ARTISSIMA 2025

Responding to the curatorial theme, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth prompting new ideas for the collective stewardship of the planet, the gallery is presenting works by Brook Andrew (Australia), Rosemary Laing (Australia) and Tseng Chien-Ying (Taiwan). Each of the artists re-examine and reclaim historic worldviews and traditions, to assert the importance of working through the unresolved past in imagining an ethical proposition for the future.

Over the last two decades, Brook Andrew has explored the legacies of colonial history and its hegemonic imperialistic ideologies with a research-focused practice drawing upon archives, vernacular objects, language and image reproduction. Here, he engages with the Australian ethnographic archive and reanimates images used to describe people as fauna, restoring agency to indigenous ancestors.

Rosemary Laing’s singular photographic practice extends to the expanded fields of performance and installation, exploring complex themes of colonialism, land ownership and cultural memory in Australia. Here, we present an assemblage of Laing’s shellwork sculptures, created from repaired, sometimes bandaged, shells collected from coast near her home in Swanhaven, an elegy to those in search of safety.

One of Taiwan’s leading contemporary ink artists, Tseng Chien-Ying uses traditional Chinese ink techniques to render contemporary subjects within an ancient visual language. The everyday takes a mythic turn in his work, to create contemporary fables.