Within the walls of the upper gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and concurrently at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Paddington, something quite profound and exciting is taking place. As a result of the rare opportunity to view significant contemporary Asian artworks from the private collection of Australian philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman; geographic, cultural, social, boundaries collapse; the merits of a collection based on a vertical trajectory from artist to object and object to artist rather than horizontally from artwork to artwork is established; Australia is asserted as a key contributor and a fundamental component of the contemporary art discourse of the Asia region; the insights and evocations generated by a curatorial vision motivated by an interest in a specific set of aesthetics, underpinned by intellectual rigor, and influenced by humanitarianism is celebrated; the vibrancy, potency, scope, vision, and diversity of the Asia region and its contemporary art scene is encapsulated; and the curatorial paradigm of exhibiting art from the Asia region in Australia is challenged and analyzed.“Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection” is arguably one of the most important exhibitions to be held in Australia in recent years, and I would that it is. The exhibition brings together 31 works by 20 artists from The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection spanning the breadth and scope of the Asia region including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. Showcased in the exhibition are works by the likes of by Ai Weiwei, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, He Yunchang, Bharti Kher, Shigeyuki Kihara, Dinh Q Lê, Lin Tianmiao, Daidō Moriyama, Nortse, Eko Nugroho, Navin Rawanchaikul, Shen Shaomin, Song Dong, Charwei Tsai, Yang Fudong, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Huan. Presented in partnership with the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney the exhibition is presented across two sites. The Art Gallery of New South Wales features the 31 works from The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection (14 May – 26 July 2015) as well as Jitish Kallat’s epic “Public Notice 2” installation (14 May – 5 October 2015) while SCAF in Paddington features Yang Zhichao’s monumental installation Chinese Bible (2009) (14 May – 1 August 2015).In order to fully appreciate the significance and importance of “Go East,” it is important to a know little bit of the history of the collection and its founders, Gene and Brian Sherman, and be able to reconcile the exhibition within their unique story. Gene and Brian, who wed in 1968, moved from their South Africa to Australia in 1976 in response to the apartheid and discrimination in their native country. Shortly after he moved to Australia, Brian drew on his experience in the investment management arena to establish a fund management company in the kitchen of their Paddington home which he later sold for $150 million. Gene arrived in Australia as an expert in French literature and throughout her career spent 17 years teaching languages at both tertiary and secondary level, obtaining a PhD (Syd) in French Literature at the University of Sydney in 1981. Following funding cuts to European language departments in the 1980s, she made the decision to move into the visual arts arena. From 1986–2007 she was Director and Proprietor of Sherman Galleries, organizing up to 22 exhibitions annually with a focus on artists from Australia and the Asia-Pacific. In 2008 Sherman Galleries reopened as Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), a not-for-profit organization to champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, that has since developed over 23 projects, produced 26 publications, and staged over 400 talks, forums, workshops, and functions.The success and influence of “Go East” originates with the founders of the collection, Gene and Brian, who are both fiercely motivated individuals, but are also a highly effective and deeply committed duo who share the same values and the same taste in art that is underpinned by a commitment to works addressing social justice issues. The harmony of their independent yet strongly attuned personalities is reflected in the character of the exhibition, which features singularly bold and dominant works, each of which either embodies or express the nature and character of the practice of its creator, but which together form a surprisingly harmonized experience. Much like an orchestra that produces wonderfully melodic symphonies using a range of disparate and diverse instruments, “Go East” is a poetic, harmonic, experience in which the divergent threads coalesce within a subtle yet important framework to form a complex yet critical narrative.Having originated with Gene and Brian, the success of the exhibition continues with the exhibition curator, the Gallery’s highly talented and experienced Director of Collections, Suhanya Raffel who has managed to extract key pieces from the Sherman’s extensive collection and present these bold, singular, and dominant works in a format that allows them the space to assert their dominance and obtain agency while at the same time harmonize within the parameters and format of a structured exhibition that recognizes and celebrates to the various lines of enquires and threads that emerge throughout. At the same time Raffel has managed to achieve the difficult feat of retaining the character of the collection and asserting the values and ideals of its founders, in particular Dr Gene Sherman. A former commercial gallerist and current Chairman and Executive Director of the philanthropic Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Dr Gene Sherman is a highly motivated intellectual and scholar with a reputation for organization, efficiency, methodization, and systemization, but she is also a passionately dedicated supporter and nurturer of cultural production with a particular interest in shape and structure, text and textiles, and is also an influential advocate of human and animal rights. It is the values, philosophies, and ideologies of both Gene and Brian’s approach to their lives and life projects that has led to the development of an art collection that not only embodies the character and values of its founders, but also encapsulates the vibrancy, potency, scope, vision, and diversity of the Asia region.