Academic literature on the topic 'Chinese Australian artists'

Abstract In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity2 and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.

In early January 2020, when Chinese theatre director Wang Chong (b. 1982) arrived in New York to remount his production of Nick Payne's Constellations for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, he couldn't have predicted that this would be the last time for months that he would watch his actors from the middle of a full house. By the time his work-in-progress solo show, Made in China 2.0, opened at the Asia TOPA Festival in Melbourne, Australia, at the end of that February, it was clear that there would be no live theatre in Wang's hometown of Beijing for some time. All of China was on lockdown as the disease now tragically familiar as COVID-19 swept the country. Then, as Wang returned to Beijing in early March, businesses around the globe were shuttering, theatres were going dark, and theatre artists were confronting an unprecedented challenge to their personal safety, livelihoods, and ability to make meaningful art. In short order, some well-resourced theatre institutions began to stream performance recordings and reconfigure their seasons for online platforms. Only a month after returning home, Wang Chong joined this mass online movement with his production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, streamed live on 5–6 April 2020 as Dengdai Geduo.

For the last two decades, the international auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been at the forefront of global art market expansion. Their world-wide footprints have enabled auction house specialists to engage with emerging artists and aspiring collectors, most notably in the developing economies of the Global South. By establishing their sales infrastructure in new locales ahead of the traditional mechanisms of primary market commercial galleries, the international auction houses have played a foundational role in the notional construction of new genres of art. However, branding alone is not sufficient to establish these new markets; the auction houses require a network of willing supporters to facilitate and drive marketplace supply and demand, be that trans-locational art market intermediaries, local governments, and/or regional auction businesses. This paper examines emerging art auction markets in three Global South case studies. It elucidates the strategic mechanisms and networks of international and regional art auction houses in the development of specific genres of contemporary art: Hong Kong and ‘Chinese contemporary art’, Singapore and ‘Southeast Asian art’, and Australia and ‘Aboriginal art’. Through examination and comparison of these three markets, this paper draws on research conducted over the past decade to reveal an integral role played by art auctions in the expansion of broader contemporary art world infrastructure in the Global South.

“Abroad” once evoked a feeling of returning to one's homeland or, in the case of post-war Australians, to the mother country. It was also synonymous with a distant journey or place in a foreign land. Today the expression “travelling abroad” infers notions of travel and adventure. The modern use of the word is more likely to be something fixed, or the undertaking of a meaningful activity, such as volunteering abroad or studying abroad. “Abroad” is also used in the context of charitable organisations such as Community Aid Abroad, Work Abroad and Projects Abroad. Rumours, too, can be “abroad” as they too travel widely, in and out in the open and in circulation. Further, a general sense of the care-free, of independence, excitement, imagination, endless possibilities and freedom is aroused. The modern sense of the word “abroad”—out of one's country or overseas—derives from its late fourteenth century meaning: “out of doors or away from home”. “Abroad” comes from the Old English word “on brede” meaning: “at wide.” This issue of M/C Journal presents a diverse and fascinating interpretation of the word “abroad”. Our feature article, “Mobility, Modernity and Abroad” by Alana Harris, provides an overview of Australian travel abroad and examines the ways in which modern tourists can be both at home and abroad at the same time. Following on from this, Marjorie Kibby, in “Monument Valley, Instagram and the Closed Circle of Representation,” discusses the use of Instagram and how tourists represent themselves in the photographs taken when they travel. In the traditional sense of the word “abroad”, Graeme Williams examines the way in which Gentlemen’s Art clubs in England influenced Australian artists who travelled there in the first decades of the twentieth century in “Australian Artists Abroad.” Jillian Adams examines the writings of Australian journalist Helen Seager during her assignment in London in 1950, and Gwen Hughes’s unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written about her observations during a trip there in the 1930s. Donna Lee Brien discusses the impact of international foods on Australians via a little known publication in Melbourne, Australia between 1956 and 1960; and Katie Ellis, Mike Kent and Kathryn Locke examine the positive impact of advocacy abroad on the way in which disabled people watch television in Australia. Patrick West proposes a new methodology for language and knowledge relations in his article on the way glossaries of indigenous words are presented in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby. Liz Davis explores the game Bayonetta and the way in which Bayonetta, the game’s main character, moves freely through both time and territory; whilst Jasleen Kaur fixes iconic brand Tiffany’s with the allure of New York and Lanlan Kuang invites us to engage with present day imaginings of journeys along the Silk Road through dance drama performances sponsored by the Chinese state to encourage its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s.The articles in this edition of M/C Journal take a word with old associations of journeys and travel, and add modern associations and ways of using the word “abroad”.

