Heavy Artillery

Overview

White Rabbit Gallery are following up their epic summer exhibition Paradise Bitch with something wildly (and literally) monumental. A metric ton of fake marble, two tons of leather, three tons of compressed paper, five thousand porcelain leaves, 8000 identical books, 130,000 minute photographs and 600,000 painted dots are charging into the Chippendale gallery space this March for Heavy Artillery, a brand new exhibition examining mass and scale in contemporary Chinese art as a means to convey even larger ideas.

Going big and in-your-face is a hugely effective way for artists to tackle the bigger concepts — life and death, technology and nature, change and eternity — and inevitably stop viewers in their tracks. But Chinese contemporary artists take this even further, using historic monumentalism for contemporary experiments. As the White Rabbit team points out, "Gigantic statues of Mao erected in the 1960s still dominate town squares all over China. But for contemporary artists, monumentalism is a way to express new realities and new ideas ... Mixing what they have learned from the West with China’s classical culture and crazy commercial zeitgeist, the former student [artists] are taking contemporary art in bold new directions."

Like most of White Rabbit's exhibitions, the works in the show are all new acquisitions — and they've never been shown in Australia before. See He Xiangyu’s Tank Project (2011-13), a Soviet-Chinese tank replica made from hand-stitched leather, Geng Xue's The Poetry of Michelangelo (2015), a video tribute to Michelangelo using a lump of clay, and Polit-Sheer-Form Office group's Library (2008), a huge, huge archive of blue books. Other artists include Liu Wei, Hsu Yung-Hsu, Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai), Guo Jian, Liu Chang, Liu Jianhua, Song Hongquan, and Taiwanese artists Ah Leon, Lin Yen-wei, Chou Chu-Wang.