Newman Huo

IS Australia a faraway and isolated continent from China or is China a mystical country remote from Australia?

If you ask Australian art dealer Ray Hughes this question, his answer will certainly be “Neither.”

For more than a decade, Hughes, who owns the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney, has been traveling to China to take works by contemporary Chinese painters, such as the Luo Brothers, Qi Zhilong, Lin Jin, Liu Xiaodong, Lu Hao, Ren Xiaolin, Chang Xugong and Jin Songyang, to Australia.

Now, after nearly two years of preparation, he is bringing a special exhibition Three Australian Painters to Shenzhen’s Guan Shanyue Art Museum.

The three Australian painters in the exhibition are Jun Chen, Joe Furlonger, and Ian Smith, who have all found their inspirations within Australian and Chinese artistic traditions and have blended the two cultural traditions in their works.

A total of 30 works by the three expressionist painters will be on display in the museum until Sept. 2.

Australian Ambassador Geoff Raby flew from Beijing to Shenzhen Tuesday and attended its opening ceremony yesterday.

“Around the world, there is a growing recognition that cultural exchange is crucial to the ongoing success of bilateral relations,” Raby said.

“While governments have a role to play in fostering these exchanges, it is often at the individual level that the most interesting results can be seen,” he said.

Raby praised highly Hughes’s endeavor of introducing the best of China’s contemporary visual arts to Australian audiences.

“His gallery in Sydney has been the center for some of the most exciting ‘cross-pollenation’ between Australian and Chinese artists for more than 10 years,” Raby added.

“The results of this extraordinary cultural exchange are now on show in the fine exhibition that Ray Hughes has brought to Shenzhen,” he said.

All three artists participating in the exhibition are among the best Australian artists represented at the Ray Hughes Gallery.

Jun Chen, one of the very few successful Chinese painters in Australia today, regards himself as “an Australian expressionist painter yet with a Chinese background.”

A native of Guangzhou, 47-year-old Chen graduated from the Chinese painting department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1986.

Chen immigrated to Australia in 1990 and gained a master’s degree in fine arts from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane in 1996.

While studying oil painting in Australia, Chen quickly discovered the major difference between Chinese and Australian art schools.

“In China, the teaching of art is very skill-oriented, but in Australia it is much more about personal expression and conceptual issues,” he said.

It took about 10 years for Chen to feel comfortable with the country’s language and customs.

Chen was the three-time winner of the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1997, 1998 and 2001, and the winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture at the same gallery in 2006.

“In Australia, many people, including audiences and art critics, believe my expressionist paintings of human figures and landscapes are not by a painter from China, but from the Western world,” Chen said.

“In fact, many elements in my expressionist style, such as strong brush touches, big color blocks and stress on personal feelings, have a lot in common with the ‘six principles of traditional Chinese painting,’” Chen said.

The “six principles of traditional Chinese painting,” established by Xie He, a Chinese writer, art historian and critic in the 5th century, define a painting in six elements, such as vitality of a work of art, the way of using the brush, form, color, composition and learning from both life and masterpieces of the past.

To succeed in competing with his Australian counterparts, Chen said he had turned what he learned from his training in Chinese painting in the past into “a great advantage.”

Chen’s co-exhibitors in the exhibition, Joe Furlonger and Ian Smith, were both born in Cairns in the region known as Far North Queensland (FNQ) in Australia.

Of the 10 Queensland landscape paintings Furlonger is displaying, four works he did purposefully with Chinese brush, ink and color pigment on Chinese rice paper easily strike a chord with Chinese audiences.

“I’m a ‘thief,’” Furlonger, 55, said with a big smile on his face, referring to his borrowing of drawing elements from Chinese painting.

This is Furlonger’s second trip to China, following his first visit to Beijing in 1997.

Furlonger said he had tried to paint landscapes for years, but didn’t feel he had been successful until he had a chance to watch on TV early modern Chinese movies, such as Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern” in the early 1990s, and was then inspired to consider how to use Chinese painting to paint Australian landscapes.

In his landscapes, Furlonger has also used the traditional Chinese-style perspective, instead of the Western-style perspective, making his works look more like traditional Chinese scroll paintings.

Because of his busy work schedule, Smith wasn’t able to come to Shenzhen with Hughes, Chen and Furlonger for the exhibition’s opening ceremony.

However, Smith’s presentation of his “Truckload” series is believed to have more pronounced affinities with China, which is striving to accelerate its pace of urbanization and modernization today.

In his busy canvases, Smith puts everything he sees in the rapidly developing areas of Queensland on the back of a big trailer, suggesting what we see one day may be gone tomorrow.

If this holds true for Queensland, it will as well apply to China, where fast-driving trucks are busy carrying goods from factories to all parts of the world.

Before the exhibition, Hughes, on behalf of the three artists, donated three of their works to Guan Shanyue Art Musuem’s permanent collection.

This is the first time the city’s museum has held an art exhibition for painters from Australia since it opened to the public 10 years ago, according to the museum’s curator Wang Xiaoming.