For the lucky ducks in Melbourne …

This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) includes a special program of films selected from the past decade of China’s digital documentary boom. Curated by Dan Edwards, ‘Street Level Visions: Chinese indie docos’ cuts through the clichés of nightly news bulletins to show us China from the ground-up, through the eyes of some of the nation’s bravest filmmakers.

The program includes landmark films such as Zhao Liang’s Petition, Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and the more recent Besieged by Waste by Wang Jiuliang, among others. Filmmakers, Ou Ning and Wang Jiuliang will also be in town for post-film Q&As and other events.

See the MIFF website for more on the films and session times. And spread the word.

Fate played a role in ensuring that Aboriginal people would begin to populate the paintings of Chinese artist Zhou Xiaoping soon after he arrived in Australia in September 1988, and that Aboriginal people would remain the main subject of his continuing explorations in art.

In China he frequently camped to paint at various sites on Huangshan, a mountain range in southern Anhui province that is famous for its bizarre rock formations. On one occasion an Australian tourist stopped to admire his work, and engaged him in conversation. He made a gift of some of his works to the tourist, and before long he found himself invited to bring his Chinese landscapes for a solo exhibition at Artists’ Space gallery in Melbourne.

Most of his works sold, and he was keen to paint something of this foreign land to take home to China. As urban scenes failed to inspire him, friends suggested a trip to Outback Australia. In Alice Springs he encountered Aboriginals for the first time, and instantly knew he wanted to paint them. His next destination was Uluru.

He managed to hitchhike part of the journey, but as no motor vehicles appeared, he began walking. The bushland attracted him, and he wandered off to explore, but as dusk approached he found that he was hopelessly lost. Three aboriginal boys suddenly appeared, as he was on the verge of collapse. Their only words he could make out were: “Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee,” the name of the Hong Kong martial arts film and TV hero. Nonetheless, he was able to communicate his friendship, and the boys took him to their campsite where he spent the night with their families. The next day the boys took him to Uluru.

James Bradley’s television documentary, Ochre and Ink, hinges on a remarkable premise. A Chinese landscape painter, Zhou Xiaoping, becomes fascinated with the traditions and Australian Aboriginal culture and develops a 23 year long relationship with its artists in outback Australia. Zhou is accepted by various local Aboriginal communities, gradually learns their painting techniques, and ultimately ends up collaborating with some of indigenous Australia’s most highly regarded artists and historians.

The most remarkable thing about all this though is just how remarkable that premise is: that a Chinese artist might be so fascinated by Aboriginal Australia, and that China and Aboriginal Australia could find a point of common purpose. These two cultures aren’t generally put together, and our surprise at the fact that they might be reveals all kinds of racial stereotypes and presumptions.

As Aboriginal historian, Marcia Langton, says in the film: ‘There’s a view that any collaboration between an Aboriginal artist and a non-Aboriginal artist is somehow suspect. They want to somehow exclude Aboriginal people altogether from modernity.’ And as linguist Murray Garde goes on, ‘Chinese people are not allowed to be interested in other cultures; they’ve just got to stay on this side of the line.’

Helen Feng, lead singer of Nova Heart, has been dubbed ‘China’s Blondie’, but the comparison doesn’t go quite far enough. Sexy, provocative and confident, she’s perhaps more of a femme Jim Morrison, constantly feeling out the boundaries of appropriateness in order to nudge them that bit further. A recent stage dive left her on crutches for months, and she’s just as bold offstage as on. Intelligent and articulate, Feng brims with opinions on American imperialism, Chinese politics, and the identity of the Beijing indie rock scene.

Born in Beijing, but raised in North America, Feng has been a major shaker in Beijing music circles since moving to China in 2002. In 2004 she started the punk band Ziyo [自游], in 2007 co-founded the electro group Pet Conspiracy, and in 2009 she and her partner, Philip Grefer, founded the Chinese music collective, FakeMusicMedia. Nova Heart is Feng’s long-planned solo project, and has the full force of her energy and professional experience.

Liao Yiwu is best-known for his book The Corpse Walker, a colourful collection of interviews with oddballs, crooks, hustlers, toilet-attendants, ex-landlords, so-called rightists, garbage-collectors, and a variety of others whose voices are rarely heard in mainstream Chinese history. First published in Taiwan in 2001, and later in a variety of languages, The Corpse Walker quickly became a bestseller in the West, its success fanned along by the news of the book’s banning in China and Liao’s uncomfortable political position back home .

