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Watching Soe and finding freedom

Story Book

Words, voices and images: Connecting to cultures around the world

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Goobalathaldin: The moon man Gidigal

Bark paintings are remarkable works of art, they are also a page from the book of Aboriginal knowledge. Here we look at the back of a bark painting in the Creative cowboy films collection.

Rethinking tropical architecture: Yann Follain

We contemplate the ways in which architecture should contribute to the development of modern communities across the tropical world and particularly in South East Asia.

Humanity

We stand in this place with deep sadness in our hearts for this war and all wars. Sadness made worse because we know deep in our hearts that nothing has been learnt.

Hiroshima

The morning of the 6th of August 1945. It is 8.15 am and the world’s first atomic bomb to be used in war, explodes 600 metres above Hiroshima.

Stolen generations

In the bustling atmosphere of the art fair in Singapore the discussion turns to the stolen generations of Aboriginal children in Australia. Sandra was stolen when she was only seven years old.

Diversity and identity: The echo of the drum

In this film artists and leaders describe the importance of diversity and identity, keeping culture and cultural revival. These things are important because they underpin human health and wellbeing.

Eiffel Tower Dreaming: Lena Nyadbi

Peter Hylands asked Dr Stéphane Laurent (Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne University) to write this article in English to give us all a perspective on France's intellectual connection to the Indigenous people of Australia.

Kagoshima and other stories

Autumn days in Kyushu in the far west of Japan and we catch the train south to the City of Kagoshima. This is to be a journey of reflection.

A Saylor’s life

Bully Saylor and Peter Hylands are on Erub in the Torres Strait close to the corner of Australia’s north eastern boundary and close by the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea.

Yamagata days: Ways of being

We gather at Governor Mieko Yoshimura’s welcoming reception for the UNWTO at the Bunshokan Former Assembly Building in Yamagata City, now beautifully restored. It is early February and the snow is all around us.

Visiting William

One of the most creative and technically brilliant sculptors in Australia, William Eicholtz, works from his studio nearby to Creative cowboy films’ base in Melbourne, we visit William’s studio to view a new body of work.

Into the light

This story was first published in May 2018 and pre COVID. In the first year of its opening the new museum received 2.3 million visitors. teamLab’s world is a world of endless possibilities, it is a world without boundaries and an art without end.

Reflections

Reflections of a Japanese life in a time before COVID.

The Prince and the message stick

When it comes to standing strong and connecting globally, the Yolŋu set the gold standard for us all. It is in this way and in April 2018 that Prince Charles visited Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land.

A certain injustice

In Alice Springs we ask Grandmother Against (child) Removal, Christine Palmer, to tell us about her latest thoughts on the matter of the removal of Indigenous Australian children from their families.

Knowledge is power: The Mulka Project

Among the very precious things in Australia is the cultural knowledge of its Indigenous people. Today and at the Mulka Project’s home in Yirrkala, this knowledge and the latest technology meet, two knowledge economies entwined.

Napuwarri: Hollow log

We join Napuwarri Marawili as we select a hollow log for the artist to create a larrakitj or memorial pole. The hollow log, bark removed, will be sanded and prepared and then painted using the traditional and sacred designs of Napuwarri’s clan.

Ishmael Marika: Knowledge flows

We look back to 2014 and the stunningly beautiful community of Yirrkala. It is also a place where a lot of very clever stuff happens and the world knows it.

Colour & design

The Women’s Centre in Maningrida is busy this morning. In a cluster of buildings that include the Djomi Museum and the former art centre building, the Women’s Centre is yet another hub of creativity in this historic place of art making.

Continental drift

Christopher Green received Creative cowboy films’ European web award in Piccadilly. The award was for our analysis of Brexit and its impact on the social and economic prospects of the UK. We were simply stating the obvious. It is not over yet.

Ruth Ngalmakarra: Milingimbi Art and Culture

Before taking us to her island homeland of Langarra, Ruth Ngalmakarra tells us about Milingimbi Art and Culture and the artistic traditions of the region.

Yidaki: Jacob Ganambarr

Jacob, from the Datawuy clan, has been playing Yidaki since he was three. In Milingimbi young people learn to play the Yidaki using leftover plastic plumber's pipe. When you are big enough to hold the Yidaki it is time to play the real thing.

