JOHN YOUNG

Portrait of John Young by Leah Jing

JOHN YOUNG is interviewed in Liminal Magazine. Speaking to Cher Tan, Young unpacks the Asian-Australian identifier, the new paradigm being evolved by the culturally-orientated, the problematic indolence of the contemporary art viewer, and his current playlist!

"My early periods of making art were based on constant re-invention and re-interpretation of my own life condition...What drove me then was having seen or stumbled into, on occasion, the possibility of making a work that makes everything in your life make sense—something that prompts things to fall into place with immense clarity."

-John Young

Read the long-form interview here.

GUAN WEI

THE MCA has just opened Guan Wei: MCA Collection, an exhibition of works by GUAN WEI from the MCA Collection.

This exhibition brings together four works from the MCA Collection; ranging from significant suites of early works on paper, which look at life and the political landscape in China in the late 1980s, through to the large-scale mural painting Feng Shui, which is concerned with a harmonious relationship between all living things and the planet. The more recent Paper War, comprising of animated video and an accompanying work on paper, explores war as an experience mediated and understood through symbols and signs.

Over the past 30 years artist Guan Wei has developed a distinctive style and personal language of symbols and metaphors that explore his Chinese cultural heritage and many influences of the West. Working across painting, sculpture and site-specific installation, his reflections upon the human condition engage with critical contemporary issues, including climate change, questions of identity, migration and exile.

The exhibition continues until 9 February 2020.

More information >

The Guardian review by Joanna Mendelssohn > (also appears in The Conversation)

The Australian review by Nicholas Jose >

Sydney Morning Herald review by John McDonald >

Arts Hub review by Gina Fairley >

View fullsize

View fullsize

LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN

LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN, along with fellow artists Paul Gough and Jon Cattapan, have put together an exhibition at Domain House in the Botanic Gardens. Turbulence, Conflict and the Garden of Remediation explores the ways in which gardens and plants have unexpected relationships with times of turbulence.

Gardens have offered refuge as places of rehabilitation and healing. The plants growing within have figured as talismans of home, as medicines and now, as harbingers of conflict-driven climate change.

The exhibition opens today and continues until 3rd November.

The artists have also curated a symposium featuring presentations and panel discussions on the place of gardens within the movements of humans caught in turbulent flows. This is a free event happening across 25th & 26th October. Register here.

Lyndell Brown & Charles Green with Jon Cattapan, Afterstorm 2 & Afterstorm 1, 2019, oil and acrylic on digital print on canvas, 175 x 240 cm, courtesy of ARC ONE and Station Gallery.

JOHN YOUNG | CYRUS TANG

Join JOHN YOUNG today for a panel discussion with artist CYRUS TANG, historian Karen Schamberger and curator Michael Do on the use of archives in art, and the stories presented in The Lives of Celestials.

1:3- - 3 pm today, at the Boroondara Arts Centre.

This is a free event, but bookings are essential.
Book here >

John Young, The Lives of the Celestials installation view, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 2019

NIKE SAVVAS

NIKE SAVVAS is the cover artist of Art Monthly Magazine, October. Accompanying the cover is an insightful essay by Savvas herself, detailing the inspiration behind Finale: Bouquet', her major installation at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongawera.

Savvas explores the history of ticker-tape parades and her work's relationship with the domain of abstract expressionism. In particular, Savvas mentions her unexpected affinity with the work of Lee Krasner, and how painting may exist in a post-medium condition no longer tied to traditional materials.

Pick up a copy of Art Monthly to read the full story now.

ANNE ZAHALKA

Anne Zahalka is currently artist in residence at the Bēhal Fejér Institute in Prague.

Anne Zahalka, If these objects could speak [detail], 2018, archival ink on rag paper, each 40 x 32 cm framed

She recently presented an exhibition called The Fate of Things. The works in the exhibition respond to recalled family stories and histories in an attempt to reconnect emotionally with lost family members, particularly Zahalka’s female predecessors. While this exhibition references post-memory and intergenerational trauma, it presents the perspective of an Australian artist whose family relocated from Europe in circumstances that will be relatable to those who have suffered diaspora, trauma or isolation.

More information >

JANET LAURENCE

JANET LAURENCE has collaborated with the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig for an exhibition in Bonn, Nach der Natur. This exhibition makes room for an encounter between life sciences, ethics and art.

Janet Laurence, Nach der Natur installation views, Museum Koenig, 2019

The collaboration follows the painful realisation that humanity has evolved from being an integral part of the community of life to a source of disturbance in nature that does not make appropriate use of its epistemic, moral and aesthetic abilities. In her work, Janet Laurence redirects our view to the community of life, especially to the deep connection between plant and animal life cycles over the millennia.

