Down the Rabbit Hole

Overview

Now with twice as many allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, it might be assumed that those running Sydney's White Rabbit– the huge and exquisite private art gallery reposing in a quiet-for-the-moment Chippendale nook—have a thing for Carroll’s fable. But nay, while White Rabbit is very likely to make one feel very small amid it’s four tall levels of ample art space, its library, teahouse, and theatrette, the gallery’s name actually comes from the idea that a good artwork can ‘leap out.’ And cause, as director Judith Neilson says, ‘serendipity and surprise’. After all, White Rabbit’s not about proto-trippy literature, but about showing striking contemporary art from the East, having been commissioned by the Nielson’s foundation in 2008 to bring to Sydney the best Chinese art produced this side of the millennial turn.

With Down The Rabbit Hole, we are cajoled to take a light-trip to China via Taiwan, and then back again. Artist pair LuxuryLogico (not a high-end corporation of logicians, but a set of twin Taiwanese futurists) bear a penchant for repurposing old technologies to create high tech sculptural forms. For this exhibition they’ve put together Solar, which, comprising a couple hundred recycled lamps individually wired and programmed, turns on to create a spate of meaningfully coded, hallucinatory light patterns. The light show continues with Wu Chi-Tsung’s Wire, a sculptural sleight-of-hand made up of mesh wire fabric and a commonplace light projector. The ultimate effect of which is to bring about a shanshui type landscape that moves, breathes and flexes on the wall.

At the more material end of the exhibition, Ashley’s Heart by photographer and multimedia artist Wu Daxin is a giant, cool (read: refrigerated) sculpture of that most vital of human organs, the heart. Daxin’s art practice revolves around a fascination with his own ability, living in China, to make large-scale art objects for a comparably miniature cost (and to make a living from them too). Elsewhere, Wu Jian’an’s landscapes offer a different kind of trance. Here, Jian'an's seemingly thick, swarming and jungle-like landscapes reveal themselves at a close distance as the painstaking layering of many finely-cut, multi-coloured paper cutouts. Lastly, in a huge piece, Michael Lin's Untitled Gathering (pictured) brings together 320 flat-top, wooden stools. Originally ungathered, they create a jigsaw-like patchwork upon which appears a super-scaled swatch from an ancient Chinese floral textile design.

Down The Rabbit Hole is open from Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm.