SYDNEY. SATURDAY 2 FEB 2019. 2.00PM – 3.30PM

The first Please Explain panel for 2019 reflects on Xiao Lu’s practice and examines the representation and misrepresentation of gender in contemporary Chinese art. Considering exhibition histories both nationally within China and internationally as part of the wider art community the panel will debate and dissect how museological and curatorial structures have contributed to how gender has been portrayed in contemporary art from China. This event is part of our public programming for Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue 肖鲁:语嘿, part of Sydney Festival 2019.

Speakers:  Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Kelly Doley (moderator), Luise Guest, Shao Yiyang and Xiao Lu.

Join us from 1.30PM at 4A for a special pre-exhibition tour conducted by visiting Beijing-based curator Alia Lin.

Speaker Profiles: 

| Moderator: Kelly DOLEY

| Kelly Doley is a Scottish-Australian artist and curator living and working on Gadigal land (Sydney). She is currently Deputy Director, UNSW Galleries and member of artist collective Barbara Cleveland.

| Chun Yin Rainbow CHAN
| Chun Yin Rainbow Chan works across music, performance and installation. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Sydney, Rainbow is interested in mistranslations, diaspora and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society. Her research engages with the authentic and the copy, exploring sites of exchange and desire which complicate Western notions of originality and appropriate consumption. Central to Rainbow’s work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global media. Her work positions the fake as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values and contemporary commodity production.

Tying together her works across installation and pop music is the relationship between nostalgia, migration and identity. She released her debut record Spacings (Silo Arts & Records) in 2016, which was feature album on FBi Radio, Radio Adelaide & RTRFM. She’s been nominated for numerous awards including FBi SMAC 2016 for Best Live Act, Record of the Year, and AIR 2017 Best Dance/Electronica Album. Her stunning single “Let Me” won SMAC Best Song of 2017.

Rainbow has performed extensively including live appearances at Sydney Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Old and New Art, Iceland Airwaves and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her installations have been exhibited with Firstdraft Gallery, Liquid Architecture, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Longli International New Media Arts Festival, China.

| Luise GUEST
| Luise Guest is the Manager of Research for the White Rabbit Collection, currently the largest ongoing collection of contemporary Chinese art internationally. A writer, researcher and art educator – and a very bad student of Chinese – Luise writes regularly about Chinese art for The Art Life. Her book Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China was published by Piper Press in 2016. Luise’s current research project examines Chinese women artists whose work subverts and reinvents traditions of ink painting.

| SHAO Yiyang 
| SHAO Yiyang is a professor of Art history and theory, deputy chair of School of Humanities at Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. She received her Ph.D in 2003 from the Department of Art history and Theory at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on modern and contemporary art and theory including most recently in Chinese, Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art (2019), Modern and Contemporary Art in the 20th Century (2018), as well as ‘Whither Art History?’. Art Bulletin (June 2016), and ‘The Inernational Identity of Chinese Art Theoretical Debates on Chinese Contemporary Art in the 1990s’ in Jason C. Kuo ed, Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted (2013).

| Alia LIN 

Alia Lin was born in Hohhot, China in 1990. She graduated from Parsons the New School for Design in 2015 with a BFA in Architectural Design. From 2015 to 2016, Lin interned at the Design Department of the Metropolitan Museum, where she worked on the exhibition design of many projects. In 2017, she graduated from University College London with a master’s degree in History of Art. In 2018, Lin worked as a curator at Zhuzhong Art Museum in Beijing. She curated and designed the exhibition “Her Kind 创” (2018) which included Xiao Lu, Zhao Yin’ou and Cao Yu.

| XIAO Lu

| XIAO Lu (Born 1962, Hangxhou) works with performance and installation. She is a graduate of the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. Her graduation work Dialogue was included in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989 and became famous after she fired a guna t it, which led her to temporary arrest and an extended period of residence in Sydney. Xiao Lu’s fictional memoir Dialogue 《对 话, published in Chinese and English in 2010, exposed powerful forces affecting women artists in contemporary China. Xiao Lu’s work has been included in important international exhibitions, most recently Performer and Participant, Tate London (2018)
and Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World, Guggenheim Museum, New york (2017), and been collected by public and private institutions including the Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Taikand Insurance Group Art Collection, Beijing; and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Xiao Lu lives and works in Beijing and Australia.