As a species with the power to imagine, we have a complicated relationship with the idea of disaster – of the apocalypse, of Armageddon. Of course we do not wish our own destruction, but we find it impossible not to envisage the event, to construct narratives around the end of the world: the skies turning black and the waters rising. Despite ourselves, we are drawn to images that visualise our inner fears and, more recently, our sense of guilt at the damage we know that we do to the planet.

Chinese-Australian installation artist, Shen Shaomin, works precisely within this psychological repertoire, his visions of a warped natural world tapping into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. His Unknown Creatures (2003) and Experimental Studio (2004) series consisted of sculptures made out of bone – bizarre and unsettling collections of fantastic animals created through errant biological mutation; while later his Bonsai Series (2007), exhibited at the Sydney Biennale in 2012, comprised of a range of miniature trees, tortured into shape with bolts and wire.

The Day After Tomorrow, Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years, continued with this eerie aesthetic, expanding further on the themes of human brutality and its impact on a fragile environment. Showing at Gallery 4A between 15 November – 10 December 2011, the exhibition transformed the greater part of the gallery into a white crystalline world twinkling in darkness, evoking a vision of an unnatural reality hovering somewhere between the near future and present.

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.

An exhibition called Cola Project doesn’t at first sound entirely new: Coca Cola, consumer culture, the power of advertising—these have all been considered before, not least of all by Chinese artists assessing the impact of global capitalism on traditional aesthetics and values.

This recent show at Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown, however, took a different perspective, and considered cola the sticky liquid rather than the clout of its global logo. After analysing the effects of consumerism on images, it appears that what you are left with is the object, and the ‘stuff’ of material culture.

Cola Project is currently the signature work of young, Beijing-based artist, He Xiangyu, and one that has been doing the international rounds since first showing in Beijing in 2010. 4A brought it to Sydney as part of their ongoing program to situate Australian art within the context of the Asia Pacific, bringing Asian exhibitions to Australia and recognising the Asian in Australian work. This, He Xiangyu’s third major art project, helps underscore this geographical and cultural proximity, if only for its acknowledgement of the finite—and increasingly crowded—nature of our physical world.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years struck a chord with many when it was first published in Hong Kong in 2009 and later in the English language in 2011. Many said it felt eerily like documentary, despite its deliberate exaggerations, while others pointed out that it tapped into widespread fears of Chinese world hegemony.

A satirical novel, set in the semi-future of 2013, The Fat Years proposes a Brave New World like China in which all dissent has been bought off with the promises of stability and consumerism. Emerging victorious from a global financial crisis of 2008, the country has now entered a new age of peace and prosperity, its version of ‘authoritarian harmony’ now legitimated by its economic success. Meanwhile, the majority of the Chinese population appears to have willingly forgotten about a one-month period of turmoil that raged across the country until ended in a bloody government crackdown.

Given the dramatic events of the last few months (e.g. the public ousting of party functionary, Bo Xilai, and the extremely public fleeing of blind activist, Chen Guangcheng from house arrest into the arms of the US Embassy in Beijing) I thought I’d have a word with Chan Koonchung and ask how the China of today appears to be shaping up against that predicted in his novel. How does he see the real China of 2013, now on the horizon? Is it maintaining its political legitimacy, internationally? And is it a coincidence that his main character, Lao Chen, shares a surname with the blind human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng?