Zheng Yuande

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency 28 April 199428 April 2015Malaysian, Painter

'Private rites' oil on canvas, 1994, 92 x 92 cm — ‘Private rites’
oil on canvas, 1994, 92 x 92 cm

Painter Zheng Yuande was the first Malaysian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan, in 1994.

Bio

Yuande is a distinguished artist who has had a notable career since the 1980s. He is perhaps most known to collectors for his Chinese Opera series of paintings from the 1980s and 1990s. In the years since then, Yuande has ventured to concentrate more on 3D molded metal art works, which are unique in their focus on the fluidity and movement of the human body, rather than concentrating on static beauty and aesthetics.

‘Whispering Corridors’ oil on canvas, 1994, 46 x 27 cm

‘Torso of male dancer’ dental rock, 1994, 12cm & 15 cm

‘Actor at rest’ charcoal on paper, 1994, 64 x 46cm

‘Dialogue of light & shadow’ oil on canvas, 1994, 76 x 76 cm

Exhibition Catalogue Essay

by Chu Li

The Echo of Light and Shadow

The echo between light and shadow is not an unfamiliar language in art. Through the years, Zheng Yuande has developed this language in his paintings and sculpture by manipulating inter-personal space, feeling, mood and the body language of his subjects. His topic remains the same: the backstage drama of the Chinese opera, the rarely seen moments of tension and release of the actors and actresses backstage, though Yuande is no longer interested in capturing the ‘real face’ of the Chinese opera.

More than ten years ago, he was painting the shifting faces of this unique art form. His passion for the opera has taken him through three artistic phases. He started by capturing the sound , the colours of the stage and the story line, the stylized masks and make-up, the symbolic gestures. This phase did not last long, and he moved o to paint the hidden colours in the life of the performers backstage. The third stage is a deeper study of is subject matter in attempting to express on canvas the silent thought so the actors just before or after a performance. ‘He Who Was the Hero Just Now!’ won for the artist the National Art Gallery’s Young Contemporary award in 1985.

In 1994, Yuande was awarded a Petronas Art Salon Young Contemporaries Prize for his painting, but Yuande knows that an artist does not paint merely for awards as the involvement in his art is total. In the early days, he was more concerned with the psychology behind the movement of every character by understanding subtle hints of colour and plays of light and he has now moved onto more subtle challenges in his art evolution.

The language of Silence is the language of Light and Shadow. Every artist knows that Light, the giver of presence, casts a shadow belonging to Light, and in between this Light and Shadow is the realm of Silence: in the heart of Silence is the Echo. This is the art of Yuande in his current Chines opera series. One cannot help feeling that the young artist is using the opera more and more as a metaphor, for he is no longer interested in painting the real facial expressions, emotions or psychology of movement; these languages have given way to the language of Echoes between Light and Shadow.

Echoes mirror their resonates loudly in Silence. Yuande’s is a spatial language of inter-relationships between forms. and he uses it to convey his feelings, building up dark sombre tones of shade, concealing markings between layers of shade and maneuvering light within the space of shadows.

His opera figures have taken on a universal quality of old world romanticism, its mystique rested in a more mature and challenging manner. The mastery of his medium, oil on canvas, is more complete and he cites as inspiration Rembrandt and Turner with Pre-Raphaelite colours, but he has also returned to draw upon the dynamics and ideas of Chinese calligraphy to build his paintings.

In sculpture as in painting, Yuande’s approach is minimalist in essence and calligraphic in style. His challenge in this current series of works is to express in minimal strokes the vastness and fullness of space, rich layers of feeling and the intense resonance of echoes between Light and Shadow, paring back unnecessary strokes and colous by going back to the basics of solid and void instead of colour and tone.

His intention is to wield understatement and restraint, drawing the viewer closer to his works, so that they may discover themselves within them. He is more aware now of forging a closer bond with his audience by withdrawing his dominance as artist, and allowing his work to declare its own presence.

Powerful silence, whose echoes speak of tone, colour, nuance and innuendo, is sure to score an impact in art as it does in life. For the artist, this language is a challenging search for basic breathing and release, and to hold the mirror of art to the echo of Light and Shadow. Zhang Yuande’s journal of Chinese opera is this Echo.

Chu Li is a Malaysian writer and photographer.

John Foubister

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency 22 April 199422 April 2015Australian, Painter

Australian visual artist John Foubister was Rimbun Dahan’s first Australian artist-in-residence in 1994. From September to November 2011 he undertook a three-month residency along with his artist partner Melanie Fulton at Hotel Penaga in Georgetown, Penang.

Bio

John Foubister studied a BA in Visual Arts at the South Australian School of Art from 1980-1983. From 1984-1995 he maintained a consistent art practice alongside paid employment. During these years John held five solo exhibitions, and participated in twelve group shows in Adelaide, and one at the National Gallery, Canberra. He was a founding member of three artist run studio spaces in Adelaide. In the years 2005 to 2011 John participated in group exhibitions in South Australia, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. In 1994 he was recipient of the Rimbun Dahan Residency which provided studio space for one year in Malaysia, with an exhibition at the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur on completion.

From 1992 until 2007 John worked as a recreation provider for people with disabilities. His joint roles included Coordinator and Arts Worker in Art Programs for people with disabilities. John project managed six major disability arts exhibitions in South Australia.

John produces medium to large scale oil paintings which reflect his interest in environment, philosophy and the role of the imagination in creating realities. Most recently his work has been concerned with the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

John has work in the National Gallery, Canberra, and private collections in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, England and the USA. In 2011 the Adelaide City Council Public Art Program featured a selection of John’s paintings, reformatted into large light boxes and positioned externally in the CBD area.

‘Open hands and the night,’ 1994, oil on canvas, 1838 x 1533cm

‘Chair and disguised genitals confronting loneliness,’ 1994, pastel on paper, 570 x 385cm

‘Mirror. The storm is strong and the craft so frail,’ 1994, oil on canvas, 1838 x 1533cm

‘Chair through closed hands,’ 1994, oil on canvas 1838 x 1220cm

Above: Looking Hard at Night, oil on canvas, 60x45cm, 2007.

Above: What I Know of My Mind, oil on canvas, 60x45cm.

THE BIG VIEW FROM THE ROOM

Catalogue notes to John’s December 1994 exhibition at Rimbun Dahan by Julian Bowron, Director, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

‘If infinity can be grasped and manipulated using rational thought, does this open the way to an understanding of the ultimate explanation of things without the need for mysticism? No, it doesn’t.’[1]

The ineffable, the intensely personal and the perverseness of things are the subject matter of John Foubister’s paintings. While this is by no means new territory, the pervasive inclination to rationality, expertise, and the systematic will to a taxonomy of the metaphysical. along with the material which pertains in the current era, makes it a hard road. Much contemporary art practice prospects rich veins of current theoretical discourse and mines them with alacrity and diligence. Particular attention is paid to ensuring that the appropriate commentators are on hand to endorse the process. Consequently, artists’ and writers’ endeavours are contained within the current orthodoxy. The bigger picture is less frequently attempted.

Foubister’s interest in quantum physics reflects the ‘preoccupations’ driving his work ‘the big view from the room’.[2] The artist’s recurrent visual language also grapples with the dilemma of reconciling personal and wider relevance. At first an exhibition of his work can appear disparate, disconcertingly so, but this has to do with an unwillingness to adopt the convenient package of a suite of work systematically or didactically promoting a neat set of ideas, or forming a too-tidy aesthetic hanging. In his determination, this strategy of discomfort, Foubister aligns with much current installation practice in insisting that the viewers begin to look beyond ‘familiar’ vocabularies and bring to the work readings of their own informed by various permutations of private, collective and cultural experience.

Adelaide poet and writer Ken Bolton has referred to Foubister’s work as ‘paintings for people who are no longer enchanted with painting’[3]. Greenberg’s dogma continues to haunt painting, obstructing its ready acceptance as a site of intellectual engagement, despite an irrefutable catalogue of intelligent contemporary work. The primary obstacle is however not the monolith of modernist notions but the obsessive drive to exorcise the modernist ghost which too often results in a denial of the continuity or histories of practice. Contemporary conceptual practices and the theoretical concerns which commonly inform them are consequently presented as having somehow spontaneously arrived fully formed and unencumbered by a history of ideas. Painting site most uncomfortably with this persistent if untenable position because its formalist concerns especially, persistently evidence a long history. The cult of the curator/specialist has been particularly unhelpful in this respect, focusing opportunistically as it does on the apparently new in order to promote the discovery of ‘innovation’. Edward Said has encapsulated this pervasive dilemma particularly well.

‘Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.’[4]

In these new works, enhanced by a year’s consolidated work away from familiar spheres, a definite narrative emerges from familiar imagery and concerns. A vivid internal world apears in haunting primordial pictures dominated by dark seas and dense jungles overlaid and intertwined with labial whirlpools and sucking vortexes of swirling paint. Alternatively grids of flatter colour are a field or a blind for an amorphous figure and the letters ‘I f if?’ Or perhaps “JF” the artists self mocking grandiose signature. Certainly Foubister teases the seriousness of the gaze and disarmingly parodies his own self-consciousness. Often floating in the foreground of the picture plane is a grinning smiley face, the artist returning the viewers’ gaze with a wry and at times slightly frightened assurance.

Foubister knows what can be done with paint, knows well the seductive and lyrical qualities which can so effectively promote sensuality and aesthetic bravado. Critically he knows also how to withhold the medium from the surface and manipulate by means of latency,, banality and deliberate unpaintedness. It is by these means, as well as his deliberate jerky narrative, that he invokes a journey which is strange and at times uneasily familiar. Wider concerns such as the way in which individual subjective reality is ‘constructed through the processing of sensory stimuli’[5] consideration of the infinite which ‘can be contemplated and symbolised but not known’[6] are intermingle with the obsessively personal, the palpably erotic and a sense of absurdity and pervading doubt.

These are not the ubiquitous media or technologically generated images though which many painters have sought to transcend the ‘inescapably precious materials of painting’[7]. These are overtly painted and drawn images consisting of particular and downright expressive marks and technique. They draw upon Hodgkin, Guston, McCahon and Magritte at least. Painting unrepentant: this work demonstrates a thriving practice.

In the work of Australian contemporary visual arts a sustained commitment to making work and maintaining articulate ideas is too often rewarded by a highly marginal existence. In a recent conversation with an Adelaide artist I found myself all but asserting that this endemic situation somehow works to maintain the urgency and edge necessary for a vital visual culture and was rightly taken to task. The equation of poverty of means with creative energy as co-dependent factors in sustaining ideas is a sentimental and insidious notion. Opportunities for artists to concentrate on their work relatively free from financial pressures are all too few. Foubister’s generous residency in Malaysia has been one such opportunity and is reward for great persistence and determination against the odds.

[1]Davies, Paul. The Mind of God London, Penguin 1992

[2] Foubister, John, letter to the author 14 November 1994

[3] Bolton, Ken. John Foubister-the resent work: some notes towards a reading of his work Broadsheet Vol 23 No 1 Autumn 1994 p. 25

[4] Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith LecturesLondon Vintage 1994 P. 57

[5] Foubister, John letter to the author 14 November 1994

[6] ibid

[7] Bowron, Julian. Mark Wingrave, Crossing (exhibition catalogue) Adelaide The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia June 1994