Louise Zhang
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Artereal Gallery
7 November - 30 November 2019
Photo: Zan Wimberley
Louise Zhang’s candy-coloured latticed Moon Gate is a tantalizing portal into the push-me-pull- you beauty and repulsion of the demi-realms of Bury the sun and all its demons.
Her visual language is complex and ambiguous.
Seductive pastels from Pop culture and the screen based technologies of her ‘digital native’ generation sugar-coat and mask the psychological intensity of an underbelly of supernatural narratives, ghouls, skeletons and hellfire from old school horror exquisitely rendered in a fusion of Chinese Literati painting style and the cut-outs and linear overlays of cartoon.
Her art is a continuing dialogue. Transformation is at its essence and reflects her personal history as ‘not quite Australian, not quite Asian’. She describes “… being a kid from a migrant family, born in a country where your parents aren’t originally … it births a new culture. I am a Third Culture Kid.”
Discouraged in childhood from engaging with the traditions, superstitions and mythologies imbedded in Chinese culture by her Christian upbringing Louise perversely immersed herself in Western and Chinese horror cinema, particularly body horror, with Kronenberg’s The Fly an absolute favourite.
The concept of metamorphosis is absorbed into Zhang’s practice, with the visceral pervading her negotiation of horror as an art form, as medium, method and symbol. It manifests in the melding, moulding and reforming of viscous solidified slime and the bulging abattoirs bondage aesthetic of her trussed, suspended and skewered ‘blob’ sculptures. Their uneasy grotesquery is ambiguously shrouded in saccharine lollypop pastels.
Undertaking a Beijing artist-residency in 2014, disparate influences were a way into navigating identity and her evolving distinctive style. Louise embraced the sculptural possibilities of scholar rocks, ancient, weathered and porous objects related traditionally to the mystique of mountains and prized for their asymmetry and awkwardness. She engaged with the rich decoration of embroidered robes and the symbolism of flowers like chrysanthemums and lotus and the celestial significances of the circular motif of the moon in garden architecture. And indulgently explores folklore and the depths and macabre ordeals and monsters of Chinese Hell, a maze of eighteen layers and ten courts with a king in each. Everyone goes to Hell but stays or leaves on the court’s assessment of deeds.
Calligraphic text is a recent element in her works. Bizarre titles, Happy Death and Skeleton Romance hang as solid colour strip banners in paintings, the traditional characters embellished with hell-fire flames. Homilies are written in both English text and Chinese characters and inscribed on cartouches at the apex of the arch above the circular doorway of Zhang’s Moon Gate sculptures.
Louise Zhang’s Bury the sun and all its demons is a fantastical and macabre installation of beauty and strangeness of playfulness tempered with tradition; a contemporary parable of the quest of a third culture kid.
Barbara Dowse
Curator