How John Young Embraced the Art of Being In Between

In 1982, Hong Kong-born artist John Young travelled to New York and sought advice from an art world legend. At the time, Young was based in Sydney and making conceptual art that he wanted to be part of global conversations, but he was concerned he might be pushed to the periphery of these debates because he lived in isolated Australia – and because he was Chinese. 

“There was no acknowledgement of Chinese artists in the contemporary art world then,” says Young. “There was Zao Wou-ki, but he’s not contemporary, he’s a modernist. So I looked at some Asian artists who were contemporary. There were the Japanese artists On Kawara, Shusaku Arakawa and Fluxus’s Yoko Ono, and one Korean guy named Nam June Paik.” 

Paik was a pioneer of video art and a predictor of the internet, coining the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974 to describe the web of telecommunications he believed would soon encircle the globe. “I asked Nam June, ‘Should I be in New York?’ He said, ‘No,’” Young recalls. Young was crushed, worried that Paik simply didn’t think he was good enough to work in the US. But Paik later clarified: “John, in the future everybody will know about everybody else’s work. You can produce it anywhere. It doesn’t matter.” 

Paik’s prediction came true. Young remained in Australia and his work is now celebrated at home and abroad, having been featured in more than 80 solo exhibitions and 160 group shows around the world, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. All of Australia’s major galleries and museums have collected his work, as has Hong Kong’s M+.  

In a way, Young has gone a step further than Paik predicted. Not only has his work received international attention despite the fact he’s based in Australia, he has also made the experience of living an international, transcultural life a core part of his art. “Much of the work is really trying to describe and visualise shared experiences with diasporans,” he says. “It works around the positivity of transculturality, the temporality and the psychological traumas that diasporan people live with.”

From Hong Kong to Australia

Young was born in Hong Kong in 1956 and grew up in Repulse Bay before it was filled with luxury high-rises. His childhood was largely, but not entirely, idyllic. He lived in a house built from granite reclaimed from the old Central Market. Every day, Young saw bullet holes in the stone that had been left during the Japanese occupation of the city. 
The spectre of violence loomed ever larger during the 1960s, when the city was rocked by multiple crises: droughts, typhoons and bank collapses, as well as an influx of refugees. On one boat trip, Young saw a police boat fish a body out of the ocean – likely one of many people who died trying to swim to Hong Kong from Mainland China. This series of upheavals culminated in the 1967 Hong Kong riots, which began as a labour dispute that spiralled into demonstrations against the British colonial government. During six months of violence, 51 people died. 

Disturbed by the riots, Young’s parents sent him to Sydney. Moving overseas at such a tender age, Young remembers feeling “that you really had to grow up quickly and forge a direction for your own life.” For Young, that path was art. After graduating from university in 1977, he began making performances, drawings, photographs, paintings and more. 

John Young’s “Safety Zone” (2010) — digital print on photographic paper and chalk on blackboard painted cotton archival paper.

Several of these explored his heritage. In 1979, Young travelled to Changchun in Jilin province and completed the performance “Manchurian Snow Walk,” in which he tramped back and forth in a remote forest, creating a temporary trail in the snow. Scholar Carolyn Barnes, who has written extensively about Young’s work, including the 2005 book John Young: The Bridge and the Fruit Tree, argues that the walk “reflected the experience of many in diaspora for whom only repeated episodes of travel and return build understanding of an alienated place of birth.”

Making connections

Over the next two decades, Young made communities as well as art. Throughout the 1980s, he was part of a group of artists and intellectuals exploring what it meant to make art in Australia at the time. In 1981, he co-authored “Some Alternatives to the Code in the Age of Hyperreality,” one of the first articles published in Australia about postmodernism and art. It reflected on how the ideologies that had dominated 20th century art criticism — like Marxism, Surrealism and psychoanalysis — were collapsing in an increasingly fragmented world in which new technologies were reshaping how people engaged with art, culture and each other.

Having successfully started conversations about postmodernism in Australia, Young turned his attention to Hong Kong, returning to the city in 1985 to co-curate the exhibition Eddie Ma, James Wong, Denis Yeung and John Young at the Hong Kong Art Centre. With its fragmented urban landscape, diverse mix of residents and position as a nexus between China and the rest of the world, “Hong Kong was living postmodernism,” says Young. However, there was not a “theoretical and descriptive framework” in the city at the time to empower artists to explore it further – something the exhibition hoped to prompt. 

While encouraging the application of theories like postmodernism to Hong Kong’s culture, Young was also finding ways to promote Asian art in Australia. “Hong Kong people or Chinese people in Australia in the Eighties were economically rich, but culturally poor,” he says. “We didn’t have any means to culturally contribute to Australia, and of course faced a colonial culture war if we tried.” To remedy this, in 1996 he co-founded 4A Gallery, a non-profit space in Sydney to support Asian artists. It is still open today, operating as the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

The History Projects

Young’s experience of being an immigrant from Hong Kong to Australia has influenced one of his latest, and largest, bodies of work: The History Projects. He began the series in the late 2000s, when he started looking for new challenges after his retrospective at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. “Transculturalism was already in my work, but it wasn’t tackling it head on,” says Young. “I started thinking: when people cross cultures, within plurality, what is the most ethical position we can take?” 
He began researching historical incidents of “violence and benevolence,” when people put their own lives at risk to help those from another culture. For example, “Safety Zone” (2010), is a tribute to the handful of foreigners who established a safety zone during the Nanjing Massacre, saving the lives of roughly 250,000 Chinese citizens from the Japanese army. 

After initially looking at international incidents, Young zeroed in on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Australia throughout history. There were moments of violence and benevolence to explore, and he had an ambition to start building a new artistic record of Chinese people on the continent. The History Projects comprises 11 series inspired by people and stories dating back to 1840, the beginning of significant immigration from China to Australia. Among the subjects explored are the Lambing Flat Riots in 1860, when Chinese miners were violently driven off their gold fields by European colonists, and the lives of Alice Lim Kee and Daisy Kwok, two Australian-born Chinese women who moved back to China in the interwar period and rose to prominent positions in Shanghai society. 

While factual events are the basis for The History Projects, Young’s works are never simply figurative renderings of the past. “It’s not reportage of social history – I’m not good at that,” he says. The series spans paintings, photographs, sculpture and more, blending figuration and abstraction to create a springboard for viewers to reflect on the experiences and ethics of the people involved.

A path forward

Young’s desire for the series to spark open-ended conversations between the past and present, and between different cultures and communities, is exemplified in his approach to its accompanying book, John Young: The History Projects, which was recently released by Power Publications. It was edited by Olivier Krischer, an art historian and curator at the University of New South Wales and a scholar of Hong Kong art history. 
In his introduction, Krischer writes: “Young has long seen art practice as a form of knowledge production, an aesthetically grounded intellectual endeavour of thinking through making.” That description applies just as well to the book, which is not a simple monograph of Young’s work, but a compendium of texts by more than 20 academics, curators, writers and artists reflecting on various ideas contained in Young’s art. It is simultaneously a guide to Young’s art and an introduction to others who are researching or building trans-cultural connections, particularly between Asia and Australia – and an effort to inspire more people to do the same. 

While the book is just beginning to reach readers, Young says The History Projects itself is coming to an end. “I feel I’ve done as much as I can for the moment,” he says. He’s now focused on a series called Abstract Paintings, which ask questions about the emotional and physical aspects of painting in a world increasingly dominated by technology. “It’s an ongoing investigation. I’ve got to work through it,” he says. “And I’ve probably done enough to be content, in a life.”