Australian-Chinese artist John Young pays tribute to China’s first modern art group, the Storm Society, at Pearl Lam until August 21. Consisting of three series of works, Storm.Resurrection showcases his “human-computer friendly” techniques that combine modern technology with traditional oil painting methods. He explains.
My mother used to collect Chinese paintings. She’d been through World War II and her generation preserved their family property by carrying ink paintings. So we had a lot of ink paintings in the house, which transcended as ‘visual sound’ to me.
I lived in Hong Kong until I was 10 years old and I found myself surrounded by many ‘visual sounds’ that I was attracted to. It was the 1970s so there wasn’t any contemporary art in Hong Kong. So to me, it was an intuitive attraction.
It’s like in music – there is noise and sound. The former is something you don’t want, whereas the latter is what you prefer to listening to.
Maybe my parents never knew that I wanted to become an artist until a few years before they passed away. But they sort of saw it coming. I was trained to be a philosopher at the time, which they thought was a poor way of making a living. So anything was better than becoming a philosopher, I guess.
Shanghai in the 1930s was like Berlin and New York at that time. It was the beginning of Asian modernity and I have great interest in this particular period.
Australia has spent about 20 years trying to examine Asian countries completely and study modernity differences. One of my best friends John Clark, who is a professor of fine art at a University, was the first English writer to introduce Asian modernity to the Western world.
The idea for Storm.Resurrection had been sitting at the back of my mind of a decade and a half, but now was the right time to do it. Although I’ve known of the Storm Society since the early 1990s, not many people in the West knew much about Shanghai in the 1930s, especially its modern art.
I think the West misreads the Storm Society and views them as a derivative of the West, which isn’t true. The Society members used a lot of Western styles, contrary to Chinese traditionalists like Xu Beihong. Their attempt was to move the society into modern art, using Western forms in different ways from how those artists had done it.
(Storm Society member) Qiu Ti was regarded as the first female modern artist in China but this image (see left) shows how self-conscious she is. From her jacket to her experiences like visiting cinemas in the 1930s as a girl, she exemplifies being a modern and free woman.
The group photo is quite interesting, as you see them all dressed in suits and ties – which artists are not supposed to do. But it shows how much they wanted to be modern and proper.
I have stumbled upon making this sort of work in the last 10 years. It’s not about style, but rather about dealing with the mass culture at the present when distraction is constantly around us.
It’s wonderful to have Storm.Resurrection at a historical building like Pearl Lam Gallery. All my current works are heavily history- and memory-based projects, so it’s great to be able to have the building’s relationships resonate with the works. Who knows? Some of the people in the Storm Society may have set foot in this building.
For aspiring artists, don’t look at the globalized world, but the world itself. The globalized world is a place filled with commercialism, but the world is about people’s relations with each other. Look at that and from a distance.
It’s troubling to see many countries around the world shutting down their borders. Young people need to build that communication again.
Until August 21, 10.30am-7pm. Pearl Lam.
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