by Sam Beard.

This interview is published in collaboration with Guan Kan Journal. Find out more about Guan Kan here.

Linda Jaivin’s Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China is a slim volume that tackles one of the most complex and paradoxical periods in modern Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution. The mental image that this period conjures for many of us is largely drawn from paintings of rosy cheeked workers raising their fists, stories of social turmoil, and the ideology and iconicity of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (or “Mao’s Little Red Book”). The reality was far more nuanced, chaotic, and confusing—and in the brevity and lucid pacing of Bombard the Headquarters, the paradoxes of the Cultural Revolution, and their impact on Chinese society, emerge in stark clarity. Jaivin’s retelling of this tumultuous decade blends its key political and historical moments with vibrant details and anecdotes that are rarely included in such concise accounts.
        I sat down for a video call with Linda Jaivin to discuss the book. As we set up the call, I spied a glimpse of her office—mountains of books, papers, and objects overflowing from shelves. Jaivin comments, ‘my desk is in the middle, surrounded by all this. So if we ever have an earthquake in Sydney and all of the bookshelves come down, there’ll be no finding me!’
        Before we begin, I mention that I’m researching the Stars (Xing Xing) art group—a group of Beijing artists that, from around 1979–80, staged several exhibitions that broke away from Maoist social realism and championed the work of young independent artists. And of course, Linda was there! She knew many of the artists and attended Xing Xing’s first official exhibition—mounted after a famed protest show, where artworks were hung on the fence of the National Art Museum of Beijing—, reporting on the exhibition for Asiaweek in 1980. The group’s activity coincided with the Beijing Spring (1978-79), which in itself is a complex period in post-Mao history closely tied to the final stages and ultimate conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. The tangled nature of modern Chinese history, and its astounding pace, makes Bombard the Headquarters! an all the more intriguing and timely overview.

SB: … That’s something that fascinates me about the Beijing Spring, that it is often conceived of in one of two distinct ways, either as the birth of the Reform and Open Up movement or the conclusion of the earlier period. Yet, to really understand the Beijing Spring fully, both ends need to be grappled with.

LJ: Exactly. And in fact, I did struggle with that. Bombard the Headquarters! is such a short book—and it had to be. The format was set by the original UK publisher, who are putting out a whole series of very short history books. So, I had to stick to this incredibly tight format. I had so much material on the Stars; I had quotations from Bei Dao’s poetry; and I really wanted to capture the cultural life of the period. But then I thought: maybe it’s more important to show the roots of all that—how it grew out of the culture of the educated youth who were sent down to the countryside, where they began writing poetry and passing it around. And it was more important, for my story, to kind of put the weight in there.

SB: Absolutely. That was one of the first questions I had for you: in approaching the Cultural Revolution within such a slim volume, what were some of your initial considerations or approaches? What were the major themes or ideas you really wanted to grapple with?

LJ: Yeah, I thought, Gee, this is going to be very, very difficult. What I really wanted to do was cover the broad sweep of the Cultural Revolution—the big events, the narrative of it. Initially, I didn’t quite take into consideration how twisted and complicated that narrative is. It wasn’t just like: this movement, then that movement, this event, then that reaction. Everything was going on at the same time. There were so many contradictory proclamations and contradictory directives. Different campaigns were launched and then didn’t quite finish. One campaign would still be going on when another one started. It was so messy. But one of the things I did want to paint, to describe, was the overall narrative—how the Cultural Revolution unfolded.
        Of course, I wanted to take into consideration some of the key players from the top—obviously Mao, Jiang Qing, and so on. I knew I would have to leave out a number of people who played important roles. However, those individuals weren’t the main movers in the end. At the same time, I wanted to be sure that I gave an impression of what was happening to ordinary people—the people being affected by these directives and campaigns. For example, you have Mao going after his political enemies, and then, at the same time, you have a translator in the Foreign Languages Bureau who’s suddenly told to stop working on a translation of an 18th-century novel. I thought: I’m going to take some peoples’ stories and weave them in to give a sense of what it was like—the real gritty details and the big sweep all in one.
        I didn’t want to overemphasise the theoretical debates behind the Cultural Revolution—just to give them enough airtime so that people could understand, for example, the implications of the Bloodlines Theory [a theory used to assess individuals’ revolutionary reliability or class guilt based on family background and to determine who could join the Red Guards and who should be targeted]. There were many discussions like that, so I had to be selective. I had to go into it and say, Okay, here’s an important one.
        It would have been really interesting to get into the weeds—if I’d had a huge book to fill, you know—about how some Red Guards argued for nonviolence in the very beginning of the movement. That would’ve been fascinating. But in the end, those factions lost. They lost pretty quickly. And so, they are pretty much irrelevant to the story. So, instead I mention that there was this argument between Red Guards: Do we use violence? Do we not use violence? Ultimately, it was Jiang Qing [Deputy Director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group and Mao’s wife] who conveyed messages to them that violence was acceptable.
        It’s also easy to get very carried away with Mao, because he’s just riveting—he’s really, really fascinating. And he is at the centre of a lot of it. At the same time, Mao would set off these... he was the big butterfly wing that sets off all the ripples of chaos. But you can’t make it all about Mao, because it wasn’t. It was about the whole country. 
        I also wanted to bring in seemingly unimportant yet fascinating details. I always have this instinct, and I try to stay in touch with it when I’m writing history in particular—if there’s something that’s relatively minor, but I find interesting, I just have to trust that other people are going to find it interesting too.
        For example, when I describe the birthday toast that Mao made to civil war. I could’ve dispensed with the scene by simply saying, At his birthday party, Mao toasted to civil war. But it was so much more fun to bring in Qi Benyu [a Party theorist] and have him describe the banquet, who was invited, what they were eating—because I find that interesting. So, it’s always a question of what is important? What is interesting? How do we keep the big picture, but also the little pictures, all going at once?
        Along with the key Party figures, there were some dissidents—the most famous ones probably being the ones I mention, like Yu Luoke with his criticism of the Bloodlines Theory, and Zhang Zhixin—oh my god, what she went through was horrific! I made sure to include them to give an idea of the debates going on at the time. So, it’s this balancing between the general and the particular, with a real sense of the importance of keeping things really interesting. 

SB: Those descriptions really stood out to me. They really add to the vibrancy of your narrative, such as your account of the incident at the British Embassy.

LJ: The British Mission, as they called it.

SB: Yes, and you describe how the staff are sitting around drinking claret, waiting as the Red Guards are protesting out front, waiting to see if they’ll storm the Mission at 10:30pm as they’ve threatened …

LJ: And watching a Peter Sellers movie! That was very funny, because I thought: Okay, there are a lot of similar incidents I could focus on––they attacked the Indonesians, they attacked many, many different people for various reasons—but with the British Mission, there was that great detail including one from the book by the American teachers Nancy and David Milton who recalled how they had seen their students walking along with cans of petrol and, at the time, thought that the students looked like they were going on a picnic! But of course, they were off to burn down the British Mission. Those accounts give such a vivid sense of just how surreal things must have felt. Then, when I started digging into it more, I found several sources saying that the British diplomats were actually watching a Peter Sellers film when the incident took place. Someone had written something like, “Wouldn’t it be great to know the name of the Peter Sellers film?” And I thought—yes, it would be!
        I have an acquaintance who works at the Foreign Office in London. So, I got in touch with her. She was fantastic, and tracked down all this material, giving me a huge selection of documents. A lot of them were the diplomats’ own accounts, written after the fact for the Office’s files. And they aren’t closed files, so I was able to go through all this original material. That was really fun—even just finding out exactly what they were eating, what they were drinking. And when I discovered that the film they were watching was The Wrong Arm of the Law. I just thought, oh my god, that is so funny! So yes, it’s not the most important detail of the Cultural Revolution, obviously—but it’s such a great one.

