Gallery 4A (the Asia-Australia Arts Centre) is currently showing a rich and meditative installation called Nostalgia, by the Chinese artist Qiu Anxiong (pronounced choo anshong, I’m reliably informed).
I attended the screening of three of his animated video works (including the three-screen The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas based on the ancient Chinese manuscript Classic of the Seas and Mountains) in Parker Street, right next to the Gallery, last Friday night. The screening was part of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Qiu’s works in Nostalgia are meditations on times that have passed, on country and traditional Chinese ways, on industrialisation, and on pollution. He uses “brush and ink” painted scenes (over 6000 of them in this work), beautifully stitched into animations in which land and town scapes morph, animals change into other animals, and catastrophic events occur.
I saw military tanks that were also elephants, birds that were ominous helicopters, birds and landforms that become aircraft and their nautical carriers. As in any true Gestalt, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the next day it was the whole, the felt experience that stayed with me. I was left with a profound sense of how we muddle through, individually and collectively, retaining traces of our remembered “natural” pasts.
Here’s a still from The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas, in Parker Street, on a warm Sydney evening, with Chinatown buzzing. The film’s haunting sound track was embellished by the periodic tings-tings of the nearby light rail cars sliding past down Hay Street.
In the Gallery, you can still get to see another video work, Flying South (2006), and the installation Nostalgia upstairs.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the 9 minute work Flying South, which I watched several times. It’s a poignant work from this accomplished artist.
