Fashioning self: Artworks from the Collection

25 February – 29 April 2012

How much do we think about what we wear? From the elegant ‘Paris Hat’ of the high street to the infamous ‘Hoody’ of contemporary urban streetwear, from the celebration of cultural identities to the subversion of national icons, this exhibition features works that show how bodies are fashioned through dress and adornment. An exhibition conceived in response to the course Fashion, Culture and the Body convened by Dr Prue Ahrens.

Curators: Kath Kerswell and Samantha Littley
 

Gonkar Gyatso: Three Realms

25 February – 29 April 2011

A Griffith University Art Gallery exhibition partnership with The University of Queensland Art Museum and
Institute of Modern Art

For many years Gonkar Gyatso has encrusted traditional Buddhist iconography with pop cultural referents to explore issues of identity, globalisation, hybridity, and consumerism. Significant new directions in his practice signal an opportune moment to consider one of world art’s rising contemporary art stars.

Gyatso was born in Tibet and grew up during the Cultural Revolution, which saw the suppression and destruction of art forms that did not coincide with Mao's ideological program. Traditional religious Tibetan art forms were forbidden, as were bourgeois Western ones. Years later, while studying traditional Chinese brush painting in Beijing, Gyatso came to appreciate the distinctiveness of his Tibetan heritage. After graduating, he studied traditional Tibetan thangka (scroll painting) in Dharamsala, India. In 1985, he founded the Sweet Tea House in Lhasa, the first Tibetan avant-garde artists’ association. Gyatso moved to London in 1996 where he was awarded a scholarship to study fine art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and established a London gallery for contemporary Tibetan art, also known as Sweet Tea House, in 2003.

Much of Gyatso's work charts shifts in identity in relation to continual migration. It has moved through traditional Chinese brush techniques and Buddhist iconography to high-density pop collages of colourful stickers and cut-out text, playing on but subverting typecast notions of pop art and Tibetan culture while reflecting on the popularity of Buddhism in the West. In combining references to traditional Tibetan life with references to a global mass-media culture that threatens to supplant and extinguish it, Gyatso creates a volatile, ambivalent mix.

While Gyatso's works featured in the 2009 Venice Biennale, the 2009 Asia Pacific Triennial, and the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, Three Realms is his first public-gallery survey. It presents three ways of looking at distinct phases of his work from the past ten years, in three exhibitions across Brisbane museums. Gyatso's recent installations were presented at the Institute of Modern Art in late 2011, and Three Realms will continue at Griffith University Art Gallery and The University of Queensland Art Museum.

Curator: Simon P. Wright

Beijing Hao! Six Chinese photomedia artists

31 March – 3 June 2012

China’s capital Beijing is a pulsing, vibrant metropolis where the old and new compete for space in an ever-changing environment. Beijing Hao! presents the work of six Chinese photomedia artists whose imagery is based in and around Beijing.

Included are Zhou Jun’s digitally coloured urban landscapes; Huang Xu’s firework series – prohibited for 20 years, fireworks are again allowed for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) in Beijing; Li Gang’s images reflecting the artist’s role beyond the confines of the studio; Feng Yan’s contemplative portrayals of domestic ‘monuments’; Zhang Hongkuan’s documents of migrant workers’ living quarters; and Lui Gang’s commentary on aspirational lifestyles and consumerism.

Presented as part of Queensland Festival of Photography 4, a biennial event organised by Queensland Centre for Photography.

Curator: Gordon Craig