SB: Absolutely. It really enriches things. One section that really got me thinking—towards the end—is where you begin discussing the contemporary ramifications of the Cultural Revolution. I was in China last year helping out on a student trip, and a couple of the students from WA had a really romantic idea of the Cultural Revolution. “Wouldn’t it have been amazing to live at a time when art had such a practical use?” And I just thought, wow—that’s such a romanticised reading. It really struck me. Are there any takeaways on the cultural-side of the Revolution that you hope readers might find?

LJ: I think the takeaway is that reading history carefully is terribly important. Even in China, there are young people who are romanticising the Cultural Revolution. It’s easy to get caught up in the romantic ideal of such movements—but only if you underplay its violence. And if the goal is some kind of revolutionary purity, as it was then, then the implications go well beyond the field of culture. I think people just need to read more history generally. Because it is very easy to make generalisations about history that are not only unhelpful for your own understanding, but also for how you approach politics and society more broadly. It’s interesting because my generation did the same thing. It was like, “Oh, the Cultural Revolution, isn’t it wonderful?” Completely misunderstanding it. Some students now might think, “well, culture got a lot of prominence,” and so on. And of course, we are living in this hyper-capitalist society where culture is just another product, which, I agree, is a terrible thing. But what you also have to understand—if you’re going to take the Cultural Revolution as any kind of ideal—is that artists and writers at the time couldn’t deviate one little bit from the political message. Those who did so got into trouble. Take the revolutionary model operas for example. The model operas were constructed so that if one was performed in one city and in a city hundreds of kilometres away, the patches on the peasants’ clothing would have to be in exactly the same place. There was no room for creativity. They were “models” in the industrial sense—something you make for replication. The replication had to be precise. And the other thing to understand about revolutionary culture—Cultural Revolutionary culture in particular—is that there is no ambiguity. There is no room for grey characters, doubters, oddballs, only villains, or heroes. They might have some sort of revelation or whatever, but there isn’t complexity. So, obviously, you couldn’t capture humanity. Because humanity is enormously complex. And really good art captures that ambiguity. You couldn’t have it.

SB: Oh, that’s such an interesting point. Another thing that really stood out to me in your account is how much the readings of Mao’s texts—which might have seemed black and white on the surface—inevitably led to so much misreading. The interpretation and misinterpretation really fuelled the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

LJ: Mao’s pronouncements could become quite oracular. A lot of his writing—things like On Contradiction, and so on—offers broad principles on which to act, and the interpretation is left up to the individual. But in China, you really shouldn’t get that interpretation wrong. Still today, the Communist Party operates more or less on this principle. You’ll often hear people talk about a jīngshén (or ‘spirit’, the ideological intent of a directive) that has come down from above. For example, the central government generally won’t issue a specific directive to the media—like “you should write about feminism this way, and not that way.” Instead, there will be a general jīngshén that talks about values, or the need for a certain kind of social guidance. Everyone at the lower levels has to try to figure out what that jīngshén actually means for them and sweat buckets in the process. Because, if they get it wrong, they get punished. That is why you often see self-censorship in China. It is much easier not to do something than to take a chance, stick your neck out. And during the Cultural Revolution, that principle was in operation but on steroids. There is just no way you would want to do anything that contradicted one of Mao’s pronouncements.

SB: This is more of a question on style. You have a real knack for wit in your writing, which is quite consistent across the work of yours that I have read. I’m curious about your use of wit when writing history. It’s an interesting pairing and an enjoyable aspect of the book!

LJ: Thank you. I think I tend to see the odd side of things. I tend to notice where things bump up against each other in strange ways. So, it’s just instinct, I think. For example, when I was at the Sydney Writers Festival in May, I was on a panel. The person leading the panel asked, “What is the difference, in your opinion, between Mao’s personality cult and Xi’s personality cult?” And the answer that just popped into my head was: “Mao had a personality!” But in fact, that actually says a lot. Because Xi’s personality cult is a construct. It’s a very carefully managed construct. Mao’s personality cult was a construct too, but it took root in society because he was a genuine revolutionary hero. To the people of China, Mao had a real legacy. They knew he had been on the Long March, they knew he had fought, that he had been through all that. He declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen. So, even though he had done some pretty shitty things—the Great Leap Forward and so on—if the goal is to create a personality cult and amplify that sense of gratitude and make a leader into even more of a god, it’s easier when you’ve got that kind of background. Whereas Xi Jinping was the son of a persecuted official, who went to the countryside like everybody else and worked his way up—obviously with a bit of help from the family name. Xi did the hard yards of being the head of this district and that province. But it’s not such an awe-inspiring story.

SB: It’s much more of a bureaucrat’s journey, isn’t it?

LJ: Yes, it’s a bureaucrat’s journey, and Mao’s was a hero’s journey. Of course, Mao’s was exaggerated in many ways. I have a slide in one of the talks I give—it shows a very famous painting of Mao at the founding of the party in 1921. He’s standing up, orating, and people are looking up at him. That’s completely ridiculous. He was a very young party member. One of the youngest, if not the youngest. He wouldn’t have been the one standing up and declaiming while everybody listened. But he was at the meeting where the Communist Party was founded. So basically, it’s a cult that’s been developed, but it’s based on real events. He was one of the founding members. By the time we get to the Cultural Revolution, the young people really did see him as a hero. The reason that’s important in the Cultural Revolution is that he was able to mobilise people based on their belief in him—the young people thought he was in trouble and swore to protect him with their lives, calling themselves Red Guards. That’s pretty amazing, right? Can you imagine a group of people on a campus today getting together and so dramatically vowing to protect Xi Jinping? It’s just very different.

SB: Yeah, absolutely. You touch on that at the end of the book, where you describe this new kind of nationalism and rose-tinted desire to go back to the Revolution. It made me think of “Make America Great Again” and other manifestations of that kind of nostalgia—the intersection of nationalism and nostalgia.

LJ: It’s very interesting. I’ve written and spoken about this, about how Trump operates by keeping everyone around him nervous, like Mao did. One moment, someone is in his favour, then they’re not. And not being in his favour is actually quite a punishment. The way Mao could just switch, and suddenly everybody else was left flat-footed. Trump does the same. Mao demanded absolute loyalty, and so does Trump. There’s a lot of comparisons to be made. One of the lectures I’ve given a couple of times is Bombard the Headquarters: From Mao to Musk. Attacking the “deep state” is very much what Mao was doing. His version of the deep state was revisionism—where things get static and the revolution stops, and it falls victim to bureaucratisation, corruption, and everything else that characterises the ‘deep state’.
        Then there’s the whole thing about mass dictatorship. Mao was inspired by what was called the Maple Bridge experience. Basically, the idea is that it’s dictatorship over the masses by the masses themselves. The ‘masses’ police each other; they dob each other in, and in some cases, they bring them to justice. That reached its apotheosis during the Cultural Revolution, where the mob was the accuser, the interrogator, and the punisher. That was mass dictatorship. When Elon Musk knew he would be in charge of DOGE, there were people on X identifying various “woke” departments or jobs in the public service, including individual staff members, a lot of them women, calling for their sacking. These posts were amplified by Musk to all his followers, and many of them responded by sending these people death threats, rape threats, etc. That, to me, follows the model of mass dictatorship. I do not think you can say Trump equals Mao, or Mao equals Trump. However, it is very useful to look at parallels, and there are plenty!

SB: Oh, that's so interesting.

LJ: I mean, the big difference is that Trump stands for nothing except himself and his ability—and his family’s ability—to grift. But Mao cared about the revolution. He did have principles. He did have a goal that was bigger than himself. Now, that doesn’t excuse what happened. But when thinking about the parallels, you have to note that Trump stands for nothing, and Mao stood for something.

