This is the modern world

A new exhibition celebrates 50 women who bucked tradition by trading parochial Australia for European modernity to create 'subtly subversive' art

- Walter Marsh

When Justine Kong Sing stepped off a steamship into Edwardian London, the Nundle-born daughter of a Chinese merchant could tell she was a long way from Australia: amid the “roar and rush” of the city, no one seemed to notice her.

"In the colonies, where foreigners are treated differently, an Oriental suffers keenly the mortification of being stared at, and often assaulted, because of his color!" she wrote.

But the 43-year-old soon attracted a different kind of attention, studying at the Westminster School of Art and exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Her speciality was water-colour-on-ivory miniature portraits, painting “London Society beauties” and a Chinese minister’s wife.

But one pocket-sized piece, Me, painted in 1912 has Kong Sing herself staring quizzically at the viewer, eyebrow arched and head tilted under a green hat. Kong Sing’s known body of work is tiny in almost every sense, and for the Art Gallery of South Australia (Agsa) curator Elle Freak, she remains an “enigma”.

Freak is a co-curator of Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940, an expansive new exhibition co-presented by Agsa and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). Some of the 50 featured artists are well-known: the Archibald-winning face of Nora Heysen; the gentle cubism of Dorrit Black; Margaret Preston’s still life studies; and the vivid, stippled colours of Grace Cossington Smith.