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WORK TITLE: The Phoenix Years
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://madeleineodea.com/
CITY: Sydney
STATE:
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, ACT, Australia; Australian Financial Review newspaper, correspondent, 1986; ABC Television, producer, 1990; China Radio International, presenter and editor, 2004; ARTINFO China, founding editor-in-chief, 2010; Art + Auction, Asia correspondent; Modern Painters, Asia correspondent; Cité Internationale des Arts, Keesing Studio, Paris, writer in residence, 2019.
AWARDS:Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize, 2017, for The Phoenix Years.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the Guardian, Art Newspaper, Bazaar Art, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Leap, Limelight, Orientations, and the Australian.
SIDELIGHTS
Australian journalist Madeleine O’Dea has worked in Beijing, China since the 1980s writing about art, culture, China, and Asian history. She has been the Asia correspondent for various publications, including Australian Financial Review newspaper, and Art + Auction and Modern Painters magazines. She has also worked in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in the Australian capital in Canberra, and was a presenter and editor with China Radio International. At ABC Television, she covered national and international politics and culture.
In 2017, O’Dea published her memoir, The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China that also explores the history of post-Cultural Revolution China and considers the transformation of modern China through its artists. Based on her research, observation, and career over the past thirty years, O’Dea delves into China’s rise to become a global economic giant over the past forty years, as well as the country’s emerging artistic avant-garde and the people’s struggle for freedom of creativity and expression, which has often caused tension with the oppressive government.
O’Dea highlights nine contemporary Chinese artists during the era of the great experiment in opening up and reform in 1986. As these artists tried to resist communism, O’Dea relates their artistic endeavors with China’s history, politics, and economics. She explained to Jonathan Chatwin on the Asian Review of Books Website: “I wanted to tell a story—a post-Cultural Revolution story—and for people at the end of it to know more about what had happened in China over the last forty years. But I also wanted them to feel something about that story, to care, and to understand that these are people like us; people we can relate to.”
Praising the book for being “a well-grounded survey of the incredible courage of Chinese artists,” a writer in Kirkus Reviews call the book “An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a helpful timeline, and extensive notes.” According to Maggie Taft in Booklist, “She makes geopolitical history accessible and engaging through the lives and experiences of such individual artists” as Huang Rui, Guo Jian, Jia Aili, and Mang Ke. “The Phoenix Years is required reading for all those who seek to understand how China has stumbled repressively through the past 40 years and how its finest citizens have persisted in trying to imagine a better, freer China,” declared Paul Monk online at The Australian. Reviewer Fiona Capp on the Sydney Morning Herald Online called the book a “moving, intimate mix of history, memoir and reportage.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2017, Maggie Taft, review of The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China, p. 12.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Phoenix Years.
ONLINE
Asian Review of Books, http://asianreviewofbooks.com/ (December 13, 2017), Jonathan Chatwin, review of The Phoenix Years.
Australian, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ (October 15, 2016), Paul Monk, review of The Phoenix Years.
Madeleine O’Dea Website, http://madeleineodea.com/ (May 1, 2018), author profile.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, https://www.smh.com.au/ (September 15, 2016 ), review of The Phoenix Years.
Madeleine O'Dea is a writer and journalist who has been covering the political, economic and cultural life of China for the past three decades. She first went to Beijing in 1986 as the correspondent for the Australian Financial Review newspaper, and covered China through the 1990s as a producer with ABC Television. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Artinfo China and the Asia correspondent for Art + Auction and Modern Painters magazines. She has written for a range of other publications including the Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Bazaar Art, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and The Australian.
MADELEINE O'DEA
Madeleine O'Dea
Photo by Nick Brightman
AUSTRALIA
Writer and journalist Madeleine O'Dea has been covering the political, economic, and cultural life of China for the past three decades as a foreign correspondent and art writer and editor. Her book, The Phoenix Years, looks at the transformation of modern China through its artists.
Supported by NZ Contemporary Art Trust.
madeleineodea.com
Madeleine O'Dea is a writer and journalist who has been covering the political, economic, and cultural life of China for the past three decades. She worked for five years with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra before entering journalism as the Beijing correspondent for The Australian Financial Review in the late 1980s. She covered China throughout the 1990s as a producer with ABC Television. In 2004 she moved to Beijing and took up a position as a presenter and editor with China Radio International and later served as the arts editor for the magazine, the Beijinger. In 2010 she became the founding editor-in-chief of ARTINFO China and the Asia correspondent for Art+Auction and Modern Painters magazines. She now lives in Sydney.