SB: With that in mind, are there any myths or common misconceptions about the Cultural Revolution which you hope to have challenged or corrected with Bombard the Headquarters?

LJ: That's an interesting question. I think one of the myths I hope the book dispels is that the Cultural Revolution was entirely directed from the top. Mao and Jiang Qing. The other is that it was entirely carried out from the bottom. The Red Guards. The reality lies in the complex dance between those two forces. You can see this in moments like Mao telling the youth, “Rebellion is justified,” while Zhou Enlai follows up with, “Yes, but only according to directions from the top.” Another thing I hope readers reflect on is how easy it is, including in contemporary Western societies, to get swept up in movements that promise clear answers to big questions. But those big questions rarely have black-and-white answers. The Cultural Revolution was full of conspiracy theories, one after another. It’s important to see how people can get caught up in that kind of thinking. I also hope readers think about the many Red Guards who later regretted what they did, or who at least reflected critically on their actions. With hindsight, we can begin to understand the dangers of mass movements, of ideological fervour, and of acting without deeply questioning why we believe what we do. Young people in Australia today have access to so much more information than the Red Guards ever did. That doesn’t mean we're immune to manipulation—but it does mean we have the opportunity to be more critical, more resistant, and more thoughtful in the face of it. And that ‘it’ could be, you know, anything from evangelical Christian cults to QAnon!

SB: Thanks again for speaking with me—one last question, and a sort of cheeky one! I’ve read several of your other books, recently including Confessions of an S&M Virgin. In the introduction of that collection of essays, you reflect on your move from more journalistic work about China to writing fiction, saying that: “For me, the movement from journalism to fiction seemed inevitable. Whatever I have worked on, it has been people who have interested me the most.” Now that you’ve moved from fiction back to writing about Chinese history, I wonder, what reflections do you have on the two modes of writing and your work looking back.

LJ: I think I’m still mainly interested in people, which informs the way that I write history. But yeah, fiction is incredibly hard. I think I did get better at it as time went on. Some of the earlier work makes me cringe a little bit! I tried very hard to write a (third) novel set in China. I worked on it from the late 1980s until about four years ago. I kept putting it aside, then picking it up again. And in the end—it just wasn’t working. I finally showed it to my agent and my publisher, and they were like, “Yeah, it’s not really working.” And I said, “I know. I just don’t know how to make it work.” So, I thought, okay, let me focus on non-fiction for a while. I’m now working on The Shortest History of Madrid. I love the format of writing short histories! I do have an idea for another novel though!

by Maraya Takoniatis, Riley Landau, Nalinie See,  Kye Fisher, and  Jess van Heerden.

The 2025 Hatched exhibition is by far the most spacious iteration of the national graduate exhibition, having been relocated into a temporary venue in Forrest Chase while renovations take place at PICA. Five critics visited the exhibition, and offer their insights here on the particular works they were drawn to. For Nalinie See and Kye Fisher, Grace Yong’s 她的姓氏,一篇历史 (her name, an anthology) prompted two divergent responses to one of the central aspects of the work. Jess van Heerden examines the pastels of Silki Wong’s Grip and skatepark iconography of Nicole Goode’s Linger. Maraya Takoniatis offers a close reading of Germaine Chan’s painting It’s the Revelation along with some reflections on the upward trajectory of the exhibition from last year. Riley Landau reflects on the innovative methods of image-making used by Litia Roko and Pippini Niamh, whose respective uses of digital media and printmaking break from expectations. The 2025 Dr Harold Schenberg Arts award winners include Samuel Chan for his sculptures, of which Transfiguration is among his most impressive, Tom Duffy’s thought-provoking (yet, to my mind, somewhat unresolved) paintings Djagats (The Newly Arrived/Native Dignity), and Grace Yong’s pensive video 她的姓氏,一篇历史 (her name, an anthology). Artworks by a further 20 graduates are included in this year’s exhibition, which runs until 5 October 2025—and with the following thoughts of these critics in mind, I will certainly be revisiting before then.



Germaine Chan, It’s the Revelation

The jumble of exposed beams, air vents, and modern skylights in PICA’s Forrest Chase venue for Hatched 2025 unexpectedly elevated the annual graduate show. Finally, young artists were placed in a room that reflected the world their generation experiences: gritty, exposed and over-engineered. The context of this fresh venue gave the works greater relevance and timeliness, even though overall there was a strong material and conceptual adherence to the previous iterations of the exhibition—after all, the arts students may change, but the art educations they receive year after year primarily remain the same. One surprising development was the selection of a contemporary painting from UWA, whose Hatched contributions in recent years have evidenced a preference for students embracing less-traditional mediums (in contrast with Curtin, which routinely champions its graduating painters). UWA student and mixed media artist Germaine Chan’s contribution to Hatched, It’s the Revelation, revives historical religious painting for a contemporary context. Across her panoramic scenes, Chan’s assorted fragments of morally dubious stick-figures in ugly, human gesticulations offer a discursive reflection on contemporary inter-personal entanglements. But Chan’s genius is not in the story she tells. The real highlight of It’s the Revelation is that despite sharing with almost every other work at Hatched the feature of visually ambiguous composition, it engages this contemporary convention without compromising Chan’s idiosyncratic expression and singular artistic identity. It is this kind of artistic innovation, of using ubiquitous and stale tools to solidify one’s distinctive artistic identity, that sees Chan carving out a space for herself within—what usually feels like—a cyclical contemporary artworld. Chan’s repackaging of a ubiquitous way of working resonates with Hatched 2025, which is itself an unironic attempt to restyle the old, improving it, whilst bypassing the struggle of starting from scratch. These innovations prove that consistency does not require conformity and that Hatched may still have more to give us.
   


Litia Roko, 500mL/point

In today’s world, it’s a Sisyphean task to locate an artist who hasn’t been affected by the rise of generative artificial intelligence. A society already inundated with a crippling inability to engage in arts, now believes that meaningful images can be produced by an algorithm regurgitating probabilistic pixels and slop. It is no surprise a collective exhibition of recently graduated and emerging artists would grapple with this existential challenge. Litia Roko’s work 500 mL/point satirises this looming challenge to art practices by presenting her own cost benefit analysis of using AI. The name itself refers to the drastic water usage AI servers require to prevent themselves from combusting. The most resonant area of her video was the open criticism of the Living Museum App. This supposedly pedagogical resource claims to use AI to bring objects from the British Museum to life. The ethical authority of western programs—notorious for their wealth of stolen heritage—is already obviously problematic, yet Roko’s video intensifies the distressing qualities of rampant AI, reflecting its true scale. She draws attention to the ways that algorithms privilege the information they have been fed, and how this can be weaponised to produce narratives that obscure and mystify the truth. For instance, in 500mL/point a Moai head claims, “I love it here,” though of course it can only speak with what data it has been fed. By so openly confronting the issues that arise when artistic practice melds with generative machinery, Roko’s work leaves any viewer more assured of the absolute inherent and indispensable worth of the human element in artistic and academic practices.



