Go East
When is text art? Art and text command their own jealous domains. When one becomes subject for the other, different meanings are animated.
A showing of the Sherman collection of contemporary Asian art, that was spread across the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Sherman’s Paddington gallery, included several works built on text motifs by leading artists from the region, among them Ai Weiwei, Yang Zhichao and Jitish Kallat.
The art of text resonated in Ai Weiwei’s Archive; a blog printed on 8,000 sheets of traditional printmakers’ paper using traditional methods. It engaged the physicality of paper and sign, as well as its symbolic space. Being displayed in a box the size of the viewer, it addressed the volume of internet communication, comparing it to the spare practice of calligraphy. This work rendered the art of text in its contemporary context as a visual and tactile proposition.
It also resonated, as Ai Weiwei’s work does, with the political climate of text, especially in China where he was, until recently, ‘confined’, as authorities had impounded his passport. The internet and the blog as powerful sites for galvanising political action, and China’s habit of closing down bloggers and blocking internet access for its citizens, made a significant context for Archive.
The art of text was differently held in an array of texts in Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible, an installation of 3000 collected diaries dating over five decades from 1949. During this period, private writing and individual opinion were discouraged, as part of the prevailing control of discourse in the ‘People’s Republic’.
The diaries were exemplars of conflicting political currents; each a compact cipher of the citizen