Palace Ladies Series

Palace Ladies Series (1985) by Ah Xian

Oil on jeans material, 77cm x 91cm

Collector: Linda Jaivin

I met Ah Xian in the early eighties in Beijing and was among the first to buy his work. A brooding eroticism pervades this painting from a very early series of his; he's now more widely known for his multimedia sculptural, including ceramic, works. Naked women, faces hidden or averted, inhabit the Forbidden City. They pass through the great studded gates of the palace into a flat, empty blue landscape with a river on the (near) horizon, where they bend to wash.

Ah Xian made these paintings just two years after Deng Xiaoping’s first major scourge of China’s newly flourishing, post-Cultural Revolution cultural scene, the 1983 Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution. At the time of the campaign, Ah Xian had been painting (among other things) nude studies drawn from art books. The police appeared on his doorstep and took several of his nudes away ‘for further study’. I bet they studied them very carefully. We had been friends for several years by 1985, when the security forces developed a fresh interest in him, in part because of our friendship. I was a journalist, and unsanctioned friendships between Chinese and foreigners, though common in the capital, were technically illegal.

While he also produced a different series of paintings around this time centring on ideas of surveillance and security, I was drawn to this painting, and a companion one with palace women, naked, walking heads down through the Forbidden City’s long vermilllion corridors – walls that enclose and oppress. Within these walls and gates, the women share a common space which, with its water and sky, offers a kind of freedom. Yet they move through it heavily, and as atomised individuals. They appear both strong and vulnerable, autonomous and captive, flickering between opposite states.

Linda Jaivin

(Linda Jaivin is an internationally published Australian author, translator, essayist and specialist writer on China, whose works include the critically acclaimed "The Shortest History of China.")

Click here to listen to Linda's commentary on Ah Xian and his work.