Enchanted Realities – Tan Lijie Selected Works 2013-2022
Curated by Lynne Howarth-Gladston and Paul Gladston
Curated by Lynne Howarth-Gladston and Paul Gladston
Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre,
77 Salamanca Place, Hobart
Saturday 19 August – Friday 1st September, 10-4pm
SOCIAL, Salamanca Arts Centre,
67 Salamanca Place, Hobart
Saturday 26 August – Sunday 3 September, 10-4pm
The Barracks Gallery,
11 The Avenue, New Norfolk Saturday 9 September – Sunday 22 October
(Saturdays and Sundays only) 11-4pm
A Chinese artist presents contemporary visions of reciprocity between humanity, Nature and the heavenly.
This exhibition showcases videos, photographs and assemblages by the Chinese
contemporary artist Tan Lijie representing imagined coexistences between lived realities,
enchanted realms, reveries and dreamscapes.
The multi-dimensionality of Tan’s work gives rise to subtly transporting atmospheres and
myriad aesthetic affects which suspend fixed perceptions of the real as well as any orderly
sense of time and space.
Tan’s work is informed by personal concerns about the controlling expectations and
devastating environmental impact of present-day, materially obsessed, societies. It is also
marked by the residual traces of traditional Chinese Confucian-literati culture and its
aspirations toward a harmonious – mutually sustaining – aestheticized reciprocity between
humanity, Nature and the heavenly.
Enchanted Realities -Tan Lijie, Selected Works 2013-2022 is curated with reference to Johnson.
Tzong-zung Chang’s conception of the Yellow Box; an intervention with internationally
dominant modes of gallery display intended as conducive to the showing of works
characterized by the harmonizing reciprocity of traditional Chinese Confucian-literati
aesthetics.
Tan continues to live and work in her home city of Shenzhen at the border between mainland
China and Hong Kong – an interstitial space resonant with the indeterminate aesthetics of the
artist’s work.
WALK THROUGH THE EXHIBITION
CATALOGUE
The Artist
TAN Lijie (b. 1991) was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Intermedia School
of The China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou (2017) and studied as an exchange student at
Kingston University, London (2015). A one-person exhibition of Tan’s work was held at The
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (2022). Her work has also been included in
group exhibitions at The Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart Tasmania, The Cipa Gallery,
Beijing, the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing and the Djanogly Gallery of The
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Her video, The World was awarded Best
Creative (drama) at the Global Chinese University Student Film Awards (2012). Tan’s video,
Haussmann in the Tropics is in the collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.
The Curators
Lynne HOWARTH-GLADSTON is an artist, curator, and researcher. She has exhibited her
paintings internationally, including in China, the UK, and Australia, and was lead curator of
the exhibitions ‘New China/New Art: Contemporary Video from Shanghai and Hangzhou,’
Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK (2015) and ‘Dis-
/Continuing Traditions: Contemporary Video Art from China,’ Salamanca Arts Centre,
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (2021). Her Ph.D. thesis is the first to engage critically with the
work of the nineteenth-century botanical illustrator, Marianne North. She was a contributor to
the BBC4 documentary, Kew’s Forgotten Queen: The Life of Marianne North (2016).
Paul GLADSTON is the inaugural Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Chinese Contemporary
Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and a Distinguished Affiliate Fellow of
the UK-China Humanities Alliance, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His numerous book-length
publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), awarded ‘best
publication’ at the Awards of Art China (2015), and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic
Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (2019). He was an advisor to the internationally-acclaimed exhibition ‘Art of Change: New Directions from China’, Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre, London (2012).
