Last Words

Overview

Early collage works from Shen Shaomin in which he weaves a tapestry from carpet and does works in singed Chinese and Australian newspapers, are particularly resonant, not only because of their delicacy and the accidental meanings that are brought together. Created shortly after the artist moved to Sydney in 1989, these works are evidence of how long the issues they encompass have been a part of our contemporary consciousness and how little has been resolved in the past 20 years. Archie Moore's Mulgoa addresses the history of these problems as present in Australia for more than 200 years, by linking up text from The Book of Revelation (plagues, wars, famine, loss of languages etc. denoting the end of the world) to the 'Greatest Hits of 1788' convict anthem 'Bound for Botany Bay.'

A little further from home, Eric Bridgeman stages The Fight, a documentary-seeming but staged conflict in the hills of Papua New Guinea. The artist's heritage in the region and sense of partial identity with it but also with 'whiteness' further complicates the relation between staging culture for the tourist gaze and the impossibility of impartial ethnography. Considerations of cultural practices and authenticity also inform Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan's In God We Trust, which uses a jeep left behind by Americans after World War Two and the decorative talents of Manilan craftspeople, to create an example of a 'folk' cultural practice that activates the industrialised and appropriative moves of postmodernism.

Hikaru Fuji's Nike Politics also represents the incorporation of American culture into the vocabularies and economies of other nations in a more satirical and threatening way, by creating a series of 'swoosh' branded police equipment, beginning with batons and handcuffs and ending with a prison uniform and a film of two people in riot gear going at one another. There's a fight in Zhang Ding's work too, in the silent loops of the artist boxing cacti. Moving between full body shots and closeups of the artist's hands and the spikes on the plants, it's an uncomfortable demonstration of endurance and, against a black background, a portrayal of decontextualised pain that acts as a reminder of the numbing effects of a lot of the media and culture we consume. He also does a charming Fellini-style self portrait against a backdrop of historical change in The Great Era.

Image: Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan 'In God We Trust'