History Reimagined: Shen Jiawei and NC Qin

Exhibition Details

Date: 27 May to 16 August 2024

Venue: Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, Building EA, Parramatta South Campus, Western Sydney University

171 Victoria Road, Rydalmere

Gallery Opening Hours: Monday – Friday (9.30am – 5.00pm)

The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (IAC) at Western Sydney University is excited to present this new exhibition entitled History Reimagined: Shen Jiawei and NC Qin, bringing together two outstanding artists of different backgrounds, using different mediums, to show their fascinating and intriguing representations and explorations of history in their artistic creations.

NC Qin, a young and successful artist specialising in glass sculpture and conceptual art, is first-generation Australian-born Chinese. Her artistic pursuit is intertwined with her identity formation. Embracing her Chinese heritage, she also interrogates and explores the hidden burden of cultural heritage within the Asian diaspora. She turns fragile glass into armour in her sculpture Glass Armour, inspired by her interest in Chinese history, in particular historical and legendary heroes from the Three Kingdoms period, depicted in Romance of The Three Kingdoms, a 14th-century historical novel. Embedded in the sculpture are handcrafted images of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, which, despite their deification as guardian gods, reveal their fatal flaws of pride and wrath, challenging traditional glorification of values of honour and pride. Her performance art video, in which the artist wears the glass armour in the nude and holds its 80kg weight on her shoulders until muscle failure, takes her exploration and interrogation into another sphere. Her new work, a series of images of prints, thoughtfully selected from the performance video, frame and freeze those tender and sensual moments of emotion into an eternal gaze.

Shen Jiawei, one of Australia’s best known master portraitists, was born and grew up in China. He was a well-established oil painting artist in China where his painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974) became an icon, although the incredible twists and turns that the painting has gone through present a piece of very interesting human and art history of its own. Shen moved to Australia in 1989 and became a highly successful and sought-after portraitist who painted the official portraits of Princess Mary of Denmark (2005), former Prime Minister John Howard (2009), Pope Frances (2013), and Australian Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove (2018). But Shen Jiawei’s lifelong interest and artistic pursuit are history painting, particularly large-scale history paintings, to capture history’s depth and complexity. The way he represents history in his artworks is quite unique and requires reflection from a contemporary and fresh angle. In his Sulman Prize- winning work, Peking Treaty (2006), he transposes Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ to the empty centre of the large Peking Treaty table where Eastern and Western diplomats negotiate a settlement of the Boxer Revolution. Most excitingly, this exhibition shows for the first time ever a print of Shen’s masterpiece, The Tower of Babel (2023), an epic artwork 20 years in the making that recreates an alternative art history of the 20th century by tracing the biggest movement of all: the International Communist Movement. The whole work consists of 90 panels, with remixes of over 100 original artworks and containing 400 individual portraits of historical characters on four murals entitled respectively “Utopia”, “Internationale”, “Gulag” and “Saturnus”.  The biggest and central piece is “Utopia”  which has Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as the framework with the design of Tatlinʼs Tower on the top. The Tower of Babel is a visual history of the political and art movements of the 20th century, reimagined and curated by the artist Shen Jiawei.

Biographies

NC Qin is an Australian artist and curator who grew up in the 90s in Sydney, graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and continued her study of visual arts across Australia, China and the USA. Qin has become known for working with cast glass, an incredibly time consuming and labour-intensive process. Her work has been collected both nationally and internationally.

NC Qin uses her primary medium of glass to prompt conversations on heritage and values.

Her work alludes to global epics and philosophies that reflect her interests as a Chinese Australian woman as she explores how myths change the value systems of today. She has exhibited in spaces such as Arts House Melbourne, Bankstown Art Centre, Griffith Regional Gallery, Fisher Library, Rookwood Cemetery’s HIDDEN walk, 541 Art Space and Gosford Regional Gallery. Her series “Head Case” was exhibited at and collected by the National Museum of Art as the winner of the Emerging Art Glass Prize 2020, as well as the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Architecture (Oxford, UK) as a finalist of IDENTITY 2019: an art and design prize.

In 2021, Qin was commissioned by Gallery Lane Cove with a solo exhibition as part of the Lunar North Confluence, a program that connected Art Space on the Concourse, Incinerator Art Space and Macquarie University Gallery. Her work Portal went on to win the Vicki Torr Prize 2021. In 2022, she went on to be a finalist of numerous art prizes and was featured in a micro documentary by EST media. In 2023, she completed a public art sculpture for Chatswood's Inner Edge Drifting exhibition as well as performed Glass Armour in Melbourne's Arts House as part of the Okkoota exhibition.

In 2024 Qin collaborated with director Will Suen to film the  Glass Armour Performance  which debuted at Casula Powerhouse for the exhibition FROM FIRE. This performance revolves around a durational performance in which the artist wears a suit of glass armour weighing 80kgs until muscular failure. The armour, created through a painstaking glass process, is overflowing with Chinese history, symbolism, narrative and cultural values.

Qin is represented by Art Atrium, Sydney.

Dr Luise Guest is an independent writer, researcher and curator. Her writing about Chinese contemporary art has been widely published in print and online platforms including The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, The Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, Art Monthly Australasia, Artist Profile, Randian and Yishu. Her first book, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China, was published in 2016 by Piper Press. She curated an exhibition of artists featured in the book in Beijing and Hong Kong in 2016 and Tao Aimin's first solo exhibition in Australia at Vermilion Art (2023). She wrote the text for the White Rabbit Collection book,  99 Artists  (2019) and is now working on a new book examining Chinese artists whose work challenges masculinist traditions of ink painting. Currently teaching in the Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW, Dr Guest’s research interests include aspects of gender and national identity in art from Greater China and the influence of Buddhist and Daoist thought on the work of contemporary artists. https://www.luiseguest.com.au/

Exhibition Speech From Dr Luise Guest

James Bradley has worked in film and TV for over 40 years, variously as a writer, producer, director and editor of numerous documentary films and series. He has a reputation for telling powerful stories and a passion for cross-cultural collaboration. He co-directed 50 Years of Silence which won the AFI Best Documentary Award and produced and directed the multi award-winning Ochre and Ink, the story of Chinese-Australian artist Zhou Xiaoping and his 23-year collaboration with Aboriginal artists.

His many editing credits include a slate of award-winning Australian Indigenous projects including the dramatic feature Radiance and documentaries Dhakiyarr vs The King, Mr Patterns, 5 Seasons, In My Father’s Country, art + soul and Occupation: Native.

James also produced the documentaries Destiny In Alice, Blown Away, and Under a Pagan Sky for ABC TV, and has taught film production and editing at Metro Screen, the University of Western Sydney, AFTRS, and Macquarie University.

James shared the 1994 AFI Best Documentary Award for 50 Years of Silence and won the 2005 AFI Non-Feature Editing Award for Mr Patterns. In 2019 he was presented with the prestigious Stanley Hawes Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Documentary Sector in Australia.

James has just completed his first feature documentary as director, Welcome to Babel, about the life and work of artists Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang, based around Jiawei’s new monumental painting - Tower of Babel.

For more images of the exhibition opening event, please CLICK  HERE.