Artists investigate their Chinese-Indigenous Australian mixed heritage

Yiban Yiban – Yellah Fellah opened on a sweltering summer afternoon at Redtory Art & Design Factory in Guangzhou, the sprawling capital of Guangdong province in southern China. While the contemporary art scene in Guangzhou is less pronounced than in Beijing or Shanghai, it is this Cantonese-speaking area that largely spawned Australia’s early waves of Chinese migration from the mid-19th century onwards. That cultural legacy lies at the heart of Yiban Yiban.

"Yiban" is Mandarin for "half", and "Yellah Fellah" is an Aboriginal term for people of mixed (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) descent. Hence this exhibition, curated by the prominent, senior Aboriginal curator Djon Mundine, comprised the work of three Aboriginal artists who also share Chinese heritage: Gary Lee, Sandra Hill and Jason Wing.

Lee, a photo artist from Darwin with Aboriginal and Chinese heritage on both his mother’s and father’s side, was represented by two earlier photographs and a selection of 10 works from a new series of portraits, China men, created during a two-month residency he undertook in Beijing in early 2012.

The earlier photographs, Billiamook and Shannon (2006) and Kenbi Dancers (2011), effectively serve to foreground Lee’s Larrakia Aboriginal identity, with enlarged family album-type photographs also shown by Hill and Wing to introduce and personalise their own mixed heritages. Wing has a recent image of himself proudly standing between his Aboriginal and Chinese grandfathers. Hill offers her maternal Chinese ancestry with two historic black-and-white portraits, including her mother and aunties.

Lee’s China men portraits belong to his ongoing street photographic project of celebrating everyday male beauty, with the diverse looks and settings of his subjects praised by Australia’s consul-general in Guangzhou, Dominic Trindade. Trindade, who officially opened the exhibition, appreciated this diversity as an insightful reflection on contemporary Chinese life, and for countering foreign (as in non-Chinese) notions that "all Chinese look the same".

Sydney-based Wing also showed a series of photographs, The Great Wall (2012), produced during a Beijing residency and previously exhibited as part of Making Change. The group exhibition commemorated 40 years of diplomatic relations between China and Australia, and premiered late 2012 at China’s National Art Museum, Beijing.

Wing Dynasty (2013), a photographic self-portrait paying homage to his mixed ancestries (as denoted by national and heraldic flags) was the exhibition’s "hero" image, reproduced on banners and posters around the Redtory precinct and in large-scale on first entering the E9 Gallery. Part of the inspiration for this work was his experience of Chinese classical opera, where the king is festooned with flags identifying clan affiliations.

Hanging directly behind this entry statement is his new photographic work, Snake (2014), a more abstracted self-portrait. In black-and-white, and with his painted face, it bears echoes of Chinese opera while aiming to unify the symbol of his Chinese astrology with Aboriginal totemic beliefs.

Occupying this sizeable gallery’s back walls is a selection of Perth-based Sandra Hall’s more modestly scaled paintings, presented in gilded frames and hung in an almost "salon" style, and suggestive of religious icons. The gallery, a former fish factory, is cathedral-like with its high-vaulted, wood-beamed roof.

With titles such as Once Were Warriors, Wife and Mother, and And Then the White Man Came, Hill’s richly textured and collaged works (including archival images presumably of her Nyoongah forebears around the time of first contact) deal more with the onslaught of colonisation and assimilation than directly addressing mixed Aboriginal/Chinese ancestries. Nonetheless, this sense of being caught between two worlds is conveyed by the derogatory racial connotations implicit in the exhibition’s title.

This exhibition grew out of a smaller show, Yuen Yang, co-curated by Mundine and Imogen Young for Sydney’s Art Atrium gallery in 2013, and which included work by Hill and Wing. It also has a thematic precedent in the Speakeasy exhibition co-curated by Vernon Ah Kee and Aaron Seeto for Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2009.

However, this showing in Guangzhou, as a significant cultural homecoming for the artists, is unprecedented and was made possible by the diligence and passion of Catherine Croll and Cultural Partnerships Australia. Since 2010, Croll's program has brokered a range of ongoing exchanges between artists and curators from Australia and China.

The attendance of Mundine, Lee and Wing at the exhibition’s opening is part of a broader exchange program organised by Croll, which included a visit to the Southern Chinese city Kunming. The purpose of the visit was to share ideas and perspectives with minority Chinese artists ,who seem to have a lot less visibility than Indigenous Australian artists within their nation’s contemporary art polity.

As Mundine remarked in his opening speech, ‘art is a conversation; we are here to start a conversation with you’. Judging by media interest at the opening and by the gallery and overall precinct’s daily influx of visitors, it’s a conversation that many Chinese seem ready to take up.

• Yiban Yiban – Yellah Fellah is at the Redtory Art & Design Factory until 17 August