TEXT ME: AN EXPLORATION OF BODY LANGUAGE (CURATED BY DANIELLE JOHNSON)

text me
an exploration of body language

20 January – 5 February 2005

Text Me considers the complex and challenging exchange of cultural experiences and information via the highly charged mediums of text and the artist’s body in the practice of contemporary Asian and Australian artists. The exhibition brings together the work of Dadang Christanto, Zhu Ming and Owen Leong, who use their bodies via performance, Simryn Gill, Guan Wei, Hossein Valamanesh and Xu Bing, who incorporate textual elements in their work and FX Harsono, Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Qiu Zhijie and Zhang Huan, whose works combine both body and text.

A familiar phrase, ‘text me’ refers to the exchange of instant text messages via mobile phone. The brevity of text messages often results in a lack of personal nuance and, increasingly, methods of communication in contemporary society are linked to messaging systems that circumvent ‘personal’ contact. In many of the works in Text Me, however, the message is literally about personal contact – between text and skin – and the poignancy of text upon flesh. Equally, when text is incorporated into artworks, the reading of the text is mediated by its inclusion in the artwork itself.

Many of the artists in the exhibition use languages that are unreadable to the majority of the Australian audience. As such, the text may be engaged with purely on an aesthetic level. Intriguingly, however, this aestheticising is invariably eclipsed by the viewer’s strong desire to comprehend and interpret what the text is actually signifying.

In Hossein Valamanesh’s poetic pieces, a Farsi phrase forms a repeated pattern. Recent works also mimic a kind of generic language. In Forest of Words, 2004 (a collaboration with Angela Valamanesh), the shapes give the impression of language and arouse the viewer’s curiosity, but spell out neither a word nor sentence. Similarly, Xu Bing is well known for his manipulation of language. His script references traditional Chinese characters, subsequently distorting them and utilising them in a pictorial and critical way.

The representation of the artist’s body in an animated or inscribed state is at once consuming and intriguing – demanding our attention and challenging our sense of ourselves and others. In performance or self-portrait works, the audience is presented with the body’s beauty, strength, gracefulness or stamina. As with text-based works, a strong desire to understand the artist’s intentions is activated; to comprehend why the artist has located himself or herself as the key to the message.

The presence of text and the body, particularly in the work of Asian artists, is frequently sited as a marker used to identify and justify the artists’ connection to ‘Asia’. The risk of such interpretation is that this may encourage a focus on the works’ or the artists’ perceived ‘Asianness’ – rather than an assessment of an artist’s intentions or the interplay that can occur between works of non-Asian artists and other artists, who may share similar conceptual concerns or artistic methods.

What unites the works of Orr, Parr and Guan Wei is a profound concern for the continuing inhumane treatment of the refugees who have found their way to Australia (or those who have made the attempt and been refused). The artists utilise performance and/or text as a mark of personal protest, thus linking their work to a history of performance art that is both radical and politically engaged.

In Parr’s 2002 performances, entitled Close the Concentration Camps, Parr had his lips sewn together referencing the protests occuring in Australia’s detention centres. Political activism also informs FX Harsono’s self-portraits and Dadang Christanto’s work. These artists communicate the horrors committed under the Suharto regime in Indonesia, whereby thousands of left-wing protestors were rounded up and killed over a number of years.

In her discussion of the work of Qiu Zhijie, Melissa Chiu comments: ‘the significance of the character painted onto the artist’s body suggests that, like a tattoo, one’s cultural background is inscribed upon one’s body’.1 This observation could equally be applied to Zhang Huan’s practice – though it is also relevant to Parr’s self-branding (with the words ‘artist’ and, later, ‘alien’). All three artists comment on the sometimes painful process of inscription and the pain borne from oppressive or narrow-minded political environments. Like Parr, Zhang Huan’s performances often involve physical feats of endurance – insignificant when measured against the emotional suffering upon which they comment.

Leong challenges the interpretation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity via performances and photographs, in which he takes on an alien-like appearance (aided by white paint, sugar-coated antlers and blackened pupils). He incites us to ‘move beyond existing social and racial hierarchies’ and believes that, as a perfect medium for his message, ‘the body is most potently located as something that is malleable rather than fixed, to be shaped and reformed according to desire’.2

In their performances, Zhu Ming and Dadang Christanto initiate self-transformation into ‘alien’ selves. Zhu Ming encases himself in a large plastic bubble (perhaps symbolic of human fragility and the divisions between class and race) and covers himself in fluorescent glow-in-the-dark paint – a painful process with an eerie result. Christanto and his son are transformed in a performance called Litsus. Both are enshrouded in black cloth while the audience flings flour-filled bombs at them, resulting in a dusty ashen appearance, signalling the body’s decay to dust after death.

All of these artists invoke consideration of human rights, tolerance and hope. Each comments on social, political and environmental concerns, the nature of the human condition, the importance of communication and the nature of one’s corporality. In a time where daily communication is often impersonal, it is interesting to consider whether these artists’ use of body/language becomes more challenging and therefore more profound.

1 Melissa Chiu, ‘The use of text in contemporary Chinese art’, Art AsiaPacific, issue 29, 2001, p. 82.

2 Owen Leong, artist’s proposal for Text Me, 22 October 2004.

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