi-panelled work, Where the River Flows, is based on an appropriated colonial sketch. The original work, View of Georges River near Liverpool New South Wales, the property of G Johnston Esqre 1819, depicts a peaceful stretch of river framed by slender gum trees, with a solid Georgian house on the far bank. Major George Johnston came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 and was granted large tracts of land around the Sydney area, including more than 200 acres around the Georges River, where a contemporary noted in his journal that he ‘had a good house and an extensive farm’.vi Both banks of the river had been occupied by Aboriginal people for more than 60,000 years. It had provided water, food and a meeting place that connected them to their ancestor spirits. Guo Jian hides an alternative to the colonisers’ version of history inside this work in the form of tiny, pixel-like photographs. He asks us to acknowledge uncomfortable truths – of Aboriginal massacres, colonial occupation, and of the racism directed towards the Chinese. The apparently peaceful landscape contains a dark message of blood and suffering.

Xiao Lu’s video documentation of her 2019 performance, Skew, similarly represents a truth that she feels compelled to speak. Xiao Lu is known for transgressive performance works. In February 1989, as a young artist newly graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, she brought Beijing’s artworld to a standstill when she fired two shots from a handgun into her installation at the opening of a major exhibition.vii More recent works involve the use of almost alchemical symbolic ingredients: ink, water, ice, alcohol and smoke are dramatic elements in actions that resemble rituals of purification. Xiao Lu’s work is always provocative, and sometimes dangerous – she pushes her bodily endurance to the limit in many of her works, risking serious injury. After 1989 and the tragic events of Tiananmen, Xiao spent nine years in Australia before returning to China, where she lived and worked until early 2021. Her work in this exhibition reflects her experiences of diaspora, of dislocation, of not quite belonging, of observing and recording.

In Skew, which took place in September 2019 in Hong Kong and is dedicated to that city, we see Xiao desperately fighting to escape a sealed pyramidal container that has been filled with red, blood-like liquid once the artist is inside it. She frantically pushes and claws her way out, finally bursting forth as a panel breaks and fluid gushes out onto the street. Skew is a ritual of mourning. The video is paired with Remember, a series of photographs of the June 4 vigil in Hong Kong commemorating the events of 1989, and of crowds protesting against the proposed extradition bill. Xiao Lu’s work is an elegy for Hong Kong, with its dark colonial history as a Treaty Port, its return to China from British rule in 1997, and its complex, troubled identity today. Like earlier performances in which the materiality of substances such as ink and water symbolise yin-yang reciprocity, Xiao Lu’s representation of trauma in Skew represents a catharsis – and a refusal to be silent.

A strong sense of place is evident in each work in the exhibition. Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen undertook the challenge of responding to artefacts held in the museum with a quiet and considered approach befitting an artist whose work centres around a process she calls ‘embodied listening’. In her experimental drawings, often combined with sound recordings, she explores the complexities of how we are connected to land. Born in Malaysia to Chinese parents with Hakka ancestry, Chen reflects on histories of migration from southern China. She was initially inspired by listening to the oral histories of migrants who, like Chen, are now living on (unceded) Aboriginal land and responding to the beauty of the natural world in their new home. Working en-plein-air in Oatley Park, she listened to the sounds of birds, wind, water, and the voices of passers-by speaking many languages.

In response to the apparently random direction of the wind blowing her paper, she drew delicate, rhythmical ink lines, each representing a possible life path, a potential direction.

Chen’s work obliquely references the history of literati shan shui landscape painting, but the presence of the landscape is not just visual – it becomes a sensory memory in the form of recorded sounds – lapping water, wind, and the hum and buzz of insects. Working with ink in the traditional manner, grinding an ink stone and using fine brushes to make slow, considered marks on xuan paper, her practice is like a form of meditation.

The museum artefact that Chen selected as a source of ideas and inspiration was the qiuqian (‘chi chi’ or fortune telling sticks) often used for divination in Daoist temples. They are depicted in Guan Wei’s work too, on the rear panel of his screen. Qiuqian represent the very human desire to find certainty amidst the chaos and confusion of life; similar sets were likely brought to Australia by the first Chinese arrivals in the 19th century. Here, they are a potent symbol of the turbulence of historical forces that shape our lives and our journeys. The wind and water that influenced Chen’s production of the work in situ are metaphors. Her work is an allegory of chance – how it operates in human destiny, and how people’s fates are at the mercy of the winds of global geopolitics.

In each artist’s work, and in their stories, we hear echoes of soft voices from the past –from those who lived along the river for aeons, and from those who crossed the ocean –for trade, for imperial power, for adventure, to escape famine or persecution, or to make a better life in a safe harbour. Themes of migration, dispossession, dislocation, loss, and memory are woven together, creating a complex narrative that honours all those who have left their traces on this landscape.

Luise Guest Independent writer & researcher

Note: The author interviewed Guan Wei and Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen in their Sydney studios, and has previously interviewed Guo Jian and Xiao Lu; they each provided her with additional information about their works in this exhibition. Lindy Lee and Jason Phu responded to the author’s questions via email.

i See https://www.nma.gov.au/explore/features/harvest-of-endurance/scroll/early-chinesemigrants#:~:text=Records%20show%20that%20about%2018,and%20purchased%20 land%20at%20Parramatta. [accessed 2.5.21] ii Gongbi painting is a meticulous and detailed painting style, often associated with court painting. The V&A Museum in London produced an excellent video that shows an artist working on silk to create carefully delineated figures replicating a famous painting. https:// www.vam.ac.uk/articles/chinese-gongbi-silk-painting [accessed 20.5.21] iii Jason Phu, Artist Profile, Issue 47, 2019, available at https://www.artistprofile.com.au/jasonphu/ [accessed 2.5.21] iv Jason Phu, in an email to the author, 16 April 2021 v The author’s review of Lindy Lee’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ‘The Moon in a Dewdrop’, was published by Randian on 18 February 2021. See https://www. randian-online.com/np_review/lindy-lee-moon-in-a-dewdrop-replicas-postmodernism-andbad-copies/ [accessed 2.5.21] vi For maps and other historical documents linked to Guo Jian’s choice of the 19th century drawing see https://dictionaryofsydney.org/natural_feature/georges_river and for details of George Johnston see https://www.peterwalker.com.au/johnson.html [accessed 2.5.21] vii For more information on Xiao Lu’s 1989 work Dialogue see the author’s book Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China (Piper Press, Sydney: 2016) or Xiao Lu’s interview with Monica Merlin for Tate, available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/researchcentres/tate-research-centre-asia/women-artists-contemporary-china/xiao-lu [accessed 19.5.21]