Negotiating ‘Chinese-Australian’ Identity: Ah Xian's Dr John Yu (2004) and his China China Series (1998–2004)

THE FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS TEXT, WITH IMAGES, IS AVAILABLE AT THE FOLLOWING LINK: https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2017.1333397 Negotiating ‘Chinese-Australian’ Identity: Ah Xian’s Dr John Yu (2004) and his China China Series (1998–2004) Alex Burchmore In 2003 Australia’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Canberra commissioned a rising Australian contemporary artist, Ah Xian, to create a portrait of Dr John Yu, one of the country’s most celebrated paediatricians. Both the artist and the subject have contributed greatly to Australian society and culture, yet it was to a certain extent their Chinese heritage that brought them together. The resulting portrait—Dr John Yu (2004, fig. 1)—communicates this ‘Chineseness’ in three interconnected aspects: above all, it is a deeply personal portrayal of a Chinese-Australian by a contemporary Chinese-Australian; at the same time, its medium as well as the manner and location in which it was created evoke an association with the history of Chinese porcelain; finally, Ah Xian’s use of an iconic Chinese motif and the link that this creates with his other works suggests an added layer of cultural meaning. It is this third, cultural element that attains most significance, uniting with the personal and historical dimensions of meaning to communicate Ah Xian’s and Yu’s shared experiences as migrant citizens, shaped by their individual negotiations of ‘Chinese-Australian’ identity. The Object Ignoring for the moment the many symbolic and affective layers of meaning that can be discovered in Dr John Yu, the sculpture can be described as a life-cast of the head and upper torso of an elderly man, replicated in porcelain at a scale slightly smaller than life size. The subject’s posture is relaxed, his eyes closed as if resting or in contemplation, his expression 1 peaceful, neither of happiness nor sadness. His features suggest a heritage outside of AngloAustralia, an impression reinforced by the brightly-coloured and delicately-patterned clothes adorning five miniature figures of children who climb about his bare, pale green form, two of them sporting neatly trimmed tufts of black hair. The contrasting colour combination at play under the viscous, reflective surface—of pale green with pops of bright red, yellow, orange, blue, green and pink—draws attention to a compositional balance between dynamic movement and subdued composure. The NPG caption for the bust introduces Dr Yu, a noted Chinese-Australian paediatrician and public figure with ties to many medical, arts and educational institutions, names Ah Xian, and reveals that the NPG commissioned the work. Bearing this in mind, it seems that the children might refer to Yu’s career, while the bust’s diminutive size and reserved style are made even more striking in contrast to his public authority. Comparing the date of creation (2003–04) with Yu’s given date of birth (1934), however, it can be inferred that the work is a deliberately humble statement of retirement at the end of a long, fulfilling career. At the time of writing, the work was displayed within a free-standing glass case that situated the work just below eye-level. Spot-lit and able to be viewed from all angles, the display enhanced the human scale of the work and fostered an intimate interaction with its glossy surface and vibrant colours, encouraging focused contemplation. Dr John Yu’s distinctive physical presence is matched by its unique place within the NPG collection. The work is one of the gallery’s most significant and costly commissions, and it remains their only twenty-first century porcelain portrait bust and one of only two sculptures representing the sitter with closed eyes—the other being the Ned Kelly Death Mask (1880, ) by Dr Maximilian L. Kreitmayer (1830–1906).i Although humble in size, Dr John Yu retains a quiet authority that reflects its singular significance. Information about the concept, commissioning and creation of Dr John Yu can be found in the relatively few texts which discuss the bust.ii Simon Elliott and Michael Desmond, both 2 formerly of the NPG, record that Ah Xian was approached not long after receiving the National Gallery of Australia’s inaugural National Sculpture Prize for Human, Human—lotus cloisonné figure 1 (2001) and that the commission had originally proposed a cloisonné bust, before Ah Xian suggested porcelain.iii It was his first and remains his only commissioned work, and is the twentieth commission in a series of portraits of Australian public figures inaugurated by the NPG in 1998.iv In March 2002, the NPG Board viewed Ah Xian’s design and unanimously bestowed approval, and the commission was formalised in 2003. He presented the bust in December 2004, after which it became part of the NPG’s permanent collection.v Death masks and life masks The association of Dr John Yu with the Ned Kelly Death Mask raises an aspect of Ah Xian’s busts that has often prompted discussion—their apparent morbidity.vi There is no doubt that the steps for producing life and death masks are almost identical; their motivations and effects, however, are very different. Death masks have long been used as sculptural aids, religious effigies, or as an object of worship in themselves, standing in for a deceased ancestor or other figure of authority.vii During the nineteenth century, when most masks still in existence were created, they gained new relevance as objects of phrenological study, a pseudo-science that ascribes psychological significance to facial features and the shape of the skull. Criminals like Ned Kelly were prime subjects for phrenologists, who believed that their features ‘could teach us moral lessons [and] could show us what evil looks like’.viii Life masks, on the other hand, have historically been produced in far fewer numbers, usually for reasons of ‘vanity, curiosity or fashion,’ or to achieve a naturalistic likeness before the proliferation of photography.ix Thus, they are usually carved, painted or otherwise altered to create a more ‘life-like’ appearance. Despite their differences, both types of mask generate what semioticians term an indexical representation. In contrast to the abstract significance of a symbol and imitative resemblance of an icon, an ‘index’ bears a direct, often causal connection with that which it signifies. This 3 concept is generally applied in art-historical analysis to film-photography, as a mode of imagecreation that records physical traces of light on a photo-sensitive medium, yet it can also be related to life-casting. To an even greater extent than photographs, casts are formed by direct interaction between subject and material—the sitter’s features are literally impressed into the plaster. There is a sensuality about casts that imbues them with a living presence. It is in this affective dimension that the distinction between death and life masks is most evident: while the fixed, compliant features of the former betray the lifelessness of the subject, in the latter the signs of discomfort and tension caused by the process of casting create a deeply emotive impression of inner humanity. The Personal It is from the affective impact of Dr John Yu that the first of three perspectives used here to analyse the sculpture derives. The idea of reading a portrait through the lens of ‘the personal’ seems at first to be a simplistic approach to a genre usually associated with the representation of personality. However, while it is generally expected that this personality will above all be that of the sitter, artists inevitably leave traces of their own identity when creating a work of art. In Dr John Yu, though the bust is first and foremost a representation of Dr Yu himself, these traces of the artist’s identity are made all the more noticeable by the shared heritage of artist and subject: it is not only an image of Dr Yu, but of ‘Chineseness’ as both he and Ah Xian experience it. Furthermore, the bust also draws upon the impact of cultural adaptation that Ah Xian explores in many of his other works, to the extent that it has become his ‘signature style’.x Personal meaning, then, cannot be restricted to the imaging of Dr Yu, but also includes aspects of Ah Xian’s own life, as well as his and Yu’s shared Chinese-Australian identity. 4 This interpretation is not intended to restrict Ah Xian’s work to a narrow, culturally essentialist role. As Melissa Chiu makes clear, such reduction is ‘a persistent and problematic tendency [for] Asian-Australian artists,’ locating their work outside of the mainstream as a ‘testimonial art’ with little relevance beyond its cultural pedigree.xi Marita Bullock finds this tendency to be particularly apparent in readings of Ah Xian’s work, which have ‘tended to idealise [it] in terms of his country of “origin”,’ or to reduce it to ‘commodified signs of ethnicity’.xii This is undoubtedly a damaging and superficial style of interpretation. Yet in his busts, and especially in Dr John Yu, Ah Xian stages a direct engagement with his Chinese heritage and feelings of cultural dislocation. By reading Dr John Yu as a portrait of Chinese-Australian identity, then, this essay is responding to an integral aspect of the work that is apparent even in the impulse underlying its commission. Desmond writes that ‘it seemed natural to match [Yu] with an artist who shared his enthusiasm for Chinese ceramics … And like John Yu, [Ah Xian] was born in China.’xiii On the NPG website, an extended caption for the work emphasises that it ‘reflects the shared cultural background of artist and sitter.’xiv Ah Xian recounts that he was chosen partially because of his heritage and for his use of a medium (Chinese porcelain) which Dr Yu has passionately studied and collected for many years, and that his design is intended ‘[to] confirm Chinese traditions as part of John’s and my cultural background’.xv In this context, then, not to address Ah Xian’s Chinese-Australian identity becomes reductive, excluding an intrinsic aspect of the conception and significance of the sculpture. From China to Australia, five decades apart While both Ah Xian and Dr Yu migrated to Australia from China, they followed very different pathways and have fostered a very different sense of connection with their adopted home as a result of divergent personal experiences and backgrounds. Dr Yu was born in 1934 in Nanjing; in 1937, when Japanese forces besieged the city, he, his mother and sisters sought refuge in 5 Hong Kong, travelling from there to Sydney to join his mother’s family, who had lived in Australia since the 1860s. In 1959, Yu graduated with a medical degree from the University of Sydney and became a resident doctor at the Royal North Shore Hospital until 1961, when he transferred to the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children. He remained there for his entire medical career, taking on the position of CEO in 1978, then presiding over the hospital’s relocation to Westmead in 1995.xvi In 1996, a year before his retirement, he was named Australian of the Year—the first Asian-Australian recipient of the honour.xvii Aside from