Thirty Years Ago, a Curiosity About Aboriginal Australia Decided His Whole Life as a Painter | 100 People With Ideas

What might life look like for someone interested in "faraway things"?

On April 1, in the center of Gallery 3 at Beijing's Today Art Museum, a clean patch of sand had been marked out around a pillar painted in bright colors. The painter Zhou Xiaoping and his collaborator Curtis Taylor walked in barefoot, took up red and yellow ochre, black charcoal and white gypsum powder in their hands, and scattered them across the yellow sand into concentric circles, arcs and grid patterns.

Every so often Zhou looked up to explain to the crowd around him: red, yellow, black and white are the four most traditional pigments of Aboriginal Australians, and the patterns stand for ideas like "country" and "origin."

The sand painting matched the name of the solo show itself: "Return to the Earth — Zhou Xiaoping's Art of Australia."

Zhou Xiaoping is a Chinese-Australian painter who moved to Melbourne in the late 1980s. This year he has brought thirty years of paintings back to China for shows in three cities: the first stop, Beijing in April, has already closed; next come the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art (May 27 to July 2) and the Jiangsu Museum of Modern Art in Nanjing (September 9 to 30).

Zhou's work has one clear theme — all of it connects to Aboriginal Australian culture. The paintings in the show are full of large abstract blocks of intersecting color, and patterns that look like symbols from somewhere else. Beyond them you can see photographs of tribal life in the desert, and video clips playing on a loop. Curtis Taylor, who came to China with Zhou this time, is himself an Aboriginal man from Arnhem Land in northern Australia; he has long lived in towns, though, and works as a filmmaker. He and Zhou are currently making a documentary together.

Two visitors stopped in front of a painting called Waterhole. One of them told QDaily that she likes Zhou's paintings because she can see him "mixing" a range of materials — ochre with traditional Chinese ink, canvas with rice paper — and getting beautiful textures and colors out of the combination.

The exhibition cost roughly a million yuan in all. Zhou won a grant from an Australian government arts fund to pay for it, and also got support from the Australian Embassy in China, the Jiangsu Federation of Literary and Art Circles and other institutions. He had to put up a sum of his own money too, of course.

The largest show this 57-year-old painter had mounted before was in 2011: "Trepang: China and the Story of Macassan-Aboriginal Trade," made with the late Aboriginal artist Johnny Bulunbulun (1946-2010). It ran three months and drew 270,000 visitors.

In 1988, while painting from life on Mount Huangshan, Zhou met a woman studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. She came up and asked whether she could buy one of his paintings, and after she got home she sent him a letter inviting him to Australia. Zhou had graduated from the art department of Anhui Normal University and then spent a few years teaching — a job that only bored him.

In Alice Springs, a small town in the central Australian desert, Zhou met dark-skinned Aboriginal people who made the desert their home.

"Their appearance and body language made an overwhelming impression on me. I heard that those beautifully colored paintings all came from their hands, and that gave me an enormous interest in these people and their art. I never expected this 'love at first sight' would turn out to be a major turning point in my life. Over the 28 years that followed, I went from the shock of first seeing Aboriginal people to gradually following their tracks, entering their lives and becoming part of them. My work grew alongside that process, and my motive changed too: I hoped that by absorbing primal art and culture I could make a new breakthrough in my own art," he later summed up.

From central Australia Zhou moved north to Darwin, known as "Australia's multicultural capital." There he met two white Australians: Chips Mackinolty, an artist with close ties to Aboriginal communities, and Peter Cooke, a coordinator at the Northern Land Council. They sent him to the Aboriginal community of Maningrida, in Arnhem Land. He later extended his visa, and in the end stayed in Australia for good.

Painting is the most prominent form in Aboriginal art. Aboriginal people paint patterns on rock, bark, sacred objects and the ground, and on their own bodies. Traditional patterns are made of lines, circles and dots. They usually carry a story, or stand for tribal history, or for the spirits of the "Dreamtime" (the world's first age of creation). They tend to hold religious or spiritual meaning, and they also serve to record history.

Jeremy Eccles, a former BBC and RTHK reporter and the writer behind the "Aboriginal Art" website, wrote in a piece on Zhou: "[Aboriginal people] adapted to surviving in a harsh environment under a strict system of rules, but that system lacked the flexibility that might have produced technological change of the kind other cultures went through. Ironically, this system, built on visual symbols that aid memory, has now become an art form — and it is exactly that art form that drew Zhou Xiaoping into Aboriginal Australian society."

