A Mangere Airport bookshop might seem an unexpected place to find an English copy of Sun Tzu’s 2000-year-old military treatise ‘The Art of War’. But it was just this chance discovery, en route to China, that shaped the artwork to emerge from John Reynolds’ artist’s residency in Beijing.

The 2010 residency was a chance for John immerse himself in an unfamiliar culture and, as a Westerner in a strange land, he knew he wanted to create a work that played out some sort of reckoning between East and West.

As a student he had been aware of ‘The Art of War’, the ancient military text that has exerted enormously influence both on Eastern military thought and modern business strategy.

When he found the English copy at Mangere, an idea began to crystallise. On his arrival in Beijing his translator took him to a bookshop, where he found both a bilingual translation of the Sun Tzu text and a Mandarin-English phrasebook.

Rules of engagement

With characteristic humour and instinct for incongruity, John began to layer together ancient poetic fragments from Sun Tzu with banal references from his phrasebook, each represented in both English and Mandarin. He chose phrases that were deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the ambiguity of being a foreigner in a strange city.

“I wanted to have my cake and eat it too,” says John. “On the one hand the serious philosophical rendering of the ancient text, and on an individual level, to tell the story of my own personal journey.”

His choice of title was deliberately provocative, mindful of the controversial Fair Trade Agreement between New Zealand and China. It was both a reference to the famous text and a nod to people’s instinctive suspicion of unfamiliar cultures – in business as well as in combat.

“‘The Art of War’ is rightly admired as a profound contemplation on the nature of conflict, politics and rules of engagement,” he says. “I was interested in engagement, and the idea that any contact between cultures is problematic.”

Visual vs literary

John Reynolds is one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed artists, his work represented in all New Zealand’s major public collections. His paintings are rich with literary, religious and historical allusions and range from postage-stamp-tiny to vast canvases many metres wide.

Text has long been central to his work: famously ‘Cloud’, for the 2006 Sydney Biennale, consisted of 7000 small canvases inscribed with Kiwi phrases.

“I can’t escape from it,” he says. “After ‘Cloud’ I said never again, that’s enough words on little bits of canvas. I love the tones and ambiguity, the dreaminess of abstract painting, I find it a satisfying contrast to text, which people tend to feel they’ve ‘got’ much more readily.

“But I read so much, I keep being dragged back to text. There’s a constant battle in my work between the visual and literary.”

Flexible relationships

The form of ‘The Art of War’, rendered in silver marker and acrylic paint on canvas, echoes the original text’s vertical alignment of bamboo-strip scripts. Each vertical word stack is self-contained and can operate at any point in the overall grouping.

The work was first exhibited at the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair in 2010 and then went on to be shown at Hong Kong’s international art fair ARTHK 2010. The work on display at Britomart Project Space is slightly smaller than it was when exhibited in Aisa, Reynolds having presented panels to admirers along the way.

Next the installation may be on its way to Brisbane, and Reynolds is considering adding to it.

“Who knows, it may continue to grow!”
 

‘The Art of War’ by John Reynolds
Britomart Project Space
28 Customs Street East, Britomart

More art at Britomart

An abridged version of this article first appeared in Edition 8 of Britomart's Scenezine magazine. Read the entire issue here.