EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Ehibition: ‘Learning Chinese’, Janenne Eaton, in Formation and form
West Space 1993 – 2003, Ed. Brett Jones, 3Deep publishers 2004

Learning Chinese

Transcriptions, (1998), was my first exhibition with West Space.  Historical records relating to the lives and conditions of Chinese miners on the goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales provided the basis for this installation work.  It was part of the Penal Colony Series I’d begun back in ’93.  It might have been the last work in the series if Brett Jones and Sarah Stubbs hadn’t invited me to participate in an exchange project between West Space and another artist run space in Hong Kong, Para/Site, planned for the following year. This second project, Materia Prima, became a pivot point for further expansion, offering a fresh challenge and opportunity to take the ideas underpinning Transcriptions much further into a different kind of dialogue where ‘historic distance’ gives way to direct cross cultural exchange.

Equidistant,  (2001), my most recent installation work at West Space, sought to examine the routines of daily life and the collaborative aspects of the Materia Prima exchange from an ‘alien’s’ perspective living within the culture, and complex topographic terrain of Hong Kong.

Scope for the temporal and artistic expansion of my projects has been directly stimulated by the working environment at West Space, where the degree of experimentation that one can risk in making a work is maximised.  This is especially important for artists working across disciplines and media.  The opportunity to contribute to this publication has offered scope to further examine the nature of the boundaries that distinguish art and life; the intersections between social and personal processes; and how those processes and intersections often connect across temporally distant events. 

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In 1788 at Sydney Cove, First Lieutenant William Bradley of the First Fleet ship Sirius, recorded in his diary that the natives were well pleased with our people until they began clearing the ground at which they were displeased and wanted us to be gone.

In 1999, in Hong Kong, Oscar Ho Hing Kay, in his Journey to the Past, made the point that it was the nature of colonial government to discourage any strong sense of local history, especially when that history was filled with records of colonial brutality.

This morning, in the Age newspaper, I came across a point made by Lesley Chow.  She notes that history is constantly being rewritten in unstable, provisional, narratives.

This essay is constructed with those ideas in mind.

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Transcriptions arose out of ideas developed in the Penal Colony Series.  The focus for the works in this series was on the stories of the life and times of my ancestors.  Like so many Australians, my forebears had first arrived in Australia as convicts, others came as economic refugees (from the Irish potato famine), and the Venetians, like the Chinese, to seek their fortunes on the gold fields in the colony of Victoria.

For Transcriptions, as in the Penal Colony Series, I drew on evidence from a range of colonial documents, other, more recent texts, and stories centred around important geographic sites, to record something of the context and the surrounding conditions that affected the lives of the Chinese miners on the goldfields.

Within that context I was most interested in the accounts of the experiences of ordinary people whose lives were caught up in what have become the ‘defining events’ of Australia’s colonial past; stories which had generally been marginalised within the master narratives of ‘official’ histories.

The ideas that defined the Penal Colony Series gained further momentum in the Transcriptions and Materia Prima projects.  A description of these projects here requires recollection of a critical ‘encounter’ that was to have a radical influence on my art practice. This encounter opened my eyes to the possibilities for constructing a discourse between art and archaeology.  The nature of this discovery provides a useful metaphor for the conceptual platform and the formal structures of the West Space installation projects themselves.

In 1982, when I was studying archaeology at the Australian National University, I found a book containing early aerial photographs of English farmlands.  These grainy grey images revealed a visual, temporal history of crop growing patterns stretching back to the Bronze Age, moving forward again through Roman times, and so on into the present.  A clearly identifiable palimpsest of almost luminous, interwoven lines, meandering, highly ‘organic’, threading across and between the geometric ‘grids’ of a more recent past.  Farming regimes over millennia visible in one image.  The historic ‘place’, like the archaeological trench, is a site that reveals shadows of human agency with its complex ‘skeins’ of activity, intertwined with ‘stratified layers’ of material, meaning and cultural significance.  Stories without words.

I like to imagine my entire project with West Space as an ‘archaeological site’.  Transcriptions represents the base of the site. The ‘artefacts’ include tracings in red biro on Double Cranes Chinese paper, copies of documents such as the Chinese Regulation Act of 1857, a newspaper account of the 1861 Uprising at Lambing Flat, drawings of Chinese miners in the Black Hills, Ballarat, and an image of the memorial Rock at Robe, South Australia.  There is also a residue of a large quantity of joss sticks and the ends of ice-cream cones.

