A woman hunting with her pet dingo is a central motif in the collection of Australian Aboriginal art now on display in an old Taoist temple converted to the Hong Miao Gallery, writes Zhou Tao.

Hong Miao Gallery was a 400-year-old Taoist temple that had been deserted for last 40 years. After its latest incarnation, it has become a temple to contemporary art, and now it's displaying Australian Aboriginal art celebrating the creation epic.

The exhibition is part of the celebration by the Australian Consulate General in Shanghai marking 35 years of diplomatic relations between China and Australia. People-to-people links are far older.

The exhibition features 88 batik paintings on silk fabric, mostly by female artists from the remote Australian desert town of Utopia. The collection is on loan from the Holmes a Court Collection.

These artworks provide a unique expression of ancient Australian indigenous culture, which is juxtaposed with the traditional Chinese wood architecture in the gallery.

"We are delighted to have such a striking collection of Australian Aboriginal art in Shanghai to mark our long history of interaction with China," says Australian Consul General Susan Dietz-Henderson.

"We are celebrating 35 years of formal diplomatic relation in 2007, but in fact our links go back much further. Chinese traders have been visiting northern Australia, where these paintings are from, for more than 250 years," she says. "Chinese people have been migrating to Australia for over 150 years. So this exhibition is a symbol of our close connections."

Workshops on Australian art for schools and art lovers are offered in conjunction with the exhibition.

Australian Aboriginal people use paintings to keep alive and pass on stories from generation to generation. Utopia is an Aboriginal community in Australia's Northern Territory. The silks tell stories from the Dreaming theme, the creation epic.

They are about individual and collective bonds with "country" and the responsibility to maintain the land through ritual, ceremony and respect for traditional law.

The images express Aboriginal people's knowledge of the environment and their use of resources. Many of the images are about hunting and gathering. The motif of a woman hunting with her pet dingo weaves through the collection, both as the grand theme of the ancestral women of the Dreaming and as contemporary women, the artists themselves.

The continuity of Aboriginal culture is strongly felt in this collection.

There is no academy or school behind this art, apart from a 20-year-old community tradition of batik making that has generated formal conventions of its own.

Date: through November 22, 10am-6pm

Address: 496 Nanjing Rd E.

Tel: 021-6351-1310

(Shanghai Daily November 16, 2007)