Nicole Goode, Linger (grind rail) and Linger (break ramp)

Nicole Goode’s unsettling works—that is, works of unsettling—speak, wordlessly, of unbecoming. Set in negative space, the two-part performance is characterised by bared underbelly, exposed neck, and implied promises unfulfilled. It is in its “un”s, its negations, that the work becomes most concrete; the artist’s untimely body, graceful and irregular in its slowness, is less of a focal point than the disruptions that its presence creates. Linger (grind rail), Goode’s 60 minute movement performance (enacted on opening night), offered an eerie screen-to-life mirroring of Linger (break ramp), a 65-minute single-channel colour video that flickers projected from floor to ceiling upon the entry wall of PICA’s temporary warehouse abode. The live performance saw Goode entangle themselves carefully around and through the work’s metallic namesake. The steady delicateness of the artist’s extended limbs and arched frame gave the impression that Goode was supported by thickened honey. Goode’s subversive employment of skating equipment, a particularly austere steel frame exposed here and there under peeling cobalt paint, created a site of contestation. This unexpected mode of relating rendered sharply the lack of bodies and movements one anticipated. Through absence and aversion, Goode prompts the consideration of patterns of exclusion in a masculine-coded space. The discomfort afforded by Goode’s displacement was enhanced by a breakdown of typically contractual audience/performer relations. Subverting developmental logic, and reaching towards viewers with an almost unblinking gaze, Goode’s durational piece lived in the margins of social intelligibility. Disruption, however, was not manifested in distance. The artist’s bodily presence throughout Linger (grind rail) emphasised, with weighted physicality, the vulnerability implicit in “resisting expectations of movement and progress,” instilling the performance with tenderness. Softness is central, too. In Linger (break ramp), the artist tumbles down a large skate ramp (in what began as excruciatingly slow motion, until I settled into this new rhythm about ten minutes in). Goode’s performance borrows from skateboarders’ failures: the angular contortion of limbs and twisting of spines, wrapping each progression in fluidity and care. Even so, viewership is not an entirely peaceful experience. For at the heels of each gentle gesture snaps violence not yet rested into tangible form. Just as gravity seems to recognise it is robbed of crunched bone and split skin, so too is violence evoked by the slanted stares, dinged BMX bells, and chuckling leers of teenagers passing through the video’s frame. Imitation silver chains and hoodies emblazoned, like the park, with text bursting into spearheads where serifs should be, are unsettled by this quiet intervention. Goode’s temporality-warping acts of queering prompt consideration of alternative ways of being and moving within this ‘public’ space.



Grace Yong, 她的姓氏,一篇历史 (her name, an anthology)

I can’t speak for everyone, but as a Southeast Asian woman raised in Western culture, I’ve often found myself in fascinating conversations with friends about the tradition of women taking their partner’s surname. Some of us imagine keeping our birth names, others consider hyphenation, and a fair few embrace the tradition. Grace Yong’s her name, an anthology, shown at this year’s Hatched, feels like an invitation to extend those conversations through a different cultural and historical lens. Gentle and introspective, the work is elegantly and thoughtfully composed, unfolding layers of meaning that invite the viewer to pause and reflect on the art of names. The video traces the way names carry lineage, tradition, and quiet currents of power, shaped by the push and pull of matriarchal and patriarchal customs. Layering image and text, it opens space for viewers to consider not just what a name means, but how it binds us to ancestry, shapes our sense of gender, and reflects the expectations of the world we move through. In earnest, I had low expectations for this video because it initially seemed overly direct and plain; yet, there is a quiet persistence to it. It’s the kind of work that lingers in your mind, unfolding its depth slowly, like a book you return to repeatedly, noticing something new each time. At certain moments, I found myself quietly enraged and confused, particularly when Yong uses phrases like “when she became a daughter” or “when she became a wife” to describe her great-grandmother’s name change. These words highlight a disheartening reality that as women, our surnames—our link to family and legacy—rarely stay with us or pass down through the maternal line. At birth, we are our father’s daughters; in marriage, our husbands’ wives; and the children we bear carry his name. Perhaps some of my frustration mirrors that of another Hatched nominee, whose work reflects on the biological truth that a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have, formed while she is still a fetus inside her mother’s womb. In carrying a child, she also carries the potential for the eggs of her future grandchildren. But I digress. Watching Yong’s work, I felt a mixture of hurt, confusion, and indignation, torn between respect for tradition and frustration with a social practice that often feels arbitrary. However, I should clarify that I am not here to dictate whether anyone should keep, change, or hyphenate their surname; it is a deeply personal choice and one I remain uncertain of myself. Still, the work leaves you with a lingering awareness of how deeply names shape identity, lineage, and those quiet, often invisible, structures of gender in our lives.



Grace Yong, 她的姓氏,一篇历史 (her name, an anthology)

Nalinie See and I largely agree on points regarding Yong’s her name, an anthology (2024), but arrived at radically different conclusions. See states her angst at the fact that Yong describes her ah zo’s (great-grandmother's) names only in terms of her relationship with men, thereby categorising her only insofar as she exists within a patriarchal hierarchy. Superficially, this argument holds ground, since the narrator of the video, ostensibly Yong herself, states that her ah zo’s name (originally 张引治 (zhang Yin Zhi)), is pronounced in Hokkien to sound like “to attract or welcome brothers,” describing her parents’ desire for successive male children, while she later assumed the moniker 彭秀贤 (Peng Xiu Xian), having married into her husband’s family. Critically however, the voice-over is accompanied by intimate closeup shots of Chinese calligraphy, including of her ah zo’s name and family photographs. While the act of naming, writing/inscribing and photography all presuppose permanence and categorisation, by articulating objects within prevailing systems, Yong instead displays them in moments of flux—dissolving their associated hierarchies. This is most explicit in two places at the end of the video in which calligraphy and names collide. In the first instance, Yong writes her ah zo’s old name, Yin Zhi, and the name Peng Yu Zhi (彭玉治) in two separate columns. Since Peng Yu Zhi was another member of the Peng family, with a similar forename to Yong’s ah zo, the latter was forced to change her first name as well as surname upon marriage. Critically, slippage is introduced into the scene by the fact that Yong crosses her ah zo’s former name out, and instead sandwiches her new name above and below the old. This is only amplified by the next shot, as Yong uses water to again write the first iteration of her ah zo’s name, only for it to dry and disappear, before writing over it again with her new name. Hence, in both instances both the act of writing, as well as calligraphy are ridden with ambivalence, through crossing out or vanishing. Hence, even while Yong is presenting her ah zo in relation to men, the ambivalence introduces a moment of slippage and indeterminacy, utterly undermining those self-same categorical structures she describes. Where See sees this as a fault, I would argue that it is the power of the work.



Pippini Niamh, Come to the Table

Printmaking occupies a unique niche in the history of art. The delightfully strange effect of printmaking, combined with its easy reproducibility, has led to its use in protest and to disseminate information. It is in this unique social history that Niamh situates her practice. Composed of two separate works, Niamh’s contributions to Hatched consist of a large black and white print, alongside the original woodblock which produced it. This is a quiet and yet considered inversion of printmaking practices, where too often the woodblock matrix is treated as a by-product. Niamh embraces the visibility of a creative process and celebrates the processual history of her prints. Furthermore, Niamh refutes the traditional wooden block by carving into the surface of a found wooden table instead of a discardable cube. Together, the print and the found-table-turned-matrix leaves a memorable image. Two chairs flank the table, one slightly ajar and inviting viewers to sit. With the work at the table is a question left unanswered. The print is gorgeous, detailing an overflowing banquet inscribed with the opening of the Lord’s Prayer ‘Give us today our daily bread.’ The abundant reference to food and other text swirling over the prints speaks to the vast question of global food equality that pervades our contemporary age. Altogether, a stunning reinvention of a popular medium—Niamh offers an engaging and meaningful contribution to Hatched.




Silki Wong, Grip

Grip floods me with a rush of sweet and arbitrary memories. In its wrinkled fabric I encountered the comforting banality of my grandmother’s apartment, where most of my early childhood was spent. I forgot, until seeing this work, the amber beads she kept on her dresser but never wore, and the parsley she grew on her balcony, sundrenched in its terracotta pot. Perhaps it is the soft colours that drew me back to this long-ago space of safety. Banners of pale periwinkle, soft sage, and inviting indigo float cloudlike from wooden poles. Hanging both upwards and downwards they are unmoved by the hurry of wind or gravity, giving them the kind of fond aloofness that one encounters in practiced daydreamers. It is in this quiet way that Silki Wong’s unassuming pastels dissolve thresholds of forgetfulness. Seemingly free of the demands of a bustling world, they become gently tethered reference points for well-worn comforts passed. I feel sure that where I meet again worn green sofas and tins of cross-stitch thread, others beside me waft through their own sacred collections of chocolate wrapper treasures. Wong’s coloured fabric rectangles shine through their snowy veils, illuminated as the stained glass shadows cast by spring leaves in the morning sun. Beautiful and wilted, the work is lit from within by the warmest golden threads that draw together eight billion everydays.