The next level, the Materia Prima level, adds more material to the Transcriptions ‘foundation’.  Here there is a much greater concentration of documentary ‘evidence’.  This artefact deposit is very much more dense, and includes an official list of names of Chinese miners buried at Beechworth cemetery, Miners Rights certificates, and court testimony lists of articles burnt or stolen from Chinese miners during the Buckland River riots.  There are numerous photographic documents recording important Chinese sites across the gold fields, such as joss houses, and grave-sites.  There are portraits of old miners who never returned home, and images of their descendents, soldiers in the First World War.  There’s a photograph of two men and two women, Westerners, standing in Tien An Mien Square, the Forbidden City in the background with the big portrait of Chairman Mao.  There are objects bound in red tape, joss sticks, circular, convex, red–framed mirrors, hexagram readings from the I Ching.  There are plastic lenses that turn the world upside down, and red plastic coated bamboo poles.  This is a very dense accumulation of ‘archaeological material’.

The next level of this site, the Equidistant level, is denser still, with the accumulated material from Transcriptions and Materia Prima.  Added to this are numerous images of our neighbourhood in Hong Kong, and of the three Australian artists involved in the Materia Prima project working in their spaces.  There are photo documents of these three with the Hong Kong artists who participated in the West Space end of the Project. They are having a good time working, eating and drinking together. This layer of artefacts includes daily video interviews, ‘spoken diaries’ reflecting on the events and working developments in the artist’s spaces at Para/Site.  There is also a large collection of cardboard cartons, red painted bamboo scaffolding, Chinese lanterns and a photographic reproduction of a door shrine.

The invisible ‘glue’ that holds it all together is found in the energy of people working together, in the sharing of cultures; and memories.

Learning Chinese,  a personal history.

 One or two people in Hong Kong enquired if I had any Chinese ancestors.  I have not heard of any; however, I do remember my maternal grandma Eloise Sonsi, who grew up in Ballarat, talking about her Aunt Leah who married a Chinese Australian descendent of one of the miners.  My grandma’s family was Italian,Venetian.  They had big market gardens around Spring Mount.  Maybe her Grandfather Domenico Sonsi was caught up in the Eureka Stockade; maybe he was part of the mob who attacked the Chinese miners along the banks of the Buckland River.  I didn’t take that much notice when I was a kid.  Now I wish I had.

Part of the impetus to focus on the place of Chinese miners in the ‘landscape’ was because, despite the significant size of their population on the gold fields of south-eastern Australia, and the extreme prejudice they experienced from other miners and from the discriminatory regulations enforced by colonial governments, their history has been marginalised.   I was interested to unearth primary documentary records that shed more light on the exigencies of their daily lives and experiences. 

There is, however, a more personal foundation, or ‘sub-strata’, underpinning this decision. It resides in a previous history, a ‘preoccupation’, that has surfaced sporadically over the years and begins while I was an art student.  It may have begun even earlier, when I was a child, dissecting parts of the picture on the blue willow pattern plate between the mashed potatoes, peas and chops; not realising the fakery of it.  It is a preoccupation with China.  Perhaps it is an echo of the escape plans of my convict ancestors John Rowley or James Betts.  It was part of convict lore that you could reach China if you could escape the settlement and walk far enough.

During the years 1856-1858, 16500 Chinese landed near this spot 

and walked some 200miles to the Victorian Gold Fields in search of gold. 

Re-enacted for the State’s Jubilee 150th celebration in1986. 

Inscription on the Chinese Memorial at Robe, South Australia.
 

Melbourne.    1968 or ’69, have forgotten exactly.  Han Su Yin visits and talks to the students at Caulfield Institute of Technology.  All of us art students agitating against the Vietnam war.  We are very impressed with what she tells us.  Including the barefoot doctors.

1969/70.  My sister, Elena, and I, frequent the Peoples Bookstore in the Metropole Arcade, off Bourke Street.  Exotic Bee and Honey soap, badges and bookmarks.  Little red books of Chairman Mao’s teachings.  Red plastic covers.  English translations.  We had one each. The children of the grasslands have seen Chairman Mao…………We buy happy coats. 

Perth.  1976.  Our neighbours Jane Tarrant and Deidre Toia visit the Peoples Republic of China with a student group from UWA.

They come home with all sorts of amazing things, including photos of themselves in Chinese winter garb, standing, smiling in the snow.  I am eager to hear the details of their experiences over a succession of pots of tea and smokes.  Mrs Eaton, Mrs Tarrant & Mrs Toia.

