“I dreamt that Tank Man survived, that he lived a good and happy life and that he stands in the Chinese mountains watching over us.”

Tank Man (Associated Press, Tiananmen Sq. 1989) overlooks a bleeding landscape (The Meat Land of a Country 山河, Guo Jian 郭健, 2017) captured within a wreath of poppy flowers. This porcelain plate, a souvenir, is an object that marks a time, a place and a set of values. And it is broken.

In 2017 I travelled to Beijing for the first time. I went with the intention of getting lost, of meeting artists and of making real the images of a place that I had lived through the television screen almost 30 years earlier. Guo Jian is a dear friend and we talked at length about this piece. It is his small painting that speaks so powerfully of a wounded place that formed the starting point for the composition.

The title refers to the ‘Century of Humiliation’ (百年国耻) China suffered at the hands of colonial forces and in particular the British Opium Wars. For better or worse, this period founded modern communist China and gave rise to an exodus of Chinese artists.

In 1989, the grainy images of a lone and unidentified man challenging a column of tanks had had a profound impact on the world, although practically unknown in China. They were images of hope at a time when the walls that separated ideologies appeared fragile and they were images that changed me.

The fate of Tank Man remains unknown.

Robert Hague is an artist who brings an impeccable skill set to the contemporary scene. Throughout his work he revels in ambiguity, conveying simultaneously elements of the heavy and light, the fixed and fluid, the brutal and the tender. He works across numerous media including, printmaking, video, painting and installation but with a concentration on sculpture, in both metal and stone.

Robert Hague’s lithographic prints bring together the feel and grandeur of antiquity with an often-biting commentary on the modern world. By embracing classical techniques, he manages to make the bitter into the sweet and shows us that contemporary art can be timeless. His fan series employs the metaphor of the decorative folding-fan, a decorative object that speaks of the politics and culture of the collector, decoration as meaning, pattern as ownership and our desire for a cultural belonging.

From his studio in Melbourne, Hague prints his own work directly from limestone slabs, on a 1940’s Charles Brand lithography press. He has exhibited widely and is represented in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2019 his work was the subject of a retrospective at the Casula Powerhouse (Sydney). Recent exhibitions include ‘Melbourne Now 2023’, NGV Australia, ‘New Prints’ at IPC New York, ‘Common Ground’ at NGV International, ‘The Megalo International Print Prize’ (Canberra), ‘Porcelaine’ at Turner Galleries (Perth), the Blake Prize (awarded the Blake Residency), 'CRUSH' at Fehily Contemporary, the ‘Wynne Prize’ at AGNSW and 'Inaugural' at Nicholas Projects.

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