Tag: White Rabbit Gallery
White Rabbit: Paradi$e Bitch
Friday, October 23rd, 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Every new show at White Rabbit is supposedly “the best yet”. How could it be otherwise? No art museum, public or private, likes to take a backward step. This time, however, I’m inclined to agree. There’s something very complete and confident about the exhibition, Paradi$e Bitch. In a display of mostly new acquisitions, we get […]
White Rabbit: State of Play
Saturday, June 20th, 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Certain nations are not renowned for their playfulness. Nicht wahr? Yet this is not the case with the Chinese who found out many years ago the only way to make life bearable is to laugh about it. The Chinese sense of humour is robust and dark. It may have been this way from time immemorial, […]
White Rabbit: Commune
Saturday, November 1st, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In the words of the Chinese philosopher, Mencius, “we survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.” This thought may be universally applicable but it is especially relevant to China today, as the horrors of the 20th century recede into the mists. It has been almost 40 years since the end of the Cultural […]
White Rabbit: Reformation & ACAF: Degeneration
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,As the Biennale of Sydney opens, having severed ties with its founding sponsor, Transfield, it’s appropriate that the White Rabbit Gallery has launched a new exhibition called Reformation. From its beginnings, five years ago, the Nielsen family’s private museum of contemporary Chinese Art has presented a striking alternative to the big public art institutions. It’s […]
White Rabbit: 'Serve the People' & Li Jin
Saturday, October 19th, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Serve the People was the theme of a speech given by Mao Zedong in September 1944, while the Red Army was still engaged in combat with the Japanese. One year later the invader was defeated and the Communist forces would be renamed “the People’s Liberation Army”. In the years that followed, the PLA would battle […]
White Rabbit: Smash Palace
Saturday, May 4th, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Every exhibition at White Rabbit, the Neilson family’s private museum of contemporary Chinese art, has featured at least one show-stopper. The tour-de-force in the current show, Smash Palace, is Cheng Dapeng’s Wonderful City (2011-12), a 9.6 metre-long 3D print. On a long, light-box table, Cheng has placed a scale model of a city overrun with […]
White Rabbit – Double Take
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Ever since Deng Xiaoping plunged China into the era of reforms in the late 1970s, with the legendary words: “To get rich is glorious”, the nation’s leaders have spent a great deal of time resolving – or ignoring – contradictions. Karl Marx himself would have had difficulty explaining the paradox of a communist country with […]
Down the Rabbit Hole
Saturday, June 9th, 2012 Art Essays, Chinese Art, International Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,Last year, according to The New York Times, 395 museums were built across China. As with most things in this vast, mysterious country, the statistics give only a superficial glimpse of the complexities involved. Firstly one might question the Chinese definition of “museum”, which may be a grandiose word for a lot of small-scale enterprises. […]
Decade of the Rabbit
Saturday, March 26th, 2011 Australian Art, Chinese Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,As a second Art Month winds towards a conclusion, it’s still not clear that this initiative is winning new audiences for the visual arts. For 2010’s first-ever Art Month the program was even more packed, but the season that followed was a mortifying experience for most of the commercial galleries. It seems that all the […]
White Rabbit: The Big Bang
Saturday, December 4th, 2010 Chinese Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,As a squad of entombed warriors takes up temporary residence at the Art Gallery of NSW this may be an opportune time to look at the state of Chinese art two thousand years down the track. White Rabbit, the Neilson family’s privately funded museum of contemporary Chinese art, is currently holding its third exhibition. Like […]