Since the late 1970s, writers such as Nourma Abbott-Smith, Murray Bail, Robert Hughes, Pierre Ryckmans, and Joanna Capon have examined Fairweather’s ability to bridge cultures. Many saw the expressive potential of calligraphy as the keystone. In Fairweather and China, Claire Roberts goes further by mapping in detail Fairweather’s relationship with China, with a particular focus on the Chinese written character or hanzi.

The book exploits several insights that Roberts and fellow editor John Thompson came upon during their extensive epistolary research for Fairweather: A life in letters (2019). Most relevant was the extent to which Fairweather’s artistic successes were bound up with his steady interest in Chinese script. It was not a coincidence, Roberts notes, that Fairweather’s most fruitful period of artistic development from the 1940s to the 1960s unfolded alongside a committed translation practice. The artist would describe this work as ‘research’ that helped him to ‘rev up’ for and ‘cool off’ from painting sessions. Translating bracketed his art-making, affecting it thoroughly. Yet until now, the connection between the two remained unclear.

‘China’ entered Fairweather’s life following the artist’s fourth failed attempt to escape internment during World War I, an experience that Roberts recounts in much detail. It was in a POW camp at Crefeld that the artist first happened upon Ernest Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912) and writings by Lafcadio Hearn. In a poetic turn of events, these sinological texts gave the POW a much-needed escape from circumstance. ‘It was the writing that particularly interested me,’ Fairweather later recalled.

Fenollosa and Hearn considered Chinese characters to be ideographic – based predominantly on images rather than sounds – more ancient hieroglyph than English letter. ‘[A]n ideograph is a vivid picture,’ Hearn wrote, ‘it lives; it speaks; it gesticulates. And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such living characters – figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile or grimace like faces.’ Such views are now largely outdated, even if their romantic appeal lingers. To any Chinese or Japanese speaker, written characters are a commonplace and intelligible form of communicating their spoken language. This is where Roberts’s approach as a curator and art historian with a long-standing interest in Chinese art and language comes to the fore. With subtlety, the author celebrates the allure of Chinese writing and the aesthetic impulses it inspires in modern art without exoticising Eastern cultural traditions and forms.

Navigating cross-cultural currents with integrity and intelligence, the author highlights Fairweather’s outsider status vis-à-vis Chinese culture and identity, while exploring what this enabled in his art. Despite living, sketchbook in hand, with local communities as a low-income migrant in Shanghai and Beijing for several years during the 1930s, Fairweather could never speak fluent Mandarin, still less identify directly with Chinese cultural values. As Roberts shows, the artist never sought to. Perhaps this helps explain his antipathy towards chinoiserie, which he seems to consider blithe and disrespectful. It also distinguishes Fairweather from other intrepid modernists of the time, enabling useful contrasts to be drawn with figures like Paul Gauguin and allowing Roberts to place the ‘universalising’ ideals of modernism within their twentieth-century and Western context.

Roberts’s holistic (not to mention engrossing) approach takes the reader on an episodic journey through the artist’s life, opening new ways of appreciating his legacy that better respond to our own times, marked as they are by postcolonial politics and the scrutinising of masculinity, environmental awareness, mass migration, increasing levels of intercultural exchange – and even pandemics. Fairweather was, after all, quite used to living in relative isolation (he spent the last twenty-one years of his life on Bribie Island). Given the epic quality of the artist’s life and art history’s penchant for biographical analysis, this approach serves Roberts well. It enables China to take on the supporting role, exerting both visionary and material influences over Fairweather’s practice from across a difficult-to-navigate cultural divide.

While the book adds much detail to Fairweather’s life and art, the reader might occasionally crave more analysis of Chinese cultural traditions or the modernisms that were unfolding simultaneously across Asia. Passages that enlist the works of Huang Binhong (1865–1955) or Wang Dongling go some way to situate Fairweather’s practice within larger narratives of cultural exchange. But they also call out for more comparative analysis to better illustrate, for example, how certain aspects of calligraphy or shan shui (a Chinese form of landscape painting) inform Fairweather’s evolving style. Likewise, a reader without working knowledge of the Tao Te Ching, Taoism, or Zen Buddhist principles may find themselves seeking additional resources to better understand some of the connections Roberts makes. None of this is to detract from the value of the book – stimulating the reader’s interest is a valuable tool for cross-cultural understanding.

Encapsulating years of research, Fairweather and China is a thoughtful text that allows the reader to gaze at the constellation of circumstances and experiences that animate an impressive artistic journey. In structure and style, the book at times resembles a scrapbook, or perhaps an artist’s sketchpad: chronicling the journey that a researcher has taken so that others can share its joys and delights.

Many of us are currently in lockdown and relative isolation. We see aspects of daily life assume new significance and keep in touch with people at a safe distance, from the comfort of homes we create for ourselves. To read anew about the art and life of the reclusive Fairweather in the current context is both enriching and apposite. Some fifty years after his death, we are coming to understand the artist better than ever before.