AASRN RESOURCES:
Visual Arts

KATE BEYNON is a Melbourne-based artist. Beynon's work employs the written word to explore issues of immigration, racism and cultural identity, melding graffiti, calligraphy, cartoons, drawing, painting, and digital photography. She was born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and settled in Australia as a child - subsequently her work is underscored by an interest in the subtle ways language is used to encapsulate difference. Since completing a BFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1993, Beynon has shown at the National Gallery of Australia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; all State Art Galleries [as part of the Moet+Chandon Touring Exhibition]; Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Art Centre of Virginia, USA.

GALLERY 4A and the ASIA-AUSTRALIA ARTS CENTRE are initiatives of the Asian Australian Artists Association, a non-profit organization set up to promote living Asian cultures in Australia and to encourage community participation in cross-cultural dialogue within a context of contemporary Australian art. In representing contemporary Australian art as a composite of diverse forms and cultural origins, Gallery 4A establishes new paradigms in discerning Australia's unique and dynamic cultural identity. To this end, Gallery 4A continuously challenges the process in which Australian identity is being defined by mainstream curatorial practice nationally and internationally.

EMIL GOH is based in Sydney and he divides his time between his art practice, curatorial projects and lecturing on video art. He was born in Malaysia and educated at Sydney College of the Arts, U of Sydney and Goldsmiths College, U of London. Goh has exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography (2003), the Powerhouse Museum (2003), Parasite Artspace Hong Kong (2003), Laforet Museum Kokura Japan (2002), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2002), the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (2002), Boutwell Draper Gallery (2002), gallery4a (2001), Akadamie fur Bildenden Kunst Vienna (2000) and the National Art Gallery Malaysia (2000). He has curated international video exhibitions at the Asia Australia Arts Centre (Gallery 4A), the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Public Programs Video Screenings for the 2002 Biennale of Sydney. He has also written for THE FACE, Good Weekend, Post West and LIKE magazines.

LINDY LEE was born in Brisbane, QLD, in 1954. She holds a PhD from U of New South Wales and teaches at the Sydney College of the Arts. Lee has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and her work in included in most major public Australian collections. Some significant exhibitions include Perspecta '85 Art Gallery of New South Wales; Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales 1986; Edge to Edge: Contemporary Australian Art to Japan, touring Museums of Contemporary Art in Japan 1988/89;Australia Beyond the Mundane: Australian Art to China, 1988; Paraculture, Artistspace New York; Strangers in Paradise: Contemporary Australian Art to Korea, 1992; Prospect'93 Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany ; Photography is Dead, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1996; Spirit and Place, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1997 and Bright and Shining, Australian Embassy, Tokyo 1999, Narrow Road to the Interior MITA Artrium, Singapore, 2003.

GREG LEONG was born in Hong Kong and is currently living in Launceston, TAS. He holds qualifications in the humanities, fine arts, and arts administration, and his academic research interests include internationalisation of art school curricula. Greg makes issue-based textile work and his collections have had several national tours and numerous gallery exhibitions. He is also a completing PhD student through UNSW (CoFA).

HOU LEONG was born in Shanghai and resided in Macau before moving to Australia in the 1980s. His most widely 'sighted' work stems from his photo-montage series, "An Australian," where the faces of national icons such as Crocodile Dundee and an ANZAC soldier were overlaid with an Asian one. He has a bachelor's degree in visual arts with first class honours from the Australian National U, and has worked as a software and web developer.

SHEN JIAWEI was born in Shanghai, China in 1948. He migrated to Australia in 1989 and currently lives and works in Sydney. Shen works in traditional oil painting and portraiture and works within the established academic style of painting. During the Cultural Revolution all art schools were closed so Shen was largely self-taught, becoming recognised as an artist in the mid 1970s. One of his works, Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974), was shown in Guggenheim Museum, both in New York and Bilbao, in the the China: 5000 Years exhibition, 1998. He moved to Australia in 1989. In the first two years he had to draw portrait sketches for tourists in Darling Harbour to survive, but used this opportunity to research portraiture and became an experienced portraitist. Since then he has done many portrait commissions in Australia and overseas.