Liao’s recent book, God is Red, is another collection of interviews, this time with elderly Chinese Christians whose faith has brought them into conflict with the state. Published to an eager audience in the West, God is Red will be supported with author tours and book signings not previously possible, since in July 2011 – after seventeen unsuccessful attempts to leave China – Liao Yiwu secretly emigrated to Germany.

Cinema Alley 2011
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Photo: Susannah Wimberley

The material of film and video is light, so we usually create darkened rooms in which to experience its art. 4A’s Cinema Alley however makes use of the night, erecting a large outdoor screen in Sydney’s Parker St for one evening each Chinese New Year Festival. Now in its third year, the event transforms this Chinatown backstreet into an open-air cinema and screens a selection of Chinese video art curated by 4A Director, Aaron Seeto. 4A’s own ‘laneway project,’ Cinema Alley is also a result of the gallery’s focus on community engagement, extending outdoors from the gallery and, this year, including screenings from their 2010 Animation Project with the local community.

If Documenta XI hadn’t supported Yang Fudong in the completion of his film Estranged Paradise in 2002, we might have lost an important contemporary artist. More than five years into the film’s production, Yang was considering leaving the world of contemporary art to take up a career in the commercial film industry – and then the Documenta festival stepped in.

As it is, we’ll never know Yang’s feature films (although we can be sure they would have been beautiful). Instead we have his delicate and poetic film and video pieces, and ongoing questions about where they should best be shown.

Chen Shuxia is a Sydney-based arts writer currently completing her Masters on Chinese contemporary art history at the University of Sydney. She spoke with Yang recently in Sydney, where he was attending the opening of his exhibition No Snow on the Broken Bridge showing at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) from 18 March – 4 June 2011.

Many thanks to Chen for this interview.

Shen Shaomin first came to acclaim in the 1900s with his Unknown Creatures and Experimental Fields series – sculptures of mythical creatures and bizarre biological scenarios made of bones. Since then, he has produced a diverse and large body of work, expressing both horror and fascination at the perversities of science, the brutality of humans against nature and the unsustainability of human civilisation.

Shen Shaomin migrated to Australia following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Like many of his Chinese-Australian peers, however, he relocated to China a few years ago to take advantage of cheaper materials and studio space, and the dynamism of China’s international art scene. Shen maintains a connection with Australia, and is increasingly represented in Australian exhibitions. I spoke to him during a recent visit for the 17th Biennale of Sydney – images and interview below.

Shou Wang and Shen Jing from White.
Photo by Matthew Niederhauser

The other night I met Shaun Hemsley, founder of the Australasian indie rock music label, tenzenmen. Shaun first went to China in 2001 and, after developing an interest in Beijing’s underground music scene, began helping tour bands travelling within and outside of China. Before he knew it he was one of a tiny number of non-Chinese people who knew about independent Chinese rock, and so he began tenzenmen in an effort to get its music out to a broader audience.

Tenzenmen now works closely with the Beijing-based label, Maybe Mars, an American run company attached to the venue D-22 where most of the Beijing rock and punk bands play. P.K.14, Xiao He, Carsick Cars, White and Joyside are some of their bigger acts, and you might recognise some of these names from recent tours overseas (P.K.14 played Melbourne Festival last year).

Stay tuned for more on Maybe Mars, the club, and the bands over the next few weeks. In the meantime, check out tenzenmen’s website, and have a listen to some of the music. A few tracks are also available to sample here.

Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, by Murong Xuecun, published by Allen & Unwin

Murong Xuecun is a leading independent writer living in China. He first built a following through publishing his work on various popular Internet sites, with Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight (2002) making his reputation. Subsequent work has included Heaven on the Left, Shenzhen on the Right, and Cherries from Eden which together with Chengdu … form his Cruel Youth Series.

Murong Xuecun’s stories generally concern relationships between young men and women in modern urban China. His plots are full of twists and turns, with his ear for comic dialogue, and use of dialects. When asked what he wished to express in his works, Murong once commented: ‘I wish I could write down the contradictions of human life and nature.’ [ref]

On 16 February, 2011, Murong gave an informal lecture at the University of Sydney, co-presented by the China Studies Centre and Confucius Institute. Given in Chinese, with English translation by Chen Minglu, an edited version of the talk is reproduced here.