Modern art has drawn energy from indigenous peoples for a long time. The most famous case is Picasso, whose eyes were opened to another, extraordinary side of art by African carved wooden masks.

Zhou dealt with Aboriginal people on instinct and interest alone. He could not really live off selling paintings until after the late 1990s; for seven or eight years before that he still earned his keep with odd jobs. At one point an Aboriginal school hired him to illustrate the English and local-language textbooks it had written itself. Zhou is tall and thin, and the children who had watched television called him "Bruce Lee."

Zhou became friends with the late painter Jimmy Pike (1940-2002), from the north of Western Australia. This year's "Return to the Earth" also screened Jimmy Pike's Quest, a documentary from 1989.

Zhou said: "Back when I was painting in a small town, people kept mentioning a local artist named Jimmy Pike, so I wanted to meet him. But when I got to his house, his wife said he had broken the law drinking and was in prison. I found a way to see him there, and we talked for a long time about Aboriginal art. We agreed to meet the next year under a big tree out in the desert. The next year we lived under that tree — we painted there, painted each other. He told me a lot of stories and taught me many skills for surviving in the desert. He told me, for instance, that a stick alone can do a lot of things: catch lizards, find food."

In 1996, Zhou brought Jimmy Pike back to China and showed the work they had made in the desert at the Kurume Friendship Art Museum in Hefei. In 1999 the two held a joint exhibition again, this time at the National Art Museum of China.

The second person to shape Zhou's work was Johnny Bulunbulun, an artist from central Arnhem Land. "Bulunbulun is his Aboriginal name, and it means 'spider.' My Aboriginal name is 'Wangbulun,' which means sea turtle. We met in his community, and I went hunting with him and painted bark paintings alongside him. In 2009 I invited him to my studio in Melbourne. He stayed more than a month with his wife and two children, and made a lot of work."

Together they painted Return to Life. On the right, Bulunbulun used the traditional bark-painting style, with fine cross-hatching, to render the sea, a canoe and many fish. On the left, Zhou painted a body of water in the manner of Chinese ink painting, in green and blue. The fish "swim" out of the rectangle on the right into the left — out of an Aboriginal form made with natural mineral pigments, and into Chinese carp done in ink and acrylic.

Zhou says the two halves had no connection at all at first. The idea came one day when he dozed off in the studio: he opened his eyes and suddenly saw that Bulunbulun's fish were swimming.

After becoming friends with Bulunbulun, Zhou was allowed into several sacred Aboriginal religious ceremonies.

A lot of things confused him at first — the symbols, for one: "Why is their way of seeing the world so different from mine?" He later learned that in the Aboriginal account of human origins, the "Rainbow Serpent" lives in "waterholes," opened up this land and established the cycle of life, death and rebirth — which is easy to connect with the Chinese dragon. In Zhou's painting Dragon, a huge, blurred creature is ringed by circles that stand for "waterholes."

Zhou explained: "Starting from what I felt of Aboriginal culture, my work has taken in a great deal of natural expression; it is an artistic process of going back to what is primal and original. Take early human rock art: it came out of real life, out of the 'real.' That 'real' gradually turns into symbols and takes on a meaning of its own. In cultural terms, that became the direction of some of my later work. Of course, the process also absorbed things from the Chinese culture I grew up in. I believe this kind of natural combination produces a very fundamental aesthetic meaning."

But in the course of "appropriating" this Aboriginal culture, Zhou has met no small amount of doubt and opposition.

In 2005, feeling that his own work "was still on the surface, still skin-deep," Zhou applied to Charles Darwin University as a graduate student. He expected to meet experts in the field; in fact some of his teachers disliked what his work was about. The university held a three-day symposium at the local museum to debate whether he had the right to go on.

"You're not Aboriginal!" his teacher told him. "You have no right to use these patterns and symbols."

For decades, political correctness around Aboriginal affairs has set off all kinds of wide debate in Australia. The people who act as "regulators" are often not Aboriginal people or artists themselves, but figures from universities, the media and the museum world who control the conversation. Zhou calls them "mainstream society." He says the objections have not stopped for a single day since the first one: "They treat it very seriously — you may not do this." He thinks many of these people put themselves in the position of "spokesperson": "Back in China, for instance, there's a way of handling ethnic-minority questions that's also quite sensitive; it's obvious that there are certain subjects you just don't raise."