Yerrdagarri: Messages from Peppi

Water lilies are many things, they are beautiful, they are numerous, around 70 species, water lilies live in the tropics and in temperate zones. Aquatic herbs, water lilies have been an important food source for Indigenous people since ancient time.

Joe Dhamanydji: Milingimbi Art and Culture

Joe Dhamanydji is a guardian of cultural knowledge, not all of this knowledge can be shared with non-Aboriginal people. He is the proud Chairman of Milingimbi Art and Culture.

How it works

East Arnhem Land and we join Laklak Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru at Buku-Lanrrnggay Mulka Art Centre. This is Yolŋu country.

Watching Soe and finding freedom

Soe Naing (Myanmar) at Art Stage Singapore in January 2014. Powerful work and performance with greater resonance than ever, loaded with history, humanity, compassion and suffering. The Singapore audience thought so as well.

The Master Printer

As the rain hammers down on the streets and buildings of tropical Cairns it was once again time to visit master printer Theo Tremblay in his print workshop Editions Tremblay NFP (no fixed press) at Canopy Artspace.

National Gallery Singapore

Singapore’s built heritage and contemporary enterprise and achievement have come together to create a series of beautifully designed institutions, where history, culture and contemporary art are now exhibited.

Arahmaiani: The grey paintings

In this film we join Arahmaiani as she paints Grey by the Elo-Progo River in Central Java and in Singapore, Tony Godfrey, Equator Art Projects, talks to Arahmaiani about the grey paintings.

If the world changed

Art history, the fourth edition of the Singapore Biennale. 82 artists and artist collectives, 13 countries and 27 curators, multiple venues. Many of the works of art were commissioned for SB2013. Art from the region predominated.

A certain harvest

We leave the River Cam and go now to a very different body of water, the blue and turquoise sea with its coral cays and volcanic islands of the Torres Strait so many thousands of miles away.

Raj Ghat

Our thanks to George Bernard Shaw. Following their meeting in 1931, Gandhi said of Bernard Shaw “I think he is a very good man”. Bernard Shaw’s response on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is the quote used in this story.

Road works

The roads we are travelling on have also become trade routes of India. The roadsides are places of work. What happens by the roadside tells you a lot about a place here.

Kathakali of Kerala

We are here to look at something that also has deep roots in Kerala’s culture, a story dance performance, the highly stylised dance drama called Kathakali.

More marvellous machines

Sore hands and heavy work raising the catch skyward and increasingly so, and over the long years, the catch becomes lighter and there are fewer fish for our fishermen to sell.

The marvellous machines of Marina Beach

Chennai’s Marina Beach extends about 12 kilometers from Beasant Nagar in the south to Fort St. George in the north, it is here we find a sculpture garden and a place where children come to play on the marvellous machines of Marina Beach.

Paul Bong: Fragments

Then the white man came along and he shot, bang, bang, bang. And he put in these bullet holes in these objects and what happened next is he tried to pull the culture to pieces. What I am doing now is to put the pieces back together again.

Billy Doolan: New Territories

At the end of April 2014 Bwgcolman elder and artist Billy Doolan travelled to Hong Kong to begin a residency at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and so begins a journey of friendship and of sharing culture with Chinese friends.

Pitt Rivers Museum

Sitting in the upstairs bar at Paddington Station, the train to Oxford delayed, time for another pint to wash down the London air. Soon we were on the train, then out, beyond the London suburbs, looking at the rolling green countryside flashing by.

Wallace Rockhole

The flight from Darwin is descending, we bank and fly low over the MacDonnell Ranges. Alice Springs Airport is just ahead. Bags unloaded we jump into the car and head mostly west to Wallace Rockhole.

Joel Ngallametta: Saltwater

We take you back more than 400 years to 1606 and the Dutch East India Company vessel Duyfken as it dropped anchor at Cape Keerweer in the Gulf of Carpentaria all those centuries ago.

Twisted histories

In this film the founder of the Wallace Rockhole Community and Ilpurla Outstation in Central Australia, talks about what happened to the old people of the Finke River country.

Raymond Bulambula: The right colour

We join Raymond Bulambula to collect ochres which he will then use to create a new painting. Raymond, Zanette, Andrea and I head out of Milingimbi township in the morning light, along a small bush track and to a nearby coastal mangrove area.

Australian homelands are forever

We have always understood that it is a crime to remove Indigenous peoples from their land and that any such removal represents the worst kind of colonialism and exploitation.