his medical career, Dr Yu has accrued many other achievements. In 2001, when the NPG commissioned his portrait, he was inducted as a Companion of the Order of Australia and, while Ah Xian worked on his bust, he served concurrently as Chancellor of the University of New South Wales (2000–2005) and Chair of the Australia-China Council (2001–2006).xviii He has occupied, and continues to occupy a range of roles within Australian public life. At the ceremony for his naming as Australian of the Year, Dr Yu himself reflected: ‘I am proud of my Chinese heritage, but even prouder to be an Australian.’xix Although born in China, then, and thus marked with a hyphenated ‘Chinese-Australian’ identity, it is with the latter term in this equation that Yu principally identifies. He has spent most of his life in Australia, and it is here that he found public recognition and professional success. Yet the work Dr John Yu is also and perhaps more strongly associated with its maker, whose exploration of the ‘Chinese-’ in ‘Chinese-Australian’ brings this aspect to the fore. Ah Xian was born in Beijing in 1960, six years before the violent political fervour of the Cultural Revolution, which consumed his formative years. He has since described the seizure and destruction at his school during this time of all books—including art books—that were deemed counter-revolutionary.xx Opportunities for arts training were thus severely restricted. The situation outside the school was equally oppressive, strident slogans covering ‘grey brick walls that shielded inappropriate sites [sic] from view’.xxi Artworks associated with the Imperial past 6 were locked in storage, the palaces and temples in which they had once been housed ‘regarded as exotic places to be reappropriated by the people’.xxii Consequently, Ah Xian had little access to the historic craft traditions that later became so central to his art. In 1989, Ah Xian made his first trip to Australia. By this time, he had established ties with Beijing’s foreign community, securing an invitation from Geoff Parr, Director of the School of Art, University of Tasmania, to spend time there as a visiting scholar. He stayed in Tasmania for two months, returning to Beijing in May.xxiii A few weeks later, the cataclysmic events of June 4 again plunged his life into the shadow of a violent politics and inspired his decision to leave China. Invited to participate in the First Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music and Visual Arts in September 1990, he seized the opportunity.xxiv Ah Xian has described his first months in Sydney as ‘very low, dark and sad,’ coloured by feelings of ‘anguish and betrayal … of being cheated.’xxv At the same time, this was the start of ‘a journey to pursue and explore something called “Freedom” … released from the intense political pressure of China’.xxvi In 1997, when Dr Yu had just retired, Ah Xian made his first experiments in porcelain, starting down the path that would lead to his current status as one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists. Although, like Dr Yu, Ah Xian found fame in Australia, he had spent over half of his life in China, during some of that country’s most tumultuous decades. His and Dr Yu’s relationship with the place of their birth is thus fundamentally distinct, demonstrating a breadth of experience that belies two-dimensional understandings of ‘Chinese-Australian’ identity. The personal within the process Aside from the traces of Dr Yu’s and Ah Xian’s life experiences in Dr John Yu, personal meaning is also fostered by the processes underlying its creation. Ah Xian first took a life mask 7 of Yu’s head and upper torso , his skin coated in petroleum jelly as Ah Xian wrapped him with plaster-soaked cloth (fig. 2) that gradually hardened until the cast could be removed.xxvii Ah Xian had experienced first-hand the discomfort involved in this process when he attempted his first life mask a decade earlier, using himself as the model. In a profile for The Australian, he recalled that a chemical reaction between the plaster and the dishwashing liquid that he used instead of petroleum jelly resulted in serious burns, requiring hospital treatment.xxviii Fortunately for Dr Yu, by 2004 Ah Xian had perfected his casting technique and so the process posed no risk of bodily harm. Nevertheless, it was still a demanding ordeal for the 67-year-old to endure. In an interview recorded for the NPG, Yu recounted the experience: Ah Xian and his wife … started wrapping me in plaster of Paris, and then when he came to do the rest of my head he had to put two straws up my nostrils so I could breathe … I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, and with my head, neck and trunk fixed, I had no sense of where my body was, and that was really a funny, spooky feeling.xxix His serene features in the finished bust belie the discomfort felt during its creation, while what at face value seems indicative of rest is in fact an incidental result of the cast-making process. Nevertheless, the physical traces of this process in combination with the verisimilitude of its result, recreating every crease and fold of skin, imbue the bust with a powerful affective impact. Endearing idiosyncrasies are raised to the ideal, becoming ‘memorials for the flawed human condition’.xxx Closed eyes in particular greatly enhance this humanity, even if incidental to the conception of the work. Writing about this in 2011, Ah Xian explained that the fact that his models’ eyes ‘remain ever closed … reflect[s] the creation of a much wider, internal, spiritual space’.xxxi It lends to his work a sense of interiority and private existence that reinforces, rather than resists personal connection with the viewer. 