orn in Beijing in 1960, initially trained as a painter, Ah Xian was a practicing artist in China throughout the 1980s. He first came to Australia in 1989, as visiting artist at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart. Stranded by the events of Tiananmen Square, in 1990 he sought asylum here, settling in Sydney with his brother and fellow artist Liu Xiao Xian. As a struggling artist in Australia, he has worked as a house painter and kitchenhand, roles that provided him with the time to recall China and its distinct aesthetic. In the alienation of exile, Ah Xian found a degree of cultural solace in historical national traditions. He began porcelain casting in the early 1990s to explore the central and ongoing theme of the human body in his practice. In 1996 and again in 1998 he returned to China, travelling to Jingdezhen — famous for kilns which for centuries produced fine porcelain objects and vessels for the Chinese imperial courts — to learn traditional techniques. Working with master potters, he learnt the processes of molding from life, decorating, glazing and firing. The move to work in cloisonné, lacquer and jade became a natural progression in reinterpreting the great traditions of Chinese crafts, exploring ideas of Chineseness or Chinese identity. In the breakthrough China China series, naturalistic porcelain busts (life casts of family and friends) are decorated with all-over images and patterns variously drawn from brush painting, ceramics (especially blue and white wares) and textiles such as dragons, birds and flowers, and landscapes. This concept creates a mismatch of form and surface that animates the faces in surprising, even surreal conjunctions: a butterfly on the eyes, for example, or a mountain on the forehead. By making these designs resemble tattoos, Ah Xian makes a statement about the indelibility of one’s cultural background, all the more prominent in his work since his residence in Australia for the last twelve years. These sculptures by Ah Xian establish a series of multilayered oppositions. The most overt is the tension between the sculptural form of the bust and the painted surface designs, which the artist likens to the oppositions of West and East. The bust is part of a Western portraiture tradition dating back to the busts of ancient Roman times and the designs are derived from Chinese decorative traditions, unique to China and in some cases to the studio-kilns at Jingdezhen. Such an opposition can also be seen as the relationship between the personal (since many of the busts are of Ah Xian’s family, including his wife, brother, and father) and the political (a statement about the artist’s own Chinese heritage articulated outside China), or between the interior self and the public face. More recently, Ah Xian has began to experiment with different materials, such as bronze and concrete. He currently lives in Sydney.