The Chinese artist Chen Qiulin has been taking displacement and the resulting unrest in people’s identity as her persistent theme since the early 1990s. Focusing on a series of her works made since 2004 dealing explicitly with tofu and Chinese surnames, this paper examines her exploration of identities in transition in the context of China’s mass urbanization and globalization. By showing the artist’s conceptual evolution, her preference for materials and mediums, and her exhibition strategy, this paper explores two issues. First, it illuminates how the artist has transformed “tofu” and “surname” into a metaphor for the dilemma of identity under the urbanization in China. Second, it discusses how the artist has integrated her trans-cultural experience with Chinese migrant communities in Australia, to reflect the continuity and fluidity of cultural identity under global migration. The Tofu and One Hundred Surnames series provides a useful case study for examining the complexity of identity transition in Chinese contemporary art, which was previously not fully recognized. Keywords: Chinese contemporary art, symbolic mobility, identity, memory, displacement, transition, diaspora, urbanization, global migration

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

Western notions of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), as expressed within copyright law, maintain a potentially fraught relationship with a range of philosophical and theoretical positions on writing and authorship that have developed within contemporary Western thinking. For Roland Barthes, authorship is compromised, de-identified and multiplied by the very nature of writing: ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (142). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari follow a related line of thought in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency’ (11). Similarly, in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory’ (24). To the extent that these philosophical and theoretical positions emerge within the practices of creative writers as remixes of appropriation, homage and/or pastiche, prima facie they problematize the commercial rights of writers as outlined in law. The case of Kathy Acker often comes up in such discussions. Acker’s 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School, for example, incorporates techniques that have attracted the charge of plagiarism as this term is commonly defined. (Peter Wollen notes this in his aptly named essay ‘Death [and Life] of the Author.’) For texts like Acker’s, the comeback against charges of plagiarism usually involves underscoring the quotient of creativity involved in the re-combination or ‘remixing’ of the parts of the original texts. (Pure repetition would, it would seem, be much harder to defend.) ‘Plagiarism’, so-called, was simply one element of Acker’s writing technique; Robert Lort nuances plagiarism as it applies to Acker as ‘pseudo-plagiarism’. According to Wollen, ‘as she always argued, it wasn’t really plagiarism because she was quite open about what she did.’ As we shall demonstrate in more detail later on, however, there is another and, we suggest, more convincing reason why Acker’s work ‘wasn’t really plagiarism.’ This relates to her conscious interest in calligraphy and to her (perhaps unconscious) appropriation of a certain strand of Chinese philosophy. All the same, within the Western context, the consistent enforcement of copyright law guarantees the rights of authors to control the distribution of their own work and thus its monetised value. The author may be ‘dead’ in writing—just the faintest trace of remixed textuality—but he/she is very much ‘alive’ as in recognised at law. The model of the author as free-standing citizen (as a defined legal entity) that copyright law employs is unlikely to be significantly eroded by the textual practices of authors who tarry artistically in the ‘de-authored territories’ mapped by figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida. Crucially, disputes concerning copyright law and the ethics of remix are resolved, within the Western context, at the intersection of relatively autonomous creative and legal domains. In the West, it is seen that these two domains are related within the one social fabric; each nuances the other (as Acker’s example shows in the simultaneity of her legal/commercial status as an author and her artistic practice as a ‘remixer’ of the original works of other authors). Legal and writing issues co-exist even as they fray each other’s boundaries. And in Western countries there is force to the law’s operations. However, the same cannot be said of the situation with respect to copyright law in China. Chinese artists are traditionally regarded as being aloof from mundane legal and commercial matters, with the consequence that the creative and the legal domains tend to ‘miss each other’ within the fabric of Chinese society. To this extent, the efficacy of the law is muted in China when it comes into contact with circumstances of authorship, writing, originality and creativity. (In saying this though, we do not wish to fall into the trap of cultural essentialism: in this article, ‘China’ and ‘The West’ are placeholders for variant cultural tendencies—clustered, perhaps, around China and its disputed territories such as Taiwan on the one hand, and around America on the other—rather than homogeneous national/cultural blocs.) Since China opened its system to Western capitalist economic activity in the 1980s, an ongoing criticism, sourced mainly out of the West, has been that the country lacks proper respect for notions of authorship and, more directly, for authorship’s derivative: copyright law. Tellingly, it took almost ten years of fierce negotiations between elements of the capitalist lobby in China and the Legislative Bureau to make the Seventh National People’s Congress pass the first Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China on 7 September 1990. A law is one thing though, and adherence to the law is another. Jayanthi Iyengar of Asia Times Online reports that ‘the US government estimates that piracy within China [of all types of products] costs American companies $20-24 billion a year in damages…. If one includes European and Japanese firms, the losses on account of Chinese piracy is in excess of $50 billion annually.’ In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that more than 99% of all music files in China are pirated. In the same year, Cara Anna wrote in The Seattle Times that, in desperation at the extent of Chinese infringement of its Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Microsoft has deployed an anti-piracy tactic that blacks out the screens of computers detected running a fake copy of Windows. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has filed complaints from many countries against China over IPRs. Iyengar also reports that, under such pressure, the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing has vowed it will continue to reinforce awareness of IPRs in order to better ensure their protection. Still, from the Western perspective at least, progress on this extremely contentious issue has been excruciatingly slow. Such a situation in respect of Chinese IPRs, however, should not lead to the conclusion that China simply needs to catch up with the more ‘morally advanced’ West. Rather, the problematic relations of the law and of creativity in China allow one to discern, and to trace through ancient Chinese history and philosophy, a different approach to remix that does not come into view so easily within Western countries. Different materialisms of writing and authorship come into play across global space, with different effects. The resistance to both the introduction and the policing of copyright law in China is, we think, the sign of a culture that retains something related to authorship and creativity that Western culture only loosely holds onto. It provides a different way of looking at remix, in the guise of what the West would tend to label plagiarism, as a practice, especially, of creativity. The ‘death’ of the author in China at law (the failure to legislate and/or police his/her rights) brings the author, as we will argue, ‘alive’ in the writing. Remix as anonymous composition (citing Barthes) becomes, in the Chinese example, remix as creative expression of singular feelings—albeit remix set adrift from the law. More concretely, our example of the Chinese writer/writing takes remix to its limit as a practice of repetition without variation—what the West would be likely to call plagiarism. Calligraphy is key to this. Of course, calligraphy is not the full extent of Chinese writing practice—not all writing is calligraphic strictly speaking. But all calligraphy is writing, and in this it influences the ethics of Chinese writing, whether character-based or otherwise, more generally. We will have more to say about the ‘pictorial’ material aspect of Chinese writing later on. In traditional Chinese culture, writing is regarded as a technical practice perfected through reproduction. Chinese calligraphy (visual writing) is learnt through exhaustively tracing and copying the style of the master calligrapher. We are tempted to say that what is at stake in Chinese remix/calligraphy is ‘the difference that cannot be helped:’ that is, the more one tries, as it were, to repeat, the more repetition becomes impossible. In part, this is explained by the interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). Now, the order of the characters—Qing 情 (‘feelings’) before Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’)—suggests that Qing creates and supports Yun. To this extent, what we have here is something akin to a Western understanding of creative writing (of the creativity of writing) in which individual and singular feelings are given expression in the very movement of the writing itself (through the bodily actions of the writer). In fact though, the Chinese case is more complicated than this, for the apprenticeship model of Chinese calligraphy cultivates a two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). More directly, the ‘composed body movements’ that one learns from the master calligrapher help compose one’s own ‘feelings’. The very repetition of the master’s work (its remixing, as it were…) enables the creativity of the apprentice. If this model of creativity is found somewhat distasteful from a Western perspective (that is, if it is seen to be too restrictive of originality) then that is because such a view, we think, depends upon a cultural misunderstanding that we will try to clear up here. To wit, the so-called Confucian model of rote learning that is more-or-less frowned upon in the West is not, at least not in the debased form that it adopts in Western stereotypes, the philosophy active in the case of Chinese calligraphy. That philosophy is Taoism. As Wing-Tsit Chan elucidates, ‘by opposing Confucian conformity with non-conformity and Confucian worldliness with a transcendental spirit, Taoism is a severe critic of Confucianism’ (136). As we will show in a moment, Chinese calligraphy exemplifies this special kind of Taoist non-conformity (in which, as Philip J. Ivanhoe limns it, ‘one must unweave the social fabric’). Chan again: ‘As the way of life, [Taoism] denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and most important of all, non-action (wu-wei). By the latter is not meant literally “inactivity” but rather “taking no action that is contrary to Nature”—in other words, letting Nature take its own course’ (136). Thus, this is a philosophy of ‘weakness’ that is neither ‘negativism’ nor ‘absolute quietism’ (137). Taoism’s supposed weakness is rather a certain form of strength, of (in the fullest sense) creative possibilities, which comes about through deference to the way of Nature. ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ illustrates this aspect of Taoism in its major philosophical tract, The Lao Tzu (Tao-Te Ching) or The Classic of the Way and its Virtue (section 35, Chan 157). The guiding principle is one of deference to the original (way, Nature or Tao) as a strategy of an expression (of self) that goes beyond the original. The Lao Tzu is full of cryptic, metaphoric expressions of this idea: ‘The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. / The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. / It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. / No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone’ (section 48, Chan 162). Similarly, The female always overcomes the male by tranquility, / And by tranquility she is underneath. / A big state can take over a small state if it places itself below the small state; / And the small state can take over a big state if it places itself below the big state. / Thus some, by placing themselves below, take over (others), / And some, by being (naturally) low, take over (other states) (section 61, Chan 168). In Taoism, it is only by (apparent) weakness and (apparent) in-action that ‘nothing is left undone’ and ‘states’ are taken over. The two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’), whereby the apprentice copies the master, aligns with this key element of Taoism. Here is the linkage between calligraphy and Taoism. The master’s work is Tao, Nature or the way: ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ (section 35, Chan 157). The apprentice’s calligraphy is ‘all the world’ (‘all the world’ being, ultimately in this context, Qing 情 [‘feelings’]). Indeed, Taoism itself is a subtle philosophy of learning (of apprenticeship to a master), unlike Confucianism, which Chan characterises as a doctrine of ‘social order’ (of servitude to a master) (136). ‘“Learn not learn”’ is how Wang Pi, as quoted by Chan (note 121, 170), understands what he himself (Chan) translates as ‘He learns to be unlearned’ (section 64, 170). In unlearning one learns what cannot be taught: this is, we suggest, a remarkable definition of creativity, which also avoids falling into the trap of asserting a one-to-one equivalence between (unlearnt) originality and creativity, for there is both learning and creativity in this Taoist paradox of pedagogy. On this, Michael Meehan points out that ‘originality is an over-rated and misguided concept in many ways.’ (There is even a sense in which, through its deliberate repetition, The Lao Tzu teaches itself, traces over itself in ‘self-plagiarising’ fashion, as if it were reflecting on the re-tracings of calligraphic pedagogy. Chan notes just how deliberate this is: ‘Since in ancient times books consisted of bamboo or wooden slabs containing some twenty characters each, it was not easy for these sentences… to be added by mistake…. Repetitions are found in more than one place’ [note 102, 166].) Thinking of Kathy Acker too as a learner, Peter Wollen’s observation that she ‘incorporated calligraphy… in her books’ and ‘was deeply committed to [the] avant-garde tradition, a tradition which was much stronger in the visual arts’ creates a highly suggestive connection between Acker’s work and Taoism. The Taoist model for learning calligraphy as, precisely, visual art—in which copying subtends creativity—serves to shift Acker away from a Barthesian or Derridean framework and into a Taoist context in which adherence to another’s form (as ‘un-learnt learning’) creatively unravels so-called plagiarism from the inside. Acker’s conscious interest in calligraphy is shown by its prevalence in Blood and Guts in High School. Edward S. Robinson identifies this text as part of her ‘middle phase’, which ‘saw the introduction of illustrations and diagrams to create multimedia texts with a collage-like feel’ (154). To our knowledge, Acker never critically reflected upon her own calligraphic practices; perhaps if she had, she would have troubled what we see as a blindspot in critics’ interpretations of her work. To wit, whenever calligraphy is mentioned in criticism on Acker, it tends to be deployed merely as an example of her cut-up technique and never analysed for its effects in its own cultural, philosophical and material specificity. (Interestingly, if the words of Chinese photographer Liu Zheng are any guide, the Taoism we’re identifying in calligraphy has also worked its way into other forms of Chinese visual art: she refers to ‘loving photographic details and cameras’ with the very Taoist term, ‘lowly’ 低级 [Three Shadows Photography Art Centre 187].) Being ‘lowly’, ‘feminine’ or ‘underneath’ has power as a radical way of learning. We mentioned above that Taoism is very metaphoric. As the co-writer of this paper Cher Coad recalls from her calligraphy classes, students in China grow up with a metaphoric proverb clearly inspired by Lao Tzu’s Taoist philosophy of learning: ‘Learning shall never stop. Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What could this mean? Before answering this question with recourse to two Western notions that, we hope, will further effect (building on Acker’s example) a rapprochement between Chinese and Western ways of thinking (be they nationally based or not), we reiterate that the infringement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China should not be viewed only as an egregious denial of universally accepted law. Rather, whatever else it may be, we see it as the shadow in the commercial realm—mixed through with all the complexities of Chinese tradition, history and cultural difference, and most particularly of the Taoist strand within Confucianism—of the never-quite-perfect copying of calligraphic writing/remixing. More generally, the re-examination of stereotypical assumptions about Chinese culture cues a re-examination of the meaning behind the copying of