The exhibition runs until 20th October.

More information >

LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN | ANNE ZAHALKA

Civilization: The Way We Live Now is an international photography exhibition of monumental scale, featuring the work of 100 of the world's finest photographers. LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN and ANNE ZAHALKA are included in this significant exhibition.

Having shown at the major institutions MMCA in Seoul and UCCA in Beijing, Civilization has now landed at the NGV until 2 February 2020.

In this increasingly globalised world, the exhibition explores photographers’ representations of life in cities and presents a journey through the shared aspects of life in the urban environment. The selected works create a picture of collective life around the world and document patterns of mass behaviour. The exhibition looks at the phenomenal complexity of life in the twenty-first century and reflects on the ways in which photographers have documented, and held a mirror up, to the world around us.

More information >

View fullsize

View fullsize

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT

Honey Long & Prue Stent, Earth Tissue, 2019, archival pigment print, 159 x 106 cm

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT are finalists in the 2019 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award with their work Earth Tissue.

The exhibition will run at Campbelltown Arts Centre from 26 Oct - 5 Dec, with all works available for purchase. It coincides its Campbelltown’s annual Festival of Fisher’s Ghost, a festival dating back to 1956 celebrating Australia’s most famous ghost - Frederick Fisher.

More information >

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, Topophilia 2, 2019, bronze, Paula Tsui’s cassette tape, crystal, mirror box, 44 x 43 x 61 cm

CYRUS TANG is one of five artists whose work makes up the new exhibition at RMIT Gallery Insistent Gestures. This exhibition brings together artists who live, work or were born in Asia to explore personal narratives.

The repetitive movements – or insistent gestures – of making carry a sense of ritual and intimate recollection that resonates with the artists’ personal histories. Here an insistent, female and labour creating subjectivity is woven into being.

Tang's bronze series Topophilia is on show, with nos. 1 & 2 visible through specially installed peepholes, and no.3 mounted on the wall.

The exhibition continues until 9 November.

More information >

JOHN YOUNG

John Young, The Lives of Celestials, 2019, installation view at Hawthorn Arts Centre

The Lives of Celestials, a solo show by JOHN YOUNG, is now open at Hawthorn Arts Centre.

Young invites us on a journey into the lives of significant figures of the Chinese diaspora in Australia, exploring important events in Chinese-Australian history from the 1840s onwards. Re-interpreted memories are distilled into large-scale installations of chalk drawings, photographs, video works and paintings.

A culmination of 3 recent History Projects by the artist, this exhibition reflects on the forces of survival, memory and otherness that continue to shape Australia's contemporary social context.

The exhibition will run until 20 October and is open 7 days a week!

More information >

Review in Art Almanac >

GUO JIAN

GUO JIAN is the cover artist of the latest edition of Artist Profile magazine.

Artist Profile is presenting a new series of paintings by Guo Jian at Sydney Contemporary. These paintings engage with traditional Song dynasty landscapes to interrogate the relationship between China's 'rubbish culture', the disposability of celebrity and the destruction of minority cultures. Some of these new works are featured in this issue of the magazine alongside a fascinating story about the artist's career to date.

ARC ONE will also be showing some new paintings by Guo Jian in our booth at Sydney Contemporary!

The magazine is on sale now!

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, 'The Imperative', HD video, 1.48 min

CYRUS TANG is supporting Sleepless Summer, a solidarity project bringing together artists from Hong Kong and Australia which endeavours to rally support for democracy protests in HK.

Curated by Nikki Lam, Sleepless Summer will present a group exhibition alongside a public program of artist discussions, performances and solidarity actions like protest-banner-making.

A selection of independent publications on Hong Kong's civil rights struggles, collected by Zine Coop, will also be presented.

Tang is showing her video work, The Imperative.

More information >

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order, 2019, 10.33 single-channel digital video installation, discarded household goods, dimensions variable. Installation view at The National exhibition, Carriageworks, 2019.

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS's work (dis)order is now on show at the Ningbo Museum in China in their 2019 Pacific Rim exhibition.

This work sees a tower built from discarded whitegoods stacked high and then toppled by the artist. Footage of the performance plays over the site of the destruction, where the appliances now lay scattered.

(dis)order is at once action and archive. It questions the speed at which we obtain and discard technologies of convenience, and implies that these machines are an inadequate or impermanent substitute to the body in domestic space.

