Subverting Mythology
“Imagine Sisyphus Happy” is an exhibition designed to provoke its audience into looking at seemingly difficult, repetitive or meaningless tasks in a new light.”
French-born, Beijing-based artist, Valerie Honnart, has been living in China on and off for 25 years and has fused the country’s traditional art techniques, aesthetics, and now mythology with that of her own European background. The Greek mythological story of Sisyphus is familiar to those in the West as a deceitful king whose eternal punishment involved hauling a heavy boulder uphill, only to watch it roll down again every time he reached the peak. His name is a by-word for futility. Incidentally, Chinese mythology also has its own Sisyphus-like figure in Wu Gang, who is punished for his earthly transgressions with eternal moon banishment, where his task is to chop down a giant osmanthus tree that heals itself after each blow from Wu Gang’s axe. In modern Chinese, the chengyu "Wu Gang chopping the tree" (吴刚伐木) is used to describe endless toil. For this reason, Honnart felt Chinese audiences would be well disposed to understanding her meaning as she painted hardworking Chinese people hauling heavy boulders instead of their usual towering loads of recycling or other seemingly burdensome objects. “In China I saw a lot of people carrying a lot of things and working, doing the same thing, day after day, which struck me,” Honnart explained, adding that the series of paintings and installations which make up the exhibition are reflections not only on the relentlessness of modern industry but also on our relationship with nature. “This mythological punishment makes the stone turn from a beautiful part of the landscape to an enemy,” she said. “If you see traditional Chinese paintings, nature is all around but in the China we live in today, it’s not that nature is the enemy, but we are disconnected from nature.” After learning traditional Chinese painting methods in Hong Kong during the 90s, Honnart now not only routinely takes artistic inspiration from her observation of modern China, but also incorporates ancient Chinese techniques into her work using ink, silk, Chinese paper and red tea as materials. In all her years in China observing the people and the culture, Honnart has concluded there is much more that unites people across borders than divides. When even the mythology of ancient societies features such similar stories, it points to a common need of people, from very different places, for the same kind of moral lessons. “We are human and living in China or living in Europe. Regarding certain matters, we behave the same; we all love, we all cherish nature, we all work, even though we might do it in different ways,” Honnart said. From the exhibition, the artist hopes people will take the opportunity to look beyond the obvious representation of oversized boulders as a burden for people to carry; to widen their perspectives to include the stone’s role as a beautiful natural object in it’s own right. “Those people carrying the stones, they are carrying a really heavy thing but it’s also about people’s relationship with nature,” Honnart said. “The same stone that is a burden to carry could also once have been a support pillar for a natural creation – a part of a beautiful natural landscape as depicted by traditional Chinese landscape painters.”
“Imagine Sisyphus Happy” runs until 29 December at Philippe Staib Gallery. Room 102, Building 4, 50 Moganshan Lu. Tel: 6298 0729.
Web: www.philippestaibgallery.com