8 A comparably potent affective impact is fostered in Dr John Yu by an apparent lack of hair, another result of the casting process which nevertheless attains meaning in the finished work. In Ah Xian’s 2003 sketch (fig. 3), Yu clearly has a full head of hair, yet in the bust he appears to be bald. On a superficial level, this can be explained by the fact that his hair would have been smoothed down with petroleum jelly and, on close examination, there is in fact a subtle differentiation in texture between hairline and skin (fig. 4). Aesthetically, however, the lack of hair serves to accentuate Yu’s nudity, and thus the humility with which he is represented. Like his closed eyes, it implies an inner, more spiritual life, elevated above the vanities and vagaries of the material world. It also evokes comparison with other representations of baldness in the history of the portrait bust. Malcolm Baker explains that hair has long served as a means for sculptors to show skill, ‘as an important signifier of status and character,’ and as a mediating element between ideal and real.xxxii Within these conventions, baldness came to occupy a unique significance that is particularly clear in a bust by English sculptor Joseph Wilton (1722–1803) currently in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (A.9-1966). Although carved in marble, this exposed figure bears more than a passing resemblance to Dr John Yu, and it is interesting to note that the subject was a medical man: Florentine physician Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758), sixty years old in 1755. Baker asserts that baldness here emphasises the ‘moral authority … public virtue and antiquarian learning’ with which Cocchi wished to be associated, drawing attention as well to Cocchi’s age.xxxiii Hair has a long history of use as a memorial for the human condition, ‘the raw material of memory,’ an emblem of the aging and eventual disappearance of the body.xxxiv The lack of hair in Dr John Yu, then, though incidental, could symbolise his life experience, his commitment to learning and moral obligations, and his inevitable bodily transience. 9 The Historical In addition to the personal aspects of the bust, Dr John Yu can also be associated with a historical dimension of meaning intrinsic to porcelain itself. Ah Xian’s turn to this medium in the years prior to the NPG commission was a gradual process, informed by an awareness of a history from which he had long felt disconnected. Claire Roberts and Roni Feinstein have traced his interest to works produced in 1992–93, which included plaster-cast hands and feet. Inspired to experiment further with body-casting but dissatisfied with the ‘cheap and unappealing’ appearance of plaster, Ah Xian turned to porcelain as a ‘durable yet fragile, precious but … affordable’ medium.xxxv During 1996–97, he practiced by casting and creating porcelain replicas of his own hands, which he later showed to Richard Dunn, then Director of the Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), University of Sydney, who was so impressed that he offered him a year-long residency.xxxvi Access to professional facilities and high-quality materials led to the creation of the first ten China China busts.xxxvii Far from the country in which both he and his medium originated, he had finally found an opportunity to test the artistic limits of this most Chinese of materials. In his own writings, Ah Xian has revealed other reasons for his turn to porcelain that illuminate the historical significance of works like Dr John Yu. In ‘Self-Exile of the Soul’, he decries the ‘swarming’ of artists to the Euro-American mainstream, at the expense of their heritage: most artists from a non-Western background who actively try to cast themselves into the mainstream … are cooperatively participating in [a] globalised art culture in a globalised form … dropping every valuable that we had but, because of its familiarity, didn’t appreciate.xxxviii Against this trend, he affirms a devotion ‘to follow with interest and introspection the ancient art and culture of China,’ thereby to reinstate the ‘more or less orderly progression’ by which 10 this art developed.xxxix For Linda Jaivin, such allegiance to a ‘Chinese’ artistic lineage signals a weariness born of Ah Xian’s experience of the Beijing avant-garde in the 1980s, when many artists and writers were ‘more interested in capturing fifteen minutes of international fame than in creating anything that spoke to their own people’.xl It can also be linked, however, to earlier experiences during the Cultural Revolution, when history and heritage were violently obscured, and to the lack of access to arts training that this entailed. New opportunities and perspective following Ah Xian’s relocation to Australia prompted a rediscovery of that which he had been denied—an interpretation that is confirmed by his own recorded thoughts: My ideas about China have changed. When I was there, I always focused on political issues … Artists in China feel angry that they aren’t able to express themselves. I think that if I didn’t come to Australia, I would be doing work like them now.xli Yet Ah Xian’s decision was not a reactionary impulse. In the same conversation cited above, he distinguishes himself from those who ‘use Chinese symbols directly from China’ as guided instead by a desire ‘to take Chinese culture as … inspiration for new cultural forms’.xlii As early as 1996, this regenerative aspiration was embedded in his artistic perspective as a searching for ‘new possibilities for combining traditional Chinese art forms and skills with contemporary concepts, techniques and styles’.xliii Like his other porcelain busts, then, and beyond its personal meaning, Dr John Yu is a point of contact for Ah Xian—and, to a lesser extent, Dr Yu—with Chinese history, situating the personal stories of maker and subject within a broader narrative of rediscovery and renewal. A return to China The merging of personal and historical in Dr John Yu is echoed in the extent to which Ah Xian’s turn to china, the medium, functioned as a vehicle for his return to China, the country. Many commentators have noted the underlying impact in his work of travel between Australia 11 and China. For Roberts, it was Ah Xian’s ‘displacement [and] his own need to feel pride in where he came from’ that first prompted his decision to work in porcelain, ‘the considered result of a period of deeply-felt life experience in which he … straddled two cultures’.xliv Similarly, Jaivin and Jonathan Goodman have traced the presence in the China China busts of ‘a metaphysical homelessness’ that compelled him to walk ‘the aesthetic and emotional terrain of exile’.xlv Beyond this therapeutic role, however, porcelain also enabled Ah Xian’s physical return to his birthplace in 1996—his first journey back since leaving six years earlier. During his brief stay in China, Ah Xian spent time in two places: Beijing, to visit his family, and Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi province. Long renowned for ceramics manufacture, the association of this city with porcelain has been traced by scholars to the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), while archaeological evidence confirms production at least as early as the Five Dynasties era (907–960).xlvi Although its present name was bestowed by a Song emperor in 1004, it was during the Ming (1368–1644) and especially Qing (1644–1912) dynasties that Jingdezhen gained an international reputation as the world’s ‘Porcelain City’.xlvii For Ah Xian, the Qing marked ‘a zenith [in production], achieving brilliance in technique and skill … aesthetic value and artistic expression’. He asserts that these achievements soon devolved, however, into standardised mediocrity during the nineteenth century, when ‘the great medium [lost] its “artistic soul”’.xlviii Yet Jingdezhen has started to rekindle its artistic spark. Over the last two decades, it has again become a hub of aesthetic innovation, ‘an “incubator” where the … dreams of ceramists from all over the world are aroused and realised’.xlix In 1999, Ah Xian returned to the city for a stay of nine months, during which time he strengthened his relationship with local artisans and drew on their expertise to refine his merging of past and present, ‘East’ and ‘West’.l While he had moulded, fired and painted the SCA busts himself with his own versions of Chinese motifs, Ah Xian now commissioned artisans to complete these processes, using a wider range of designs, 12 glazes and techniques, some taken from centuries-old pattern books.li Yet his work remained contemporary in form and concept—a confronting contrast for the artisans, ‘shaking their heads and laughing as if … executing a madman’s commission,’ and who, accustomed to utilitarian forms, ‘had never encountered such conceptual craft’.lii By 2004, when he travelled to the city to supervise work on Dr John Yu, Ah Xian had surmounted these difficulties and fostered many close working relationships, and so was able to have works produced more efficiently and to a much higher level of refinement. At this stage in his career, porcelain was not only a means for his return to China, but a tangible connection between his renewed life there and his now-familiar life in Australia. Dr John Yu can thus be seen as one of the most resolved artistic statements to have emerged from Ah Xian’s five-year dialogue with porcelain, the result of a diligent negotiation with, and rediscovery of history. The Cultural In addition to the historical connection with China that porcelain evokes, ‘Chineseness’ is also conveyed in Dr John Yu by the children on the front and back of the bust (fig. 5). In fact, for viewers unfamiliar with the links between china and China, these are the most visibly ‘Chinese’ feature. Their conventional ‘three small tufts’ of hair, stylised facial features, patterned clothing and even their manner of depiction all point to Chinese iconography.liii Unlike porcelain, which alludes more subtly to historical context, they conjure a vivid cultural dimension of meaning, complementing the personal and historical with a vibrant, colourful and eccentric image of China as a different world unto itself. A certain amount of history is, nevertheless, involved. Images of children have long been associated in China with wishes for joy and abundance, often depicted ‘clambering over the Laughing Buddha’ in a style of representation that Ah Xian has referenced with their 13 appearance on Dr John Yu.liv These iconographic conventions can be traced to the Tang dynasty (618–907), when small child-figures sculpted in wax, called huasheng (化生)—a Buddhist term meaning ‘transformation-birth’—were floated in water during festivals to express ‘a woman’s wish for children’. During the subsequent Song dynasty (960–1279), similar figures called mohouluo (摩喉罗) were sculpted in clay or carved from wood, jade or ivory, again purchased by women in the hope of increased fertility. The inspiration for both of these practices ultimately derives from the ‘images of reborn souls seated on lotuses’ depicted in Buddhist paintings of the