Jingwei Bu x Linda Marie Walker

If you look away from the artworks in this exhibition you will find two “hammers” on the floor – pieces of stone Jingwei Bu has used to stamp the aluminium panels on show here. One of these hammers is a piece of Cowell jade, crafted by Andrew Stock to fit Bu’s hand. The other is a rounded stone from Adelaide’s southern beaches, that naturally fits into Bu’s palm. Bu stamped about three of the smaller panels while in the gallery, and so I can tell you, it is a hard, visibly exhausting working method. The larger panels, especially, are the product of long, arduous labour on Bu’s part. A larger one  on the east wall, reproduces a list of words Bu made during her studies at art school reading art theory. She initially made the list so she could look the words up later. Here the words appear in a disconcerting palimpsest, distorting much of the panel’s surface into blisters and bulges, like a glistening mammatus cloud.

Jingwei Bu is an artist who, in these aluminium works, stamps – which is to say writes – words and sentences. Linda Marie Walker, known as a writer, here shows textile art. (A sample of Walker’s writings appear in the TLM library shelf in the window of the gallery. And, it should be added Walker is no slouch as an artist – she has concurrent shows at Fabrik, Lobethal, and Mrs Harris’ Shop, Torrensville.) Both Bu and Walker explore interplays between mark-making, symbol-making, and image-making. For example, Walker’s Il pleut takes Apollinaire’s famous calligramme, marking, erasing or cancelling its letters with stitched crosses, while leaving its imagery vivid.

Bu’s works on paper, made with stains of tea water and graphite pencil, offer other forms of semiotic play. In one of these, “The Real Time Matters” is written across four sheets of paper. Processes of flow, mark-making and writing leave their traces, and remain legible as events. Duration of process is made visible in these works on paper, and also in the aluminium panels, where each blow of a hammer remains legible in a stamped letter. Interpretation too is a temporal, “real time” process, and perhaps it is helpful to think how the event of interpretation can track the event of making. These four sheets, like other works on paper here by Bu, can also be rearranged, reordering the words of the title, and the elements of the image, in some new semblance of sense.

Bu’s works with flows and blots of tea water include drawn marks, in some cases bisecting them, in others at tangents to them. One such work is I Built a Scooter that travels between Reality and Dreams. Here, a drawn tangent has become a “scooter” – a platform on wheels recalling Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker drawings – positioned as if carrying a large blot of tea water. This cues the viewer to the performative wit in other works – bisected blots in Droplets become pills, and the tangent lines in other works orient themselves to the flows to “catch” and bring playful balance to these chance marks. 

Calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire, Il pleut [It rains], 1916.

There is humour too in Walker’s Il pleut. But for Walker, these kinds of juxtapositions are “cooler” – more related, maybe to the great wit of modern art, Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps they are the kinds of blots and stains that might be part of some bachelor-machine–like conceit, or they could suggest a childlike Freudian fort–da game – a play with the dissolution and reconstitution of the self.But those are my readings, and they run in not-quite-the-right direction. Walker’s own sense is different. Walker’s stains are made with plants – in some, the traces of geranium flowers, strangely bruised in colour and brain-like in shape, can be made out. Walker mentions that her stains and flows are a way of marking the surface, allowing a beginning to happen, or opening a way to that beginning. Bu, as it happens, says much the same. Bu has an interest in Taoist philosophy – this lends the exhibition its name LET BEAUTY BE,‭ 顺其自然‭ ‬– and provides a helpful way of thinking about chance here. The title from the Tao Te Ching appears half in English, and half in Chinese characters. “Let beauty be” (taken from Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching) encourages us to place aside our preconceptions of beauty in engaging with the visual and sensory world, for the genuinely aesthetic does not conform to rules and expectations. The phrase also holds within it a typically Taoist contradiction – putting beauty aside is the only way to find it. The second part, 顺其自然 (shùn qí zìrán “let nature take its course”) completes that thought, locating the source of beauty beyond the goal-oriented behaviour of ordinary human activity. It sums up something of the artists’ attitudes. Walker has an interest in Buddhism, which has at its heart another, related insight about reconceiving one’s conception of self in relation to the world. I’m also struck by how these ideas drawn from or related to Taoism also overlap with attitudes made popular by the contemporary practices of mindfulness. In any case, that beauty, however one manages to find it, seems to me present in Walker’s and Bu’s works – and in particular, it is present in the way they integrate and respond to chance physical processes – the stains and flows.  

“Just do the damn thing” Bu stamps into sheets of aluminium with her stone hammers. For Walker, writing and making has a basis in a similar regular, constant work attitude. Not everyone can create like this. I for one, need time to think, or the writing will go round in dreary repetition. Action must follow conception for me. But both Walker and Bu draw creation directly out of nature’s flow, or so it seems. And each time it comes out surprising and new. Walker’s A record is a visible testament to this approach – a group of thirty-two textile collages made one a day. Red features across many of them, binding the group together, with sly, offhanded op-art energy. One work looks much like Malevich’s Red Square (1915) which he imagined as a peasant woman’s headscarf viewed from above. Walker’s square has the same out-of-whack angularity and white ground. But it is labelled “Good Friday” on one side and has inconspicuously drawn on it – which makes me worry that I shouldn’t mention it – a tiny white cross. It is not, I think, meant to have a religious weight, but still, it has semiotic weight – perhaps like the crosses in Il pleut, it could be a cancellation, an erasure, a marker of absence.  But then I hear Bu hammering “just do the damn thing”, and I think of the similar marks, stitches, crosses, and letters made across Walker’s works, of which this is just one in a vast flow. 

Michael Newall, September 2024

  1. After writing this, Walker mentioned that it is Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914) that has been of particular interest to her. The “stoppages” trace the chance shapes made by falling threads, and appear like a patchwork over an old painting of Duchamp’s turned on its side. In this way Network of Stoppages could be seen as a kind of model for an “expanded” textile practice.