One of Brazil’s most prominent artists at the moment, Adriana Varejão was recently in Hong Kong to open her first exhibition in the region
China’s influence can be felt stongly throughout the work of Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão.
“It’s a relationship that I created in my work, inventing a Brazilian China,” explains the artist.
Varejão’s interest in China started with Brazilian Baroque, especially that of Minas Gerais – a gold mining centre in the 18th century, with many ornately decorated churches, designed by Antonio Francisco Lisboa, the “Aleijadinho”.
Brazilian baroque was greatly influenced by China with “many elements of chinoiserie”, imitation decorative motifs of Chinese art, Varejão explains. It was her curiousity about “how those images sailed from a far away place like China to Brazil” that sparked the artist’s interest in the “relationship between the former Portuguese colonies, on four continents, which generated many cultural exchanges. Brazil is a country where this cultural wealth is vast. It is built on these influences.”
For the artist, Macau always seemed to be “an imaginary territory, a contagion between Brazil and China” which first caught her attention when, on a visit to Lisbon, she came across the book: Macau Glória: a Glória do Vulgar by architects Manuel Vicente, Manuel Graça Dias and Helena Resende, edited in 1991 by the Cultural Institute.
This apparent place of fiction arose again in A Muralha de Macau – a reinvented version of a city that Varejão had never visited – a 2001 work for the Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
And then an allusion to the territory is also made in Passagem de Macau a Vila Rica (1992), in which the artist brings together two extreme points, Macau and Vila Rica (or Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, the former name of the capital of Minas Gerais) – distant places that merge as an effect of colonization, with wounds and imperfections. The wounds and the blood are violence and exploitation, but also “eroticism, fertility, birth, growth, baroque drama,” she says.
However until now, Macau has remained a fictional territory for Varejão, who is yet to visit the city. She revealed her intention to visit Macau for the first time during this trip to Hong Kong, as part of a documentary started in 2012, recording the historical and Portuguese influences in her work.
– Painting the “fringes” of history –
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, Adriana had her first individual exhibition in 1988. The first contact she had with Asia was in 1993 on a three-month tour of Guilin, Shanghai and Beijing. Varejão took home a Chinese painting, a book about the Song dynasty, some literature and references to Song era porcelain, as well as a tile with a craquelure finish – an effect of enamel and cracked pottery – which caught her attention.
“At that stage, my work was still full of Baroque and materiality. But the first time I saw the Song period porcelain I fell in love, because there are no representations, figurative or decorative, just the craquelure surface, which covers the entire object; there is just the shape, surface and colour,” she recalls.
That’s when China took center stage in Varejão’s work, through the use of Chinese porcelain references. The artist is also strongly influenced by Portuguese pottery and porcelain.
“Portugal has a great tradition of tiles from the 17th century and in Brazil we have a lot of it. I’ve read many books on Islamic, Dutch, and Portuguese ceramics,” she shares.
Varejão’s tile installations are often described as “visceral” – tiled walls with blood and allusive visual metaphors to violence from colonial times and slavery.
In Hong Kong there are eight original works on show. Some of her pieces have travelled all over the world as part of other exhibitions and prestigious museum collections, from the Tate Modern in London to the Guggenheim in New York.
Erotic elements, symbols of religious art, Chinese porcelain, details of fantastic illustrations of animals and extravagant beings – original drawings from the 17th century of what was thought to be the new exotic world – are all intertwined in the works, with eastern landscapes as a background, inspired by the work of another modernist Brazilian painter admired by Varejão, Guignard (1896 – 1962), who painted fanciful landscapes, imitating oriental styles.
The artist explains that for her “the landscape is a construction. You do not paint what you see, what you paint you belong to, and you belong to a tradition, not a particular landscape. The way you represent a landscape is a cultural thing.”
Asked if her work is a process of searching for her roots, she responds: “Normally, the version of history we have is that which we learn in school. Especially in Brazil, we have a very Eurocentric version of history. I tell a version of history on the ‘fringes’. I like to show different versions of history.”