Brian Robinson: men+GODS

Brian Robinson tells Peter Hylands about his men + GODS exhibition (KickArts, Cairns, North Queensland, 2012). Brian’s exhibition takes us on a visual journey through a world of mythology, a journey of tension between men and Gods.

And so to Xi’an

I want to take you to Xi’an, the home of the Chinese warriors. The discovery of the Chinese warriors by Mr Yang in 1974, while drilling for water and what Yang’s initial discovery will lead to, as excavations continue, are extraordinary.

Ching-Hui Chou: Animal farm

The Animal Farm series is composed of 36 complex tableaus and intimate portraits. The large works are just under two meters wide, the portraits just over a metre wide.

Hsu Yung-Hsu: Fine art

By any measure the ceramic sculptures created by Hsu Yung-Hsu are impressive. The works are very large in scale, hand built ceramic forms that are technically challenging to create.

Angela Yuen Ka Yee

Angela’s art practise focuses on urban culture as ‘a tangible expression of the disappearing city value and local cityscape’. Angela explores the correlation between urban development and city value via installation and photography.

An earlier portrait in Prahran (2005)

Traditional art school or studio practice is that you have a studio nude and you paint the figure quite anonymously and in a way that it does not really matter who the person is. They are just a body or a type that you are painting.

Courage

Australian sculptor William Eicholtz completes a major commission for the City of Yarra in Melbourne. The bronze casting techniques used here are similar to those of ancient Greece.

Memory of nature

A year or more has passed and we meet Arahmaiani again under a Javan sky to create the installation and performance once more, this time in a field on the banks of the Elo-Progo River in Central Java. Borobudur is close by this location.

Borobudur: Thinking Mandala

Borobudur lay hidden under volcanic ash and forest until Stamford Raffles, who was enthralled by Javanese history and collecting Java’s antiques, organised a dig to expose the long lost temple. The year was 1814. We are with Arahmaiani in Java.

Modernity and tradition

A journey through modernity and tradition from Tokyo to Kyoto on a Shinkansen to the heart of ancient Japanese culture and tradition.

Yamagata days: Ginzan Onsen

The snow is falling heavily as we arrive at Ginzan Onsen, there are metres of it everywhere. For me these are memories of an Alpine childhood all those years ago in Carinthia.

Yamagata days: Ceremony

This morning we are in Yamagata City and we have been invited to a tea ceremony at Seifuso, the Chashitsu (teahouse) yet another beautiful and purposeful building in its white snow landscape in a Maple park.

The art of Zen

Tokyo National Museum is a storehouse of treasures. The museum’s collection is made up of 114,000 items and includes 87 National Treasures and 634 Important Cultural Properties. Around 3,000 objects are exhibited at any one time.

Nara and Kyoto

First stop is Kyoto’s Nishiki Market 錦市場, a thriving shopping precinct, an undercover and narrow alley, which stretches for five blocks in the downtown district. Most of what is here is food related.

The National Museum of Art, Osaka

The National Museum of Art in Osaka was opened in late 1997 as the fourth national museum in Japan. The building was originally designed as the Exposition Museum of Fine Arts at Osaka’s Expo 70 and was then redeveloped to its current use.

Mino washi

It seems that all roads lead to Mino where the Nagara River flows. Mino steeped in ceramics, paper and light and some very beautiful Edo period houses.

Yamagata Days

In our lives there are days to remember. Our days in Yamagata will live long in our memories. We start our journey in a spiritual Shinto heartland as we visit Mount Haguro, the most accessible and one of three mountains.

Paper as art

Back in Mino and we work with traditional Japanese papermaker, Takeshi Kano. The creative cowboy films team clap when Takeshi-san finishes his morning’s work. You get the feeling he deserves the spontaneous applause.

Hermannsburg

Not that far from Wallace Rockhole in Tjoritja (the West MacDonnell Ranges country) is the community of Hermannsburg (the sacred site of Ntaria). The township is 130km to the west of Alice Springs.

The curious case of the Burrup Murujuga

The Burrup Peninsula, or in local language the Murujuga, in the remote North West of Western Australia, contains an extraordinary collection of ancient rock carvings created by many hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people across the millennia.

Media and the Murujuga

This extraordinarily significant site, the Murujuga, gives us vital insights into the pre-history of man, continues to be under significant pressure from even more commercial development in the form of industrial infrastructure.