products and technology in contemporary, industrialised China. So, ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What is this ‘more than the blue of black’? Or put differently, why is calligraphic writing, as learnt from the master, always infused with the singular feelings of the (apprentice) writer? The work of Deleuze, Guattari and Claire Parnet provides two possible responses. In On the Line, Deleuze and Guattari (and Deleuze in co-authorship with Parnet) author a number of comments that support the conception we are attempting to develop concerning the lines of Chinese calligraphy. A line, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is always a line of lines (‘Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight’ [57]). In the section of On the Line entitled ‘Politics’, Deleuze and Parnet outline the impossibility of any line being just one line. If life is a line (as it is said, you throw someone a life line), then ‘We have as many entangled lines in our lives as there are in the palm of a hand’ (71). Of any (hypothetical) single line it can be said that other lines emerge: ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ The feelings of the apprentice calligrapher (his/her multiple lines) emerge through the repeated copying of the lines and composed body movements of the master. The Deleuzean notion of repetition takes this idea further. Repetitive Chinese calligraphy clearly indexes what Claire Colebrook refers to as ‘Deleuze’s concept of eternal return. The only thing that is repeated or returns is difference; no two moments of life can be the same. By virtue of the flow of time, any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)’ (121). Now, it might be objected that Chinese calligraphic practices, because of the substantially ideographic nature of Chinese writing (see Kristeva 72-81), allow for material mutations that can find no purchase in Western, alphabetical systems of writing. But the materiality of time that Colebrook refers to as part of her engagement with Deleuzean non-repetitious (untimely) repetition guarantees the materiality of all modes of writing. Furthermore, Julia Kristeva notes that, with any form of language, one cannot leave ‘the realm of materialism’ (6) and Adrian Miles, in his article ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing,’ sees the apparently very ‘unmaterial’ writing of hypertext ‘as an embodied activity that has its own particular affordances and possibilities—its own constraints and local actualisations’ (1-2). Calligraphic repetition of the master’s model creates the apprentice’s feelings as (inevitable) difference. In this then, the learning by the Chinese apprentice of the lines of the master’s calligraphy challenges international (both Western and non-Western) artists of writing to ‘remix remix’ as a matter—as a materialisation—of the line. Not the line as a self-identical entity of writing that only goes to make up writing more generally; rather, lines as a materialisation of lines within lines within lines. More self-reflexively, even the collaborative enterprise of this article, co-authored as it is by a woman of Chinese ethnicity and a white Australian man, suggests a remixing of writing through, beneath and over each other’s lines. Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) expresses and maximises Qing 情 (‘feelings’). Taoist ‘un-learnt learning’ generates remix as the singular creativity of the writer. Writers get into a blue with the line—paint it, black. Of course, these ideas won’t and shouldn’t make copyright infringement (or associated legalities) redundant notions. But in exposing the cultural relativisms often buried within the deployment of this and related terms, the idea of lines of lines far exceeds a merely formalistic practice (one cut off from the materialities of culture) and rather suggests a mode of non-repetitious repetition in contact with all of the elements of culture (of history, of society, of politics, of bodies…) wherever these may be found, and whatever their state of becoming. In this way, remix re-creates the depths of culture even as it stirs up its surfaces of writing. References Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Anna, Cara. ‘Microsoft Anti-Piracy Technology Upsets Users in China.’ The Seattle Times. 28 Oct. 2008 ‹http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2008321919_webmsftchina28.html›. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142-148. Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. ‘Recording Industry Steps Up Campaign against Internet Piracy in China.’ ifpi. 4 Feb. 2008 ‹http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20080204.html›. Ivanhoe, Philip J. ‘Taoism’. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 787. Iyengar, Jayanthi. ‘Intellectual Property Piracy Rocks China Boat.’ Asia Times Online. 16 Sept. 2004 ‹http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FI16Ad07.html›. Kristeva, Julia. Language: The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lort, Robert. ‘Kathy Acker (1944-1997).’ Jahsonic: A Vocabulary of Culture. 2003 ‹http://www.jahsonic.com/KathyAcker.html›. Meehan, Michael. ‘Week 5a: Playing with Genres.’ Lecture notes. Unit ALL705. Short Stories: Writers and Readers. Trimester 2. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013. Miles, Adrian. ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing.’ Studies in Material Thinking 1.2 (April 2008) ‹http://www.materialthinking.org/papers/29›. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. ‘Photography and Intimate Space Symposium.’ Conversations: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre’s 2007 Symposium Series. Ed. RongRong, inri, et al. Beijing: Three Shadows Press Limited, 2008. 179-191. Wollen, Peter. ‘Death (and Life) of the Author.’ London Review of Books 20.3 (5 Feb. 1998). ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-author›.