Canberra.  July, 1985.  Bill Ferguson and I begin our travels in China.  

Saturday November 19, ’99.  Hong Kong.

Here at last and working.

Standing on the newspaper with wet feet after my shower.  I don’t think I’ll ever get the ink and text off my feet.  The image of the traveller.

Full moon and one wispy cloud moving in the skies over Hong Kong tonight.  Another good meal at Danny Lo’s – we couldn’t resist after last night’s dinner.  The start of the day better than I could imagine, walking down a narrow street of fishmonger stalls.  The fish glistening and still moving.

Consulted the I Ching with drinking straws.  Phoned Bill at home for the reading- T’ung Jen, Fellowship with  men.  No moving lines.   He will send FAX copy of text.

 
I have read the I Ching for twenty nine years. 

Thursday January 16,  ’98.  Corowa.

Another hot dry day; clear blue sky. No wind.  Dad and I drove to Beechworth today.  He wasn’t really feeling well enough but a sense of movement seemed important.  It was a ‘defining event’ sort of day because I found the ‘key’ to tackling the gold rush period for the Penal Colony Series! – the Chinese cemetery on the outskirts of town.

From the tall, twin burning towers a procession of dark grey basalt headstones stretched back up a long low rise; each headstone bearing its carved inscription in Chinese characters.  Along the fence-line a sign had been erected that said, in red on white – Chinese Ceremonial Burning Towers.  The savage Buckland riots of 1857 drove many Chinese to the Beechworth goldfields.  By 1860 when these towers were built, over 5000 Chinese were already seeking gold here.  During burials, paper tokens were burnt here and small offerings of pork and wine made to sustain the departing spirit accompanied by the ashes of burning paper prayers.  Exploding firecrackers scared devils away.  The turbulent gold years have gone but mortal remains of 2000 Chinese lie peacefully here.

I took some 3D photos of the graves and burning towers.  The beautiful faded red metal cones on the top of the grey towers look stark and elemental against the clear blue sky.  Also took some photos of Dad, in situ. I hope they turn out.

We had a delicious pie for lunch in a little bakery in town.  After that we visited the O’Hara Burke Museum near the ‘ancient’ Monkey Puzzle trees.  There were fragments of carved signs and other artefacts that had belonged to the Chinese miners and their community in Beechworth. I was  struck  by a  list of  names of  Chinese miners  (written in English),  buried in  the cemetery. I asked the curator if she could send me a copy of the list.  She said she would ask the Director who wasn’t there today, unfortunately.  I do hope they won’t forget.

Sunday November  3, ‘02.  Melbourne.

6 am.  North wind.  Greasy, yellow sky.  Change coming.  No rain expected.  Woke up thinking of Beechworth Chinese cemetery.

List of goods belonging  to Hong See burnt or taken away on the 4th July 1857 by rioters at the Buckland diggings.

Long boots                 14 pairs
Flannel shirts              2 dozen
Cabbage tree hats     10 pieces
Blankets                       11 pairs
Coats                             9 pieces
Calico                            4 pieces
Moleskin trousers     20 pairs
Opium                         73 tins
Salt fish                       45 tins
Chinese tobacco        45 lbs
Candles                         5 chests
Sugar                             4 bags
Flour                              3 bags

Monday  November 23, ’99.  Hong Kong.

I thought of Mum and Grandma this morning as I burnt joss sticks in the temple on the way to Para/Site.  They would have been so pleased for me to be here working on this project.

By the time I arrived Richard had gotten well stuck into the wall partition  which divides the lower gallery space into two; his space and mine.  By mid afternoon he’d finished it.  I’m in the process of filling all the nicks and seams and other joins.  It will be a great wall.  He feels really pleased with it and can now clearly see the shape of his space.

Gregory worked upstairs in his space.  He had an electrical day’ with little lights, antennae and wires.  He is going well.  Gregory and Richard are such easy, lively companions.

Saturday  November 27, ’99.  Hong Kong.

We are at the halfway point and we are all tired.  Breakfast restored us so we arrived at the gallery feeling full of enthusiasm.  The main achievement today was putting the first coat of red enamel paint on the doorway and on the large part of the floor in my space.  The particular red is bright and deep like arterial blood; it glows and seems to be alive!  By the time I’d finished it was getting on; close to video diary/ happy hour.  We’ve found a close source of tonic for our gin, which is handy.

