TAASA Review Issues

As a follow up to this year’s TAASA Monday night lecture series ‘Arts and Architecture in Northern India’, we are pleased to be able to publish articles in this issue based on three of those talks.

Jackie Menzies’ article broadens her TAASA talk to present an overview of the demons found in Shaktism, the Hindu tradition that believes shakti, divine female energy revered as the Goddess (Devi), is the Supreme Reality. Her article draws on vivid images from various museum collections.

Architecture is the focus of John Zubrzycki’s article, taking us through the rich architectural legacy of Lucknow, which, as he says, owes much to the ambitions of the Nawabs of Awadh who ruled the state from 1722 to 1856.

Finally, Christina Sumner’s article considers four distinctive Indian embroidery traditions, two each from Lucknow and Kolkata. Her intention, as she puts it, is both to demonstrate the diversity and virtuosity of Indian embroidery and to show the cultural roots and connections between these traditions.

We cover an exhibition that will open mid year in Sydney. Moon Jar: An Axis will first run in June at the LNL gallery in Newtown and then move to the Korean Cultural Centre Australia in Sydney’s CBD from 12 July to 21 August. Co-curator Jinyoung Lee writes about the intention of this exhibition to position the moon jar not as a historical artefact, but as a form perpetually rediscovered according to the sensibilities of artists working today. A TAASA tour of this exhibition has been organised for 28 July.

Another gallery visit that you might want to put in your diary is the newly expanded Newcastle Art Gallery. For the first time, the Gallery will have space to offer displays from its permanent collection of around 7000 items. Graeme Wiffen describes this much anticipated extension and has homed in on what is said to be ‘the most significant 20th century Japanese ceramics collection in Australia’, part of which is now on display.

While no longer on display, the significance of a series of three exhibitions held in Arts House in Melbourne over 2023 and 2024 is explained in Zining Ke’s article. These exhibitions presented a range of Dalit artistic practices that can be seen as part of an international drive to reframe the Dalit experience of exclusion and objectification as part of a broader decolonial shift in global contemporary art. Caste is here re-articulated, according to Zining Ke, through lived experience, resistance and alternative epistemologies that operate beyond the structures of the caste system.

Deborah Nixon’s article reflects on the post-colonial reframing of ‘history’ in the context of the long relationship that existed between the Yolŋu in Northern Australia and Macassan trepangers (sea cucumber harvesters) from present day Indonesia. The recent Yolŋu exhibition at the AGNSW included several works that made visible this Macassan contact, demonstrating the value of visual evidence previously dismissed as less legitimate than written records produced by European colonisers. Debroah Nixon’s attention to this history was first ignited by a family heirloom: a souvenir model of a clove boat or perahu cengki brought home from Maluku, Eastern Indonesia in the 70’s by her geologist father.

Not to neglect the contemporary art scene, Luise Guest has contributed an article on two Chinese artists Shi Zhiying and Wang Xin. Although their painting practices are quite different, they both produce, according to the author, ‘paintings with a hidden charge, a sense of mystery, which make us want to look, and to look again’.

The recent TAASA survey suggests that members enjoy reading contributions from collectors discussing a particular item from their collection. Chunjiang Li, a collector of Chinese ceramics, has chosen a favourite Kangxi period zun shaped porcelain vase which appeals to him because its underglaze cobalt decoration is, he says, imbued with the painterly spirit of the Song dynasty – both in featuring a scene from a well-known Song period poem and in its choice of painting method that deliberately alludes to a particular Song painting style.

Finally, we offer two book reviews in this issue. One, contributed by Luise Guest, is a long overdue review of Alex Burchmore’s New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art. It presents the work of four ceramicists who in their different ways explore the material and conceptual possibilities of porcelain as a contemporary artistic medium.

Judith Snodgrass has reviewed Art and War in Japan and its Empire 1931-1960, a publication that brings together 20 excellent papers on the impact of war on art practices and offers a profusion of high quality full colour images, many published here for the first time.