We'd eat at Cahill's, Cahill's Family Restaurants I believe they were called, and quite plushy looking ... . At Cahill's we'd eat Viennese Schnitzel, with potato salad and some nice red cabbage salad, sort of pickled ... . Even more exotic was Chicken Maryland, served with a banana and a slice of pineapple in batter. It cost 7s 6d. -- Marion Halligan (11) We migrated in the sixties. Born in Cape Town, I was raised in the heart of Jewish Bondi. The flavours of my youth? Probably equal parts peri-peri, horseradish and chicken booster, not bouquet garni. My introduction to what was 'Australian' food was had in restaurants. And yes, I remember Cahill's, though I can't tell you when exactly, or how much things cost. Mid-sixties. I knew, even then, that there were better restaurants, like the places Dad used to take us with checked tablecloths and bottles with candles dripping wax and fish nets everywhere. His favourites were Mother's Cellar and The Gap at Watson's Bay. I think it's still there. This was before they built Australia Square and Dad became obsessed with the Summit, and of course the Blue Angel, where we never doubted that the lobsters were live. Favourite dishes? I would only eat 'chicken in a basket' or spaghetti bolognaise; well, I was very young, and prone to tears. I can remember my father, losing patience and insisting, "you have a basket for the bread, just put the bloody chicken in it". I can't even remember what it was, probably the same Chicken Maryland Halligan mentions, or a cousin. Fried chicken with a battered pineapple ring and chips of course, sometimes magically grated to form a lattice. I know I enjoyed going out to eat but all meals held the prospect of tension. Visser says the tension arises from the prospect of ending up as a main course. In my case, a mere hors d'œuvre for my sarcastic oldest brother. I was the youngest and unsure how to get the best, the most, as much, or even what I wanted. I wouldn't order until I had read the whole menu, which took long enough even when it wasn't in French or Italian. The menu rarely helped me, rather it served to frustrate my entire family because they knew I was going to order spaghetti or chicken anyway, but that made no difference, the menu had to be read before ordering, and no amount of harassment could convince me otherwise. I love the thought of that child, and her passionate sense of propriety. On special occasions Dad would order Spumante and we would all have a glass, and I felt terribly sophisticated; fortunately the experience doesn't seem to have permanently damaged my palate. Spumante reminded Dad of Italy, the war, you know. Granny used to refer to this as "Henry's trip to Europe". My Dad loved the war, and I'm sure it's not all rosy nostalgia because it was the only time he got away from his family. He drove a truck and didn't have to kill anybody and all we ever heard about was the mud, the black market and the girls. So a glass of cheap, sweet fizzy brought it all back, every time, and who am I to scoff, when the merest whiff of retsina and I'm floating in the bath-flat Aegean under a hot blue sky with anybody called Jani? Cahill's, meanwhile, was in the city, in the days when you 'went to town'. Going to town was always a treat but it depended largely on with whom and why. With Mum it meant serious shopping, and though there was the promise of lunch at David Jones Cafeteria, was it worth the endless hours of torture trying on shoes that were too small and school uniforms which were too big, but of course I would grow into them? And how could a pie with sauce in a plastic packet have been a treat? Going to town with Nana was a different story. It was with some expectation that we would descend into the air-conditioned red-walled cavern that was Cahill's. What I remember about Cahill's was the occasion, and the fish and chips. Nana spent her childhood in a Dickensian orphanage and her adulthood in the North of England, waiting for my grandfather to pick a winner, so I imagine that she felt comfortable with what she knew. That she always ordered fish and chips is only strange because Nana was famous for her fish and chips, perhaps she liked to compare. And I really shouldn't find it odd when I find it difficult to order anything other than fritto misto; in two generations we've progressed to "trefe"1 but not past the deep fryer. So I'm sure that I ordered fish and chips too, or perhaps I ate some of hers, because that was the only thing to do, otherwise she would eat one piece, then look around before coughing theatrically into a serviette which she would then drop, casually, over the other piece and put it in her bag. It was absolutely awful, and we grandchildren loved it when she did that. The other thing I have to say about fish and chips is that we Jews like to eat fried fish cold, but then we don't batter the fish, just flour and egg. I suppose it forms a batter anyway but it doesn't separate from the fish, and we like a solid fish, say kingfish, while Australians seem to go for thinner fillets encased in oily batter. Cahill's did something in between. To follow, tea for Nana, while I always ate fruit salad and ice cream; this I also used to eat on our Saturday afternoon excursions to the 'Cross' which Nana said reminded her of Paris, because it was full of 'artists' like herself. So Nana would sip her tea while I ate my tinned fruit salad and we enjoyed each other and the world, and what a delight for a chatty little girl, the undivided attention of such a beloved adult. I do believe that I will never feel as grown up, ever again, as I did when I was a little girl, out for lunch with my Nana. So as you see I have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips. Their cooking and consumption have flavoured my childhood and possibly yours. The association of fish and chips with that Hanson woman2 is therefore particularly galling, and yet also pertinent. I've never believed that it's just a coincidence that she is purveyor of fish and chips; after all, fish and chips are emblematic of 'Englishness'. Hanson wants Australians to maintain their cultural identification with the mother country, she could hardly have achieved her profile were she the proprietor of a noodle shop. So as you see I have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips. Their cooking and consumption have flavoured my childhood and possibly yours. The association of fish and chips with that Hanson woman2 is therefore particularly galling, and yet also pertinent. I've never believed that it's just a coincidence that she is purveyor of fish and chips; after all, fish and chips are emblematic of 'Englishness'. Hanson wants Australians to maintain their cultural identification with the mother country, she could hardly have achieved her profile were she the proprietor of a noodle shop. Here lies the Great Divide