Home Thoughts from Abroad

by Joanna Kitto

Commissioned by Praxis Artspace for Home Thoughts for Abroad, 2017 

‘The personal is political’ was the rallying cry for second-wave feminists of the late 1960s. The phrase underscored the connection between personal experience and broader social and political structures. In an essay of the same title (1970), Carol Hansich, a member of the New York Radical Women’s Movement, argued that engagement with the inequality of women from a personal viewpoint was as powerful and as influential to change as public protest and marches. This idea that individual engagement is as important as collective action pervades contemporary art and culture.

Contemporary art is inherently embroiled in the complexities of our time. It witnesses our environment, translates our thoughts and documents our condition. Art allows us to see the world through varied eyes, offering new perspectives on another’s lived experience and memory. In Home Thoughts from Abroad three artists engage with the social, economic, environmental and political concerns of their homelands from the vantage point of a life in Adelaide, Australia. Badiucao speaks as a Chinese artist in exile, Elyas Alavi as an Afghan refugee and Aida Azin a as first-generation Australian building an understanding of her heritage.

Badiucao is an artist committed to free expression, unafraid to confront issues of political and social significance. Born in Shanghai, Badiucao moved to Australia in 2011, fleeing his nation state in order to freely comment on it. Adopting a pseudonym, Badiucao began to prolifically publish cartoons on his website. Through cunning wit and cutting satire, he approaches with provocative force Chinese ideologies and themes including the workings of capital, of culture and of the media.

Badiucao is driven by personal and familial experiences. His grandfather and great uncle were stage and screen writers during the 1940s and 1950s who fell victim to China’s infamous Hundred Flowers Movement. In 1956, Mao Zedong, leader and chairman of the Communist Party, introduced a policy designed to promote a flourishing of the arts and to progress the sciences. Mao’s agenda was to allow comrades to discuss the country’s future direction with an expectation that the emerging dialogue would show socialism to be superior to capitalism. However, Mao did not anticipate the spread of dissent that was catalysed and by 1957 he ordered a halt to the campaign. This effectively ushered in a period of persecution of intellectuals, students and artists known as the Anti-Rightists Movement. Badiucao says this pattern has tended to recur in recent Chinese history whereby free thought is encouraged and then suppressed. His grandfather and great uncle were labeled as reactionaries, ending their careers and leading to their tragic death - Badiucao’s grandfather was imprisoned in a labour camp in Gansu province, two thousand miles outside of Shanghai, where he succumbed to malnutrition and starvation, and his great uncle committed suicide in 1957. The story of the brothers has become family folklore; their tragic experiences are taken to warn against anti-establishment sentiments. And yet, the courage of Badiucao’s forebears and the injustice of their treatment only serves to steady him on his course.

Badiucao’s cartoons employ humour to comment on, to subvert and to satirise the one-party communist rule of Xi Jinping. Using the red and black of China’s national colours, he presents truths that he believes to be un- or under-reported: the close relationship of the government and the media, the smog epidemic, food and water contamination and the plight of political prisoners. Badiucao harnesses his art practice and his free access to the Internet from Australia, to question the authority of government. He is a proponent of individual acts of resistance against political power and by creating an awareness of contemporary Chinese issues his message is clear: ‘as individuals, we can still have our voice’.

In the arresting installation Meng (Dream)(2017), Badiucao evokes the troubled sleep of the activist artist. He presents a mattress of four thousand hand-sharpened pencils, on the very bed frame he has slept on during his exile in Australia. The pencils have been shipped en masse from Fuzhou, China and laboriously taken to by the artist with a knife – each one whittled down to a point sharp enough to pierce the skin. The title refers to the ‘Chinese Dream’, the lexicon employed by Xi Jinping as the embodiment of his political ideology; young people should ‘dare to dream, work assiduously to fulfill the dreams and contribute to the revitalisation of the nation’.2 The work can be read as non-cooperation with the government and a representation of the price a dissident can pay for speaking out. As an artist-in-exile, Badiucao does not rest easy.

