The Crippled Tree #1, Autumn 2010

oil on Belgian linen

274 x 183 cm

SAFETY ZONE
Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne, 15 April – 22 May 2010
University of Queensland Art Museum Brisbane, 10 June – 7 August 2011

"Safety Zone presents a series of intricate paintings that resemble historical reminiscences of human survival by linking experimental contemporary art with investigative visual reports, in historical photographs and documents.

This body of work draws attention to incidents across the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu, China, just moments before the onset of the Nanjing Massacre, which followed the capture of the city by Japanese Imperial Forces on 13 December 1937. In the six weeks following the invasion, a quarter of a million Chinese citizens were killed in what the American historian Iris Chang described as the ‘forgotten holocaust of World War II’.

The carefully assembled bank of 60 chalk drawings and digital prints that make up the centrepiece of Safety Zone provides an intricate understanding of the humanity that lies beneath this tragic event through the revelation of extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice."

Dr Thomas J. Berghuis
University of Sydney
2010