A state-of-the-art temple to contemporary Chinese art hidden on a Chippendale backstreet, we always look forward to what White Rabbit Gallery has in store for us. And it looks like the gallery is heading into 2024 with a bang, with A Blueprint for Ruins set to explore the fallout of rapid urbanisation across the gallery’s four floors from December through to May.
Summoning apocalyptic images of cities tearing themselves apart to make way for towering skyscrapers and gleaming high-rises, this exhibition reverberates with the shadows of the dispossessed within China’s urban metamorphosis. As the nation’s cities race to embrace modernity in a never-ending dance of renewal, buildings are designed to be demolished even before their completion. The casualties of development are left to drift through the ruins of their ruptured world. Displaced individuals and their stories echo through abandoned spaces, once home to ancestral sites and legacies of long family lineages.
The artworks in A Blueprint for Ruins guide us toward the remnants of memories woven into the very fabric of each structure, even as the walls crumble. As the artist Hu Weiyi poignantly writes: “It’s as if every abandoned building, about to disappear, is attempting to sing its last note, and eventually they will come together to form a requiem for an era.”
As always, a trip to White Rabbit isn’t complete without pots of freshly brewed tea and plates of steaming dumplings under the canopy of empty birdcages in the café downstairs (we just love that combo of existential contemporary art and quaint hospitality).
A Blueprint for Ruins is open from Dec 20, 2023, to May 12, 2024. White Rabbit Gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10am-5pm, and it’s free to visit.
