Tag: China
White Rabbit: I Am the People
Saturday, August 12th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In China, art is constantly flirting with politics. It’s a game of approach-and-retreat everywhere in evidence in the new White Rabbit exhibition, I Am the People, which features 27 artists or groups of artists. It’s one of curator, David Williams’s most ambitious, most overtly political shows – perhaps not as attractive or spectacular as some […]
Academy Awards 2021
Friday, April 30th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s a sign of how radically the world is changing that China has remained silent about Chloé Zhao winning Oscars for Best Film and Best Director for Nomadland. One might expect that a movie about a class of poor Americans living in mobile homes would be highly congenial to a regime that wants to portray […]
William Yang: Seeing & Being Seen
Monday, April 5th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,William Yang is a Sydney institution but a Queenslander born and bred. Last week he was reclaimed by his state of origin for a retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery that allows us to read one artist’s career as a tale of social evolution. Even allowing for the wrong turnings of the present day, over […]
White Rabbit: And Now
Thursday, June 18th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,As art in Sydney creeps back into the light, White Rabbit Gallery is embarking on its second decade. Over its first ten years, Judith Neilson’s private museum of contemporary Chinese art has charted the social, political and cultural changes in a turbulent country. The collection now includes more than 3,000 works by 700 artists, all […]
Guan Wei
Friday, November 8th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,This is Guan Wei month in Sydney, with the Museum of Contemporary Art displaying its holdings of this popular Chinese-Australian artist; the University of Western Sydney hosting an exhibition at its Parramatta South Campus, and Martin Browne Contemporary showing new work. Not many artists can say they’ve had three exhibitions running sumultaneously in the same […]
Terracotta Warriors & Cai Guo-Qiang
Thursday, June 27th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It’s an unspoken convention that museums display modern art in brightly-lit white boxes while ancient artefacts are picked out by spotlights in darkened rooms. It may be symbolic that the art of our time is to be viewed with maximum clarity, nothing concealed, while the shadows and gloom of historical displays reflect the partial state […]
Overshadowing the Empire
Thursday, June 27th, 2019 Blog,Cai Guo-Qiang gives the impression of being a truly happy man. Tall and lean, he has the crew cut favoured by the marines, but unlike those artists who need to appear terribly earnest, he is quick with a smile and a laugh. Why wouldn’t he be happy? Cai was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, a […]
White Rabbit: Hot Blood
Thursday, June 13th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,When the Chinese Defence Minister recently told us the government had been “correct” in its response to the Tiananmen Square protests he said a lot about China today. For the past three decades the Party has kept silent about Tiananmen and obliged its citizens to follow suit. To suddenly come out and portray the massacre […]
Old Masters in Shenzhen
Thursday, May 2nd, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Thirty years ago Australia began to export Aboriginal art to major venues in the United States and Europe. Unlike earlier international forays, Dreamings (1988) and Aratjara (1993) were framed as art exhibitions, not as collections of ethnographic artefacts. Nowadays, with China unassailable as our largest trading partner, the National Museum of Australia is repeating the exercise with […]
Newsletter 282
Monday, April 15th, 2019 Art Essays, Newsletter,This week began in Canberra where I went to see The Historical Expression of Chinese Art at the National Museum of Australia. A deadly title (and not in the indigenous sense), but a pretty good show, it’s also the subject of this week’s art column. The title was a reminder of the way China is […]