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Supernatural: Visions of the Future

  • Art, Galleries
  1. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  2. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  3. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  4. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  5. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  6. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  7. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  8. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  9. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  10. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  11. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  12. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
  13. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
    Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan
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Time Out says

White Rabbit’s latest exhibition conjures up earthly and unearthly worlds

The foyer installation at White Rabbit always sets the tone for each exhibition, but the one that greets visitors to Supernatural is a pretty big statement.

Hanging high above the gallery are ten life-like nude figures. They have the body of a man, but from the chest up they’re dragonflies, complete with four wings and bulbous eyes. The sculptures, called ‘Deviation’, are modelled on the artist Li Shan’s own body (apart from the dragonfly bits, obviously), and are designed to “eliminate the human superiority complex”: we don’t have 360-degree vision, can’t fly, and definitely can’t fly backwards. Why do we think we’re superior?

The rest of the exhibition isn’t so much about biological transformation, but more about the way our world has transformed over the thousands of years that humans have dominated. And of course, given the exhibition’s title, there’s a touch of the supernatural about it all.

Highlights include: Huang Zhen’s wire sculptures on the second floor, made to resemble the Wuyi Mountains from his home province of Fujian; Xiao Yu’s transformative bamboo sculptures, Zhu Jinshi’s dramatic oil painting which uses thick slabs of paint to form mountains; Chen Wei's urban landscape photography; Qiu Anxiong's whimsical 3D animation; and Ai Weiwei’s ‘Oil Spill’, featuring glossy black porcelain disks that look like droplets of oil.

And make sure you head up to the top floor (some people may forget that you need to take the lift to see the full exhibition) where Yang Wei-Lin’s installation of thousands of cloth discs takes over the entire room, hanging from threads to create a landscape that looks like the sea.

Written by
Ben Neutze

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Price:
Free
Opening hours:
Wed-Sun 10am-5pm
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