Madeleine O’Dea is a writer and public speaker with a 30-year background in journalism. Her memoir/history of post-Cultural Revolution China, The Phoenix Years, was published by Allen & Unwin, (Sydney, 2016) and by Pegasus Books (New York, 2017)
The Phoenix Years won the Alex Buzo Shortlist Prize at the 2017 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, which honours excellence in literary research, and was long-listed for the 2017 Walkley Book Award. It was also chosen by the Grattan Institute for their 2016 Summer Reading List for the Prime Minister. To learn more about The Phoenix Years please listen in to Madeleine on ABC’s Conversations with Richard Fidler.
Madeleine is currently working on her second book and has been chosen by the Australia Council to be writer in residence at the Keesing Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from February to August 2019.
Madeleine worked for five years with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra before entering journalism as the Beijing correspondent for The Australian Financial Review in 1986.
She subsequently covered national and international politics and culture throughout the 1990s as a producer with ABC Television, while continuing to regularly cover developments in China for ABC current affairs programs including Foreign Correspondent and 4 Corners. She then spent the early 2000s freelancing out of Europe with a focus on international arts. In 2004 she moved back to Beijing to take up a position as a presenter and editor with China Radio International and later served as the arts editor for the magazine, the Beijinger.
In 2010 she became the founding editor-in-chief of ARTINFO China and Asia correspondent for ARTINFO.com, and Art+Auction and Modern Painters magazines.
Madeleine has also written extensively on international arts and culture, as well as on Chinese politics, society, and culture, for a range of other publications including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Guardian, the Toronto Globe and Mail, The Art Newspaper, and Leap, Limelight, and Orientations, magazines.
Now an independent writer, Madeleine lives in Sydney.
Madeleine can be contacted via this website or c/o her agent Margaret Gee: margaret@margaretgee.com
The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China
Maggie Taft
Booklist. 114.3 (Oct. 1, 2017): p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China. By Madeleine O'Dea. Oct. 2017.368p. illus. Pegasus, $27.95 (9781681775272). 709.510.
Contemporary Chinese artists, most of them painters, are at the heart of journalist O'Dea's narrative, though her book is less a history of modern art than it is a history of modern China. She makes geopolitical history accessible and engaging through the lives and experiences of such individual artists as Huang Rui, a founding member of Stars, the radical arts collective that ushered in Chinese contemporary art, and Guo Jian, whose paintings are inspired by his work as a propaganda poster artist. Through Jia Aili, an artist best known for his monumental paintings of decrepit machinery in ghostly landscapes, we learn about the Mao-era factory towns in the northeast that went into decline once China opened up trade with the West and moved production to newly built factories in the south. O'Dea writes for readers new to art, offering straightforward descriptions of individual works, and new to Chinese history, explaining the nuts and bolts of crucial policies and protests. By focusing on how individuals experienced communism and resisted it, O'Dea succeeds in making history human.--Maggie Taft
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taft, Maggie. "The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2017, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510653686/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=630591e5. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510653686
O'Dea, Madeleine: THE PHOENIX YEARS
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
O'Dea, Madeleine THE PHOENIX YEARS Pegasus (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-68177-527-2
A well-grounded survey of the incredible courage of Chinese artists since the first flowering of the late 1970s and subsequent crackdowns.O'Dea, an Australian journalist who has traveled to and lived in China during the past three decades and founded ArtInfo China, first befriended Chinese artists in the late 1980s and followed their tumultuous trajectory during the years since. Here, she chronicles the lives of nine people, moving from China's "great experiment in 'opening up and reform' " in 1986, when the rehabilitated leader Deng Xiaoping, courted by the U.S. since meeting Jimmy Carter in 1979, first embarked on liberalizing reforms and artists embraced the whiff of freedom, through the tragedy of the crackdown after the Tiananmen Square revolution of 1989 and to the present embrace of forgetting and economic pragmatism. Before there was 1989, O'Dea reminds us, there was 1976, when an earlier drive for democratic action erupted in Tiananmen Square after the death of Mao Zedong, the earthquake of Tangshan, and the public mourning of the death of Premier Zhou Enlai. Many of the artists who exploded in personal expression in 1976 had been teenage Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution who were inculcated in stamping out "bourgeois liberalism" and terrorizing their teachers. Artists like Huang Rui and Mang Ke, as well as the artists calling themselves the "Stars," created a newsletter that was eventually shut down by Deng's regime. The author also looks at the effects of the Sino-Vietnamese War--not often discussed in China--and the "very heaven" conditions that fostered artistic freedom in the 1980s, as people began to pull themselves out of poverty. Like the death of Zhou in 1976, the death of reformer Hu Yaobang in April 1989 sparked widespread demonstrations, and the political consequences were dire, creating essentially another generation of forgetting. An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a helpful timeline, and extensive notes.