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Images courtesy of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Documentation photos by Rebecca Mansell.

by Tara Heffernan.

I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders.

— Thomas Bernhard, Extinction, 1986.

We study “power,” but without any interrogation of the kinds of power embedded in the assumption that our institutionalized role is one of endless, infinite “critique.”

— Catherine Liu, “External Compliance, Internal Defiance,” 2024.

From the mass strike to the go-slow, refusing work has long been a tactic within labour movements. However, in the wake of the 1960s counterculture, this refusal was often aestheticised; stripped of its collective dimension and recast as an individual lifestyle choice. Rather than emphasise the importance of dignity in the workplace and pride in work—values earlier working-class movements championed[1]—many on the New Left embraced a complete rejection, or refusal to work as a political stance in and of itself. TCB’s current exhibition Sneak Out (19 July – 17 August 2025) offers a telling contemporary manifestation of this attitude. According to the blurb, the exhibition was inspired by “counter-social responses”[2] to the pressures of contemporary work and home life—sneaking out, time-stealing, and quiet-quitting.
        Many of the works exhibited consider aesthetic features of the white-collar workplace. For example, Ella Valentine’s assisted readymade It’s like a receipt of my brain (2025) features a welcome mat. The homogenised surface of heavily textured, tightly bound dreadlocks of fabric are presented for close inspection at eye level. Scraps of paper bearing drawings and scrawled notes curl off the edges of the carpet like bleached tongues. There’s something of the three-ring binder writer about it—the exertion of creative energy in frustrated doodlings during work hours. Remember, French novelist and art critic J.K. Huysmans drafted his novels from his desk at the Ministry of the Interior, altering their letterhead to read “Ministry of the Interior Life.” Conventionally, the welcome mat provides a surface upon which to discard debris carried underfoot—an often-futile attempt to maintain the boundary between the inside and outside; the personal from the semi-private/semi-public bureaucratic environment of the workplace. Elevating the ground—in this case, homogenous office turf—to the verticality of art, turns the carpet into a horizontal landscape: the non-space of white-collar labour that encourages regulated civility.
        Modelled on the dome convex mirrors found in shops and street corners, Chloe Nolan’s Interior #1 and Interior #2 (both 2025) depict warped, fictive office spaces. A surveillance staple, the convex dome condenses multiple lines of sight into a single field. From the Arnolfini Portrait’s embedded mirror to avant-gardist optical tricks that mesmerised the early twentieth century bourgeois, the device has shaped ways of seeing. Nolan’s mirrors hold sparse scenes: bold lines and block colours render the banal architecture of contemporary labour in a sterile pop style—Howard Arkley meets Mike Judge’s Office Space.
        Grace Connors’s opening-night spoken word performance, Keith—drawn from a broader performance series based on her experiences working for a debt collector and as a witness to a company CEO’s odd speech at an EOFY party—channels the swaggering, hard-edged rhetoric of capitalism’s hustlers and middle-management gangsters. The brash machismo of these flawed characters is a jarring departure from the rest of the show, which deals mostly in the softened yet still malevolent euphemisms of the HR-sanitised workplace.
        Curator Paul Boyé provides a densely written curatorial agenda which makes bold, though rather scattered, claims. In line with the theme, it seems that Boyé “quiet-quit” before proof-reading. It begins: “‘Sneak Out’ pathologies [pathologises?][3] the blurred boundaries between home and work spaces as domains of limit, and looks to heighten and/or mitigate anxieties around such spaces.” Though the syntactic muddiness and conceptual redundancy are consistent with much art writing today, there’s a lot going on in this sentence. "Pathologi[s]es" is vague without a clear subject or mechanism—the sentence gestures toward criticality but doesn’t clearly establish what exactly is being rendered pathological, by whom, or to what end. "Domains of limit", while it has an appealing psychoanalytic gloss, is an opaque nominal construction lacking semantic precision. The phrase "heighten and/or mitigate anxieties" reflects muddled rhetorical intent, collapsing opposing actions into an uncommitted formulation. Moreover, despite dressing in the garb of lofty, poststructuralist discourse, “heighten and/or mitigate,” with the disjunctive conjunction, also echoes the therapeutic solutionist language of the managerial class.
        It’s tiresome to quibble over grammar and punctuation. It is content that matters. Pedantry about things like spelling, punctuation, and pronunciation is usually a tell for rule-lovers who balk at sincere intellectual curiosity. That said, when over-writing is used to craft the illusion of conceptual complexity, it is difficult to ignore. It is form as content. Moreover, this use of linguistic flair and (stilted) labyrinthine sentence structure reflects the forms of white-collar work—or subversions of work—sanctioned within professional class workplaces that thrive on symbolic capital.
        Dan Bourke’s featured series Values (2025) specifically addresses the use of language, and the ideological conditioning promulgated in white-collar workplaces. The works consist of stuffed animals sourced from second hand retailers, suspended from the ceiling in three bulbousy columns. Lettering affixed to each spell out words often touted by Australian art institutions: INTEGRITY, DIVERSITY, RESPECT. In a recent review, Francis Russell aptly examined Bourke’s conflation of cuteness and buzzwords as a reflection on managerial kitsch: the symbolic, aesthetic and rhetorical gloss of inspirational, human-centered and morally upright language used in workplace culture.[4] By suspending these plush mascots of virtue mid-air, Bourke exposes the soft furnishings of managerial ideology—the way language in the contemporary workplace is padded, packaged, and displayed for effect.
        One of the most distinctive bears in Bourke’s arrangement is patterned with love hearts and peace symbols, an icon of the hippie generation. Its foot touches the gallery floor. No other toy makes contact. Though likely inadvertent, it strikes me as a “grounded” critique not only of work culture, but of the rhetoric the exhibition extols. Championing free love, preaching anti-establishment rebellion, and launching full-throated attacks on the family as a patriarchal and repressive construct, the utopian idealism of 1970s hippie flower power laid the foundations for today’s cultural climate of individualism, extended adolescence, and the erosion of any meaningful distinction between art and life, aesthetics and politics. One of the more emblematic slogans to emerge from this moment was Timothy Leary’s mantra: “TUNE IN. TURN ON. DROP OUT.” Debuting in 1967, the slogan quickly circulated through underground press, featuring on posters and pamphlets associated with the psychedelic and anti-establishment movements. However, Leary, a former Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic evangelist, was less interested in systemic critique than in personal transcendence via LSD. Though his call to “drop out” became a popular shorthand for resistance, for most of his followers, this break from normative society was more symbolic than structural. These were not the original “dropouts” for whom the term was coined, those expelled or excluded from educational institutions, working life, and social legitimacy, but rather individuals who could afford to romanticise nonconformity. Leary’s rhetorical sleight of hand allowed this privileged class to cosplay rejection, collapsing the figure of the dispossessed with that of the bohemian, and in doing so, aestheticise marginality without confronting its material stakes.
        Like “drop out”, “sneak out” is an infantilising term: it recalls schoolchildren playing hooky, or suburban teens climbing out the window at night. Just like the child who slips away from school to loiter in public, or the teenager who quietly exits the family home to get clumsily fingered in a night-sheathed playground—both eventually returning to their disciplinary structures, ideally undetected—so too does the worker re-enter their workplace, their micro-act of dissent absorbed without notice, allowing their normative relationship to capitalism to remain intact.
        Infantilising, but also in line with the cadence of managerial neologism, sneaking out, quiet-quitting, and time stealing all suggest illicit behaviour—yet crucially, they also evoke a calculated navigation of disciplinary risk. What happens when one abdicates their responsibilities in the workplace? Perhaps, if we occupy bullshit jobs,[5] there are no repercussions. However, sometimes others take on the burden.[6] At best, quiet-quitting, sneaking out and time stealing are therapeutic—but ultimately superficial and likely counterproductive—solutions to broader problems with work and managerial culture. At worst, they function as a way to flaunt one’s relative lack of precarity with affected nonchalance.
        In their 1972 book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb tell the stories of working-class people in America during the late 1960s. One common experience shared by their upwardly mobile subjects is surprise at the nonchalance of their middle-class born co-workers. “A poor man,” the authors explain, “has to want upward mobility in order to establish dignity,” while for the educated, presumably born with dignity, “their status means they can cheat.”[7] Demonstrating its continuity, Catherine Liu reiterated in 2023: “Working class children of all races were told by parents or grandparents that obeying rules was a mode of survival in a world that was hostile to their interests.” Thus, “the countercultural disdain for squares,” often harboured by the children of the well-off, typically carries “class-based contempt.”[8]
        The iconic film Nightcleaners (1975) provides a telling historical anchor in the exhibition, illuminating the cleavage between pre- and post-‘68 attitudes towards work. The documentary, by the Berwick Street Film Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott, and Humphry Trevelyan), follows a campaign to unionise women night cleaners in London office buildings during the early 1970s. It intercuts nocturnal footage of women cleaning under harsh fluorescents with shaky scenes of union meetings. Fragments of conversation reveal the spillage between the women’s paid work and their unpaid domestic labour.
        Many critics have noted that—due to its lack of resolution, eschewal of a narrative or clear political message—tensions arose between the filmmakers, workers, and unionists involved in the project. “The film doesn’t fulfil the messianic functions the organized Left ... require of a film,” argued Lucy Waugh, a feminist featured in the film. “Our struggle,” she continued, “is ... as much with the Left as it is with the film making tradition.”[9] Though a compelling document, in retrospect, the film’s ambiguity and self-referentiality read as a kind of acquiescence to the broader post-’68 treatment of “work” as a floating signifier, untethered from the Old Left’s understanding of work as primarily productive labour. In the film, work is anchored both in its literal subject matter, feminised labour, and in the meta role of the documentary as artistic labour. This is made visible through self-reflexive techniques that foreground the film’s status as a representational, ideologically loaded medium: shots of clapperboards, editing tables, slow motion, extreme close-ups of strained faces, and warping effects that muddy sound and vision. This self-conscious formalism risks draining urgency from its subject, leaving the cleaners’ struggle suspended in an abstract play of signs—a symptom of the post-’68 retreat from labour’s material conditions into the insulated circuits of avant-garde discourse.
        The retreat into formalism, where the representation of labour eclipses its material stakes, is taken to an extreme in a Cronenbergian sculpture by Oliver Hull. In Admin mimes entropy (the monotony of inner movements seize upon fleeting visions) (2025), Hull has practiced self-surveillance, measuring the capacity of the artist’s hand. The sculpture consists of two mounted industrial devices linked to a metal junction box, their conduits snaking like veins or umbilical cords. Each clock-like circular face displays the numbers 1–9. These numbers light up seemingly at random. The order, however, is determined by the artist’s “cognitive fingerprint,” based on sequences manually entered every five minutes over several days. Though Hull aimed to pick numbers at random, when analysed, these inputs revealed the human bias toward pseudo-randomness and apophenia—the tendency to perceive and impose patterns even in acts intended to be arbitrary. entropy echoes the surrealist explorations of the inner psyche, but in a Ballardian register that reveals its limits through sophisticated data analysis. It critiques artwork—an ideologically loaded compound noun—through exposing the poverty of the human mind when it is liberated entirely from meaning and romanticised as free. Even creative attempts at chaos and ambiguity are usually driven by something concealed, ideological, idiosyncratic, and entirely unconscious.
        In Hull’s work, the act of making becomes less about engaging with the material conditions of labour and more about tracing the artist’s own cognitive residue—a clever move that, in its austerity, coyly parodies both the contemporary obsession with mining (and revealing) inner worlds, and the post-’68 withdrawal from the shop floor into the closed loops of avant-garde introspection. The question of skill itself comes into focus, and with it, the shifting stakes of what counts as labour today. Manual labour, long considered low- to no-skill work, still requires competence with the tools. Art and intellectual work, however, have been thoroughly de-skilled. As a credentialed member of the managerial class, you can swap a verb for a noun and, unfortunately, few people will notice. However, for the janitorial staff, using a mop on carpet likely won’t go unremarked upon.

