The exhibition was instigated and curated by former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby with the purpose of not only creating a beautiful experience, but also telling the story of a part of China most Australians know little about.
AFR features Aniwar Mamat’s solo exhibition, ‘Borderlands’.
“Art’s role as a global ambassador has long been recognised, and so it is with Australia’s first exhibition of contemporary Uyghur art from China.
Borderlands, a solo exhibition of woollen felt and painted artworks by ethnic minority Uyghur artist Aniwar Mamat, will be opened by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday evening in Sydney.
The exhibition was instigated and curated by former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby [https://www.afr.com/by/geoff-raby-141pvz] with the purpose of not only creating a beautiful experience, but also telling the story of a part of China most Australians know little about.
In introducing the abstract art of Aniwar Mamat to Australia, Raby has journeyed as far west from Beijing as you can get and still be in China.
Aniwar, who is in Sydney for the exhibition, was born in 1962 in Kargilik, a trading city on the old Silk Road in Xinjiang Province, on the western outskirts of the Taklamakan Desert. He was raised among the traditional carpet makers of Xinjiang, and learned their ancient craft of sheep’s wool felting, which he has employed in some of the work in Borderlands at Vermilion Art in Sydney’s Dawes Point from April 29 to May 31.
Some members of the Chinese community in Australia told Vermilion Art director Aileen Moka she was “brave” to be hosting the exhibition because the Uyghurs are such a “sensitive topic” in China due to the extensive reporting of crackdowns in the predominantly Muslim region over the past decade.
But Moka said she was determined to exhibit art from right across the vast expanse of China.
“I find Western culture very appreciative of it,” she said.
Borderlands includes some of Aniwar’s felt hangings, where the natural wool felt is shot through with bright colours.
It also introduces his never-before-exhibited paintings on corrugated fibreglass, a building material that remained available during COVID-19 in China when the supply of artist’s canvas dried up.
Aniwar rejected any particular interpretation of his work.
“I am painting a space for people to put themselves in,” Aniwar said through an interpreter.
Aniwar has lived since 1986 in Beijing, where he became a leading avant-garde artist and a professor of art.
Raby met Aniwar in 2007 through former Australian Financial Review China correspondent, Madeleine O’Dea, who witnessed the flowering and suppression of Chinese contemporary art during her time in China in the 1980s and has remained close friends with many of the leading artists [https://www.afr.com/link/follow-20180101- gqxx7o].
Raby, Australia’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011, said a wider-ranging engagement with Chinese art would give this country “a more developed and sophisticated understanding of contemporary China”.
“It’s so different from the stereotyped nonsense you get in the media in the West. It would be a much happier relationship if people understood.”
According to Raby, Xinjiang is so remote from Beijing that in 2022 its five top trading partners were its neighbours Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
The Uyghurs of Xinjiang remain Islamic, even though their lands have been a province of China since the second half of the eighteenth century.
For almost a decade from 2014, following a spate of violence and terrorism in Xinjiang, Uyghurs were subjected to “strike hard” policies ordered by Beijing, including forced internment of perhaps a million non-Han citizens in re-education camps.
In his new book, ‘Great Game On’, Raby addresses accusations of cultural genocide made by Western governments, led by the US.
“While much of the evidence is disputed, and while condemnation of the rounding- up of Islamic minorities was also cynically used by President Trump, and other Western states that had scores to settle with China … no doubt reprehensible and large-scale abuses of human rights have occurred, and are likely to be continuing,” Raby writes.
Borderlands will be on view at Vermilion Art from April 29 until May 31.”
Elizabeth Fortescue writes the Saleroom column and about the visual arts. She was previously arts editor at The Daily Telegraph and is Australia correspondent for The Art Newspaper.