GUAN WEI was born in Beijing, China in 1957, and migrated to Australia in 1988. He currently lives and works in Sydney. Wei, at present, is one of the most recognisable and successful contemporary Chinese diasporic artists in Australia. Wei was part of the 1980s avant-garde movement in China and arrived in Australia as an already well-developed artist fluent in the visual language and style of Western contemporary art. Wei works mainly in the medium of oil and acrylic, producing paintings that often play with symbols, styles and the visual language of both Chinese and Australian cultures. Wei has held twenty five solo exhibitions; and he has been included in numerous important contemporary exhibitions in Australia and internationally, such as The Rose Crossing (1999-2000), Lines of Descent (2000-2001), and survey exhibitions such as the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 1999.

AH XIAN was born in Beijing, China in 1960 and migrated to Australia in 1989. He currently resides in Sydney. Xian recently won Australia’s first National Sculpture Prize in 2001 for his Human human – lotus cloisonné figure 1 (2000-01). In his earlier works, Xian experimented with many different Western art forms working mainly in mixed media and installation form demonstrated in his installation, Implement of Deduction #2 (Reduction) with Disappearance of Mona Lisa, 1996. Works produced within this period dealt mainly with issues of politics, freedom and censorship and directly reflected Xian’s political experiences in China and decision to leave after Tiananmen. 

WILLIAM YANG is an important Australian photographer who is much loved and much exhibited. His territory is people - family, friends and acquaintances. His work often involves words, either written on the image or as part of a performance with William speaking and showing slides. He has performed and exhibited widely, both in Australia and overseas. His photographs and stage shows, including the acclaimed Sadness which wove together two themes: the discovery of his Chinese heritage, and the rituals of dying and death in Sydney, have moved people with their honesty and compassion. The NSW State Library held a major retrospective of William's work in 1998. Miscellaneous Obsessions, a collection of his work from the last 20 years was shown at Stills Gallery in October 2002 as part of the Gay Games cultural festival.Over the past fourteen years Yang has been doing performance pieces with slide projection in the theatre. Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, Shadows, and Blood Links are some of the titles. These have toured extensively in Australia and overseas. [This biog is taken from Stills Gallery, Paddington, NSW]

YOUNG ZE RUNGE or JOHN YOUNG is a Hong Kong-born Australian artist. During the Cultural Revolution in China, he was sent to Australia to complete his education. In the 1970s, he read philosophy at U of Sydney, in particular, the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the early 1980s he went on a pilgrimage to Ireland, London, and Europe to visit Wittgenstein's sites of significance. Young began his exhibiting career with a solo exhibition comprising a work shown for one minute on the door of a hut in the small fishing village of Rosroe, Connemara, Ireland in 1982. On his return from Europe, he was a founding member of the artists' group, Various Artists Ltd. Since that time, he has worked on many series of works, in particular, the Silhouette series (1985-89), the Polychromes series (1989-93), and more recently the Double Ground and Square Painting series. This later work revolves around such issues as frameworks of representation, mood states, certainty, the plight of Asians in the diaspora, and images in and memories of cultural tourism.

Melbourne-based artist ZHOU XIAOPING arrived in Australia from China in 1988. He "was trained in Chinese traditional brush painting, the guohua style. He has lived in Melbourne for fifteen years and each year he spends a substantial amount of time in the aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. Since the early 1990s his artistic endeavour includes continuous collaboration with Jimmy Pike, the well-known aboriginal artist in the Great Sandy Desert, until Pike’s death in 2003" (Yiyan Wang). Zhou has a postgraduate Arts degree from Northern Territory U. In 1996, Zhou and Jimmy Pike held a joint exhibition of work in Zhou's home town of Hefei in China.