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Footnotes:

1. Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 33.

2. This is in stark contrast to the Old Left, who could be described as pro-social. The Old Left promoted collectivist ideals through labour unions and advocated for universal welfare systems and state planning for the common good. They saw the working class as the key agent of change and viewed “the social” as a shared realm of solidarity against capitalist individualism. Catherine Liu recently reflected on the role of social life for the working class: “people for whom failure is ... future destroying have few resources to fall back on when they are rejected or do poorly at work. Building strong social bonds creates the much-touted ‘resilience’ so often invoked in discussions of adversity, whether in business or in life... The Professional Managerial Types who tout resilience have learned to instrumentalize depersonalization.” Catherine Liu, “Don’t take it personally: the advice on rejection,” CLiuAnon (Substack), May 24, 2023, https://substack.com/@cliuanon/p-123309479, (subscriber-only).

3. The original text contains the irregular use “pathologies.” This might be intended as an artful grammatical bending, treating a noun as though it were an active verb. 

4. Made to withstand crushing hugs and rough handling, these toys seem to coyly acknowledge the growing infantilisation of adults, particularly under the dogma of social justice language. The craze for collectibles, plushies, and tiny pets points to a generation freed from traditional family roles, finding ersatz “families” in workplaces and professional networks.

5. Magdalena Soffia, Alex J. Wood, and Brendan Burchell, “Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs,” Work, Employment, and Society, vol. 36, no.5 (2022), 816-840.

6. A fun coincidence poetically aligned with the theme: when I visited TCB during opening hours and waited outside for 30 minutes with the scrawled promise of “back in 5” keeping me, another person working in the building let me in. The gallery-minder didn’t reappear during my hour visit.   

7. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), 22.

8. Catherine Liu, “External Compliance, Internal Defiance”, CLiuAnon (Substack),November 1, 2024, cliuanon.substack.com/p/external-compliance-internal-defiance (subscriber-only)

9. Lucy Waugh quoted in Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: Documentary Grierson and Beyond, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2008), 197.  

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Images of Sneak Out (Dan Bourke, Grace Connors, Oliver Hull, Chloe Nolan, Ella Valentine, Berwick Street Collective. Curated By Paul Boyé) at TCB Gallery, 19 July 2025 – 17 Aug 2025. Photography by Nina Rose Prendergast.

By Chance, Li Gang

by Sam Beard.

This text is published in collaboration with Guan Kan Journal. Find out more about Guan Kan here.