Before that, however, I was determined to paint the rough and neglected little shrine house on the footpath near our front door.  I wanted to restore it and get it ‘working’ again.  Anyhow, as I’m rolling the red enamel onto it I’m starting to feel a bit conspicuous; I’m experiencing a sense of doubt about the ‘propriety’ of doing it.  I kept at it though.  Two police officers went by. They didn’t interfere with my efforts.  It looked so beautiful because it was originally a deep Chinese-forget-me- not blue.  The combination of the red and blue is quite electric.  I still wasn’t sure, until a little event occurred.  As I was finishing up, trying with difficulty to put the used tray and roller back into the original packaging before throwing it away, the old, old lady who collects the used cardboard boxes in Po Yan Street just appeared and silently took over the bag and helped me do it. I felt sure it was a sign of approval. Tomorrow I plan to make the incense burner arrangement in it.

Richard worked all day in his space with the heavy enamel paint and I think the fumes got to him.  He seemed not his usual light - hearted self!

Sunday  November  28, ’99. Hong Kong.

Woke up after a good sleep feeling more energetic and positive after a bit of a ‘down’ day yesterday.  A beautiful morning, too.  Gregory was a bit late coming over; Richard was going to Para/Site very early.  We found him working away and clearly feeling restored.  After settling in, Gregory and I went down to Queens Rd West to buy incense and other equipment to set up the door shrine.  Gregory also wanted to get his used cardboard cartons.

After getting back with our load we made up the shrine.  People in the Street thought it was good apparently, because there were smiles and some people stopped to talk to us.  The Landlady who lives in another part of the building, bowed in front of it.  She’d given us the ‘nod’.

Tuesday, November  30 ’99.  Hong Kong.

Spent the afternoon and evening finishing pasting the first layer of photocopies of the old Chinese mining documents to my walls.  Tomorrow I’ll begin the second layer including photos, etc.  We are conscious of time ticking away now.  Too fast!

The weather continues to be absolute perfection; autumn-mild, no wind, mostly sunny, no rain.

This morning we went out to the New Asia University in the New Territories with Kacey Wong where we each gave a talk to his students about our own work   A very early start for the long train ride out.  Trains without individual carriages.  It was like travelling fast inside the belly of a snake.  Or dragon!  Hong Kong public transport is such a contrast to our plodding public systems in Australia. 

 July 10, ’85.  On the train to Shanghai.  Very hot and humid.

We have left Beijing to begin our travels with Jane (Tarrant) and Alan.  Going hard sleeper isn’t quite the battle I thought it would be from Jane and Alan’s description. Jane and Alan have been living and teaching at the Beijing Foreign Affairs College for nearly a year.  They made us very comfortable in their tiny government flat. We have been welcomed by their neighbours and friends.  We are known as ‘foreign experts’.

Beijing is large and sprawling;  dusty despite the rain, & very humid.  Air full of mist, dust and pollution from the factory chimneys.  We are seeing a great deal of the city at all levels; a view Westerners would not see.

On our first night after dinner we went for a bike ride.  To be on a bike in the dimly lit streets of Beijing was like being on an acid trip.

Another sight that has really caught my eye is the dress of many of the men.  Magnificently bright (fluoro) lipstick pink, or brilliant lapis lazuli blue singlets.  With them they wear dark green or navy trousers tied at the waist with a good solid brown leather belt.  Must find those singlets.  Maybe in Shanghai.

The fan sellers have just come down the carriage and Jane has bought us one each.  They are welcome, because despite the air-conditioning it’s damn hot in this carriage.  My fan is purple and aqua with birds on a branch.

Note - colours in temples;  red, yellow, aqua, ultramarine blue.  Also beautiful red oxide walls, especially on the  front of the Forbidden City.

Dope growing wild all over the city.  Great clumps of it in the grounds of the Temple of Heaven.

Have learnt some Chinese words…..

At the end of our first day, 5th July, we went to Tien An Men Square.  All day I’d  felt like a foreign ‘capitalist roader’, and was not really comfortable.  Fortunately this seemed to leave me at Tien An Mien Square.  We had an historical photograph taken of the four of us in front of the Gate to the Forbidden City.  A huge portrait of Chairman Mao looking down on us all.  Loving the food, although it is only available within certain hours.

    Saturday  December, 4  ’99.  Hong Kong. I re-hung the list of names of the Chinese miners in the Beechworth cemetery in a more central place.  Moved a few other things then got stuck into taping the old furniture.

