'Art and Politics' talk at Art Gallery of NSW

All three panelists at the talk have a Chinese origin (Dadang Christanto was born in Indonesia) and the general consensus was that Australia is still the lucky country. Shen Jiawei said it’s Marx’s workingman’s ideal.

L to r: Dadang Christanto, Xiao Luin, Shen Jiawei, Linda Jaivin

Linda Jaivin led the conversation, having also Mandarin to call on (as she did when Xiao asked about some words for translation). Xiao said that art is about expressing herself, though she admitted that sometimes that means talking about politics. Her history with art goes back to events of 1989.

Formative for Christanto and Shen were the events in Indonesia in the 1960s when Communists and people of Chinese ancestry were set upon and massacred in a killing spree for which there seems to be no accurate total.

In the background the Aboriginal paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye – which I had become accustomed to on an earlier visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, having sat in a nearby seat admiring their intricacies and loops – attest to other political acts in Australia that still haven’t been assimilated, though the Welcome to Country given by the AGNSW staffer at the beginning of last night’s talk point to a way forward.