5 Questions with John Young
John Young Zerunge AM is a Hong Kong-born Australian artist known for his discursive and scholarly approach to art practice with an aesthetic and ethical commitment. His work draws on transcultural art history to explore the impacts of technology, migratory dislocation, and plural notions of time, resonance, and melancholia.
Over the past two decades, Young has focused on two major bodies of work: The History Projects, which evolved from examining violence and benevolence in world historical events to visually re-imagining Chinese Australian history since 1840; and Abstract Paintings, a reassessment of technology’s devastation to bodily skills.
Since his first exhibition in 1982 at Rosroe, Connemara, Ireland, Young has held over 80 solo and four survey exhibitions, including one at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art. His work has been shown at major institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and is substantially held in collections including M+ Museum, Hong Kong.
Young has also played a key role in regional cultural development, representing Australia in numerous exhibitions across Northeast and Southeast Asia since 1992. He continues to exhibit regularly in Australia, Berlin, and Hong Kong.John Young: History Projects, is published by the Power Institute, University of Sydney.
No.1
Hello John. Between 2005 and 2019, you created eleven distinct artworks that collectively form a body of work titled The History Projects. This new book, also titled The History Projects, is described as a “critical guide,” with contributions from curators, writers, and academics, alongside your own. Why this book, and why now?
Hi Cher. When you say “now”, I interpret it as referring to the past two decades. This book has been a long time in the making—six years, in fact. I don’t see it as a traditional monograph; that would be a hollow form of satisfaction. Instead, it represents the efforts of a generation of curators, writers, academics, historians and visual artists who have engaged in, and contributed to, trans-cultural advocacy—advocacy for our place in the world. I hope the book opens up spaces to see art and book-making as relevant not just for the current moment or institutions, but across longer timespans, through the ethical commitments and availabilities embedded in these processes.
I learnt much from your book Peripathetic, particularly about the commodification of subjectivities. Artists today are often constructed as useful subjectivities within institutional power structures. Individuals are hungry for agency, and institutions promise it—whether ultimately it’s for expedient, ideological or propagandistic influence. One could argue that some contemporary art institutions co-opt even so-called “interventionist” strategies and normalise them into socialite marketing. The outward-facing function of contemporary art often appears reduced to entertainment for audiences now trained to expect less from art in terms of its ability to shift their worldviews, driven by consumption. At best, it’s a form of conceptual entertainment. Such systems of legitimisation tend to neutralise socio-political empathy—clearly demonstrated, I believe, in the recent Venice Biennale/Khaled Sabsabi incident, a regrettable example of political dog-whistling and bureaucratic tenaciousness. Of course, there are institutional agents and museum directors who strive for better, and I applaud their ethical stance. But the ethical function of art and its traditional institutional advocacy seems to be eroding—not just in how it engages viewers, but in what it offers the artist’s psyche. Personally, over the past two and a half decades, I have found it necessary to cultivate values through the art-making process.
The book is the product of many voices. It was constructed by editor Olivier Krischer and assistant editor Genevieve Trail (both of whom, by the way, are Asian-lingual) as more of a pedagogic and creative endeavour—an open workbook. The History Projects as a series of artworks I’ve engaged in over the last two decades have varied aims: personal, subjective, and often, as I mentioned earlier, philosophical.
No.2
The book comes twenty years after the very first History Project. Where does your enduring fascination with “history” come from?
Existentially. As a migrant—and often still living under the mental frameworks of colonialism—and as a diasporic person, my experience of the present is always conjoined with the past. Memory, and often trauma, occupy more space in daily life than an innocent sense of the present. The History Projects, those twelve projects you referred to—not so much the book—began with many unresolved questions that meandered over time. They helped bring personal clarity to longstanding philosophical concerns: the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, Henri Bergson’s notion of durée (that encompasses the simultaneity of past and present), the role of memory in diasporic life, and whether the possibility of virtue can be cultivated through an art-making life. These reflections have recently led me to appreciate thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers and Zhuangzi. The artworks call forth historical narratives that inherently engage with these questions. Introducing the notion of “history” in contemporary art, I believe, enables such inquiries to come into conjunction.
This mode of working—the “historical” modality and its associated narratives—seems to establish a reciprocal relationship between the artist’s and audience’s learning.
Yes, and crucially, it does not elevate the artist into the mythical figure of the “insightful author”, nor does it aim to become a political weapon. It is, perhaps, more socialist in orientation: artist and audience create and learn from the historical-art text simultaneously. I hope the book’s structure encourages a similar interaction. Perhaps the role of the artist is to distil this reciprocal learning process—of ethical values in history—into art: virtue values such as empathy, hospitality, and how to identify and reckon with the resonance of trauma through reconstructing meaningful historical narratives. We live in a world ruled by oligarchical reptiles. Past narratives of violence and benevolence might also illuminate or help us cope with the extremes of inhumanity we face today, and the psychogenic or dissociative fugues that such events give rise to.
From a practical point of view, the projects started as an enquiry in developing a working method, so the History Projects’ narratives were initially contextualised in a universal register, rather than later ones which are nationally specific. Halfway through the projects, I noticed there has never been any visual history of the Chinese in Australia since 1840. There was, of course, much non-visual textual historical research—thankfully initiated by Anglo-Australian historians, and we thank them for that wholeheartedly. There was only one visual scroll, called The Harvest of Endurance, made by two Nanjing professors during the bicentennial celebrations, but never anything systematically visual by Asian-Australians. So I took it as a duty to try to initiate this—a visual history. This was followed by two years of research funded with an Arts Council Fellowship, with a team of researchers, and we found 103 fascinating narratives: stories of the Chinese in Australia since 1840. It was never within my intentions to simply initiate a presence of the identity of this cultural group—the enquiry was always about what kind of ethical values we may derive from these trans-cultural narratives, given the method that was being developed.