On a hot, humid afternoon in June 2024, famed Chinese painter Qi Zhilong welcomed a group of UWA students into his Beijing studio. I was tagging along on a trip organised by Tami Xiang and Darren Jorgensen. For days we’d been crisscrossing Beijing, visiting crowded studios and white-walled galleries, meeting and interviewing artists. After days of unfamiliar sights, Qi Zhilong’s studio stopped me short. I’d been here before, five years earlier, on the same student program. Familiar sculptures stood across the concrete floor. Paintings, some works in progress, leaned against the grey studio walls. Recognised for his ironic paintings of revolutionary women dressed in Mao-era attire, Qi became one of leading figures in China’s 1980s Gaudy Art and Political Pop movements. After discussing his works with the students, Qi led us downstairs to a lunch he and his wife had prepared for us. In the basement of his studio-home, an alcove was set up with drums, synths, and a long Mongolian horn. As we chowed down on a late lunch and drank, Qi and his friends began jamming—long improvisations with Qi playing a droning bass, while fellow artists played the horn, synths, and drums. The players soon swapped instruments with students, pausing only to eat, drink, and smoke as the long jam played on.
        At some point, I was waved over to a conversation. Darren and the man who had been stoically twiddling the synth were both leaning back on monobloc chairs, chatting and sipping baijiu. The musician was Li Gang, who, it turns out, is also an artist. Li was surprised to learn we were from Western Australia and quickly explained that he had studied in Perth in the 1990s. He asked what I did. “I write art criticism,” I replied. Again, to my surprise Li began sharing stories about the late critic David Bromfield (who had only recently passed away), sculptor Tony Jones, and Li’s own exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). Li recounted one particular story I’ve heard several times: of a painting by George Haynes depicting Bromfield as a chicken being strangled by the artist (or at least that’s how I remember it!). In a sprawling city of 21 million people, on a trip where the itinerary shifted at a moment’s notice, kicking back and listening to artworld tales from ’90s Perth felt utterly surreal.
        We stayed in touch, and what follows are some of Li’s reminiscences of his time studying at the Claremont School of Art in the early 1990s, alongside images he kept from those years. This chance meeting reminded me, in stark clarity, that while it may be entertaining to amuse ourselves with Perth’s isolation and size, in reality the city has always been a cosmopolitan place (how much so varying only on one's perspective and definition), perhaps even long before it thought of itself as such. However, for all its cosmopolitanism, the Perth Li arrived in was a troubled place for the Asian diaspora community. In the late 1980s, a wave of racist poster campaigns and violent attacks targeted Asian businesses, perpetrated by members of Perth’s Neo-Nazi group, the Australian Nationalist Movement. Led by the moustachioed racist Peter Joseph “Jack” Van Tongeren, the group was linked to the firebombing of several Chinese restaurants across the city. Yet, Li recalls a kinder experience—of the generosity of fellow students and teachers who helped him settle in and advance his studies. Eventually, Li moved to Melbourne before returning to Beijing, having recognised the limitations of Perth’s artworld for sculptors and the difficulties he faced exhibiting his work within its then-conservative gallery circuit.

The following is based on an interview with Li taken several months after our initial meeting.

Li Gang: Actually, the first time I tried to go to Kansas City in America, but my application to art school there was rejected, then I applied for art school in Adelaide. My third application was to Perth. A friend of my father at the time, she knew some people organising English lessons at a school called Buckland College. So, I got a visa and came to Perth. I had never heard about Perth; only Melbourne, Sydney, maybe Brisbane, something like that. I was quite dramatic at the time, having applied twice to study art and being rejected. So, for the third application, I decided to change subject and study mechanics. I think it was 4 October 1990 that I arrived in Perth. I attended Buckland College to study English, as well as mechanics. I lived in Mosman Park and cycled to the college which was only 10 minutes away.
        I didn't like mechanics. At the same time, I had a friend who was studying with me at Buckland College. He was a painter, often painting portraits. He had a girlfriend, and the pair encouraged me to study art. Another painter friend, Perdita Phillips—I still remember her well, she was very nice. I told her too that I wanted to study art. She checked the newspaper, found a class at the Claremont School of Art, saying, “today's your last day to enrol!” So, she rushed me there—we drove down and I enrolled. By day, I would study my English, still learning words for the mechanics classes—“gearbox”, “windscreen wiper”, and so on—and every Thursday night from 6 to 8pm, I would attend sculpture classes. I studied with Tony Jones. He taught me how to make clay figures and armatures. Tony gave me a good mark, which helped me to apply for full-time study. I'm really grateful to Tony and Perdita for this.


I really wanted to study art full-time, but I was told that I couldn't change in the middle of my mechanics class. Then, the following week, Buckland College, where I was studying, suddenly went bankrupt! Suddenly the school no longer existed. Apparently, the principal's wife took the money to gamble in Singapore and lost it all. It was big news at the time: the first private college to go bankrupt in Perth, apparently. So now I had an opportunity to change from mechanics to art! I had to pass an English test, so it took me another six months to start at the Claremont School of Art, but I eventually did. I took my portfolio—including sculptures I made during that initial class with Tony Jones and photos of work I made in China—down to the School and met with Robin Phillips, who was a senior lecturer there. He thought it was very good. I'm really grateful to Robin for accepting me. In China, you have to sit a drawing exam. Here, I was able to get in just through this meeting with Robin.
        I studied there for three years, even taking some art history classes. That subject was the most difficult, because I had read about contemporary art and modern art history, but in Chinese, so while I remembered all those names—the Impressionists, Cubists, etc—I had to relearn. But I passed, no problem. It's a long story, but to get into the Claremont School, it was a big moment for my art career. I remember all those people very well: Tony Jones, Robin Phillips, Arthur Kalamaras, John Fairhall, Rosemary Hunter and Drew Armstrong, who both taught art history. Rosemary was very nice—she knew I had a hard time with English, so helped me a lot.
        Before coming to Perth, in China the door was still closed to a lot of Western art. So we never really had the opportunity to see many big shows. The only big exhibition I remember in Beijing was a Robert Rauschenberg show in 1986 or something like that. That was the first contemporary show I remember seeing in China. It was a big shock to us. But in Perth, I remember a very big Picasso show, and an exhibition called Mao Goes Pop, which was the first time they brought Chinese contemporary art to Perth, I think. A lot of great photography shows too. Tony Jones would encourage me to participate in competitions. He also introduced me to Gomboc Gallery and helped me to get my work in their sculpture park.


At the School, we'd hold these barbecues sometimes and talk about art and politics, and get a little drunk. And I would talk a lot—maybe a little too much! But it was a really great time for us to connect. Every Saturday we'd buy the newspaper and read the reviews by David Bromfield. There were a few critics, and every student would read them and talk about them in class the next week. At that time, PICA had only just opened. I remember seeing some Japanese minimalist art there. It was beautiful in that big space. I remember this Hong Kong guy who did a performance downstairs where he would cook for you—you'd make an order, and he'd cook for you, and learn about culture through cooking. And one Japanese artist used a big boat carved in wood and filled it up with water, in the boat—it was fantastic! There were a lot of different people around. One of the things I liked about the School was there were people of all different ages—one guy who studied sculpture was 80 or something. All these different people, with different backgrounds, bringing their knowledge to the School. After my three years of study in Perth, I moved to Melbourne to study for two years at the Victorian College of Art. Most of the students at the VCA were young students who had just graduated from high school. I missed the diversity of people that was at Claremont—mixing with a lot of interesting people with different backgrounds.
        In Perth at that time, it was very hard to find opportunities to show my work. On the campus, there was a gallery to show your work, where we held a few shows. At the time, near PICA, there was a small space called Arthouse Gallery, which was a gallery for fresh people like me. I rented galleries a few times and held shows with friends. The Moores Building in Fremantle was also a space we would have shows in—our second or third show. Because I was a sculpture major, I would show mostly at Gomboc Gallery. Some teachers of mine would show there, like Claire Bailey. Big metal figurative work was popular at the time. I had some figurative work, but most of mine was more abstract. Abstract sculpture was harder to show in Perth at that time. People liked the figurative stuff, like Hans Arkeveld, Tony Jones, Claire Bailey, Stuart Elliot. They were all very popular and dominated sculpture then. For me, a Chinese student, I figured that—given the limitations to show my work—I should try and study elsewhere. I was thinking of Sydney or Melbourne. I asked my art history teacher Rosemary, and she recommended Melbourne. It was better than Sydney, she said. Rosemary Hunter gave me a lot of help. Sometimes she would give night classes. She would drop me off afterwards at my place on Newcastle Street in Perth, even though she lived in Nedlands. I'm still very grateful for that, and remember her small Honda.