Murujuga

Images which appear to depict mega fauna and other extinct species, such as the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), fat-tailed macropod and Tasmanian Devil, are evident in the petroglyphs.

Murujuga gets short shrift

In 2007 I was asked to read a statement by the RT. Hon. Malcolm Fraser AC, CH, Prime Minister of Australia (1975-1983) at Melbourne’s Federation Square. The statement was in support of the preservation of the ancient rock art of the Murujuga.

Mick Kubarkku

Margie West AM writes about Mick Kubarkku. Mick Kubarkku was an artist from the rugged escarpment region of western Arnhem Land renowned for its extensive galleries of rock art.

Bardayal Nadjamerrek

Margie West AM writes about Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO. Kunwinjku language (Kundedjnjenghmi dialect). Wamud Namok was one of most respected and well-known artists working in the Western Arnhem Land painting tradition.

The art and the dragonfly

As the day fades across the waters of the Liverpool River, the reddening sky with its polished marbled patterns reflect golden in the gently undulating waves. On Mangrove shore where giant crocodiles sleep something remarkable is happening.

A kind and thoughtful man

Sid and I go to sit by the beach of a million bleached shells, piled high along the tide's edge for as far as the eye can see. This too is Saltwater Crocodile territory. The Crocodiles sleep in the morning sun. It is here we stop to talk.

Namatjira’s front door

To the south west of Alice Springs we stand in a place where a remarkable individual lived and worked. And we enter through Albert Namatjira’s front door. We have not been to this place before.

Irankarapte

Irankarapte is Ainu and it means hello, well much more than hello – allow me to touch your heart gently.

creative-i 1: Vanishing worlds

In the article Silent country Alick Tipoti makes us think about the importance of language in preserving culture, in The world we make we look at the impact of our own actions on Indigenous cultures and we visit our Maasai friends in the Rift Valley.

creative-i 2: Around the world

At home once more and in London we visit Christopher Green in the scholar’s room of the British Library. Christopher is the British Library's first artist in residence.

creative-i 3: The Survival Issue

We visit the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair and head further north to see Sid Bruce Short Joe in Pormpuraaw, Cape York.

creative-i 4: The Singapore Issue

The rise and rise of contemporary art in Indonesia is reflected by the Indonesian Pavilion at Art Stage Singapore where the work is compelling and a demonstration of how contemporary art can be a powerful reflection of society and meaning.

creative-i 5: The First Nations Issue

Not only did these visitors not leave, but they broke the law. They killed animals and did not eat their flesh, they killed fish during their breeding season, their animals trampled across our yam gardens and they blocked the rivers and the creeks.

Love and India in a time of Covid

So let’s step back and take a journey in pictures and stories through Southern India with the Creative cowboy films crew and think of our friends across this beautiful and incredibly complex country.

Qutb Minar

This time we visit the Mehrauli region, one of seven ancient cities that compose the State of Delhi, here we visit the Qutb complex. It is December and the days are still warm as the winter shadows lengthen.

Mahabalipuram: A temple by the sea

For more than one thousand years our temple by the sea, the Shore Temple, as it is known, has stood here resisting the lapping waves and the salty winds that have licked at and melted its precious masonry.

Brihadeeswarar Temple

It is mid January and we are in Tamil Nadu. The southern Indian light still bright, and its sun, still warm as we visit a favourite place for another story about the architecture and buildings of India.

A Taj Mahal Sunday

It is early on Sunday morning in New Delhi, the plan is to drive south to visit Agra and the Taj Mahal. The drive should take about four hours, so there is time to do the round trip in a day.

Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum

Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum is a fine example of Japanese museum design. This place of culture was designed by architects Kengo Kuma and Nihon Sekkei.

Ainu weaving and embroidery

Ainu craft traditions continue and of the great skills handed down to the current generation of women is the art of Nibutani-attus weaving and embroidery.

Meet Takeshi San

We visit Japanese papermaker, Takeshi Kano, in his studio in Mino City. In this story Takeshi san demonstrates how the kozo fibres are beaten and then how the fibres are sieved to make the individual sheets of paper.

creative-i 6: The Art & Nature Issue

The Art and nature issue of creative-i takes us on a journey to Australia where we meet a very talented group of individuals, each making a significant contribution to art or science in Australia.

creative-i 7: The Bangladesh Issue

This is the seventh in the series of our international magazine creative-i. In this issue we travel to Bangladesh, to India and Tibet.

