Colliding Landscapes: Dunhuang Cave Temples and the Tim Johnson System

Abstract

When is a painted copy no longer a copy? When it deviates so far from the original that the copy achieves its own separate identity as an interpretation. That is the condition proposed by the best-known painting in the oeuvre of the prolific Australian painter Tim Johnson. His Illusory City (1983-5) was based on a source so obscure that few would have grasped they were dealing with a work of citation. In this, it was unlike much 1980s Australian appropriation art, which played upon the possibility that viewers would recognise and relish a series of witty or trenchant visual citations. Instead, in the sincerity of his homage to other cultures - Chinese and Aboriginal - and the completeness of his pictorial transformation of their ways of making images, Johnson's practice smacks as much of the high modern japonaiserie of Vincent van Gogh or the cubist copying of old masters by Juan Gris as it does the homeless postmodern borrowings of David Salle or Imants Tillers.