Australian art explores its fundament

Photographica Australis, a traveling exhibition of photography by 15 contemporary Austrian artists, has reached its last stop in Taipei. Currently showing at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), the exhibition has been to Bangkok, Singapore and Bangladesh since 2002.

Organized by the Australian Centre for Photography, Photographica Australis aims to help Asian viewers take note of the diversity of Austrian culture.

"The title of the exhibition is in Latin as a reference to the scientific naming of plants in biology. While bio-diversity is important in nature, cultural diversity is of equal importance," said Alasdair Foster, curator of the exhibition.

In presenting a wide spectrum of Australian photography, Foster includes different generations of artists working with various techniques and sub-genres, but has excluded big names such as Bill Henson and Tracey Moffatt. "These artists are important in Australia, but not necessarily known internationally. In mapping the wholeness of a culture, you can't look at only those at the top. Therefore I have juxtaposed younger and older artists here for you to get a better picture of Australian photography," Foster said.

The are three sections to the show "Bio-diversity," the first section, is a compact showcase of the ideas, styles and methodologies prevalent in Australia today.

In Esperanto of Vision, Phillip George uses digital manipulation to create a panorama of a coast near Sydney, where the first European immigrants landed on the continent. Iconographic images of different cultures are combined to form its landscape. China's Great Wall sits on the distant mountains, ancient Greek architecture faces the waves, with ancient Indian statues nearby. The cultures living in today's Australia, the images seem to suggest, are exactly the same as those in other parts of the world millennia ago.

Martin Walch's Six Traces in Four Dimensions invites visitors to take a look at the landscape of a mining site in Tasmania through stereo viewers. The work is a reaction to Australian environmentalists' call to stop mining in the area on account of the damage mining does to its natural landscape. In Walch's view, the Tasmania landscape is artificial in essence. The man-made environment is simply the area's primordial form. The environmentalist has too sentimental a notion of ecology, he suggests. To stress the point, laser beams sweep the landscape to create images of rivers and mountains covered with strips of light.

The second section "Art and Suburbia" deals with the making of art in the interacting contexts of art history and suburban life.

Glenn Sloggett is known for his love of irony and contradiction. Sloggett's Untitled Series documents in a tongue-in-cheek manner sights on the suburban streets. There is a budget-burial company van with the slogan "cheaper and deeper" across its window and a rundown corner shop whose signboard claims that it serves Melbourne's best cappuccino among other street oddities.

The "Intersection" section explores the construction of meaning and the formation of identity. The work that reflects the themes best may be Brenda Croft's Contact/Warra Warra, a collage about the first European immigrants' mistaking native phrase "Warra Warra" for "welcome," when the Aborigines were actually telling them to "go away."