No.3
A “history project” can be described as one that collates disparate items, memories, and emotions to create images of the past that then speak to the present with the hope that it might change the course of the future—an inverted understanding of traditional ideas around time, perhaps. How do you think art can nurture new subjectivities outside the narrow narratives around “history”, particularly in a settler-colonial context?
First, if we can find alternatives to viewing time as purely linear—past to future via cause and effect—we may discover latent possibilities that have always been with us. I don’t believe causality is inevitable. The future is multifarious; multiple strands of significance exist. The linear, realist, cause-effect model of time and action is only one possibility. In contrast, from a wider perspective, looking at the scope of the art world—through its often crude and mythicised presentation of modernism—has perpetuated an idea of endless forward progress through refutation and destruction of the past. This is akin to a kind of fascist futurism, progressiveness. That constant replacement of the immediate past with “the new” is a dissociative tendency—a psychological condition that negates empathy or melancholic mood states. Modernism and settler-colonialism both engage in similar dissociative practices—it’s conceptual territorialisation. In a multicultural world and art world, if we allow ourselves to navigate time acausally, by accepting multiple solutions, worldviews, and values rather than a sense of defensive inevitability, a fear of loss, historical narratives might then be seen not as closed systems but as revisits. They can be invitations to discover or cultivate virtue—virtue values born of intention, not outcome.
No.4
Do you see the book, or your practice, as activism? Why or why not?
The book is not a sharp weapon, and my practice does not presume to offer direct solutions. Rather, it tries to open up or clarify conceptual terrains where art-making becomes possible again. I hope the work allows someone to one day move beyond the clichés of what art-making is “meant” to be—especially when those clichés are not even accessible to everyone, or when people must grow despite them. We remain in a settler-colonial context, where access and legitimacy often rely on entitlement and inherited privilege.
If there is activism here, it’s in the sense that I believe the field needs clarity. The projects offer multi-traditional, virtue-ethical alternatives via historical narratives—not as answers, but as openings. The driving forces behind art-making differ radically from goal-driven activism, which may be effective in some contexts. The will to change is present, but its mode differs entirely.
Methodologically, for instance, many History Projects were not initiated by rational planning. They often emerged from a pattern of synchronous events. Take the Safety Zone project, a narrative about the 21 foreigners who saved 300,000 Chinese citizens during the Nanjing Massacre. The central figure was the German businessman John Rabe, whom the Chinese later called “the Living Buddha”. While flying to Berlin, I saw a perfectly circular rainbow in the clouds, an ‘apparition’—something I’d never witnessed before. In Chinese tradition, such a phenomenon is known as “Buddha’s Ray”. The link between “Buddha’s Ray” and “the Living Buddha” struck me profoundly. When I arrived in Berlin and told my gallerist Alexander Ochs and researcher Sylvia Volz about it, Alexander—an expert on Erik Satie and John Cage—understood the significance. He bought me a train ticket the next day to meet Rabe’s grandson, who had the archives I needed. That moment of synchronicity, of intuition, started a project that took two years to complete and present with significance in many sites.
No.5
As one of many Asian Australian elder artists whose work has always been avant-garde, you inspire many of us within the diaspora to continue troubling the idea of borders and nationality—not to mention, to consider more deeply the relations that come with being an Asian settler-migrant. Do you ever think of legacy? How does that word make you feel?
My name is ‘young’, but I am old! You find your place in the world—and what lands in your lap—because of the times you live in. Sometimes, you may be the only one available to do what needs to be clarified or mended. The idea that someone, one day, might find meaning in the works and the narratives—that is certainly one of my hopes. But I know I will likely never know when, or how, they might stumble upon it. And that’s fine. I’m content. All I know is: if they don’t someday burn this book, it still carries a hope, and working this way has democratised my idea of making art.
You can’t burn ideas and perspectives. Legacy, for me, lies in the density of a working method—its implicit clarity of purpose, and its perspicuousness in how it engages with many facets where change is needed—to do so with a genuine philosophical intent for betterment, learning, and atonement.
(Credit: Zan Wimberley)
Find out more
Between 2005 and 2019, Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young Zerunge created 11 art series which he called ‘The History Projects’. This book is a critical guide to this expansive body of artworks, which explore diasporic memory, transcultural identity, and what Young describes as an ‘ethical responsibility’ towards the past.
Featuring more than 400 images, and a wide variety of texts—including new essays and interviews, key republished articles, poetry, artist reflections, and diary pages—this book is a definitive reference for Young’s transformative recent practice and its urgent reckoning with history as unfinished business.
Edited by Olivier Krischer, with contributions from:
John Young, Olivier Krischer, Carolyn Barnes, John Clark, Venita Poblocki, Caroline Turner, Jen Webb, Sylvia D. Volz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfgang Huber, Anette Simojoki, Thomas J. Berghuis, Jacqueline Lo, Marc Glöde, Brian Castro, Jennifer Mackenzie, Claire Hielscher, Nadia Rhook, Cyrus Tang, Pei Pei He, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Mikala Tai, Matt Cox, Claire Roberts, Aaron Seeto.
Get it from Power Publications here.