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Launching this September, Tan Lijie — Selected Works is the second bilingual publication from the ���������¼� Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art (JNCCA) Editions. This richly illustrated volume in English and Chinese invites us into the quietly resonant world of Chinese contemporary artist Tan Lijie. Bringing together two recent exhibitions, Rain on the Platform (Tainan, 2024) and Enchanted Realities (Hobart, 2023), curated by Professor Paul Gladston and Dr. Lynne Howarth-Gladston, the collection offers a poetic encounter with the artist’s enchanting transcultural and transhistorical practice.

Born in 1991, Tan Lijie lives and works in Shenzhen, the fast-evolving border city between mainland China and Hong Kong. Drawing on video, photography, cyanotype, and assemblage, Tan’s work captures the fleeting and the overlooked: rain falling during the morning rush, sunlight soaking into paper, a flower blooming on a border balcony. These ordinary interruptions become portals, suspending time, softening space, and revealing the rhythms where city and nature meet.

Here, Tan’s work slows us down. In Rain on the Platform, images resonant with sun-developed cyanotypes run at 12 frames per second, as a morning downpour stalls the rush hour and the park across the road comes alive differently – an intentionally unhurried response to an accelerated present.

“I like to let the sun be the image-maker and allow chance to guide what appears,” says Tan.

That same attention shapes the works gathered in Hobart: The Story of Bougainvillea traces a path from family photographs to the tangled histories of Shenzhen’s shifting borders, where flowers, people, and memory intertwine.

“Bougainvillea has accompanied my growth as much as the city’s, so I treat memory as a landscape I can walk,” Tan reflects.

What draws Paul Gladston and Lynne Howarth-Gladston to Tan’s work is her ability to bring different traditions into vibrant, living dialogue. Moving seamlessly between different media, Tan uncovers “intersecting resonances”, weaving together thought and feeling that flow between classical Chinese ideas and contemporary global image-making, without turning either into mere background.

In this creative exchange, images and language support and echo each other. Tan’s work is rich with lyrical nods to both Chinese and international literature, recalling the Confucian-literati tradition of turning painting into poetry and poetry back into painting – arts historically made with the same brush and ink, now reimagined through light, time and presence. The result is neither empty pastiche nor straightforward quotation, but a living grammar in which everyday experience can flicker into something heightened, and inherited forms find new uses.

The JNCCA Editions series publishes writing related to the work of the ���������¼� Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art. Each edition in the series presents an existing/previously planned publication or combination of publications in a newly edited and/or expanded format both in hard copy and electronically. Some editions will be produced in collaboration with other publishers; some will include texts that have undergone independent scholarly peer review. Planned publications include catalogues accompanying exhibitions curated or supported by the Chair. All the editions have a dedicated ISBN number and contain English and corresponding Chinese texts. JNCCA editions aims to publish books whose content was not made public due to lack of funding, unforeseen events, or restrictions on freedom of critical expression. Find out more.