Contemporary Art 5 Guo Jian By Michael Young


Dissident Australian-Chinese artist Guo Jian lives in semi-rural isolation two hours north of Sydney on the New South Wales Central Coast, in a house large enough to swallow several families. His studio, once a large three-car garage is 100-square metres with plenty of storage space in several side rooms. Canvasses litter the floor, stacked like carpets in a carpet showroom.


Several paintings in


various stages of completion lean against walls. Tere is one that shows a naked Chinese woman – a reprise of the earlier Te Day Before I Went Away series that made his name – and two large recent trompe l’oeil photographic works


made from


thousands of tiny portrait photographs which, when viewed from a distance, assume the look of a traditional Chinese landscape complete with misty lakes and trees. When viewed close, the landscape dissolves into a pointillist-like morass of faces. Jian used as many as 30,000 tiny photographs in a previous work. Tere is something a little tentative


about the studio space with its low beamed ceiling, but I cannot quite put my finger on what it is. I wondered how it compared to his first studio at the Yuanmingyuan artist village on the northwest of Beijing that he had occupied in the early 1990s and that was eventually shut down in 1993. ‘It was a shared room off a farmer’s courtyard,’ he remembered.


Jian fled to Australia in 1992, after being involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations only to return to China in 2005, where he occupied several studios before settling at Songzhuang artist village in Bejing in a 200-square-metre warehouse with 7.5-metre ceilings. Te Central Coast studio in comparison is cramped and gloomy with low ceilings and restricted natural light. Nonetheless it is safe, comfortable, even though a touch residential for an artist whose parents and grandparents suffered at the hands of the communist party. His paternal grandfather was executed by the PLA in the early 1950s for being a landowner, Jian revealed. His mother and father were both


tormented by Red Guards


during the Cultural Revolution (1966 -76), Chairman Mao’s attempt to restore his authority after the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-62), which saw millions of Chinese die from famine. himself,


Jian born in 1962, often


encountered Red Guard violence on the streets of Duyun in southwest China’s Guizhou province where he was born. Jian grew up during this turbulent


period of the Cultural Revolution but confessed to having been a fan of the model operas, the only form of entertainment generally available, instituted by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who became the deputy director of the Central Cultural


Revolution Group advancing Mao’s political


Guo Jian with an unfinished work that continues his famous series from the 2000-08. He still gets commissions from people who contact him and want similar paintings. Tis work is one of these commissioned pieces.


ideology through these operas which showed proletarian characters fighting heroically against traditional oppression. For Jian, one model opera proved particularly popular, Te Red Detachment of Women, not so much for the high-toned patriotism it displayed but because the women on stage wore shorts and tight skirts that revealed their legs, something that was frowned on for ordinary Chinese women at the time. As a boy Jian had two dreams. One was to be an artist – as a child he was always drawing – the other was to be


a soldier. Te two dreams coalesced when he was 17 and joined the People’s Liberation Army during the brief Sino- Vietnamese war. But his drawing skill kept him away from combat and instead of a combat soldier he became an army propaganda artist. Later, as an art student at the


Central Minorities Institute in Beijing (6,000 students from his area applied but only three were admitted), he was swept up in the Tiananmen Square protests for greater freedom and democracy. He joined the hunger


strikers and was in the square when the tanks rolled in and the PLA began firing indiscriminately at anything that moved. Te memories of seeing so many fellow students killed and their bodies piled high in the bicycle lot of the local Fuxingmen Hospital have never left him. Like many idealistic young men of his generation, he believed the PLA was the defender of the people. ‘It was beyond belief that the PLA would ever fire on Chinese people. It was the people’s army. I never thought the Continued on page 6


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