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In design magazines of the last year or so 'Asian' has been hot. It was the primary fashion trend of 1998 and now even the cheaper chain stores offer a range of Asian homewares. Some of these items are Chinese in origin, some Thai, some completely unlocatable––in spirit, closely related to the Chinoiserie of the Nineteenth Century. In this context, an event such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) can be in real danger of being viewed as a pan-Asian visual supermarket, regardless of intentions.
With this in mind, Paul Bai's show at the new Satellite Space in Fortitude Valley is an entirely appropriate annotation to the spectacle of the concurrent APT. Bai was born and raised in Northern China. His own migration to this country coincided with the pro-democracy events of the late eighties. As a consequence, his art training was in Australia rather than China. The artist's exposure to and combination of traditional Chinese values and Western art theory has led him to analyse the effect of Chinese culture on Australian society and vice versa over the past six years. The series of four ink drawings in the current exhibition, an extension of the concepts in a group of paintings shown recently in Sydney, continues to question the relationship between cultural exchange and cultural tokenism.
Bai previously has referred to the Chinese artistic tradition of stating true meaning obliquely, or as Trinh Minhha has described it, the choice to 'suggest always more than what they represent'.[1] This tradition of classical Chinese culture, born of historical necessity, neatly dovetails with a post-Derridian fascination with the ambiguity of language. In this show the simplified designs, nominally representing a Chinese style