Zoe came in today, so I asked her to translate into Cantonese the inscription on the Robe Memorial to hang next to the photograph of it that I’d placed in the window.  Tonight, however, as we were leaving Para/Site an old gentleman stopped us, indicating that something was wrong with the dates in the translation.  I got Luke, Ching Chin Wai, down from upstairs to translate for us.  It appeared that the dates 1850–1858 were inverted, and there were some other problems.  Thank goodness that man took the time to assist me to get it right.

 I am relieved to find that reception of the documentary ‘archive’ within the context of a work of art has been positively received by the Hong Kong audience.  In  realising  this project here, I feel the border zone between ‘historic distance’, as articulated in the archival material, and direct exchange between people from different cultural backgrounds, has been breached.  Useful connections, and a degree of mutual enlightenment has ensued

Leung Chi Wo, in his Materia Prima catalogue essay Exchange of art?  Art of exchange?, notes that in my work, “the interesting link was that the history of the Chinese minority in Australia was re-presented in a society where Chinese is the majority”.

One of the most common responses so far, has been real surprise at the duration and visibility of Chinese culture in Australia.  Temple sites and monuments dating back to the mid eighteen hundreds, and that remain as an integral part of the fabric of Chinese Australian cultural history, have prompted many questions.  Because I am not Chinese, some people wondered why I was interested in a Chinese history at all.  Some of the old copies of documents were written in Cantonese; people were very interested in them and read out the texts for me.

Sunday December  5, ’99.  Hong Kong. Kith, Tsang Tak Ping, came back to Para/Site with us. He has responded very positively to my work, picking out particular things, like the red taped furniture. He really likes the Beechworth cemetery ‘tableau’ with the 3D photos and the ‘Chinese roof’ construction.  Also the work is close to his own interest in local history; and in the collection of ‘artefacts’.  Also the interest from passers-by has greatly increased since I put the Robe memorial rock images and magnifying sheets, which look like limpid glass lanterns, in the window.  From a distance, both inside and outside the gallery, everything captured within the ‘frame’ of these ‘lanterns’ is turned upside down. 

Richard has been working on his wall text with the translation Kith brought in today.  Gregory has spent all day in the stairwell leading up to his installation painting it a deep ‘night’ brown called ‘Donkey’, of all things. An excellent but exhausting day for us all.

  Monday December, 6  ’99.  Hong Kong. A lovely surprise to see Brett had arrived from Melbourne when I got to the gallery!  Fortunately I had bought breakfast from our favourite bakery on Possession Street.  That’s where the British planted their flag when they came.  Possession Street was on the shore-line then!  Brett was pleased to see our efforts.  We congratulated him on choosing us three to participate in this project! 
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In bringing this essay to a conclusion, there are a number of points I wish to make that issue directly from my experience with West Space, (and Para/Site).  The character of the working environment is one that stimulates artists to challenge themselves and their ideas.  As a consequence the audience is also challenged.  The degree of experimentation that one can risk in making a work is, likewise, maximised in that environment, especially for artists working across disciplines and media.   

The widening of my own artistic terrain through the three projects represents a contrast to my long experience with commercial galleries where exhibiting ‘resolved’ bodies of work had always seemed to represent a kind of ‘closure’.  Issues regarding ‘sales’ are always present in that context, as are the personality relationships between dealer and artist; a bit of a closed loop, really.  One of the major points about artist run spaces like West Space is that artists have a functional level of control and ownership of their project; an operating independence that is empowering and positive.  It the sort of experience that is critical, I think, for young artists.

I would say that as a ‘working model’ artist run spaces, like West Space offer the very best opportunities now and in the future for artists to potently engage, through various modes of expression, with the complex challenges of a culturally diverse, and rapidly changing society.  The energy that suffuses the working environment of West Space is about it offering a forward thinking and dynamic communal exchange of ideas between artists locally, nationally, and ‘across borders’.  Fundamental to that exchange are those durable connections to, and engagement with, the broader community beyond its walls.  Those elements have been critical for the development and artistic realisation of my particular project. 

……………… and while the concentric ripples resulting from a stone lobbed in a pool is an analogue dilute by now with use, it nevertheless carries the visual, descriptive, diagrammatic clarity of my experience with West Space.  The stone and the ripples embody the simple idea of expansion or ‘increase’.

I / Increase.  It furthers one to undertake something.  It furthers one to cross the great water.  Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it.

- Essay:  ‘Learning Chinese’, Janenne Eaton, in Formation and form, West Space 1993 – 2003, Ed. Brett Jones, 3Deep publishers 2004