ON THE ANTICIPATION OF TRAVEL AND ITS REALITY

By

Merryn Gates

Published in "Meridian: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art", curated by Rachel Kent, Russell Storer & Vivienne Webb, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, N.S.W. (2002)

In the year 2000 Rose Farrell and George Parkin went to China for a residency at the Beijing Art Academy. Their apartment was not too far away, a half-hour walk to the suburb of Chaoyang, on the eastern outer ring road of Beijing Proper.

An enduring platitude would have it that we travel to confirm what we already know. Farrell and Parkin had drawn on some cliches of revolutionary China in an earlier series Red Squares (1988)—Tian'anmen is perhaps redder now, but the official year 2000 Olympic-bid colour for Beijing was grey. However, it was not propaganda but an ex-Red Army first-aid manual that they planned to work from. Since the 1992 series A Passion for Maladies, arcane medical practices and contraptions have been central to their work. In the ensuing years this body of work has become more clearly a metaphor for the individual's vulnerability in the face of great social change—scientific, religious, social and political.

A Thousand Golden Remedies is a mixture of the planned, the pragmatic and the inspired. Walking the streets of Beijing Farrell and Parkin discovered the large emporiums where white-coated assistants presided over counters of herbal medicines or the stock-in-trade of the acupuncturist. From here were sourced the Ginseng root, seahorse, Lingzhi fungus and dried Gecko lizard; the plastic model dog, horse, cow and pig that feature in A Thousand Golden Remedies. The images retain a curiosity for the uncommon, but the mystery now hinges on a cultural difference, not the characteristic historical distance. Equally uncharacteristic, the works are sparse, almost cryptic, word-pictures. The resulting composition is in part, I suspect, a response to Chinese language, in which meaning is built up into a single, potent ideogram. Links are almost architectural, as in the wooden base of the acupuncture model, or literal as in the tied bandage/splint. The series was realised with calligraphic speed and facility.

On their way to The Tibet Dipper Colour Lab to process the film for A Thousand Golden Remedies they passed a dentist shop window. The artists recall that "patients, receiving treatment with a bright light flaring off their faces, could be seen through the window in what appeared to us to be almost a theatre of the macabre". In circumstances so unlike western conventions, where such painful procedures are private, in Beijing the dentist's skill was proclaimed with graphic photos beside the front door, the surgery visible, indeed under the spotlight, as they worked into the evening.

Flaming Sun is another encounter with an impromptu night theatre, and zooms in to observe 'Hero Workers' on bamboo scaffolding, the flare of welding casting large shadow play on the multi-storey apartment under construction. This is the new Beijing. The artists worked furtively from across the street, unsure of how their filming would be taken in this country of constant surveillance. The theatrical conventions are emphasised by the slow motion replay which magnifies the human drama unfolding. Each of the videos progresses at the same, dream-like pace, as if in counterpoint to the chaotic frenzy of the city.

Farrell and Parkin took certain expectation with them to China. While there they responded with acuity to the culture of Beijing. The images and videos offer an artist's nuance to the question posed by Alain de Botton:

Is travelling a mindset? We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigues by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall.
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2002, p246

Merryn Gates is a freelance curator and writer. She has written on Farrell and Parkin since 1992. By chance she was in Beijing at the same time as the artists, and visited their studio at the Beijing Art Academy.