paradisiacal plane of existence on which devout practitioners can expect to dwell after death.lv If read with reference to Buddhist roots, then, the child-figures on Dr John Yu can be seen as a sign of rebirth, or what Ah Xian has termed ‘a spiritual lift-up,’ complementing the contemplative state signalled by Yu’s closed eyes and moral transcendence indicated by his apparent lack of hair.lvi Cast in porcelain, he is elevated to a higher dimension, his inner virtue conquering the frailty of the flesh. However, in addition to fertility and renewal, children in Chinese art can more generally imply wishes for wealth and wellbeing. Thus, the ‘New Year babies’ that remain a popular subject of Spring Festival posters and paintings are emblematic of ‘riches and good fortune,’ plump, joyful and often shown ‘engaged in sports and contests, wrestling and running’.lvii A historical precedent for these images can also be found in the Song dynasty, in ‘generic scenes of …healthy, happy male progeny … indulg[ing] in childish amusements.’lviii . Bearing this cultural lineage in mind, the child-figures could be a gesture of good will between artist and subject, an augur of joy drawn from the iconographic vocabulary of their shared heritage. For all of its shared iconography, Dr John Yu remains a deeply personal, unique image, and thus this cultural interpretation must be tempered by a more specific reading. Dr Yu is recognised above all for his paediatric career, so the decision to depict him with children seems 14 appropriate. Yu himself has expressed his pleasure at their addition, acknowledging also a connection to his Chinese heritage: When I look at the portrait, people might assume that the first thing that reminds me of my heritage is my facial appearance. But it’s not. It’s actually the children … A lot of Chinese sculptures have young children climbing all over the subject. I was [also] really pleased because it related to and reflected on my life work as a paediatrician.lix On an aesthetic level, Ah Xian has said that he wanted to create via the addition of the children ‘a contrast and tension … yet great harmony as well’.lx The ultimate effect is certainly one of harmonious contrast: youth and age, activity and stillness, monochrome and colour. Above all, although derived from the evolution of a centuries-old cultural lineage, the children are alive with youthful irreverence, a sense of motion barely held in place that enhances the ‘slow time’ of the bust, the dignified vulnerability of that which, in contrast to both its medium and its iconography, withers and fades over a few brief decades. An answer to China China The China China series has been referred to multiple times as the body of work to which Dr John Yu can be most closely related. This series emerged from Ah Xian’s 1998 SCA residency, when he produced ten busts which Chiu has observed are ‘some of [his] most minimal works,’ with large areas of white porcelain left bare.lxi This is particularly notable in Bust 4 (fig. 6), on which the leaves and stems of a lotus plant complement, rather than obscure, the features of the sitter—Ah Xian’s wife, Mali Hong—caressing her hairline and one eyebrow, a pale-red petal sitting lightly on her right eyelid. In the attention paid to the sitter’s physical features and emphasis on the sensuous surface of the porcelain, the work offers a precedent for Dr John Yu. Yet, the subtlety of decoration on Bust 4, sensitive to the contours of individual facial features, is in contrast to busts produced in Jingdezhen in 1999, 2002 and 2004. For these, Ah Xian 15 worked closely with local artisans, adapting their knowledge of conventional techniques and motifs to express his ideas. Using a historically-informed iconography, Ah Xian heightened the tension between personal and cultural identity. Commentators on his work have described the designs covering these works as reminiscent of tattoos, scarring, a rash, a ‘disfiguring strawberry birthmark,’ a binding, a second skin, or a form of ‘cultural branding’.lxii Although their individual features can still be discerned, each sitter’s identity is obscured. Their idiosyncrasies are masked by cultural symbols; ‘smothered in the beauty of a time longforgotten,’ they are ‘depersonalised and transformed into artefacts [under] the weight of history and culture’.lxiii This obliteration is particularly apparent in works such as Bust 19 (1999; fig. 7), on which the eyes and mouth are hidden beneath a dominant motif. However, during Ah Xian’s trip to Jingdezhen in 2004 to produce Dr John Yu, he had three other busts painted with a celadon glaze—the final three of the China China series—that, like the former, reverse this sublimation of the personal to the cultural. Numbered as China China— Bust 78 (fig. 8), Bust 79 (fig. 9) and Bust 80 (fig. 10), each represents a different, anonymous young woman, her features enhanced, as in Bust 4, by trailing lotus leaves and flowers—though here, like the children on Dr John Yu, the additions are in three dimensions. The similarity between these four works is immediately apparent: in each bust, the usually opaque surface decoration so characteristic of the series is reduced to a transparent glaze, through which facial features can be clearly recognised. This subtle adornment highlights the contrasts between the works: their gender; the youth of the women in comparison to the signs of aging in Dr John Yu; the use of celadon glaze on the applied lotus leaves and flowers in contrast to the multicoloured child-figures. While such distinctions set the works apart, they also suggest a shared focus on the vicissitudes