The Ningbo Art Museum was built in 2005 and designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Wang Shu.

More information >

ROBERT OWEN

Robert Owen, Endings (Kodachrome 64, No.00, 22/07/1992), 2009, archival print on 310gms Carsons BSK Reeves Paper, 104 x 72.5 cm

Serial has recently opened at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery. This exhibition explores the significance of the series in contemporary artistic practice, and features work from their permanent collection, including one of ROBERT OWEN's Endings prints.

Robert Nelson, art critic for The Age, writes of this series:

"Robert Owen’s Endings look like bright abstract landscapes. They are in fact prints made from film stubs that Robert collected from 1968 to the 90s, when film began to come to an end for the bulk of photography. But Robert kept them, because each one always marked an end. What would happen when you shine photographic light through the end rather than the middle?...The Endings are a portrait of a photograph beyond the last photograph; and strangely this seems to presage the end of photography while simply representing the end of the photosensitive celluloid.”

The exhibition continues until 10 November.

More information >

NIKE SAVVAS

NIKE SAVVAS has created a large-scale, site-specific commission for the Toi Art Gallery at Te Papa Tongawera, Museum of New Zealand.

Made up of thousands of colourful tabs suspended mid-flight, Finale: Bouquet is a kinetic, colourful and optically dazzling art installation. As a student of painting in the 1980s, Savvas became increasingly dissatisfied with the assumed two-dimensionality of the medium and the prescribed limits of its materials. Her practice has since developed a central concern with the broader experiential zone of conceptual, spatial and sensorial immersion. "It's like a huge abstract expressionist painting", she says of Finale, "a painting in the making, with tens of thousands of brushstrokes." The colours Savvas has chosen are inspired by the watercolour artworks of native flora by the early 20th century New Zealand artist Sarah Featon.

The exhibition will continue until 12 January 2020.

More information >

Review in Artist Profile magazine >

Images: Nike Savvas, Finale: Bouquet, 2019, recyclable plastic, electric fans, 7.8 x 18.9 x 8.7 m. Photos courtesy of Te Papa.

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT | JOHN YOUNG

Oceans from here is an exhibition of contemporary photography exploring the aesthetics of water and its ebb and flow as a global life force. Currently showing at Gosford Regional Gallery, it features the work of HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, and JOHN YOUNG.

Ten artists selected by the Australian Centre for Photography have responded to water as a vital element, which flows through the land to the seas and fills the atmosphere of our planet. Several of the artists reinforce notions of an Australian identity so closely tied to the oceans that surround this nation island. Others immerse the viewer in a metaphorical ocean that surrounds, defines and moves through us all.

The exhibition continues in Gosford until 1 September.

More information >

Image credits:

Left: Honey Long & Prue Stent, Scallop, 2017, archival pigment print, 159 x 106 cm
Right: John Young, Ancient Water I, 2018, glicee print on archival Museo Silver Rag Paper, 126.5 x 73 cm.

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, The Modern World Encyclopaedia Vol.2, 2017, cremated book ashes, book cover, dimensions variable.

Congratulations to CYRUS TANG, a finalist in this year's Banyule Award for Works on Paper.

The 2019 Banyule Award called on artists to submit artworks that address current social, cultural, political or environmental issues. In Tang's selected work, the artist has taken a 1936 encyclopaedia and burned and arranged its contents. In this transformation of material, she suggests that the knowledge of the past has disappeared and we have not learnt from history.

The finalist exhibition will run from 28 August at Hatch Contemporary Arts Space in Ivanhoe.

More information >

LYDIA WEGNER

Lydia Wegner, Orange Push, 2019, archival inkjet print, steel frame, 120 x 80 cm.

A big congratulations to LYDIA WEGNER, who is a finalist in this year's Bowness Photography Prize.

The Bowness Prize is an important survey of contemporary photographic practice and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country.

Wegner's work Orange Push will hang in the exhibition from 5 October - 17 November. This work was shown at ARC ONE earlier this year in Wegner’s solo show, Shifting Light.

More information >

ROBERT OWEN

Image: Robert Owen, Sutra 4 (from the Tracing Light series), 2019, polished stainless steel, 651 x 451 x 421 cm. Photo: John Gollings.

Robert Owen has recently completed Sutra 4 - a privately commissioned large-scale work.

Sutra 4 is a sculpture based on the geometry of the hypercube, a mathematical concept referring to the fourth dimension. The work reconstructs Euclidian geometry through an intuitive play with space and light to reveal a new structural space with a relationship to the organic and the poetic.