The work of more than 65 Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists, sculptors and video artists was shown at this year’s Korea International Art Fair (KIAF). To celebrate the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two nations, Australia was in focus as the guest country at KIAF, which has become one of the most prominent art events in Asia in less than a decade.

“Korea has a growing art market and a very healthy art culture of its own, but it’s also very receptive to international trends which makes it an exciting proposition for Australian artists and galleries,” says Janan Greer, chief executive of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association (ACGA).

2011 was a rare opportunity for Australia to “demonstrate the strength of Australian contemporary art, strengthen cultural relations and develop exchange programmes, with the generous assistance of the Federal Government,” according to Randi Linnegar, president of ACGA.

Some 200 galleries – along with many artists and collectors – from around the world attended the event which took place in late September in Seoul. Among them were 17 Australian galleries, including the prestigious Niagara Galleries, ARC ONE and Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne. It’s the third year that Australian galleries have been represented and a mix of young and emerging visual artists have had their works on show. Among them were some of Australia’s most established and highly collectable artists, including Ben Quilty, who recently won Australia’s most prestigious award for portraiture, The Archibald Prize.

Cross-cultural exchange of ideas is a major fringe benefit of the fair. Some Korean artists expressed keen interest in the different approach to contemporary art in Australia. “Korean artists are very focused on academic excellence and going to university is quite an accolade for a Korean artist,” notes Greer. “By contrast, Australian artists aren’t necessarily professionally trained, but Koreans are very interested in the spontaneity and lack of structure they see in Australian artists’ work.”

SALLY GABORI: Catalyst for Creativity

Sally Gabori found her calling late in life. The Kaiadilt woman, from one of Australia’s most remote communities in north-west Queensland, first took up a paintbrush in 2005, aged 80, after wandering into the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre. Her love of paint and expressive use of colour provided her with a way to tell the story of her ancestors and the land that she had lost.

Gabori comes from one of the Indigenous coastal tribes that inhabited the South Wellesley Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria up until the 1940s. A forced mass transportation to Mornington Island led to the break-up of families and the culture. Today Gabori is one of the few elders who still speaks the Kaiadilt language.

Beverly Knight, Director of Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne, which represents the artist, says: “Colour and canvas became the catalyst for the creation of an entirely unique visual language; a way for Sally to explore life, landscape and memory.”

The combination of abstraction and ancient motifs in Gabori’s work has made her one of the most collectable of Australia’s Indigenous artists. As well as appearing in major galleries throughout Australia, her paintings have attracted international attention with exhibitions held in the UK, US, Singapore, South Korea and the Middle East.

TRACY LUFF: Bringing Cardboard to Life

Who would have thought that recycled cardboard could be so beautiful? Tracy Luff’s sculptures transform this utilitarian material into sensual, organic forms. Composed of hundreds of cardboard discs threaded onto wire, Luff overlaps each piece a few millimetres to create textured form.

Luff’s path into art began when she came to Australia from Malaysia 25 years ago. Wanting to paint, she enrolled in a TAFE course but found she was drawn towards sculpture. Cardboard was cheap and easy to find and she says she was influenced by her childhood growing up in a poor family where everything was recycled.

The sculptures are shaped like columns, some delicately tapered from a bulbous base or swelling in the middle like a cigar. Grouping them under names such as “Cocoon family” or “Seed family”, Luff suggests growth and gestation, birth and new beginnings. “So many people think cardboard is dead, but it is alive; you can see the way it moves,” she said at the launch of her exhibition Slowly, Quietly, Surely, at the NG Art Gallery in Chippendale, Sydney. The title is a reference to the patience required to assemble these sculptures.

Luff says her art process is similar to the factory work she used to do as a teenager during the school holidays. “Once you get good at it, your head can be somewhere else,” she says.

BEN QUILTY: Machismo to Go

Ben Quilty’s work has been variously described as anti-establishment and disturbing. This year he won the Archibald, Australia’s most prestigious portraiture prize, for a relatively sombre portrait of art patron Margaret Olley. It was a crowning achievement for Quilty, a startlingly original painter whose art poses a challenge to Australians’ image of themselves.

Since his breakthrough exhibition of a series of paintings of his white Holden Torana, Quilty has been exploring notions of masculinity and rites of passage. For the Korea International Art Fair he exhibited works from
The Evo Project. “This project began after I made a painting of my very old friend called Evo. The work then explores the evolution of men that I have known. It’s also a pun on Evo’s name.” Quilty says that although he has been a willing participant in the zealously macho adult world that he depicts, this exhibition is “a critique of that deformed masculinity rather than a celebration of it”.

As well as the paintings of big men, The Evo Project includes the first works ever seen of Quilty’s wife. “They are small, intimate and confronting paintings reflecting the state of mind of the female most involved in my life,” he says. “She will be a quiet observer to the madness of the big, fat oil-painted men around her.”

His style has an unmistakable passion and physicality – a Quilty canvas looks like it has been assaulted with paint, so thickly layered is the pigment and so muscular the brushstrokes. In fact he’s been credited with almost single-handedly reviving the art of contemporary Australian painting.

Quilty’s work is widely represented in major galleries throughout Australia. He has had successful solo shows around the country and undertaken residencies in Barcelona, and in Paris as the winner of the Brett Whiteley scholarship.