in-betweeness: the art of liu xiao xian

art & australia:

In-betweeness: The art of Liu Xiao Xian
Claire Roberts
Art & Australia Summer 2009 pp 222-225

Left Beijing for Sydney after Tiananmen at 27 - was a dialectical materialist then reincarnation artworks but justbelieves some of your thoughts might remain - China plates work is about 'China,about memory and rememebering
something of a previous era'


CR: Liu Xiao Xian's art makes you smile. Born in Beijing in 1963, he has lived and worked in Sydney since 1990. Our gods, 2000, arguably his best-known work, is a composite portrait of Christ and Buddha – each portrait made from image pixels of the other. Acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the work is related to an earlier three-part black-and-white portrait titled Reincarnation: Mao, Buddha and I, 1998, using the same technique. Liu has a presence in all his artworks. This can be subtle and indirect, such as the early use of a hand-held camera to create fractured portraits of buildings composed of multiple images taken from a fixed vantage point, or art-directing his elder brother and fellow artist Ah Xian to pose for surrealist-inspired photographic constructions. His later works are complex self-portraits and explorations of the cultural dislocation of being Chinese and living in Australia, a phenomenon he has described as 'in-betweenness'.


Liu is a bold artist, willing to take risks. In 1988 he quit his job as an assistant optical engineer in Beijing and, with the encouragement of his brother, became an independent artist. He is part of a generation of self-taught, experimental artists that emerged after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution with a determination to find their own creative voices. After the trauma and bloodshed of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Liu left China and moved to Australia. He quickly realised that he would have to build his career all over again. After six difficult years he was finally granted permanent residency in 1996. In 2002 he was awarded a Master of Visual Arts in Photomedia at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) and since then his art has flourished, yet the challenge of living between cultures remains.


On the eve of his first major survey show at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, the artist spoke with Claire Roberts about the creative pull between Australia and China.


Claire Roberts: You have described yourself as living in a state of in-betweenness. Can you talk about this feeling?


Liu Xiao Xian: I was twenty-seven when I arrived in Australia. I had lived my whole life in a Chinese cultural environment, much of it influenced by Communist Party ideology. It was only when I began travelling back and forth between Australia and China that this feeling developed. I had uprooted myself from my original home and my life in Australia was not fully established. Neither place felt like home. Even though you are physically in one place or another, it is as if your heart/mind is always somewhere in-between. But there is also a positive side. Being in the middle I can see both sides, which gives me an advantage. This is why I have an interest in comparing the two cultures, looking at differences as well as similarities.


CR: In an interview you were once asked whether you believed in reincarnation. You replied that you were a 'dialectical materialist'. What did you mean?


LXX: I grew up during the Cultural Revolution. There was no religion. Any beliefs you had related to what you were taught by the Communist Party, and that was called dialectical materialism. But that kind of materialism is totally different from Madonna's material world. According to Marxism, the world is a physical entity. There is no afterlife and the purpose of religion is to deceive people. We were taught not to believe in gods or ghosts, only to believe in the Communist Party ...