Come with me to the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, a gallery that houses contemporary Chinese art.
It’s becoming a favourite for Lisa and I if we have a day or two in the city and part of it is the disorienting impact of the Oriental. When I go to the major galleries I can spell, remember and pronounce the names of many artists and I can place them in historical and stylistic periods. With Chinese art, I have no idea and it confronts me.
Is China just a trade partner that consumes our coal, beef and, perhaps, data, or is China much more than that?
The current exhibition is called Lumen and many of the works explicitly involve the element of light. Most of the works are not created through the traditions of drawing, painting and sculpting but through artists picking up technological tools: computer graphics, a Van der Graaf generator, pixels and plastics.
In this exhibition, the everyday is reimagined.
Solar, 2010 by LuxuryLogico
Four men from Taiwan form the LuxuryLogico collective and have installed a cluster of lamps that we’d normally use at home.
If this were an Ikea display, I’d be wondering why you can call a lamp Erskog or Lars. I’d want to know how much they cost but instead, I sit in a mini cinema, I pause and, as the lights turn on and off in patterned ways, I marvel at what light can do and the miracle that sits everyday in my loungeroom
Ashley’s Heart, 2011 by Wu Daxin
Wu Daxin had a friend Ashley who needed hospitalisation following a collapse and has created an artwork that looks like the blood vessels of a heart and speaks of fragility and renewal. Wu Daxin uses refrigeration tubing to create art. Through the day, the moisture in the air freezes and a snake-like icicle forms
If I were at home, I would wonder if we need to call a repair person for our fridge but again, I wonder at the strange, cold beauty of ice.
Dust 2, 2008 by Cong Lingqi
Cong Lingqi found common household items, objects from rural Chinese life that have been discarded or forgotten and with string and a spotligh they are turned into a languishing, haunting work.
In a way this seems like rubbish… space dust…
In a way this seems like objects that will last forever and bear witness to civilisation.
The gallery has given me back everyday objects in new ways.
W, 2015–2019 by Feng Chen
Feng Chen (he) installed and filmed a metronome. They sit on opposite walls
They ask me: do I prefer to look at the object or its moving image? For a couple of minutes of the 4-minute video the metal arm of the metronome seems to stand still and the rest of the metronome and the shelf it sits on rotate to and fro like some troubled ship at sea
What really moves when I look at a metronome? The arm or the room? Or me? I’m nudged into thinking about physical and even physical frames of reference
and my confidence about perception and reality is given a humbling moment to pause.
Original 1, by Yang Xin
Yang Xin somehow took metals and paint and has generated beautiful shapes that remind one of gemstones or biological cells. If I encountered something like this on a kitchen bench at home, I would wonder if Lisa has dropped an earring or whether I need to get some antibacterial spray. But Yang Xin invites me to marvel at the beauty that probably sits in the minerals and cells that make up all things and I wonder and give thanks.
Initial Psalm, 2013 by Huang Siying
Using fractal geometry and computer graphics as well as hormone-level statistics from a newborn’s umbilical cord, Huang Siying generates 3D printing and a video clip called Initial Psalm and, while hardly understanding, my heart sings praise to the intricate precision and beauty that supports life itself.
Miniature, 2015 LuxuryLogico
Luxury Logico have created another installation that transforms a darkened room with light. They have teased out a computer or TV screen into three dimensions and each little globe is like a pixel apparently they are using the data from a movie - a film of a person walking through a room was one suggestion, and so the lights come and go and you realise that something is happening that you can never fully perceive and you stop to wonder at all that happens in the overly familiar act of watching a TV show or a YouTube clip on your phone.
A little step into Chinese contemporary art and its embracing of technological ways of art-making generates strangeness and newness. New ways of experiencing the everyday, the real, the tiny, the other, the unexpected, the reframed, re-presented, re-configured artworks and the act of slowly, quietly, thoughtfully encountering the works has a meditative, reflective, humbling effect on me.
I can’t easily remember the names of the artists. I can’t really understand their art-making processes, but I’ve been shown the complexity and beauty of things and the exhibition becomes a rehearsal for me of the practices of renewal and wonder. Practices that can deepen even further by discerning the craftsmanship, the complexity, the scope and the beauty of the Christ who illumines all things and holds all things together.