BLACK LIVES MATTER! The plea and call to action is resonating worldwide.

It is at the heart of Jason Wing’s art. He challenges, protests and mourns Australia’s fraught colonising and indigenous histories and the continuing contemporary impact of contested Country and the loss of the rich indigenous traditions and cultural identities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Jason Wing’s mother is an Aboriginal woman of the Biripi people in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales. His father is Chinese (Cantonese). The artist’s many layered Australian heritage and DNA powers and drives his potent installations and objects:

“The common thread throughout my practice is the everyday battle which Aboriginal people fight living in this colonial institutional framework. We fight for re-writing Aboriginal history that has been erased, destroyed, hidden and lost. We fight for equal human rights. We fight for our culture to be respected, valued and celebrated in a genuine way. We fight for equal rights socially, culturally, politically and economically”.

Battleground assembles a serried armory of symbolic battle-shields-for-our-time. Ground-in glyphs of surveyors’ marks alongside other universal cultural symbols of Country and ownership applied in ochre pigments of white and red, scar, leach and bleed into harsh rusted Corten steel surfaces. Such marks universally bode a change of occupier and of purpose, whether to the natural environment, to inhabitants, and inevitably their histories…

The artist’s ritualistic shields are at once a call to arms signaling both defense and attack. And a memorial.  United in protesting the corrosive impact of invasive settlement, of law-making practices, of mining with its desecration of sacred grounds and destruction of natural habitats, and against the ingrained and systemic discriminatory attitudes that alienate peoples, endanger culture and threaten Country.

Rio Tinto detonating explosives in the Juukan Gorge of Western Australia on 15 May 2020 destroying a significant site dating back 46,000 years for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people bears witness to the distressing disregard and ongoing massacre by corporate giants of Aboriginal heritage.

Stenciled texts and portentous cut-out holes in selected of Wing’s shields ominously admonish and attest “… that once culture is cut out – it is so, so hard to put back.”

At school in Sydney, Jason Wing, like so many generations of students, was taught that Australia was discovered by Captain James Cook when he sailed into Kamay (but named by Cook in his charts as Botany Bay), the home of the Eora and Gweagal people.

It is a flawed colonial victor perspective perpetuated by law-makers, many historians and school and university curricula that denies the sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Wing’s response is a succession of works created since 2012 around versions of busts of Captain James Cook to challenge audiences to rethink dual and alternate histories to those that are embedded in the Australian psyche of Australia as terra nullius (meaning a land belonging to no one) and having been peacefully settled by European colonizers:

The artist emphatically asserts: “There are many politically correct terms such as “colonised, peacefully settled, occupied, discovered etc. The truth is that Australia was stolen by armed robbery. History is often written and erased by the victors, so I decided to challenge colonial history of Australia from an Aboriginal perspective.”

Australia was stolen by armed robbery is a found fiberglass bust of Cook on which the artist placed a black balaclava. It won the 2012 Parliament of New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize and is held in the permanent collection of the New South Wales Parliament House. It attracted a furor of controversy. Subsequent cast bronze versions by Wing of Cook, both masked and unmasked have followed.

Captain James Crook (black light), a screen-print edition created in 2019-2020 and coincides with the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Cook’s arrival in Australia. It depicts a barefaced bust of Cook. Supplied with the work is a Black Light Torch, a device used by forensic scientists to analyse crime scenes. When shone on the work it reveals Cook/Crook wearing a black balaclava – significantly the disguise of choice for bandits. The clever visual pun serves to ‘shine a light’, to ‘enlighten’ and importantly to confront and reconcile the divided issues surrounding our colonial past.

Artist and activist, Jason Wing is exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He has delivered a range of significant public art commissions and is represented in major Australian collections including the National Gallery of Australia and prestigious Australian and International public, corporate and private collections.

Barbara Dowse
Curator, Artereal Gallery
10^th June 2020