look what these clever dutch people did! they came up with real rainbow roses, to make us all happy. kind of kitsch, but everyone has time for a bit of psychedelic flora on tuesday evenings, don't they?

With the Olympics on our heels the world’s gaze is fixed on China. But there’s a lot more going on there than stadiums, torches, training, corporate sponsorship and sweaty towels.

Until relatively recently there were very few private collections or museums with contemporary Chinese art, but it’s now the peak of attention and esteem. Like Paris in the 20s, New York in the 70s or Berlin in the 90s, Beijing is today one of the most exciting art centres of the world.

Like all these places before it, it’s a site of rapid change - nowhere else on earth is transforming so rapidly or at such a large scale. The nation’s transmuting urban environments have opened up the potential to explore what it being lost, and what is coming; and artists working in China are capturing the energy, uncertainty and transience of their shifting society.

From Confucius to Mao, the culture has traditionally disregarded individualism in favour of the collective good - but this is shifting. China’s radical transition from communism to consumerism has occurred alongside dizzying developments in new technology, economic growth, urbanisation and globalisation. With this has come a fascinating explosion of art that’s concerned with new identity – both national and individual.

Reflecting the ambivalence of their times and breaking away from the old-world values of generations past, many contemporary Chinese artists also evoke a quiet melancholy for lost tradition. A culture with a rich and ancient history of refined craftsmanship, Chinese artists today both re-engage and re-imagine their artistic past, often employing the old, orthodox techniques and aesthetics in their work.

After China was opened up to the outside world in the late 70s there was an expeditious emergence of young artists who were striving to catch up with the modernist and post-modernist developments in art in the west. In 1989 there was to be a large show called the China Modern Art Exhibition in Beijing. But when on the day of the official opening the performance artist Xiao Lu walked into the gallery and fired two gun shots into a glass mirror that formed the centrepiece of her own installation, Dialogue, she was promptly arrested and the entire exhibition was closed down.

With the horrific consequences of the student protests at Tiananmen Square in the same year, the exploding art scene suddenly seemed to mellow down into obscurity. The brave new resurgence has only come about in the last decade or so, with the Shanghai Biennale (and the controversial coinciding group exhibition Fuck Off) in 2000 bringing widespread attention.

Today Ai Weiwei is one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese art. A cultural commentator, publisher, curator, architect and artist, he’s recently been in Sydney for the first international survey of his work. The show, still on at Sherman gallery in Paddington and at Campbelltown Arts Centre is titled Under Construction – referring to the ways Ai deals with the destruction and construction of history, of ancient artefacts, of identity and of China itself.

Another superstar on the scene is Cai Guo-Qiang, whose use of gunpowder in his vast drawings eventually led to him experimenting with explosives that he developed for his signature ‘explosion events’ - artistically choreographed shows using fireworks and other pyrotechnics. His large-scale animal sculpture/installation pieces, like the one pictured here, are also well known.

The conceptual artist Zhao Bandi has made his reputation with staged scenarios where he and his toy panda play out everyday situations. Blurring the boundary between image and reality, the panda character has a voice of its own – often appearing in speech bubbles. Last year the eccentric artist worked on a show for China Fashion Week in Beijing, presenting 33 black and white panda-esque creations that represented different social classes and issues in China.

What these artists and so many of their contemporaries have in common is the desire to intersect, dissect and rebuild their surroundings, and question the values and meanings of their still unstable reality. But the society has come a long way since the censoring of the China Modern Art Exhibition in ’89. That Xiao Lu’s aforementioned Dialogue sold for US$200 000 in 2006 at a Beijing auction is testament to the profound cultural shift that has taken place.

With only five contemporary art galleries in China in the early 90s, today there are well over 100. If you’re heading to Beijing, the best way to being to grasp the plethora of new art is to go to the Danshi district known as 798. An abandoned military electronics factory on the outskirts of the city, the site has been converted to a hub of studios, galleries and performance spaces showcasing a smorgasbord of the many flavours this generation of creatives are cooking up.

quote of the day

“When Walser first put on his make-up, he looked in the mirror and did not recognize himself. As he contemplated the stranger peering interrogatively back at him out of the glass, he felt the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of freedom … he experienced the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being, that lies at the heart of burlesque.”

