How does research-driven art offer critical readings of colonial histories and identarian discourses? What is our relationship with such art and the archives it utilises? Can we maintain an objective reading of modernism and diversity discourse that Australia has borrowed from Euro-America and apply it to the analysis of Asian Australian art? These questions, which are key in the multipolar (art) world of today, are explored through the lens of works by Hong Kong-born, Australian artist John Young in the Power Institutes latest publication John Young: The History Projects edited by Olivier Krischer.

The publication compiles critical essays, interviews, and artist statements associated with Young’s installation series History Projects. Created from 2005 to 2019, History Projects includes painting, drawing, print, tapestry, video, and collaborative works. In Young’s mixture of handwritten Chinese and English texts with archival photographs, his diverse heritage is apparent.

Young’s family emigrated to Sydney in 1967 when he was eleven years old, driven by concerns about proletariat struggle in Mainland China and the 1967 workers’ riot in Hong Kong. Young’s trajectory serves as a poignant case study for art historical analysis regarding diversity in Australian art. In 1997, Australia’s international politics were leaning towards Asia when he co-founded Gallery 4A (renamed 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2007) in Sydney—a hub that aims to expand Australia’s contemporary art scene by accentuating Asian Australian perspectives.

Structured chronologically around the eleven iterations of Young’s History Projects, primary materials such as images of works as well as artist’s notes and sketches are supplemented by relevant historical sources and critical readings of his work. The first half of the book links to histories of violence in other regions, while the second focuses on Chinese Australian history. In each artwork, Young deploys nodes and figures to illustrate his research, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), an anti-Nazist; John Rabe (1882-1950), a member of the Nazi party; and rescuer of Chinese people in Japanese-occupied Nanjing, and Australian-born Chinese Daisy Kwok (1908-1998), who was persecuted in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. The images and texts delineate a complex picture of various heritages that Young’s practice connects with, which not only include histories of migration and violence but also artistic lineages from Asia and Europe, which Australian artists like himself are indebted.

How do we read Young’s gaze at histories beyond artistic process and aesthetic choices? Scholars and artists have increasingly turned their attention to revising the simplified label of Asian Australian diaspora, as it is hard to define without exclusion. Many also recognise that Euro-American modernity, which influenced the language repertoire of Australian art, like Young’s, is hard to unhinge. As the book makes clear, Euro-American conceptualism was increasingly interrogated as he matured as an artist.

Although these works are based on historical materials, Young stresses that they were ‘never constructed as documentaries.’¹ For Jacqueline Lo, Mikala Tai, and Nadia Rhook, empathy plays a crucial role in connecting with these works’ contemporary significance and histories. In reviewing the background and plight of repositioning Australia in ‘Asia’, Lo points out that the conventional method of interpreting Asian Australian artists through biographic and ethnic identification often marginalises their works.² Young, Lo argues, reflects on historical violence through an inter-diasporic perspective not to essentialise Asian-Australian identity but to search for ‘reciprocity with an "Other".’³ Rhook furthers this argument. By respecting historical archives, Young creates a ‘space of imagination’ and humane engagement with the past.⁴ In addition, the incompleteness of archival history—itself a site of erasure and replacement—must be embraced, and Young’s drawings that eschew straightforward symbols serve as a metaphor of this. Tai recognises Young’s decision to foreground benevolence rather than trauma in his pictorial citation of historical events. Recalling a moment of visceral feeling during a research trip with Young to Blackguard Gully, Tai suggests that Young’s painting series Lambing Flat, a blend of archival material with personal narratives, serves as a form of history painting that evokes that which is marginalised in national history.⁵

This publication also seeks to complicate conventional identitarian markers in art and history. Matt Cox’s conversation with Young prompts us to rethink frameworks that embrace multiple autonomies while not downplaying conventional art historical methodologies, which originate in Euroamerican contexts. Similarly, John Clark suggests that Young sought alternative routes to visualise Chinese Australian history. Besides rejecting the use of a hybrid language based on his cultural roots, Young explores linkages with histories of the ‘Other’, including outside of China and Australia.⁶ Oliver Krischer further observes multiple temporalities embedded in the pictorial idioms of abstraction and photography in Young’s works—as they encompass different personal and historical sources and styles. Krischer considers how the artworks allow, following historian Susan Crane, for ‘historical subjectivity’, whereby direct experiences as well as distance from the past give rise to distinct interpretations.⁷ Reconsidering our relationship to archives and sites, Sophie Loy-Wilson presents a personal reflection that deals with the history of violence against Chinese miners and critiques the methodological limitations of history as a discipline, as well as its omissions and oversights. Recognising how Young’s method presents truths that historians ‘are simply not prepared to hear’, Loy-Wilson analyses the productive ‘fake documentary style’ of None Living Knows (2017).⁸ There, violence is not represented directly but hints at the way history often skirts the issue.

This book makes a crucial contribution to the study of contemporary art that engages with identity, even beyond an Australian context. Caroline Turner and Jen Webb position Young’s art in a new global art context that emerged as a criticism of the Asia-Europe binary, due to the transcultural content and wider concerns of humanity and diaspora.⁹ Claire Roberts reads the way Young engages with Ian Fairweather’s work as a practice of forming dialogue across different traditions. Roberts sees Young’s use of Fairweather’s painting methods—informed by hybrid origins (including calligraphy)—to transform photographs into its essential colours, visually distancing it like an ‘afterimage’ while maintaining an emphasis on the Asian and Euro-American traditions that modernist painting absorbed.¹⁰ Carolyn Barnes proposes seeing Young’s work as a sort of ‘new history painting’ that rejects direct depictions of events or narratives.¹¹ Instead he highlights our ignorance of histories and exposes the potential for making subjective connections with them.¹²

As an edited collection, the essays demonstrate how Young’s work can be read as an interrogation of Eurocentric art history and essentialist Asianness. The new history paintings of John Young are made to be felt, not to dictate a certain version of history. If there is something I wish the publication delved into more deeply, though, it would be to add a comparative analysis. Bringing in Indigenous and Asian Australian artists of Chinese and other heritages, would further complicate temporality through a genuinely diverse regional art history. Nonetheless, the publication is certainly recommended for readers excavating Asian or contemporary art. Also, for readers unfamiliar with John Young’s work or Asian Australian history, this is a go-to book that will offer new discoveries every time they read.