In fact, ever since the 1970s, as Aboriginal art has come to be valued more and more, there has been a steady stream of cases in which "carpetbaggers" cheated and exploited tribal Aboriginal people for commercial gain. In 1985, local artists in Yuendumu, a town in the Northern Territory, started a campaign for their rights over this, and with the government's involvement set up their own independent sales network.

The "borrowing" of art and culture by certain "outsiders" has been put in the same sensitive position. In the 1980s the Sydney painter Tim Johnson made a body of fine paintings jointly with Aboriginal artists, and took a great deal of criticism for it. But there was a subtle "line" here as well. The art critic John McDonald recorded: "Once it was accepted that Johnson only painted Aboriginal designs he had permission to use, and that he shared the proceeds of the collaborative works with the other painters, most of this criticism disappeared."

Zhou says the controversy around him has also gradually "been resolved" since 2005. He won the support of Professor Marcia Langton, an Aboriginal scholar. Her position in the debate was that Zhou's motive in promoting Aboriginal culture was admirable, and that he was open to its complexity rather than afraid of it; the critics, she argued, were foolishly trying to confine people's understanding of Aboriginal people to an ancient, walled-off frame instead of letting them go on into their own "modernity."

In 2011, Marcia Langton worked with Zhou Xiaoping and Bulunbulun to put together the "Trepang" exhibition at the Capital Museum in Beijing.

The show grew out of a piece of history shared by the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land and the Macassans, an Indonesian people: from the 18th century on, Macassans visited the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land regularly. Trading on the basis of trepang (sea cucumber) and other natural resources, they brought changes in language, technology and religion to northern Australia. And through the same Macassan trading network, northern Australia was connected to the Chinese market that bought the trepang.

Sadly, Bulunbulun himself died shortly before the exhibition opened.

Zhou hopes this year's "Return to the Earth" can repeat the success of "Trepang" six years ago. He sees that show as a "turning point" in his career, whose direct result was that "more people came to know him." Australia's ABC television made a documentary about it called Ochre and Ink.

But "Return to the Earth" is smaller than "Trepang." For that show Zhou brought a team of more than a dozen people, worked on it full time for two years, and spent ten years altogether getting it ready, at a total cost of 5 million yuan. "Trepang," though, was fully sponsored by Rio Tinto Group, Australia's second-largest iron ore producer.

Rio Tinto has been one of the earliest Western companies to supply iron ore to the Chinese market, going back to the 1970s, and China is now its fourth-largest market, after North America, Europe and Japan. On the other hand, Rio Tinto has met plenty of resistance from Aboriginal people over its development of land resources since the 1960s.

In 2009, Rio Tinto executives in China were arrested and caught up in an "espionage case," and Chinalco's planned US$19.5 billion investment in Rio Tinto ended when Rio Tinto called the deal off. That soured relations between China and Australia, but they eased at the end of the year, when Vice Premier Li Keqiang visited Australia. The China-Australia Joint Statement signed then agreed to hold an "Australian Culture Year" in China from 2010 to 2011, and a "Chinese Culture Year" in Australia from 2011 to 2012. Over that period dozens of Australian cultural and art exhibitions were held one after another in major Chinese cities, quite a few of them tied to Aboriginal culture.

Zhou does not tie his own shows to that grand backdrop. "For an individual, I just find it interesting, and I'm willing [to share it] — it's that simple. There isn't some lofty idea behind it, you know?"

Zhou sells his paintings through his own website, each at a roughly "middling" price. Only in these past few years, since turning 50, has he felt he seems to have "entered a spiritual stage" — digesting what he has taken in so far, and trying to build "a personal style unlike anyone else's," even "de-Aboriginalizing it, de-Sinicizing it." People who know Aboriginal culture have praised him for "painting it right."

He does not go out to the wilderness often now (there is no need, he says, to "do it for other people to see"), but he says the biggest effect of long stretches out there is that when you come back to the city "you turn a little melancholy" — "you've made yourself isolated."

In the catalog for "Return to the Earth," the review Zhou values most is Jeremy Eccles's.

Zhou says he and Eccles reached an understanding on the question of using Aboriginal cultural symbols freely. But some of the words in the piece made him uncomfortable — the original title, for instance, was not "insights" but "spy."

He had it changed.

Cover image from Zhou Xiaoping's paintings Crossing (2016) and Portrait of Jimmy and Xiaoping (1999); in-text images courtesy of Today Art Museum and the exhibition catalog.