“Go East” is profound as much for what it isn’t as what it is. First of all, what it is, a deftly curated showcase of seminal works of contemporary art by some of the most engaging and enthralling artists from the Asia Pacific region that is testament to the vision, foresight, and values of its founders, Sydney-based philanthropists and art collectors Gene and Brian Sherman, whose Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is one of the most influential and engaged art-based philanthropic ventures in Australia and the Asia Pacific. And what it isn’t, an antipodean vision of the Asia Pacific region that presents works by Asian artists as some sort of exotic and distant orientalist novelties that are foreign to a country that is in fact one of the most multicultural countries in the world and home to wonderfully strong and vibrant communities of people from almost all of the countries represented in the exhibition. Instead of attempting to contextualize the works within a cultural, social, or historical framework, “Go East” asserts the diversity and vibrancy of the Asia region within a framework that places the artist at the center of a dyamic forum, rather than at the periphery of a static display. Each work strongly reflects and reveals the wider practice of each artist, in some cases overtly while in others covertly, not that an in-depth understanding of each artist’s practice is required to experience the full impact of each work in the exhibition, such is the clarity of the voices and visual languages of the participating artists.Although “Go East” is comprised of singularly dominant and at times seemingly disparate works, as the exhibition unfolds a number of converging threads and lines of enquiry emerge, referencing a diverse range of ideas and concepts including action, performance, self-critique, introspection, reflection, activism, identity, home, as well as the beauty of weakness and vulnerability, all of which poignantly lead back to the artist as source and subject. Highlights of the exhibition include Filipino husband and wife team Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s poignant exploration of the concepts of home and place, “Habitation #1 (Flat Pack)” (2013), a traditional stilt-house dwelling found in the lowland cultures of the Philippines created from Ikea cardboard and Ikea shelves; Chinese sculpture and installation artist Yin Xiuzhen’s “Portable City: Paris, (2004), one of the artist’s miniature cities in a suitcase fashioned from the used clothes of people from different cities; acclaimed Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho’s “La Rue Parle #7” (2012), a wonderfully intricate and fragile set of embroideries featuring imagery gleaned from photographs taken by the artist of Paris and its people; influential Chinese artist Song Dong’s dramatic and disturbing video “Burning Mirror,” (2001); Tibentan artist Nortse’s “Zen Meditation (2012), a haunting installation of empty, chared Buddhist monk robes; Samoan-born artist Shigeyuki Kihara’s challenging photographic self-portrait “Fa’afafine; In the Manner of a Woman” (2005) in which the artist performs as both the male and female model; and dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, “An Archive” (2015), a newly commissioned work premiering in the exhibition comprising 6,830 sheets of rice paper detailing the artist’s social media commentary from 2005 – 2013, all stacked in a traditional huali wood box. Each sheet is individually designed, taking Weiwei and his designers over six months to create, according to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Then there is Jitish Kallat’s epic “Public Notice 2” (2007) which lines the Gallery’s vast entrance court with a field of bone-shaped letters that spell out Mahatma Gandhi’s famous speech delivered on the eve of the historic 1930 Salt March. Situated at SCAF is Yang Zhichao’s incredible “Chinese Bible” (2009), an installation of 3,000 diaries and notebooks that the artist collected from markets in Beijing over a period of three years. Jitish Kallat’s “Public Notice 2” (2007) and Yang Zhichao’s “Chinese Bible” (2009) both deserve to be the subject of their own article, and both have been generously gifted to the AGNSW by the Shermans.The ambiguous title of the exhibition, “Go East,” raises more questions than it gives answers, which is exactly as it should be given region’s ongoing development and evolution as it attempts to position itself within the global community. Geographically speaking, to “Go East” takes the viewer to the regions or countries lying to the east of Europe, especially China, Japan, and India, while physically it would send viewers to New Zealand – about which the less said the better. Socio-culturally, “East” is a word often associated with Asia, but in the context of the exhibition it is a term that is perhaps usurped by the assertion of Australia’s place within the Asia region and its influence on the broader contemporary art scene. Metaphorically, “Go East” suggests a crossing of boundaries and borders, prompting the viewer to ask “to where?” and “to what?” The genius of the instead of “Go East” is that instead of focusing on the art object as the sole focus, the works in “Go East” celebrate the art object but also transcend its materialized and commercialized status, extoling the value of the voice and hand of the artist and presenting the Asia region as a source of cultural production rather than the theme of an exhibition. In fact I would suggest that the exhibition is best approached not as an exhibition of Asian art, but rather an exhibition of art in Asia, such is its effectiveness at collapsing the boundaries of race, culture, ethnicity, geography, and nation. Not only does “Go East” situate Australia squarely within the framework and structure of the Asia region and assert Australia’s in, it cements its position as a key contributor to the dialogue and discourse of the contemporary art scene in Asia and the Pacific. And by opening up their collection to the public, Gene and Brian Sherman have allowed the AGNSW to reveal the merits of engaging a region and its artists through a framework that is underpinned by a combination of personal values, intuitive aesthetics, structured ideas and concepts, intellectual rigor, and passionate interests. When approached in this way the diversity of Asia is not a place to be defined or pigeonholed; its diversity and complexity is what makes it such a fascinating, revealing, and exciting region that should be celebrated and explored, not defined or deconstructed. The realization that “Go East” can only really reach its full potential in Australia is a profound moment that makes “Go East” one of the most important and profound exhibitions in Australia in recent times and an exhibition that sets the bar for the presentation of art from the Asia region in public institutions in Australia.To visit the AGNSW website click here.To visit the SCAF website click here.
↧