The art of Hina Ningyo

In Japan, sometimes it is a good idea to go and check out what your neighbours are up to. Mitsuko Ando is the third generation to make Bonbori lights or lanterns for the formal display of Hina dolls.

Gifu, our land of memories

There is the natural world in Gifu, butterflies flutter by on the soft warm air, the mountains soar to the sky and forests, dressed in shades of green, march on every hillside.

Snowflakes fall as beetles do

First of all this is a story about Hon-minoshi, the beautiful hand-made paper from Gifu Prefecture. A parcel arrives from Gifu and we discover that snowflakes fall as beetles do.

Land song: A poem for the missing

We take you to Lake Tyrrell in northern Victoria, the country of the Boorong people under the night sky.

The Boorong night sky

I started out in 1993, found most of the creatures and the people within two years but took until last year to find Kulkunbulla. One of the Brothers Berm still eludes me.

Stars over Tyrrell: John’s story

Andrea and I met John and Kirsty Morieson in 2014 through an introduction by Niagara Galleries director Bill Nuttall.

Stars over Tyrrell: The night sky of the Boorong

One hundred and fifty five years ago, a Boorong family at Lake Tyrrell told William Stanbridge something of their stories relating to the night sky.

Family with egg: Collected works

This story is part of a series which provides students and collectors with an image of a work by Andrea Hylands in the collection of museums or private collectors around the world.

21st Century Museum of Art

We were last in Kanazawa in the heat of the summer when we drove here via the mountains to the north of Gifu.

Meet the Maasai

During this period of drought the journeys for the Maasai men grew ever longer, as they searched for pastures to feed their animals.

Peppimenarti

Heading out of Darwin we drive south on the Stuart Highway to the small township of Adelaide River. It is here the highway crosses the river.

Shoutou-an

The building was moved to Kanazawa in 1979 when it was renamed Shoutou-an.

“I was scratching my head all the time but nothing came out from my head. I said I can't live without painting. I don't even know if I can say I am painting. I am just following my heart and my feeling”.

Peter and Andrea Hylands

October 17, 2023
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Soe Naing (Myanmar) at Art Stage Singapore in January 2014. Powerful work and performance with greater resonance than ever, loaded with history, humanity, compassion and suffering. The Singapore audience thought so as well.

We watch Soe behind his transparent plexiglass wall, cut off from us, recalling the isolation, reflecting the need to be alone and away from the tortures of a fractured past.

Wipe it back and back and back, dissolving the black paint.

Soe paints on his side of the wall, encased in his artwork, oblivious of the audience in front of him.

Soe’s work is called Intermission on Stage, a performance work of reverse acrylic painting from within.

Keeping vigil throughout the decades of censorship and isolationism, Soe, writes in diary each day, creating some 10,000 diary sketches.

In Singapore he creates his reverse paintings by dissolving the black paint, revealing his diary sketches for the first time.

Record and then wipe something from memory, from skin, from a recent past.  The nightmares keep coming back.  

‍

‍

Wipe the nightmares and back and back, dissolve the black paint as a hope to some healing.

‍

‍

‍

This is a constant cleansing. Revealing a secret history, meticulously recorded in those 10,000 diary sketches.

‍

Paula Tin Nyo, founder of Yone Arts

We watch Soe behind his transparent plexiglass wall, cut off from us, recalling the isolation, reflecting the need to be alone and away from the tortures of a fractured past.

Wipe it back and back and back, dissolving the black paint.

Soe paints on his side of the wall, encased in his artwork, oblivious of the audience in front of him.

Soe’s work is called Intermission on Stage, a performance work of reverse acrylic painting from within.

Keeping vigil throughout the decades of censorship and isolationism, Soe, writes in diary each day, creating some 10,000 diary sketches.

In Singapore he creates his reverse paintings by dissolving the black paint, revealing his diary sketches for the first time.

Record and then wipe something from memory, from skin, from a recent past.  The nightmares keep coming back.  

‍

‍

Wipe the nightmares and back and back, dissolve the black paint as a hope to some healing.

‍

‍

‍

This is a constant cleansing. Revealing a secret history, meticulously recorded in those 10,000 diary sketches.

‍

Paula Tin Nyo, founder of Yone Arts
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