Before I came to Perth, I worked in a factory in Beijing. It was a tricycle factory. That’s where I learned welding and would use square metal and offcuts to make sculptures at night in Beijing. It was photographs of those sculptures that I showed Robin to get into the Claremont School. At the School, I focused on sculpture, making many bronzes. I remember on the day I went to enrol, I looked through the sculpture department—through the glass doors—and saw a big bronze figure standing there, like two metres tall. I was very impressed, and I told myself, well, I want to learn how to make bronze sculptures. Later, I learned that it was my teacher's work, Arthur Kalamaras. He taught us how to make models with the wax and cast the bronzes. After studying at the VCA, I went back to China and set up a studio for metal sculpting. Lots of welding and that sort of thing. Around the same time, I set up a bronze foundry in Beijing. I based it on the setup I learned from at the Claremont School. We’d make the wax models and take them to Wembley Tech once a month, which had a small foundry.
        At the same time as all of that bronze casting, I was really interested in welding. There was a metalworking area with piles of old metal that nobody used. The metals were donated from the shipyards—offcuts and other items. I was one of the first students to use that old material. Another was John Grono, who used metal and cement. He’d make these large armatures and set them in cement, big and heavy. I focused on metalwork, casting bronzes and welding. For three years, I made sculptures that were half-figurative, half-abstract. I exhibited some of these at Arthouse Gallery, which David Bromfield saw and wrote about—that was fantastic!


There was a studio out the back of the sculpture department at the School. In that shed, I could do a lot of welding and grinding, and make a lot of noise. I remember all the technicians really well. We’d borrow the tools from one tech, Paul Hutchins, who was Welsh and managed the tools. Every morning at 9 am, we’d go to his room to borrow tools—goggles, grinders, and welding machines. By 4 pm, Paul would come out with a notebook to collect the tools. Sometimes we wouldn’t like to see him! When he showed up, that would mean we’d have to stop working and return the equipment. He’d be very strict. “Give the tools back! Now it’s time to leave.” That’s Paul! But I liked him. He’d teach us how to use the tools safely. He was fantastic. After nearly three years, we used most of the old metal there. But people would often donate junk before it was thrown out. We’d use old cookers or things like that. For one sculpture, I used parts from an old motorcycle that Claire Bailey left there. I brought that sculpture from Perth to Melbourne, before shipping it to Beijing. Now, it’s still in my apartment in Beijing. I might have to send you some photographs. Alright. Ciao, ciao!

My sincere thanks to Li for generously sharing his memories and archive.

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Images courtesy of Li Gang.

Nazila Jahangir, Immigration

by Sam Beard.

Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, in his writings on the subject of translation, proposed three modes of translation: interlingual, or a “word-for-word” translation of a text from one language to another; intralingual, in which the translation expands to “rewording” the text to reflect the tone, mood, and register of the original language; and intersemiotic, in which a text is “translated” into another form or medium, such as a film adaptation of a play. This third form—the intersemiotic—holds particular potency when thinking through a series of buzzwords often used when discussing contemporary art: that a work considers or speaks to a subject, or tells a story. Here, we see the conflation of subject with narrative, confused, one might say, through the intersemiotic translation of the artwork into description.
        While this tension between art objects and the words we use to organise and communicate our thoughts on them has its own literature, rarely does it seem that critics approach their craft with a rhetorical style that, through any consistency, affirms to the reader an appreciation of this tension. On the other hand, such word games easily become distractions from addressing the work in earnest. What happens when the tension betweenlanguage and image is itself the tension at the heart of a work? For painter Nazila Jahangir, a silent prefix—mis—stands before interpretation: the desire to “read” her paintings, to narrativise them, is matched by an equal hesitation to “misread” them. This uneasiness underpins Jahangir’s exhibition of hyperreal paintings, Immigration, held earlier this year at Stala Contemporary.
        Iranian-born Nazila Jahangir moved to Australia in 2019, before studying her MFA at the University of Western Australia. The campus itself is a source of visual imagery for Jahangir, with various buildings and locations appearing in her paintings, alongside other sites around Perth/Boorloo. The ten paintings comprising Immigration attest to Jahangir’s skill as a hyperrealist painter, their surfaces rendered in oil with a slick, satin, dreamlike finish. Art historical motifs abound—a translator’s delight—tempting the viewer to “read” the works as odes or homages to the history of art. Yet they remain distinctly removed from such didactic interpretations.
        Immigration – Annunciation is one such example. Two figures—a double self-portrait—are depicted in the poses of Gabriel and Mary, blending elements of Leonardo da Vinci’s and Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciations (c. 1472 and c. 1489, respectively). From da Vinci, Jahangir borrows the positioning and spacing of the figures, along with their outdoor setting. From Botticelli’s more dramatic rendition, she reimagines the dynamic poses. While da Vinci’s scene occurs in an enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus—a Christian symbol of seclusion, purity, and paradise—Botticelli’s takes place within an interior space. Jahangir’s hortus conclusus is the UWA grounds. But this is no symbol of virginal purity. Instead, a hot, dry heat seems to beat down on the pair, both clad in silky black nighties. Jahangir’s “Mary” dons dark sunnies (perhaps she’s hungover) and beach thongs, while precariously leaning back on a bentwood chair (shocked by the appearance of her doppelgänger, perhaps). As you can see, even in describing the scene, the temptation to narrativise—to spin stories that go well beyond the symbolic cues that titillate the mind toward interpretation—is almost inescapable.
        Jahangir describes this blend of familiar and unfamiliar imagery as a mix of “external and internal” motifs, combining memories and objects she brought with her from Iran with the sites and scenes of Perth/Boorloo. Infused with her adroit surrealist tendencies, the paintings strike me as hyperreal—but not in the typical artworld sense. Unlike the photorealism of Chuck Close or Robert Bechtle, Jahangir’s paintings recall Umberto Eco’s usage of the term in his essay Travels in Hyperreality, where he applies it to Madame Tussauds wax museums—where Abe Lincoln fraternises with JFK—and to casino replicas of iconic buildings from around the world. For Eco, the hyperreal is not merely a copy offering a one-to-one equivalence with an original (i.e. a lifelike JFK); rather, the hyperreal travels beyond reality, distorting and surpassing it. In Jahangir’s paintings, double likenesses surprise one another, hairdos defy gravity, and religious iconography is mimicked through contemporary hyper-localisms. These parts converge in unexpected ways, forming a subtle, interrelated chaos. It is the beyond-reality-ness of many of Jahangir’s paintings that might leave one uncomfortably tempted to describe them as surrealist. It is also their hyperreal qualities that invoke the sense that something is being lost in translation—that a slippage has occurred.
        In this sense, the works elegantly realise Jahangir’s ambition to “show”, not “tell”, a migrant experience—where memories of the familiar meet the strangeness of the new, and where, as Homi K. Bhabha describes, the self is constantly in translation. What is most interesting to me about Jahangir’s overall project is that—rather than explaining or describing the experience—its ultimate aim appears to be the evocation of this intersemiotic confusion in the viewer.

Nazila Jahangir, Immigration, Stala Contemporary, 12 April – 11 May 2025.

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Image credits:

1. Nazila Jahangir, Immigration – Annunciation, 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm.

2. Nazila Jahangir, Immigration – Waiting for Godot, 2024, oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm.

3. Nazila Jahangir, Immigration – Chasing a Butterfly, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm.