Ah Xian, painter and sculptor, was born Liu Ji Xian in Beijing, China, in 1960. He adopted the name Ah in 1983. Despite both parents holding positions at universities, Xian trained as a mechanical fitter at a technical school and worked in a factory. A self-taught painter and draughtsman connected to the Chinese avant-garde, Xian was on one occasion targeted and jailed overnight under the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) anti-spiritual pollution campaign for producing nude paintings – an act considered individualist and Western by the CCP.
In 1989, Xian travelled to Australia for a visiting scholar placement at the University of Tasmania’s Tasmanian School of Art. Xian’s return to Beijing was short lived due to the Tiananmen Square Massacre on 4 June 1989. An invitation to participate in the First Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music and Visual Arts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in September 1990 allowed Xian and his brother, Liu Xiao Xian, to leave China and apply for political asylum in Australia. His inital application for a Chinese student concession was rejected because he was not a student.
With Sydney as their base, Xian and his brother continued to apply for asylum in Australia. In Sydney, Xian supported himself and his family working in a T-shirt factory and as a house painter between 1990 and 1998 and during this period he continued to draw and paint. In 1991 Xian produced a series of paintings in a social realist style collectively titled Heavy Wounds reflecting the violent and traumatic outcomes of the Tiananmen Massacre. This was followed by his inclusion in the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1993 exhibition 'Mao Goes Pop: China Post 1989’ which exhibited his Pervasive spirit series of plaster casts in wooden cases. In 1995 Xian was granted permanent residency in Australia, continuing to live in Sydney.
In 1996, Xian took up a one-year residency placement at Sydney College of the Arts enabling access to a studio space, materials and kilns. In this period he experimented with sculpture and ceramic techniques, beginning his China, China series (1999) consisting of 40 bust casts hand-painted with Chinese motifs including flowers, birds, dragons and landscapes.
In 1999 the Australia Council New Work Grant allowed Xian to travel to Jingdezhen, an area historically known for the production of fine Chinese porcelain. Staying for 9 months Xian visited many studios to study technique and design, continuing and refining his China, China series. Here Xian utilized the expertise of ceramics masters in studios to finish works that would comprise his first successful Chinese show at the Art Gallery of Beijing, Normal University, in the same year. A number of his China, China works were displayed at Queensland Art Gallery’s 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial in 1999.
In 2000 Xian began experimenting with cloisonné metalwork and full body porcelain casting. His Human Human – lotus, cloisonné, figure 1 (2001) reinterprets Chinese traditions of cloisonné decorative use and design and won Xian the National Gallery of Australia’s inaugural National Sculpture Prize of $50 000.
In 2001, Xian was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to create a bust portrait of prominent paediatric doctor John Yu. Yu’s celadon bust portrait, completed in 2004, reflected a Chinese spiritual and artistic tradition appreciated by both the artist and sitter. For this work the mould was produced in Australia and the cast by master ceramicists in Jingdezhen.
A solo exhibition at New York’s Asia Society Galleries from October 2002 to February 2003 called ‘Asia Refigured: The Art of Ah Xian’, combined Xian’s works with Chinese ceramic pieces from the Rockefeller collection.
In 2007, Xian presented his Metaphysica series, 36 bronze bust casts with various bronze finishes and found objects atop each head. These found objects, purchased at markets and roadside stalls reference auspicious symbols of Chinese spiritual, mythological and historical belief systems. In using bronze Xian utilized studios in the city of Nanchang in China’s southeast.
2008 saw a string of international shows for Ah Xian at the Hague’s Gemeentemuseum, Heilbronn’s Stadtische Museum, Recklinghausen’s Kunsthalle and Berlin’s Georg Kolbe Museum.
In 2009, Xian was the recipient of the National Gallery of Victoria’s final $50 000 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, a triennial award for a series of works rather than an individual piece, for Concrete Forrest (2009). This series of 36 bust casts presents Xian’s first works in concrete and each is uniquely imprinted with plant matter local to the Jingdezhen area. Xian said of the award “It’s a huge encouragement in two ways — psychological as well as the financial,” (Boland, 2009).
Ah Xian’s linking of western artistic traditions of sculpted portraits and the nude with reinterpreted traditional Chinese art forms of porcelain, cloisonné, brass work and hand-painted motifs has been facilitated by his frequent movements between China and Australia. As such his work explores notions of identity, diaspora and cultural history, forming an expression of cultural belonging and heritage from a context that straddles inside and outside Chinese culture.
- Writers:
-
Rebecca Craig
duggim
- Date written:
- 2013
- Last updated:
- 2013
