Burning Series No.2

Burning Series No.2 (2008) by Zhao Dalu

Oil on Linen, 117cm x 89cm

Collector: Carrillo Gantner

Zhao Dalu was a graduate student in the Design Department of the Beijing National Film School in the first intake of students after the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-76). Ai Weiwei was another student in the Design Department at that time, and my wife Ziyin was also a fellow student but in the Directing Department.

After graduation, Dalu worked in TV for a time, then as a painter and later as a Professor of Fine Arts at Beijing People’s University. He came to live in Australia in the 1990s and lived for some years in Sydney. Twice his portraits won The People’s Choice Award in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: one of Australia’s first Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, Dr Stephen FitzGerald, and which is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra; the second of John Clark, the long serving Director of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, and which is now in the collection of the University of Tasmania from where John hailed.

Dalu was always torn between Australia and China, and kept his apartment and a studio in Beijing where I first met him. When we visited Beijing, we often visited his studio at the back of Ai Weiwei’s house, and shared bowls of delicious dumplings made by his wife Xiao Xi, herself an accomplished photographer. In fact, Dalu did a very fine portrait of me which hangs in our house.

In the early 2000s, Dalu and Xiao Xi moved to Melbourne, and we continued the friendship. They bought a house near Wallan to the north of the city where Dalu had his studio and where they worked tirelessly together to create a large and wonderful garden.

I cannot remember exactly when I saw this and other paintings from the “Burning Series” about Dalu’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, but I do recall the shock and the seeming contradiction between their beauty and the message that Dalu was portraying. Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book had been the sacred talisman of virtue and belief for his generation, yet here was a very gorgeous, very naked young woman holding it up in a defiant gesture as it burned. It is a very provocative and masterful painting that demands the viewer’s attention and awe.

Carrillo Gantner

(Professor Carrillo Gantner AC is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts & Culture, a former actor, director and founder of Playbox Theatre, and the Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1985-1987.)