and I fear that I may be part of the problem, not the solution. I am hoist on my hybrid petard, uncomfortably, because much as I dislike elitist Epicureanism I have seen that the reality of what we eat in this country is not always pretty. And all the best efforts of the proselytising 'foodie' media are falling on deaf or already converted ears. Back in the mother country, this battleground is already well trod: there remains something shamefaced about the acceptance of fish and chips as a component of 'Englishness' among the 'better classes' ... . This set of perceptions attaches fish and chips to potent patriotic images of land, countryside, industrial might ... and above all, the notion of Britain as a gallant seafaring notion whose little ships do battle with the elements and the foreign enemy to feed and protect the people. (Walton 2) I see Pauline, wrapped in the flag, battered hake in upraised hand ... and let's not forget that fish and chips were one of our first fast foods, at a time when there was little respite for women, often providing the only hot meal of the day, particularly for workers. Of course the practice was seen to be harmful by health care professionals. The consumption of food prepared outside the home was read as poor mothering, a breakdown in the process of policing of 'proper' families and of course no-one is sure just what sort of mother Pauline is. She appears to be estranged from her older children, a case of one Chiko Roll too many? The irony of fish and chips and Englishness is that, according to Walton, fish and chips also symbolise cultural diversity: viewed in other moods and seen from other angles, of course, the image and associations of fish and chips could be very different. They expressed ethnic diversity as well as simplistic national solidarity, from the strong East End Jewish element in the early days of fish frying in London, through the strong Italian presence in the trade from the turn of the century, in urban Scotland and Ireland especially, to the growing importance of the Chinese and Greek Cypriots in the post-Second World War decades. (2) So fish and chips have played a significant role for a number of ethnic groups. They're ours, not hers. But I'm still troubled, I need to tell the gastronomic mafia that Pacific Rim cuisine won't be Oz food until a significant number of Australians are eating it, and I'm afraid "mainstream Australia, out there" is eating extremely boring food. Could it be that the resentment against Asians is because their food is just so much better? Footnotes 1. trefe: (yiddish) animals, seafood or insects considered impure, abomination, not to be eaten under any circumstances, notably pig and shellfish. 2. Pauline Hanson was elected to the Australian Federal Parliament as an independent candidate in 1996, and soon made her presence known with outspoken comments about Aborigines, (mainly Asian) migrants, and welfare recipients [ed.]. 3. Stephanie Alexander is a noted Australian food writer and restaurateur, and her A Shared Table is the latest of a plethora of Australian television series celebrating our gastronomic abundance. References Halligan,Marion. Eat My Words. Sydney: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. Visser, Margaret. The Rituals of Dinner. New York: Grove/Weidenfeld, 1991. Walton, John K. Fish and Chips and the British Working Class: 1870-1940. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Felicity Newman. "'You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php>. Chicago style: Felicity Newman, "'You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Felicity Newman. (1999) "You have a basket for the bread, just put the bloody chicken in it". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/basket.php> ([your date of access]).

For this issue of M/C Journal we were inspired to select the theme of ‘technique’ by the intersection of the critical discourses around technology and the praxis of everyday life that has been a preoccupation of late-20th and early-21st century cultural studies. We wanted to revisit, rupture, and reconstruct the foundational terms that give this journal its name—media and culture—by using the common nexus of technology. This special issue enlivens the idea of technique within the gamut of technology, media, science, culture, and creativity. The idea of technique is itself an intriguing prompt for the authors in this issue. It has inspired their pursuit of ideas of processes and procedures, methods and makers, habits and hacks, routines and rituals, and knowledge and know-how. Sharing a common etymology with technology, technique builds upon the ancient Greek term techne that describes the arts and mechanical crafts. If we connect technique and technology to this genealogical inheritance, we are presented with an insistence upon understanding how we craft not only objects but also the world. Throughout history we can find plenty of examples of tools and devices all increasing in technical complexity over time to meet the needs of human societies as they unfold across time—from axes and spears, drawing and writing implements, and clockwork mechanisms to telescopes, eye-glasses, and time-keeping and counting machines. As technical objects have become more complex, the cultures that produce them have produced increasingly specialised knowledge and fragmentary perceptions of the world in which they exist. Technology is thus the study of how to apply techne, craft; when people employ technology they are not just making use of a tool or device, they are also generating and employing techniques constitutive of a world view. While this might seem high-minded, the above reflection is based on the recognition that humans make use of techniques every day. Marshall McLuhan famously described this everyday relation with technologies and their techniques as extensions of the human body, notably of the senses. For McLuhan (1964), media are the substance of these extensions, and these extensions include a range of things beyond the tired trio of newspapers, radio and television, such as those engaged with by our authors in this issue. There is a long cross-cultural genealogy of ideas about technology and technique, which is far too large to discuss in sufficient detail here, it may suffice for us to summarise our focus by turning to the work of the influential British Cultural Studies scholar Raymond Williams. For Williams (1974), technology is used by people, and in this use people create meaningful exchanges of information structured by techniques and know-how. Used in this way, Williams argues, technology becomes a medium of communication that interacts with a social context. More strongly, Williams suggests that it is from a social necessity first and foremost that people develop techniques that make use of technology that is available in their milieu. The