At White Rabbit Gallery, a Shadowy World of Shifting Forms Unfolds in Laozi’s Furnace
Exhibition view: Group Exhibition, Laozi's Furnace, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney (26 June–10 November 2024). Courtesy White Rabbit Gallery. Photo: Jessica Maurer.
In the student and art hub of Chippendale, Sydney, Chinese artists tap into long-held traditions of allegory, reproduction, and storytelling for an alchemic exhibition theme.
Now in its fifteenth year, the non-profit White Rabbit Gallery, established in 2009 by Judith Nielson to showcase her seminal collection of contemporary Chinese art, presents bi-annual exhibitions from holdings of nearly 3,000 works. The latest offering, Laozi's Furnace, features 19 artists who use a wide variety of media—including sound, clay, photographic emulsion, data, porcelain, leather, sandpaper, and paper—to create work that is transformative in process and intent.
The title of the show references both Laozi (Old Master), the mythical sixth-century BCE philosopher and founder of Taoism, and the furnace used in Taoist alchemical experimentation to create elixirs of immortality using elements such as mercury, lead, cinnabar, and gold.
While not a new strategy, the analogy of artist as alchemist is a particularly useful one for Chinese artists, who have a long cultural history of deploying subterfuge and metaphor to produce transformative and allegorical works, while the idea of immortality is one that finds resonance in traditions of storytelling, mythology, and the emulation of work by past masters.
Continuing my habit of starting on the top floor at White Rabbit Gallery—albeit conscious that this might not be the way the exhibition is intended to be experienced—I take the lift to the third floor, where several works play with the exhibition theme through unusual processes that create unexpected outcomes.
Feng Chen's Light Puzzle – Trio (2019) uses data drawn from the movement of people around the exhibition space to conjure a musical score broadcast through a microphone, while a series of three-dimensional, carbon-fibre reproductions of the artist's doodles, He (2019), Odo, Owo, and Oko (all 2023), retain their character as drawings, seeming to have leapt from the page onto the gallery floor.
Two artists use photography's alchemic properties in novel ways. For Jiang Pengyi's series 'Foresight' (2017), Curator David Williams tells me that, 'like an alchemist experimenting in a laboratory', the artist 'places organic matter including tofu, cucumber, fruits, and vegetables onto colour negatives, producing unexpected compositions that look like vibrant abstract paintings.' In his series 'Trace' (2015–16), Jiang has painstakingly lifted the emulsion from Polaroid photographic prints, pinning them in abstract swathes of colour and shape and granting them a life of their own.
In Wang Ningde's Water Ripples #08 (2013), transparent acrylic photographic prints are affixed in vertical rows to the picture plane, while a light source casts shadows of the images onto the surface of the work, creating an imaginary, abstract landscape that resembles islands in a rippling, blue sea.
On the second floor and elsewhere in the exhibition, works of porcelain and clay are used to express ideas around creation and transformation.
The main exhibition area on this level is dominated by Lu Pingyuan's installation Shadow of the Shadow (2021), a crowd of 488 creatures made from black, air-dry clay. As Williams elaborates, 'With this work, Lu attempts to give shape to the mutable quality of shadows through figures ... inspired by the cartoon Barbapapa. He combines this cartoon language of forms with [ideas from] Plato's Allegory of the Cave to comment on themes of reality and illusion.' While the creatures' cartoon heritage give the work a humour, their dark, overwhelming presence injects an air of foreboding, as anthropomorphic forms hint at the dangers of humans 'playing god' when they meddle in the creation or extension of life.
In an adjacent space, Geng Xue's Mr Sea (2013–14) is a suite of ceramic figures and forest forms accompanied by a stop-motion animation that shows the artist's creations in action, illustrating how life is expressed through movement and willpower. The animation also shows the alchemical process by which the pieces are made, starting life as mere lumps of clay before being transformed into highly crafted, fine porcelain works of art. The artist comments in the wall caption, 'When Europeans first saw Chinese porcelain, it seemed so fine, translucent, and superior to anything they could fashion that they concluded it must have been made with magic and called it "white gold".'
On the first floor, several monumental works bring political themes to the fore. He Xiangyu's Tank Project (2011–13) is a life-size—albeit deflated—replica of the World War II-era Soviet T34 tank, here made entirely from Italian leather. Filling the room with its aroma, the work confounds audience expectations; where the viewer might expect to see handbags, they are instead presented with a weapon of war, its deflated condition perhaps a comment on the failure of conflict to solve the problems of the world.
Liu Wei's Big Dog – Death Star (2015–16) continues the artist's penchant for large-scale works made from unexpected materials—in this case, rawhide dog chews. This replica of the legendary space station and weapon from Star Wars (1977–ongoing) is a metaphor of dystopian ruin. As Williams notes, 'Liu compares the voracious hunger of a dog to humanity's insatiable hunger for power. The "Death Star" as a weapon of mass destruction can be compared to the alchemists' discovery of gunpowder, in that both raise ethical questions about the impacts of new technological inventions.'
Two video-based works also express political themes but do so on a more intimate level. He Yunchang is known for his subversive performances, and his Blooming Season: Snow in June (2015–16) is documented here in a video and accompanying photographic series. In the video, medical staff rub the artist's body with sandpaper, while the photographs detail the resulting abrasions as they heal over the course of a year. Referencing the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, his body—rubbed raw, slow to heal—represents the body politic, its scars an ongoing form of remembrance and defiance.
Joss (2013) by Cheng Ran + Item Idem (aka Cyril Duval) shows the silent, slow-motion combustion of paper and papier-mâché objects produced specifically for relatives to offer at ancestors' graves, including representations of fast food, alcohol, designer handbags, and a variety of cultural icons, ranging from Mickey Mouse to a dragon. Each is set alight and destroyed to the peaceful yet solemn soundtrack of Maria Callas singing 'Ave Maria', creating a surprisingly meditative experience as the viewer comes to acknowledge that life and its material comforts are temporary. The video also presents a clever confluence of themes: the well-known Chinese practice of producing 'knock off' designer items butts up against the contemporary Western idea of the artist as the creator of original work.
On the gallery's entrance level, whether viewed first or last, sculptural pieces by Liu Jianhua, Hsu Yunghsu, and Ah Leon impress with their skilful transformation of everyday objects through material. Porcelain becomes organic matter in Liu's Fallen Leaves (2012–14); ceramic resembles the form of oyster shells in Hsu's 2011–27 (2011); and ceramic stoneware is recast as a child's wooden chair and desk in Ah's Memories of Elementary School (2009), offering viewers a thoughtful introduction or conclusion to an exhibition that at its heights evokes the magic, danger, and transgressive nature of the alchemist's art. —[O]