HOT: A Fairy Tale in Red Times, NGV International, Melbourne

A Fairy Tale in Red Times: works from the White Rabbit Collection is a free National Gallery of Victoria exhibition featuring works from Sydney’s famous White Rabbit Gallery. White Rabbit Gallery was started in 2009 by art collector and philanthropist Judith Neilson and it now holds the world’s largest private collection of contemporary Chinese art.

There are twenty-six works from Chinese and Taiwanese artists, some of which have never been exhibited in Australia.

Highlights for us include Zhu Jinshi's large scale immersive installation The Ship of Time (2018). The walk-through cylinder is made from 14,000 sheets of fireproof rice paper, 1800 pieces of fine bamboo and 2000 cotton threads. I find it a rather cocooning and meditative space….

…Shi Yong's A Bunch of Happy Fantasies (2009), an unsettling bright red neon installation. Look a bit closer and you can work out that the characters are of upside down gibberish Chinese characters….

…Lady AB likes the surrealist painting Bathtub (2017) by Zhang Xiaogang. It is part of the artist’s famous Bloodline series, which are inspired by family photos from the Cultural Revolution period and European surrealism…

and Mao Tongqiang's Order (2015), a reflective stainless-steel wall shot repeatedly with bullets.

A Fairy Tale in Red Times: works from the White Rabbit Collection in an immersive and thought-provoking collection of works which explore identity, culture, future reality and imagination. It's worth taking the time to get to Level 3 to explore the galleries – and it's free!

To see more Chinese art at NGV click here for my review of Terracotta Warriors x Cai Guo-Qiang

Click here for my review of Alexander Calder: Workshop for Kids at NGV