Dot painting on Cheung Chau - The good, the bad, and the ugly

A Hong Kong perspective on Papunya Tula?

Having moved from Australia to Hong Kong, I am always on the look-out for signs, however tenuous, of the connections between the two places. In part, I suppose this is an attempt to know how and where I fit, in this chaotic and bustling metropolis.

So it was interesting the other day to be wandering one of the back alleys of Cheung Chau, one of the outlying islands, and come across one of the ubiquitous private education businesses in HK, whose sole purpose seems to be about taking advantage of the desire of parents to hot-house their kids. This particular one focused on art, and what caught my eye in the window was a display of (Australian) indigenous dot-painting - or at least some Cantonese young people's take on this. Who knows what they had been told/taught about Aboriginal art practices and history, or how much Australian indigenous art they had seen, thought about, or enjoyed. 

As an early childhood teacher back in Australia, I did some 'teaching' of art, though it is certainly very informal in the preschool years, and much of it is about exploration. I also did a lot of thinking, talking and teaching about Australia's indigenous culture, because it is something that is unique and valuable to Australia, and also to the world, being probably the world's oldest continuous culture. On a side note, there was a nice piece in the BBC news online, about Aboriginal science, and their early interest in astronomy, based on analysis of a site in my home state of Victoria.

So this subject interested me on a number of levels, in part because there has been some controversy in Australia about whether it is respectful to teach 'dot painting' to children, as if this can effectively 'do' Aboriginal culture for the class the whole year. It might be different, perhaps, if children experimented with dot painting in the course of a whole year's learning about all the different forms of Aboriginal art, because dot painting is just one technique of many, mostly associated with an art movement based around Papunya, in the central part of Australia, northwest of Alice Springs. Or indeed if children were given some sense of the meaning, the history and the traditions of dot painting, which would give them some sense of the intricacies of indigenous cultures in Australia. At the root of it all, I suppose, is respect, and whether it is disrespectful, particularly in a country that still has a wide streak of racism when it comes to the treatment of indigenous people, to take one tiny element of a culture, and appropriate it without thought or meaning.

Of course, in Hong Kong, it is entirely different. Without the troubled relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, who can say what meaning it has in this context. Perhaps a traveler from Australia with Indigenous heritage might smile on seeing that same display in Cheung Chau, knowing how far their culture has travelled. Which all reminds me of a beautiful poster put out by ATSIC years ago, which if you can track it down, remains one of the best images ever...