Curated by Binghui Huangfu. Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore. Text & Subtext cuts across the grain of homogenising discourses about Asian and women's art practices - injecting individual, local, and political elements into this broader discourse. The exhibition adds a sub-textual nuance to pre-packaged thinking about these areas of discussion.
Curated by Binghui Huangfu
Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore
Text & Subtext cuts across the grain of homogenising discourses about
Asian and women's art practices - injecting individual, local, and
political elements into this broader discourse. The exhibition adds a
sub-textual nuance to pre-packaged thinking about these areas of
discussion.
In the main, Asian art has been experienced in the West via the
narrow-band selection of international Biennales or through the
circulation of market-friendly art reproduced in commercial art
magazines. The work of Asian women artists has usually been written
about and described through the filter of a Western feminism which
tends to gloss over particular and local concerns in its assumption
that vast social leaps and bounds have been made by women
the-world-over - in Asia this isn't always the case. Importantly,
curator Binghui Huangfu describes the very different situation of
women and art(ists) according to national boundaries rather than
'across Asia', thereby resisting the typical Western reduction of
Asia to a single geo-political region or bloc.
We find out that in Korea art itself is valued but women artists are
poorly represented (reflecting women's broader social role),
meanwhile in China, the Communist party has long valued women but
contemporary art has no particular standing. In contrast in the
rapidly developing nations of South East Asia more dynamic and
inclusive cultures are forming. In fact in Thailand and the
Philippines women's art has already developed its own infrastructure.
It was within this variegated and complex context that the art for
this exhibition had to be selected.
In the exhibition's catalogue Binghui Huangfu describes the artists'
'desire for the re-contextualisation of contemporary art into an
Asian context' as well as a desire for the hybridisation of
established form, content, and subject matter. If contemporary Asian
art can be seen as developing local hybrids of global concerns then
for Huangfu it could be said that these women artists are developing
a 'hybrid of this hybrid' hence the Subtext. In this way the
exhibition 'shows the real possibility of an intelligent alternative
to much of the market-dominated art emanating from Asia today.' And
'by virtue of this isolation and separation of women from their
mainstream colleagues, women artists in Asia are developing means of
expression in many ways more capable of direct and honest
expression.' In particular Text & Subtext presents the work of
artists who are finding new formal and conceptual ways of tackling
personal and local issues.
THURSDAY 11 JANUARY FROM 6 - 8 PM
Artspace - The Gunnery - 43/51 Cowper Wharf Road - Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 - Australia
tel +61 2 9368 1899 - fax +61 2 9368 1705