Christina Chau

Between You, Me, and Lindy

Christina Chau

It’s early in the night and you’re already dozing. You’re exhausted from working fourteen hour days – starting early so you can finish in time to see me and our daughter. I know that we’re trying to stay humble and grateful for the things that we have, even though every day feels never-ending yet months just slip away.

I’m writing you this letter because if I don’t, these thoughts will also slip away, and I insist on finding a way to press my thoughts onto you – otherwise where is the space of a relationship? How do we glimpse each other and meet in between, rather than passing one another?

I went to the exhibition opening for Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop with Aki tonight. We were able to see the show before everyone else, which was lucky because then Aki had a toilet accident. The show includes some of Lee’s earlier pieces where she worked with photocopies of Western art historical masters. A piece in particular titled The Silence of Painters (1989) has been celebrated for her critique of postmodern mise en abyme, not only because it is an image made up of images, but as reproductions of reproductions she emphasises how reproducibility generates power and cultural capital.

Lindy Lee, The Silence of Painters (detail), 1989, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint on paper, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, © the artist.

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, [left to right] The Silence of Painters, 1989, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995; Ulterior Function, 1993, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; Ten Worlds, Ten Directions, 2002, courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Jill Hawker, 2016. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Walter Benjamin, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, John Berger, and Arthur Danto are obvious figures to guide interpretations of the work. But instead of leaning on theory and criticism, I’m caught remembering my dad’s hallway. Do you remember this story? When I was young my dad had bought a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and mounted it in the hallway with a thick gold frame and installed light bulbs around the work. My dad would proudly exclaim to each visitor: ‘My Mona Lisa is bigger than the real thing!’ I remember standing in front of the piece as a teenager and feeling the lightbulbs burning my cheeks and hoping that it would all catch fire.

Coincidentally our Melville City Makuru Artbox was delivered today. As a response to COVID times and a way to get families involved in local arts, Artbox invites ten local artists to devise an activity for children. It’s a ripper line up and Dan Bourke’s activity instructs kids to glue and paint pasta around a printed portrait, using a printout of Mona Lisa as an example of a work of art. Somehow all of this has come full circle!

Already Aki is thrilled to adorn the lady with pasta and I caught myself saying “one day you might see the real version of this painting” – and so the cycles of art and power continue.

In the gallery I am not cringing at Lee’s work like I did in Dad’s hallway, so perhaps the joke is on me. In The Silence of Painters, Lee points to how reproduction is fundamental to the machinations of art history, where framing power relies on a copy referring to a sacred original. At the time of making the work Lee called herself ‘a copy of a copy’, no doubt expressing her feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence around identity that reproduction inevitably creates. Similarly to Lee’s family, my Chinese ancestors fled (sometimes unsuccessfully) from persecution during the cultural revolution in China. They fled to Hong Kong and then Australia, and Lindy and I were each first generation Chinese-Australians. When I hear her say that she felt like a copy of a copy, I can feel similar reverberations of dislocation, broken familial memory, and lineage. I feel unmoored and confused. Will Aki feel like this too? Like another copy further detached from something that we can’t even begin to understand? I feel so sad that it’s unlikely that we’ll go to Hong Kong as a family together – not anymore after what has happened to our city.

And so perhaps Lindy Lee, Dan Bourke, Dad, and Aki are all right: that objects gain power and magnetism through their reproduction, because copies accelerate the desire for more copies. It doesn’t matter if it’s kitsch, parody, or just simply about relishing a work of art in your own home, especially if it’s bigger than the real thing. I’ll likely rely on showing Aki photos of Hong Kong and our family holidays and talk about how that city once was, and she’ll only know about that place and those times through stories and images.

Author’s note This piece titled Between You, Me and Lindy, explores some intersections between art theory, criticism and domestic life. By focusing on The Silence of Painters (1989) by Lindy Lee, this piece of writing gives attention to how experiencing art permeates through to our personal lives and thoughts in and amongst family life.

Christina Chau is an arts writer and a lecturer, and the Director of Impact, Research, Engagement in the School of Media, Culture, Art, and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.