of the human condition—our metamorphosis from birth to death, across gender and age divides, symbolised both in the children and in the lotus, another primary Buddhist symbol of transformation.lxiv 16 With these similarities and contrasts in mind, then, Dr John Yu can be repositioned in Ah Xian’s oeuvre as the final statement of the artist’s dialogue with porcelain, a resolution of the tensions between personal, historical and cultural aspects of identity that animate Ah Xian’s oeuvre. Unlike the China China busts, in which external signs of ‘Chineseness’ obscure the individuality of sitters and suggest a collective cultural identity, Dr John Yu celebrates the presence of the subject, reducing the cultural and historical to secondary elements that enhance rather than obscure. It is a simultaneously joyful and restful work—a balance of opposites given solid form in the contrast between Dr Yu and the children who climb over him—in which both artist and subject seem to have achieved harmony with their split identities, and out of which the possibility of future growth, and even rebirth, emerges. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Claire Roberts (University of Melbourne), Robert Wellington (Australian National University) and Charlotte Galloway (ANU), for their support, guidance and encouragement; Julie Brooke (ANU), for reading the first draft of this essay; the two anonymous reviewers, for their very insightful and generous comments; and especially Ah Xian, for creating the works discussed here and for always being happy to respond to my constant questions. i Simon Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire', Portrait, 1 March 2005, http://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/15/claywater-fire/ (accessed 22 March 2016). ii It should be noted that, while Dr John Yu has received little academic attention, the National Portrait Gallery has given the bust substantial consideration and prominence within their collection. In addition to the sources cited here, it has been included in both editions of the NPG's permanent collection catalogue The Companion (2008 and 2015) and is always a key work considered in Access and Learning tours. iii Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire'; Michael Desmond, John Yu (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2009), 6. Tarun Nagesh, Assistant Curator of Asian Art at Queensland Art Gallery, provides a concise description of the stages involved in cloisonné production: ‘strips of gold, brass, silver, copper or other metals are welded to a metal backing and the resulting spaces are filled with vitreous enamel paste. The creation is then fired, ground smooth and polished.’ Tarun Nagesh, Ah Xian: Metaphysica (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2013), n.p. iv Ah Xian, conversation with the author, 14 April 2016; Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire'. v Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire'. vi See, for example: Linda Jaivin, 'Ah Xian: Recent Works in Porcelain', ArtAsiaPacific 33, no. 1 (2002): 28; Claire Roberts, 'Ah Xian: "China. China". Recent Works in Porcelain', in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Jennifer Webb (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999), 228; Dieter Brunner, 'Die Büste Und Die Unsterblichkeit: Ein Chinesischer Künstler Auf Den Pfaden Westlicher Kultur [The Bust and Immortality: A Chinese Artist on the Paths of Western Culture]', in Ah Xian: Skulpturen, ed. Marc Gundel et al. (Bonn: Edition Braus, 2007), 45. vii M. H. Kaufman and Robert McNeil, 'Death Masks and Life Masks at Edinburgh University', British Medical Journal 298, no. 6672 (February 25 1989): 507. viii Alexandra Roginski, Ned Kelly and Death Masks (National Portrait Gallery, n.d.), http://www.portrait.gov.au/ stories/ned-kelly-death-masks (accessed 4 May 2016). ix Kaufman and McNeil, 'Death Masks and Life Masks at Edinburgh University', 506. 17 x Nagesh, Ah Xian: Metaphysica, n.p. Melissa Chiu, 'Asian-Australian Artists: Cultural Shifts in Australia', Art & Australia 37, no. 2 (1999): 256–57. xii Marita Bullock, '"China China": Autoethnography as Literal Translation in Ah Xian’s Porcelain Forms', in Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 101–02. xiii Desmond, John Yu, 4–5. xiv National Portrait Gallery, 'John Yu AC', National Portrait Gallery, 2006, http://www.portrait.gov.au/people/ john-yu-1934 (accessed 19 April 2016). xv Ah Xian, conversation with the author, 13 April 2016; Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire'. xvi Desmond, John Yu, 2; Australian of the Year Awards, 'Australian of the Year 1996: Dr John Yu AC', Honour Roll: Past Award Finalists and Recipients, http://www.australianoftheyear.org.au/hon ourroll/?view=fullView&recipientID=99 (accessed 19 April 2016); Will Ockenden, 'Former Australian of the Year and Chinese Refugee Hits out at Immigration Policy', AM (ABC News, 10 May 2014), http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2014/ s4002043.htm (accessed 2 May 2016). xvii Desmond, John Yu, 2. xviii National Portrait Gallery, 'John Yu AC’; Desmond, John Yu, 4. xix Australian of the Year Awards, 'Australian of the Year 1996: Dr John Yu AC.’ xx Mabel Lee, 'Ah Xian: Challenging the Spatial Limitations of Sculptural Art', Humanities Australia, no. 6 (2015): 49. xxi Claire Roberts, ‘The Slow Art of Ah Xian’, Art & Australia 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 392-93. xxii Ibid. xxiii Lee, 'Ah Xian: Challenging the Spatial Limitations of Sculptural Art', 51; Russell Storer, 'Ah Xian: Healing the