Born in China and raised in Australia, Jia Jia’s practice examines her dual heritage and the complex history of cultural and economic exchange with ‘Blue and White’ China. Exploring nostalgic desires through a romantic fusion of Eastern and Western aesthetics, she’s interested in how objects become holding places for personal and material histories, and vehicles of metaphysical projection.
Jia Jia received her Masters of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2020 and was the recipient of the Art150 Fellowship. She has collaborated with Speak Percussion, Sophia Brous and Danielle Brustman. Jia Jia was the commissioned artist for Dream Factory at City Gallery in 2021/22. Her artwork, Dream my Monaro, was acquired for the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection.
New Gold Fountain
Water is essential to life. The supply of clean drinking water is fundamental to the successful function of urban environments and for the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. New Gold Fountain celebrates this resource and the public drinking fountain through the embellishment of the utilitarian stainless steel drinking feature with an abstracted re-interpretation of Chinese ‘Blue and White’ porcelain.
An overlay of ceramic glaze stones will be mosaiced onto the industrial readymade, transforming the design object into a functional artwork of aesthetic pleasure. These customised features will be installed across two sites in Chinatown: Tianjin Gardens and the Chinese Museum’s forecourt, reinstating the memorial drinking fountain to reflect a cultural history of site and the legacy of porcelain. The artwork also places value on the human utilisation of clay as an integral medium from vessel to art.
The title New Gold Fountain simultaneously refers to two significant historical narratives of Chinese engagement and trade in local and global contexts.
- Chinese porcelain: the first worldwide luxury consumer product perpetually imitated and re-invented, dubbed as ‘White Gold’ from the European obsession.
- The Victorian gold rush nicknamed ‘New Gold Mountain’: bringing Chinese prospectors in search of fortune, which established Chinatown as an ethnic enclave for the community.