insight of Williams is that technology is frequently a (or the) material basis for late capitalist culture, and that techniques are a culmination of the knowledge of what technology is used for and, significantly, how to use it. Media are thus the applied use of technology as forms a social link, a mediation, between ourselves and the world. As history has demonstrated however, there are always unintended consequences that come with each new medium. Sometimes it is as simple as unintended uses that go beyond anything the original creator dreamed of. People routinely test the limits and boundaries of a new medium by examining what is already possible. Creativity is key to these experiments. For instance, the classic definition of ‘a hacker’ has very little to do with computer crime. Instead, the word ‘hacker’ defines someone who is motivated to solve problems through playful creativity and, often, displays of wit—and, of course, proficiency with techniques. It just so happens that the techniques uncovered by computer hackers also have applications elsewhere in society, a trend that continues to this day with the increase in interest in a range of 'hacker-esque' activities. Whether it's the political activist group Anonymous who directly employ techniques of subversion to further their varied agendas (Coleman 2014), or the more benign 'Maker' movement that champions a Do-It-Yourself approach to technology and hardware. The articles included in this issue of the M/C Journal explore a variety of techniques as they manifest through a specific medium. Each article presents a case study that answers Katherine Hayles' (2004) call for more "media-specific analysis" in cultural and critical theory. Liam Cole Young anchors this issue with his discussion of the relationship of technology to culture. Young charts the origins and history of a branch of German media studies that informs what we now call ‘cultural techniques’ or Kulturtechniken. Young invites his readers to reconsider the technology-culture relationship by rethinking Kulturtechniken so often misappropriated as techniques of audience and content analysis. Specifically, Young seeks to reposition the frame of institutional media studies, thus providing an alternative to the fetishisation of audiences and content in favour of a view that is sensitive to the intellectual history of ‘cultural techniques’, bringing them in dialogue with an understanding of the material specificity of media formats and the material realities of logistical media. Peng Liu draws our attention to the bodily techniques and responses of the artist structured by Chinese painting and the Confucian perspective. Liu argues that his memories and experiences of the Forgotten City and Chinese culture impress themselves upon his mapping of the aesthetic as he paints. Focusing on the interrelation and resistances of the body-as-artist and the conceptual structures that inform his sense of self, Liu imagines and reflects upon himself as a Chinese-artist. César Albarrán Torres and Justine Humphry delve into the cultural politics and labour of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ in relation to the expansion of gambling enabled by Internet-enabled mobile devices. Torres and Humphry suggest that recent policy decisions enacted by neo-liberal governance in Australia has resulted in attempts to regulate or interrupt gambling addiction. In so doing, they argue that these policies have reconfigured the self-discipline of the subject-state relation in the Australian context. Nicole Pepperell and Duncan Law take us into the recent history of the faith in Internet technology as a progressive force of economic, legal, political and social emancipation. Examining the politics of the Internet’s divergent potentials, Pepperell and Law suggest that rhetorical, social and politics techniques have proven themselves decisive in the success or failure of realising the Internet’s emancipatory potential. They note that it is not without irony that recognising the limitations of politicised technologies may have a positive impact on the manifestation of private freedoms. To close this special issue, Jamileh Kadivar turns her gaze to the case of techniques of surveillance and counter-surveillance in Iran during the non-violent protests of the Iranian Green Movement in 2009. Kadivar argues that the centrality of surveillance for a convergent media environment cannot be understated, and its operation and function served to target and repress protest and dissent in Iran during the northern hemisphere’s late autumn of 2009. Yet Kadivar notes the important role of visibility in the contestations of surveillance in Iran and other dissenting movements such as Occupy. The editors of the 'technique' issue of M/C Journal wish to thank the M/C editorial team for the opportunity to gather articles under the theme. Thank you also to the scholars who provided constructive feedback during the peer-review process. And, most importantly, thank you to our authors without whom this issue would not be possible. References Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the Story of Anonymous. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2014. Hayles, N.Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67-90 McLuhan, H. Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Berkeley, Calif.: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London, UK: Collins, 1974.

This dissertation focuses on Chinese artists who migrated to the West (Australia, the United States, and France )during the late eighties and early nineties. Throughout the thesis, it is argued that transexperience encourages a more fluid perception of the relationship to the homeland, not only positing it in the past but also in the present. The structure of the dissertation, devised in terms of locations, is relevant to the author's argument that the site of settlement is a significant determinant in the development of artistic expressions of overseas Chinese artists. A brief conclusion explores some of the most recent developments in the relationship between overseas Chinese artists and their homeland as seen in more frequent travel back, the exhibition of their work (which would have been impossible only a few years ago), and official invitations to represent China in international exhibitions.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis focuses on the work and experience of Guan Wei. Guan Wei is a Chinese born artist now living and working in Australia. He is one of a number of mainland Chinese who came to live in Australia in the late 1989s and early 1990s. While there are certain commonalities between the experiences of these artists, I have concentrated on Guan Wei not merely as a case study for recent emigre Chinese artists in Australia, but because of his prominent place in Australian contemporary art.