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"O'Dea, Madeleine: THE PHOENIX YEARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192027/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8dee0664. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192027
“The Phoenix Years: Art, resistance and the making of modern China” by Madeleine O’Dea
Madeleine O’Dea Madeleine O’Dea
A few years ago, President Xi Jinping gave a speech which offered his views on the role art should play in Chinese life. Questioning the pursuit of artistic goals which did not seem purely focused on inspiring the nation, he went on to assert that something seemed rotten in the world of contemporary artists:
Some don’t tell right from wrong, don’t distinguish between good and evil, present ugliness as beauty, exaggerate society’s dark side. Some are salacious, indulge in kitsch, are of low taste and have gradually turned their work into cash cows, or into ecstasy pills for sensual stimulation. Some invent things and write without basis. Their work is shoddy and strained; they have created cultural garbage.
Art has long been bothersome for the Chinese Communist Party. Over the course of the long years of the Cultural Revolution, reform of art and literature was seen as a necessity in bringing about a New China; Mao’s wife Jiang Qing was charged with overseeing this revolution, and doggedly set out to blunt the cutting edge of culture. As the Chinese suffered through moralistic new operas designed to reform their thought, she sat in her Beijing villa watching American movies and reading Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
The inevitable confrontation between the spirit embodied by art—of freedom, creativity and the possibility of exploring diverse and contradictory ideas—and the autocratic tendencies of the CCP spilled onto the streets of Beijing and China’s other cities in the early summer of 1989. As Madeleine O’Dea notes in her new book The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance and the Making of Modern China, there was an inevitability to the clashes of 1989:
The events … were long in the making. …. When [former Party Secretary] Hu Yaobang died it was like the crack from a starter’s gun, signalling that an event long anticipated could at last begin.
The events of that summer had been foreshadowed by protests in the latter years of the 1970s, specifically those which erupted after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976 and the later 1978 “Democracy Wall” movement. In both cases, art and literature had provided a forum for the sometimes allegorical, and sometimes very direct, expression of grievances.
The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China, Madeleine O'Dea (Pegasus Books, October 2017; Allen & Unwin, September 2016)
The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China, Madeleine O’Dea (Pegasus Books, October 2017; Allen & Unwin, September 2016)
For O’Dea in The Phoenix Years, as for China, 1989 was the threshold year—one which marked the crossing of an invisible line, both personal and creative, for many of the artists who form the subject of the book. The Phoenix Years is partly a memoir by a journalist whose experience of the country extends back to the 1980s; part historical account; and part biographical survey of the lives of China’s leading contemporary artists, many of whom made their name producing work rooted in the politics of the late 1970s and 1980s.
When I spoke to Madeleine O’Dea, I asked her how she had alighted on this polymorphous concept. “It took me a long time to admit that was what I was planning to do,” she tells me from her home in Australia.
I wanted to tell a story—a post-Cultural Revolution story—and for people at the end of it to know more about what had happened in China over the last forty years. But I also wanted them to feel something about that story, to care, and to understand that these are people like us; people we can relate to.’
Having spent much of the last thirty years watching the Chinese art world—and the last seven actively reporting on it—it became gradually obvious that China’s contemporary artists might provide a vehicle to carry the broader story of China’s recent changes and challenges.
“I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that in the ten years between 1979 and 1989 the history of China and its contemporary art were so deeply intertwined,” she observes.
And the artists and their work also tell us something vital about this period; namely that the forces for change were coming just as much from below as from above—and the people who really express that in a way that is visible and can be shown to people in the West are the artists.
