Sifting time

BACKGROUND: Geoff Hogg was an early contributor to cultural exchange with China from the mid 1970s. Through the 1980s Hogg developed one of the first collaborative public art projects between Chinese and foreign artists in China. This early groundbreaking creative research was largely focused in Shaanxi Province. This exhibition, curated by Damien Smith, comprises the work of key art practitioners in Australian and Chinese who have affected the nature of intercultural art practice, an area of significant cultural advance and enquiry (see 'Outer Site', 2009, forward by US writer, Lucy Lippard). The exhibition included work by prominent artists: Liu Zhuoquan, Huang Xu, Guan Wei, Anne Graham, Tony Scott and Geoff Hogg who "reflect on the ways that culture is either preserved or discarded, remodelled, in contemporary guise or forgotten with the passing of time". CONTRIBUTION: Geoff Hogg's artwork presented in this exhibition explored and compared contemporary experience and engagement through intercultural practice. Hogg's artworks examine the traces of history through combining the scraps and detritus of everyday life. Hogg contributed to knowledge about cultural exchange (and this instance through Chinese/Australian relations) via the use of new and old scraps of paper, images and concepts, and cutoffs from everyday life. The individual elements of Hogg's artworks are entirely handmade and from paper, wood, ink and paint and seemingly contradict the rigidity of the grid formation in which they are installed. SIGNIFICANCE: The artwork was exhibited at the Museum of Australian Chinese History, the key museum of its type in Australia. It was funded and supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria, the key State funding authority. These works have been created in the context of the RMIT Art in Chinatown Strategy to which it has contributed. The strategy links RMIT University to the City of Melbourne as an active Art in Public Space entity.