‘There is also the West Heavens’: a Chinese-Indian conversation CAROLINE TURNER West Heavens, ‘China’s first major exchange of contemporary art and scholarship with India’, opened in Shanghai in October 2010. The project, a satellite event of the Shanghai Biennale, included an exhibition of the works of thirteen Indian and five Chinese contemporary artists, exchange visits, forums, publications, a website, and lectures by distinguished Indian scholars in conversation with leading Chinese scholars under the title The India China Summit on Social Thought. The project, one of the most imaginative and interesting cross-cultural dialogues I have encountered in recent years, was the brainchild of Commissioner Chang Tsong-Zung (better known to Australians as Johnson Chang) from Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, and adjunct professor at the prestigious China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Since the early 1980s, he has been a key figure in presenting contemporary Chinese art abroad as well as a notable intellectual force in China. The exhibition, Place. Time.Play: Contemporary Art from India and China, was curated by Dr Chaitanya Sambrani of the School of Art, Australian National University, one of the most scholarly and imaginative young curators working in the field of contemporary Asian art today. The title West Heavens, as declared in the short printed Introduction (the catalogue is due out in May): signals the invitation to encounter locations and histories across old and new borders … For China, long before the seismic cultural shift towards the West it had experienced one other profound cultural turn. The Buddhist turn did not
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come with comparable destructive fervour as the past century of revolutions, but its influence was just as farreaching … For China today, after a century of revolutions, it is critical to remind ourselves that in our imagination of the world there is not just the West, but also the West Heavens.
India was known as West Heavens from the Han Dynasty (206BC–220CE). West was the direction that the famous Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) took in 629 CE seeking the authentic Buddhist texts that would resolve contradictions in the texts then available in China. Xuanzang’s own writings document his monumental pilgrimage until his return to the capital, Chang-an, after twenty-seven years with 657 Sanskrit texts. There is a certain irony in the fact that Buddhism is now a minority religion in India, but some twenty-three percent of the population of officially atheistic China still admit to trusting in Buddha. The objective of the exhibition is not so much to honour the achievements of Xuanzang or even to evoke the spirit of a time when two great fountainhead cultures could engage in the pursuit of mutual enlightenment united by a Buddhist faith. In reality the project is more about changing the contemporary relationship between the two nations. The Shanghai customs officials however seemed barely responsive to the concept, delaying some works’ inclusion in the exhibition for several days.1 This did not affect the enthusiasm of the mainly Chinese opening night audience or attendances at the first lecture by Sarat Maharaj (curator for Sweden’s forthcoming sixth Göteborg International Biennial 2011) at the Shanghai Art Museum. The works
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