Dongwang Fan: Clay Relief Family Creative Workshop
In this family workshop, artist Dongwang Fan will run a clay relief carving session to help mark the opening of the new exhibitions Kerameikos and The trace is not a presence …
Participants will learn how to carve a mini landscape on clay formed by a willow tree, a bird and a pavilion. This iconography symbolises love, friendship, freedom, loyalty and courage in Chinese painting and carvings.
The workshop is suitable for adults and children over 10 to learn the basics of traditional Chinese low relief landscape composition. Appreciate Chinese philosophy and aesthetics in a way that is easy to understand, yet meditative, enjoyable and relaxing.
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Dongwang Fan is one of the five artists exhibited in the exhibition The trace is not a presence… an exhibition examining time, history and memory through different Chinese diasporic communities. Chinese Australian artist Dr Dongwang Fan studied traditional Chinese art including paintings and ivory low relief carving at Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts (SSAC) in the 1970’s and migrated to Australia in 1990 where he studied a Master of Art at COFA and Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. He has exhibited widely including NGA and won many prizes including the Mosman Art Prize. He was twice the finalist at the Wynne and Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the finalist at Moran prize.
In The trace is not a presence…, Dongwang Fan’s painting of a Willow Pattern Story employs a new method of ‘painting as a low relief sculpture’ to produce the ‘sculptural painting’ the same way as jade or lacquer carving. Thus, in order to bring out a sense of 3D volume on the 2D surface, a visual illusionism is employed to express the traditional Chinese art.
Header image: Dongwang Fan