Elyas Alavi also approaches notions of unrest through metaphor. Alavi fled Afghanistan’s Daikundi province with his family when he was six years old, seeking protection in Iran as the war in his homeland intensified. In 2007 he came to South Australia as a refugee at risk. The emotional tumult of living in a conflict-zone and then leaving his country as a refugee, impacts deeply on Alavi’s practice.

In recent works Alavi has used animal carcasses as referential to life in a war-torn country. In 2015, Alavi covered the front pages of Middle Eastern and Australian newspapers with rows of painted animal carcasses hung in butcher’s shops. The bloodied bodies represented scenes of horror normalised when viewed day after day. In Milky Life (2017), a series of ink, acrylic and hand-cut photograph collages, Alavi utilises the image of de-feathered chickens to replace the heads of striding human figures, pails of milk and blood swinging precariously from their hands. The artist says that these surreal images pervade his sleep.

Ordugah (Detention Camp) (2013) and Blood Sample (2017) comment on discrimination against Afghan refugees in Iran. For Alavi, the suburb of Sakhteman felt like an ordugah, a detention camp both undocumented and documented refugees live in constant fear of being caught at police checkpoints when leaving or entering. To travel to other cities, a person must obtain a ten day permit, available only once per year. In his performative video piece, Alavi suggests confinement and geographical control over Afghan refugees in Iranian suburbs; invisible wire fences and walls surrounding communities living on the fringes of cities. He wraps fragile thread around trees, poles and across roads at the edges of Sahkteman in an attempt to make visible the walls of the ordugah.

Blood Sample responds to the death of a twelve year old Afghan girl in Shiraz, Iran who was denied an organ transplant due to her status as an illegal immigrant. This is particularly pertinent for Alavi, whose own sister is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. In contrast, photographs of young Afghan solders who fought and died for Iran in the Syrian war are displayed in suburbs where Afghan refugees live. Alavi reflects on this injustice. His blood is drawn alongside the blood of an Iranian friend. Their blood is poured into corporeal blocks of ice before melting away. 

For Australian born painter Aida Azin, art making forms part of an ongoing pursuit to understand her world through engagement with others. Azin’s Filipina mother and Iranian father moved to Australia in 1988, leaving behind the Iran-Iraq war. Building a deeper connection with her heritage has become a central theme in Azin’s practice. She has spent extensive time in the Philippines, learning about Filipino culture, politics and people through candid conversation. While in Manila in 2016, Azin created Everything is Stolen, a raw and expressive series of paintings that shared the political history of the Philippines through the artist’s voice.

The seven-meter mural in Home Thoughts from Abroad is the result of Azin’s most recent visit to the Philippines early 2017. Titled Feeding Fishes, this site-specific painting is inherently personal, both responsive to and reflective of her experience. Contemporary culture and events are intertwined to create a new landscape. Memory, history and fiction coalesce across the wall in energetic bouts of activity. Fragments of thought, derived from Azin’s extensive journals and notebooks, are revealed and concealed with the use of bold colour and figuration. Through her lens, we see elements of the rich cultural identity of the archipelago, the effects of Spanish colonisation of the Philippines and the fight for independence. Perhaps the most confronting reality Azin highlights is that of the ongoing and violent anti-drug campaign that has claimed countless lives in the name of clean, drug-free streets. President Rodrigo Duterte inspired the title for this piece with his infamous words to drug pushers,

“I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there.”

Azin spoke with artists and activists in Manila who see the war on drugs as propaganda to inflict fear and maintain power. Standing back from her work, Azin says that ‘artists should never stop asking questions’. Azin transfers her innate curiosity to her viewers, urging us to pay attention.

Together in Home Thoughts from Abroad, these artists share with us their unique position in the world and through their work, it becomes clear that the one of the most radical acts is that of listening.

— Joanna Kitto is a curator and writer in Tarntanya (Adelaide). She currently holds the position of Associate Curator, Samstag Museum of Art, and Co-Director, fine print magazine.