Those artists include Sheng Qi, who chopped off his finger in a moment of despair in the aftermath of June 4th; Guo Jian, famous for his propaganda-inspired paintings, and whose diorama of Tiananmen Square covered in minced meat got him arrested by the Beijing police in 2014; and Huang Rui, one of the founders of the avant garde “Stars” group, which also included Wang Keping and Ma Desheng. Huang had also been an editor of underground literary journal Today, which played a crucial role in articulating the ideals of the Democracy Wall protests. The lives and work of these artists are inextricably bound up with the politics of this period, and they continue to wrestle with their own personal involvement, and the ultimate futility of their radicalism, in their work today. Their work sometimes monomaniacally confronts the reality that, as O’Dea puts it,
a long-cherished vision of the future collapsed, to be replaced by the great compromise offered by the Government: Leave the governing (and the writing of history) to us, and we will make you rich.
Though the narrative of these intensely political years forms the dramatic centre of the book, the social and cultural shifts of more recent times also come under scrutiny both by O’Dea and the artists she follows. As she observes, however, artwork which in other countries would be considered as relatively gentle social commentary takes, in China, a different tenor. The new generations of Chinese artists are
very concerned about development; concerned about the environment; concerned about issues of sexuality—so the issues now are more social, but because this is China, they become political as well.
Many of them are unable to show their work in China, despite its often indirect nature, so increasingly hope to exhibit abroad, and ensure that their pieces make it onto the internet so that they can be seen at home. “In the end,” O’Dea comments, “China is the audience they care about.”
O’Dea is skeptical about the direction of travel evident in contemporary China, in particular the increasing restrictions on personal freedom that have marked the Xi era. “People are finding the situation there increasingly challenging, and nobody knows how far it will all go,” she comments.
A lot of the initiatives just seem so random—I mean, why ban The Big Bang Theory? It’s difficult to know from one day to the next what will be acceptable and what won’t be.
As she observes in the book’s conclusion, if one sees China’s recent history as a series of peaks and troughs,
there is no doubt now that we are seeing a trough, one of the deepest of the last four decades.
However, she professes positivity about the sheer level of energy and creativity in the country—“it’s just remarkable”—and despite the authoritarian nature of the state, the didactic rhetoric emerging from the president, and the sense that the insurrectionary spirit of 1989 has been exhausted by the pursuit of materialist goals—O’Dea remains an optimist about China’s future: “You’ve got to be,” she says, laughing. “Haven’t you?”
Dr Jonathan Chatwin is a British writer who has lived in, and written on, China. He is the author of Anywhere Out of the World: The Work of Bruce Chatwin.
The Phoenix Years review: Madeleine O'Dea's exploration of change in China
By Fiona Capp15 September 2016 — 4:39pm
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IN SHORT NON-FICTION
PICK OF THE WEEK
The Phoenix Years by Madeleine O'Dea.
The Phoenix Years by Madeleine O'Dea.
Photo: Supplied
The Phoenix Years
MADELEINE O'DEA
ALLEN & UNWIN, $34.99
In 1978, a Chinese artist who had spent his teenage years being "re-educated" in the countryside, asked a young woman to strip naked to the waist so that he might capture the upheaval happening around him through his own version of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. It was the first of many risky, defiant acts that Huang Rui, like many other artists of his generation, took part in as China began to open up to the rest of the world. In this moving, intimate mix of history, memoir and reportage, Madeleine O'Dea explores the radical transformations that have taken place in China in the past four decades through the eyes of nine artists. "People haven't become happier just because they have become richer," reflects Jia Aili. "Every Chinese person has a secret path to take them back into the past. If they didn't, the speed of change would be unbearable."
The Phoenix Years: Madeleine O’Dea praises China’s free spirits
An empty chair holds dissident Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 Nobel Peace prize.
An empty chair holds dissident Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 Nobel Peace prize.
PAUL MONKThe Australian12:00AM October 15, 2016
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In the past half-dozen years, at least three journalists of Australian origin or based in Australia have written first-class books about contemporary China. The first was Richard McGregor in 2010. The second was this newspaper’s Rowan Callick in 2013. The third is Madeleine O’Dea with The Phoenix Years. O’Dea’s is easily as good as the other two and trumps (if one can now comfortably use that verb) all mealy-mouthed apologetics for the repressive China of Xi Jinping.
McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers was a brilliantly incisive expose of the huge Communist mafia that holds the world’s largest country under its thumb. It illuminated the structure and practices of the Communist Party in the era before the ascension of the overweening premier princeling Xi, under whom many chickens are coming home to roost.
