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ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The world suddenly seems to be a roaring lion that does not welcome a human invasion. In 2020, under the worldwide attack of the coronavirus, humans seem to be awakening. The humans who have occupied the world are not powerful as we thought. We may fall in an instant. It is very frustrating that if the world is without humans, it will still continue in its life and beauty. So people in this world are more like guests. From April 2017 to April 2018, I held a touring exhibition entitled Dialogues with The Dreaming: The Art of Zhou Xiaoping in Australia at Beijing’s Today Art Museum, Chengdu’s Contemporary Art Museum, Jiangsu’s Modern Art Museum and the Shenzhen Art Museum, in China. The exhibition demonstrated my cross-cultural artistic practice and brought together the influence of Chinese, Western and Aboriginal culture and art concepts. In this practical process, I realised how important cultural reconciliation and civilisational exchange are. When I lived in the Outback, it allowed me, as an artist, to re-examine the complexity and the weight of the world I live in, and to reconsider the origins of art, thus providing more possibilities for the recreation of art – in particular, the main forms of creative expression in contemporary art, including protests, satire, counterculture, and subversion. Subversion is not the only method of artistic creativity. Learning and borrowing inspiration from nature are also highly creative. The richness and might of nature go far beyond human imagination. In the human world,the Aborigines understand the richness of nature better than anyone, and the power of divinity makes that richness greater. Every national culture contains divine genes and molecules. Looking back at my artistic creation process in Australia, I feel that I followed the path of "learning from nature" from the traditional Chinese culture that I accepted when I was young, then followed that path from China to the world of the Australian Aborigines. This exhibition is a continuation of the 2017 Dialogues with The Dreaming exhibition in China, and it is a sorting and inspection of my thirty-year creation of art. The works are all located in Australia,at ACIAC Western Sydney University, Live in Art Sydney, and The Museum of Chinese Australian History and the ACAE Gallery,both in Melbourne. |
