White Rabbit Gallery

Transcription

Welcome to the White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection exhibition here at the Samstag Museum of Art which is presented in association with the Adelaide Festival Centre's 2011 OzAsia Festival. White Rabbit Collection is a collection made over the last 20 years of contemporary Chinese art. It's from a wide range of artists. It focuses on art from the third wave of Chinese contemporary arts. So, we're starting to see work that addresses a whole lot of new concerns, some that we haven't seen before in western society. For this exhibition at Samstag, we've selected the works by 13 artists which is only a very small selection of works from the entire collection. We very much looked at selecting works that are very different in media and very different in content. It's not often that we get to have a look at works from China and I think when we look at these works, we understand that there is that sense of the exotic about the works, that we understand that they are not works that we are readily familiar with. This work is a particular favourite of mine. It's Shi Jindian's Blue CJ750 It's a work that's made out of stainless steel mesh that's been kind of crocheted to make a perfect representation of an actual object in this case, a motorcycle. The incredible level of detail, almost X-ray, makes it a truly sublime object. That is what makes them so totally special and unique things. We're standing in front of my favourite work in the current exhibition, which is by an artist called Sun Furong. It's one of the more sombre works in the exhibition It's a work that at first comes across as very political when you first see it but when you become aware of her motivations and the feelings behind it, it becomes a very deeply personal work. She went through an undisclosed traumatic past. She found that she couldn't quite bring herself to make anything quite as beautiful and delicate as she had previously been doing. She tried to start making these decorative cuts into fabric but in the process, she started to hack into it and rip it up. At first, she felt like she was cutting herself and she was quite upset, but she found as she went on and on it started to feel like she was cutting someone else and she started to become quite indifferent. She came to a stop when she felt like it was actually becoming a form of torture, and she distanced herself from the process. One of the things that really strikes me about the works in this exhibition, is the sense of imagination and that really stands out, and I think one of the artists that really does play on the ideas of imagination is the artist Cang Xin. He is actually a Shaman, and his father was a Shaman as well and part of the Shaman beliefs is that everything is interconnected the souls of animals, plants and humans are all one and you can see this in the very diverse forms that he has created but one of my favourites is the little baby and growing out of the baby, almost like life's journey, is this large, winding plant and at the top of the plant is a beautiful, flowering lotus plant and I think in many ways, that's almost like a metaphor for life's journey, going from the small baby and then becoming something quite beautiful and magical. We're absolutely delighted to have the White Rabbit exhibition here at Samstag. It's the first time this exhibition has toured. To have the exhibition here for the first time down from Sydney is really very exciting because it is one of the largest and most significant collections of Chinese art in the world.