Boomerang is an imposing example of internationally renowned Chinese-born artist Ai Weiwei’s strategy of working playfully across cultural contexts. Shaped after the iconic Aboriginal throwing tool, this oversized, intensely lit, waterfall-style chandelier hangs above the water in QAG as if it were in a hotel’s grand foyer.

Ai Weiwei has a history of bringing everyday things into art museum settings. He has long acknowledged the influence of early-twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp, who famously brought otherwise banal objects — including a men’s urinal and an upturned bicycle wheel — into a gallery and declared them art, thereby creating the ‘readymade’.

Duchamp’s challenges to convention opened up new possibilities for art, highlighting the ways in which an object’s value and meaning can shift when it changes context. Accordingly, Boomerang takes the chandelier, with its connotations of wealth and opulence, and enlarges it to absurd scale, shaping it into the motif of an object associated with exotic conceptions of Australia.
 

Errant Objects

Like Ai Weiwei’s Boomerang, the works displayed alongside it in ‘Errant Objects’ — a selection from QAGOMA’s contemporary Asian art holdings — alter and recontextualise objects and images, challenging established ideas and systems.

Erbossyn Meldibekov battered and crushed four Soviet-era cooking pots to create shifting views of the Hindu Kush — the great mountain system of Central Asia that remains a site of military and social significance. While continuing the artistic tradition of repurposing everyday objects to create works of art, these also pots bear the traces of a powerful force, implying a manifestation of violence.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Zico Albaiquni’s multilayered paintings combine historical and everyday images to reflect real-world complexities. Albaiquni’s canvases borrow imagery from modern and contemporary Indonesian art exhibitions, museum dioramas and tourist art to suggest a wide range of cultural influences. Nguyen’s paintings comment on the abundance of visual information filling city walls and public spaces in Vietnam, where officially sanctioned propaganda murals sit side by side with consumer advertising, stencilling and graffiti.

Nada yang hilang (The lost note) 2008 by Rudi Mantofani is a meticulously crafted melding of nine electric guitars, arranged to be physically unplayable. At once an homage and parody of the guitar’s status as a pop-cultural symbol, the work also evokes tensions between imported consumer culture and traditional social values in the context of the artist’s home in contemporary Indonesia.

Wang Luyan creates paradoxical machines whose internal forces cancel each other out. Bicycle (20) – 1996 no. 15/20 1996 is one of a number of bicycles the artist ‘reformed’ with the addition of a second rear flywheel, which caused them to travel backwards when pedalled forwards. No matter how hard the rider peddles, they move further from their destination.