Callick’s Party Time: Who Runs China and How updated McGregor’s work and provided readers with a wonderfully judicious portrait of a nation teetering between maturing as a modern state and stumbling into an era of renewed tyranny and possibly confounding conflicts.
O’Dea, who spent more time in China than either of the others has done, gives us a beautifully crafted and immensely readable book that moves back and forth between the narrative of historical events and the personal stories and artistic endeavours of some of contemporary China’s most imaginative and free-spirited citizens.
The Phoenix Years by Madeleine O’Dea
The Phoenix Years by Madeleine O’Dea
The Phoenix Years is required reading for all those who seek to understand how China has stumbled repressively through the past 40 years and how its finest citizens have persisted in trying to imagine a better, freer China. In interweaving the macro-economic and political with the personal and artistic, O’Dea does not put a foot wrong.
The book is well-paced, vividly written, based on deeply enriching personal encounters and observations and grounded in completely sound scholarship. Those who keep repeating the weary and fallacious mantra that Chinese culture is incompatible with democratic norms and that the Communist Party, instead of being criticised for human rights abuses, should be held in awe for ‘‘lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty’’ in record time, need to have this book thrust under their noses.
O’Dea worked for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet before moving into journalism. She was Beijing correspondent for The Australian Financial Review in 1986 and later worked for ABC television. As she tells us early in the book she ‘‘was there for the ‘big story’, in the 1980s, of how the opening up of China was revolutionising its economy’’. She was there again and again in the 1990s and the 2000s.
Reading her book, I confess I more than once found myself reflecting that I should have become a journalist in China instead of an intelligence analyst charged with thinking about it. She was able to travel far more widely doing her work than I was ever permitted to do in the course of mine. Such are the bizarre constraints of the secret intelligence world.
It is immensely refreshing to read O’Dea’s well-informed and forthright defences of Wei Jingsheng and Liu Xiaobo, whose lengthy incarcerations by the Communist Party for their principled, articulate and peaceful democratic dissent constitute a damning indictment of the Chinese regime. She tells their stories and quotes their words in context. That is good to see. Their warnings, about dictatorship coming back if the party refused to open the path to political reform and liberal democracy are being borne out under the neo-Maoist Xi.
As O’Dea observes:
The intense crackdown on China’s civil society, which began with the ascension of President Xi Jinping in late 2012, is now in its fourth year and shows no sign of slackening. Instead, an ever widening circle of people is being caught up in a campaign to silence alternative voices. In July 2015 a major police operation targeting China’s rights lawyers was launched across the nation. More than 300 people were picked up for questioning and 19 were charged after months in secret detention. The severity of the charges shocked even seasoned observers of China’s human rights record.
She points out that the state conducts surveillance, censorship, repression and the strangling of critical debate to an extent that is both extraordinary by Western standards and profoundly counterproductive from the point of view of China’s wellbeing and further development.
The soul of the book, however, breathes in her account of the lives and artistic endeavours of a range of people whose names are almost certainly unknown to more than a small circle of Australians who have paid attention to Chinese cultural affairs, even in the diaspora, over the past generation: Huang Rui, Zhang Xiaogang, Gonkar Gyatso, Aniwar Mamat, Guo Jian, Sheng Qi, Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Cao Fei, Jia Aili and Pei Li, all born between 1952 and 1985.
The link between the two themes or strands of the book is formed early on, where O’Dea writes that ‘‘when China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, was writing about what influenced him most deeply in his formative years, he cited the poetry of Bei Dao and Mang Ke and the art of Huang Rui’’.
As I read this book, I found myself highlighting numerous passages indicative of the soundness of the author’s knowledge, the maturity of her prose and the poignancy of the stories she tells. There are many passages I would have liked to quote.
But above all, I found myself thinking that O’Dea has done us all a great service by bringing together the disparate stories of her artists and showing how their creativity has been a constant struggle against regime repression.
That is the direct testimony of these free spirits, for whom the death of Mao in 1976 was a liberation, the 1978 Democracy Wall a springtime of freedom of expression, the open-minded general secretary Hu Yaobang a hero and the brutal crushing of the popular democracy movement in June 1989 a defining moment. Their vision for China’s future should be ours.
Paul Monk is the former head of China analysis in the Defence Intelligence Organisation and author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance and the Making of Modern China
By Madeleine O’Dea
Allen & Unwin, 360pp, $34.99