Today we’re venturing into the world of contemporary Chinese art, particularly the thought-provoking work of Hung-Chih Peng.
I don’t know much about him but recently encountered his work because a friend recommended that Lisa and I go to the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale.
It’s free. The tea and dumplings are great.
And if you line up your visit with a guided tour you’ll learn a lot about modern-day China.
In the foyer, we encountered this:
As tall as an adult and measuring some 8 metres in length your gaze gets swallowed by one of today’s gigantic cruise ships made up of 8000 pieces of white plastic almost begging you to help as it writhes and twists. You wonder if the Titanic is sinking all over again.
Importantly, the work is called The Deluge - Noah’s Ark. So Hung-Chih Peng likes to invoke religious imagery? Well, indeed he does.
He is famous for creating videos of sacred texts by painting them on a white wall using dog food He then lets his white dog approach his work and lick it all off. He films this but then shows the film backward so it looks like the dog’s tongue is painting the wall with proverbs such as 'Clever talk and a pretentious manner are seldom compatible with the benevolent.'
The work is titled Canine Monk: excerpts from the analects of Confucius. One day, the dog is offering proverbs from Confucius.
On another day it is the words of the Bhagavad Gita.
And on another day it’s words of our holy Scriptures.
Critics have not held back from saying that the word given by a DOG shown backwards may be the word of GOD.
A final, shocking work offered by the artist is his response to a film made for children by a Palestinian Islamist group. In the story a beloved mouse figure called Farfur is clumsily killed by an Israeli soldier to show the children that Israelis and Americans are cruel.
Hung-Chih Peng was struck by the semiotic clumsiness of using such an American symbol as a Mickey Mouse figure as the victim and offered this response, Farfur the Martyr.
Words fail me.
I’m tempted to think that this contemporary Chinese artist is mocking religious traditions and symbols, pointing out that religion is absurd.
But that would be too hasty an assessment.
In his artist statement, he says he is wanting to juxtapose opposites to expose the sin that happens when we ignore natural and divine law.
The guide at the gallery said that the inspiration for Deluge was a story of two Scandanavian fisherman who, around 100 years ago, chanced upon what was the last known mating pair of a seabird that had been thought extinct. They also found a nest of eggs. The clubbed the birds to death, crushed the eggs and ate the lot for dinner. Fishing was bad that day.
When the Taipei Biennale began where Hung-Chih Peng was meant to exhibit he had no work to show on day 1. Instead, a small army of 3D printers and computers was wheeled into the gallery and, before a puzzled and maybe sceptical crowd, the latter-day Noah built an ark with its desperate cry that even the image of salvation is drowning.
I’m not sure that it is religion that is absurd. It could be that we human beings are.
In our hypocrisy, short-sightedness, violence and greed Hung-Chih Peng seems to be saying that we are absurd.