Wounds', Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art + Culture 43, no. 1 (2014): 39. xxiv Rebecca Craig, 'Ah Xian—Biography', Design & Art Australia Online, 2013, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/ ah-xian/biography/ (accessed 24 March 2016); Roni Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', Art in America 90, no. 2 (February 2002): 110. xxv Ah Xian, 18 January 2014, cited in Storer, 'Ah Xian: Healing the Wounds', 39. xxvi Ah Xian, 'Self-Exile of the Soul', TAASA Review 8, no. 1 (1999): 8. xxvii Desmond, John Yu, 6. xxviii Rosemary Neill, 'The Face: Ah Xian', The Australian, 21 March 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ arts/the-face-ah-xian/story-e6frg8n6-1111119160459 (accessed 4 April 2016). xxix National Portrait Gallery, I Couldn’t Hear, I Couldn’t See: An Interview with John Yu, n.d., http://www.por trait.gov.au/stories/john-yu (accessed 19 April 2016). xxx Storer, 'Ah Xian: Healing the Wounds', 41. xxxi Ah Xian, 'A Light towards the Future', in Porcelain City—Jingdezhen, ed. Amanda Game (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011), n.p. xxxii Malcolm Baker, '"No Cap or Wig But a Thin Hair upon It": Hair and the Male Portrait Bust in England Around 1750', Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 64, 68. xxxiii Ibid, 70–72. xxxiv Geoffrey Batchen, 'Ere the Substance Fade: Photography and Hair Jewellery', in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (New York: Routledge, 2004), 37–38. xxxv Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', 110; Roberts, 'Ah Xian: "China. China". Recent Works in Porcelain', 228. The works incorporating plaster-cast hands and feet were exhibited as two series, with the titles Site Perspectives and Pervasive Spirit (both 1992-93). xi xxxvi Yi Yang, «这帮兄弟那些年» [Old Time with These Sworn Guys] (Hong Kong: China Fine Arts Publishing House, 2013), 27; Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', 110. xxxvii Lee, 'Ah Xian: Challenging the Spatial Limitations of Sculptural Art', 47. xxxviii Ah Xian, 'Self-Exile of the Soul', 8–9. xxxix Ibid. xl Jaivin, 'Ah Xian: Recent Works in Porcelain', 29. xli Ah Xian, interview with Melissa Chiu, 2001, cited in Melissa Chiu, 'The Iconic and the Personal: Ah Xian', in Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (Milan: Charta, 2006), 183. xlii Ibid., 190. xliii Ah Xian, letter to Clare Williamson, 11 June 1996, cited in Clare Williamson and Michael Snelling, Above and Beyond: Austral/Asian Interactions (South Yarra, VIC: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1996), 6. xliv Roberts, 'The Slow Art of Ah Xian', 393; Roberts, 'Ah Xian: "China. China". Recent Works in Porcelain', 228. 18 xlv Jonathan Goodman, 'Ah Xian', Sculpture 22, no. 5 (June 2003): 73; Jaivin, 'Ah Xian: Recent Works in Porcelain', 28. xlvi Guoping Feng, Yinjiao Hu, and Jimei Shao, «景德镇千年窑火不熄的陶瓷之城» [Jingdezhen: A City with Kiln-Fire Burning a Thousand Years], ed. Jingdezhen People’s Government News Office (Beijing: Intercontinental Press, 2006), 8; Rosemary E. Scott, Elegant Form and Harmonious Decoration: Four Dynasties of Jingdezhen Porcelain (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1992), 9. xlvii Feng, Hu, and Shao, «景德镇千年窑火不熄的陶瓷之城» [Jingdezhen: A City with Kiln-Fire Burning a Thousand Years], 48. xlviii Ah Xian and Jo Ely, 'Engaging Contemporary Art Audiences', Journal of Australian Ceramics 47, no. 2 (July 2008): 17. xlix Lili Fang, 'Jingdezhen and the Artist: 1910–2012', in New 'China': Porcelain Art from Jingdezhen, 1910–2012, ed. Willow Weilan Hai Chang and J. May Lee Barrett (New York: China Institute Gallery, 2012), 13. l Roberts, 'Ah Xian: "China. China". Recent Works in Porcelain', 228; Lee, 'Ah Xian: Challenging the Spatial Limitations of Sculptural Art', 47. li Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', 111. lii Roberts, 'The Slow Art of Ah Xian', 393; Stephan von der Schulenburg, 'À La Recherche de La Porcelaine Perdue [In Search of Lost Porcelain]', in Ah Xian: Skulpturen, ed. Marc Gundel et al. (Bonn: Edition Braus, 2007), 26. liii Eva Strober, Symbols on Chinese Porcelain: 10,000 Times Happiness (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2011), 186. liv Elliott, 'Clay, Water, Fire'; Ah Xian and Kathryn Wells, 'Ah Xian: Ancient Crafts, Contemporary Practice—A New Language of Art', Craft Australia, 28 September 2011, http://www.craftaustralia.org.au/library/inter view.php?id=ah-xian-ancient-crafts-contemporary-practice (accessed 12 April 2016). lv Ellen Johnston Laing, 'Auspicious Images of Children in China: Ninth to Thirteenth Century', Orientations 27, no. 1 (January 1996): 47–48. lvi Ah Xian and Wells, 'Ah Xian: Ancient Crafts, Contemporary Practice—A New Language of Art'. lvii Patricia Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery (Vermont: Tuttle, 2008), 153–56. lviii Laing, 'Auspicious Images of Children in China: Ninth to Thirteenth Century', 49–50. lix National Portrait Gallery, I Couldn’t Hear, I Couldn’t See: An Interview with John Yu. lx Ah Xian, cited in Desmond, John Yu, 6. lxi Chiu, 'The Iconic and the Personal: Ah Xian', 187. lxii Jaivin, 'Ah Xian: Recent Works in Porcelain', 28–29; Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', 109, 111; Melissa Chiu, 'Ah Xian', ArtAsiaPacific, no. 37 (2003): 31; Chiu, 'The Iconic and the Personal: Ah Xian', 188; Roberts, 'The Slow Art of Ah Xian', 397; Storer, 'Ah Xian: Healing the Wounds', 39. lxiii Von der Schulenburg, 'À La Recherche de La Porcelaine Perdue [In Search of Lost Porcelain]', 27; Feinstein, 'A Journey to China', 111. lxiv Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery, 28. 19