THE TINY SYDNEY Chinatown gallery 4A is crammed to overflowing with both people and contemporary Asian art. Greeting visitors downstairs are strollers filled with fibreglass babies, each priced for 'adoption' at A$500 (HK$2,650) apiece. Beijing artist Jiang Jie believes as many as 50,000 mainland babies are adopted by foreigners each year and took photographs illustrating the issue for a local exhibition in 1994.
'They don't realise they have become part of the Chinese traffic, the Asian traffic and world traffic,' she says in her artist's statement. 'From here to there, or maybe nowhere, they are made to lose their roots. One day, maybe, some will come back to look for their native place and cause a traffic jam there.'
The exhibition is part of Asian Traffic, a four-month project organised by the Asia-Australia Art Centre that includes seminars, panel discussions and talks by artists. There will also be works by 30 Asian and Asian-Australian artists shown between now and October.
Hong Kong representation is strong. British-born David Clarke will show his black-and-white photographs of daily life in Hong Kong, while Renee So, who moved from Hong Kong to Australia, will exhibit sculptural knitted works based on 18th-century chinoiserie images. Upstairs from Jiang's unwanted babies are works by Hong Kong's Leung Mee-ping, who is also concerned about adoption.
Best known for Memorise the Future - her collection of child-sized shoes made from human hair - Leung now shows Cherubic Island, a piece vaguely about a blind mainland girl adopted by westerners in Hong Kong. Leung uses crayons to draw childlike drawings on McDonald's napkins, creating a moving and gritty image of life in Hong Kong. 'My main concern is China-Hong Kong relations,' Leung says. 'Hong Kong is uniquely placed to make sense of how China is changing. So the changing of Hong Kong is the changing of China and the changing of China is the changing of the world.'
According to Asia-Australia Arts Centre director Binghui Huangfu, Asian Traffic aims to explore 'the real issues in a region undergoing incomprehensible change by illustrating the density and depth of its contemporary art'.
Huangfu's career started at Beijing's Cultural Palace. She continued her curatorial studies in Australia before moving to Singapore to spend seven years at LaSalle-SIA College's Earl Lu Gallery, later producing a series of international exhibitions. She returned to Australia where she believes contemporary art is more dynamic than in Singapore.
