Ah Xian

Asian Australian Artists Association, Sydney, Gallery 4A Fundraising Exhibition
The Austcorp Group Limited Art Collection; purchased from the above in 2003

Gallery 4A Fundraising Exhibition, 2003

This work is in good original condition.
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Born in Beijing, Ah Xian first came to Australia in 1989, as visiting artist at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart. Stranded by the events of Tiananmen Square, he sought asylum here, settling in Sydney with his brother and fellow artist Liu Xiao Xian. In the alienation of exile, Ah Xian found a degree of cultural solace in historical national traditions, expanding his painting practice in the late 1990s to incorporate traditional Chinese decorative arts, often working in collaboration with artisans in his native country. In the breakthrough China China series, naturalistic porcelain busts (life casts of family and friends) are decorated with all-over images and patterns variously drawn from brush painting, ceramics (especially blue and white wares) and textiles. This concept creates a mismatch of form and surface that animates the faces in surprising, even surreal conjunctions: a butterfly on the eyes, for example, or a mountain on the forehead. More broadly and more significantly, it effectively illustrates the tension between Ah Xian's motherland culture and that of his adopted home, or between the interior self and the public face.

Maintaining the metaphor but extending the material vocabulary, Ah Xian also produced works in gold lacquer and then in cloisonné enamel. His life-size, full-figure copper and enamel sculpture Human human lotus (2001, Queensland Art Gallery) won the inaugural National Sculpture Prize at the National Gallery of Australia in 2001, bringing the artist to wide public attention in Australia, China and beyond. He has since exhibited extensively here and overseas, his solo museum exhibitions including Ah Xian meets Jingdezhen (Museum of Frankfurt, 2002); China reconfigured: the art of Ah Xian (Asia Society, New York, 2002); Ah Xian (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2003); and Ah Xian: sculpture (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 2008).

The present work employs the established bust format, here in the complex technique of cloisonné enamel, made with the assistance of craftsmen from the historic pottery centre of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. Here the overlay patterns are not in random array, but are centred symmetrically against a blue ground. (In traditional Chinese physics, blue-green symbolises one of the five elements, wood, and by extension the season of spring, when everything overflows with vigor and vitality.) Across the chest is that archetypal symbol of China, the dragon, in the form of a traditional Tao Tieh mask, while the calm repose of the sculpted face is covered by another snarling, curling dragon face.

Despite the difficulties of his personal history, the racial and national identity politics of his iconography and the occasional shadows in individual works, Ah Xian retains a gentle, optimistic perspective. As he said in his artist's statement for the recent Contemporary Commonwealth exhibition: 'Although politics and art both play major roles in human history, politics is usually a short-lived way by which people practise their greed and lust for power (ruling other people and even the world). However, art is ever-precious, exploring our peaceful, bright and never-ending imagination.'¹

1. Ah Xian, artist's statement, in Charles Green (ed.), 2006/contemporary commonwealth/, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, 2006, p. 131