Cross Worlds

Fan Dongwang Solo Exhibition, Sydney College of the Arts Galleries.

Bold and beautiful, large-scale paintings exploring cultural identity and globalisation through the juxtaposition of traditional Chinese imagery, western icons and symbols of technology comprise an innovative exhibition showing at Sydney College of the Arts: Crossed Worlds. In it rugby players, ancient Chinese sages, Christ figures, Red Guards and Botticelli’s Madonna's people the paintings of established Chinese-Australian painter Fan Dongwang. Such montages of apparently disparate imagery are made more complex by the deliberate ambiguity of gender and race in many instances, which painter Fan Dongwang refers to as cross-dressing.  This social/psychological perspective of multiplicity in his works - as in Shifting Perspectives and Body - is deliberately reflected in the multiplicity of visual perspectives in his densely layered paintings, as well as the mix of Chinese and western art principles and techniques utilised.