(from Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus)

The Dame bends over, whips up her crinolines; she has three pairs of knee-length bloomers, which she wears according to mood.

One pair of bloomers is made out of the Union Jack, for the sake of patriotism.

The second pait of bloomers is quartered red and black in the memory of Utopia.

The third and vastest pair of bloomers is scarlet, with a target on the seat, centred on the asshole, and this pair is wholly dedicated to obscenity.

(from Angela Carter’s In Pantoland)


It was not so long ago that wearing bloomers, those loose pants gathered near the knee, was a radical move.

Bloomers were invented by and named after Amelia Bloomer, an early American suffragette and social reformer who founded and edited the feminist publication Lily (1849–55). She interests me, not least because my name is also Amelia, my surname is Groom (not far from her's) and my middle name is Lily! My parents say they had never heard of her when they named me.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century gender roles were being drastically reformed and, insignificant as it might sound, women started to ride bikes. The bicycle gives autonomy and mobility, and thus was a threat to the patriarchy, which needed women to stay in their defined place, both figuratively and physically. The feminist and civil rights leader, Susan B. Anthony, is quoted as saying "the bicycle had done more to emancipate women then anything else in the world."

Amelia started wearing bloomers for practicality, especially for cycling. It was necessary to cast off the constricting and uncomfortable clothing styles that had covered women's bodies for centuries, but it was no easy task. Amelia, and other women who took to bloomers, were ridiculed and abused in the street.

Here she is in a controversially "short" dress.

write letters. everyone loves the post. i can't believe stamps only cost 50 cents! envelopes are great. don't let them become redundant. letter boxes are great too, as are letter writing paper sets. see this sample friendly letter or take inspiration from one of these lovely ladies. write letters!

Quote of the day:

“Dr Dee would like, for a mate to this mermaid, to keep in a cage, if alive, or, if dead, in a stoppered bottle, an angel.”

(from Angela Carter’s Alice in Prague or The Curious Room)

While in other cities, like Melbourne, the streets provide a constant canvas for paint, poster and canvas art, Sydney’s graffiti police seem to do too good a job at keeping the bricks naked.

Enter May’s, an ongoing street art project in a St Peter’s laneway that showcases a diverse range of street art talent, and is fully blessed by the surrounding community of residents and businesses.

Each month, May’s curator invites a new bunch of street artists to come and work their skills on one of five 3 X 2.5m installed panels, though many of the pieces extend beyond the panels to the walls, street signs and roller doors along the laneway.

Previous guest artists have included Dlux!, the Die Laughing Collective, Kill Pixie, and internationals icons like Mr Cartoon.

At the end of the month new canvases go up for the next wave, but all panels are kept for exhibiting elsewhere in the future, providing an ever-growing documentary of a grassroots art scene that is largely overlooked by galleries and art institutions.

In the words of Tugi Balog, founder of the project “I started the May's project because I wanted to provide street artists with as permanent a record of their work as they were likely to get. I wanted to provide somewhere for artists to compare styles, show off their skills and hopefully produce a shining example of what a few people with aerosol cans can do for a generic, drab lane in the big city.”

May’s Lane is a two minute walk from St Peter’s station, and of course, is open 247.

Make the most of this free extra day. Thanks to the 29th of February the calendar stays in synch - without it your birthday would end up falling on a day that wasn’t your birthday...

It’s also the only day of the year that women are permitted to make marriage proposals, apparently. It is said that in a 1288 law passed by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), fines were levied if a woman’s leap day proposal was refused by the man. These ranged from a kiss to £1 to a silk gown, in order to soften the blow for the rejected woman.

Hmm.

And now for today’s quote...

“I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of our journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy wih preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless”

(from Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima)

quote of the day:

“That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take their oath.”

(Virginia Woolf)