Exhibition Opening-History Reimagined: Shen Jiawei and NC Qin

This new exhibition entitled History Reimagined: Shen Jiawei and NC Qin brings together two outstanding artists of different backgrounds, using different mediums, to show their fascinating and intriguing representations and explorations of history in their artistic creations.

NC Qin’s artistic pursuit is intertwined with her identity formation. Embracing her Chinese heritage, she also interrogates and explores the hidden burden of cultural heritage within the Asian diaspora. She turns fragile glass into armour in her sculpture Glass Armour, inspired by her interest in Chinese history and legendary heroes. Her performance art video, in which the artist wears the intricately designed glass armour while naked and holds its 80kg weight on her shoulders until muscle failure, takes her exploration and interrogation into another sphere. Her new work, a series of images of prints, thoughtfully selected from the performance video, frame and freeze those tender and sensual moments of emotion into an eternal gaze.

Shen Jiawei, one of Australia’s best known master portraitists, has pursued a lifelong interest in history painting, particularly large-scale history paintings, to capture history’s depth and complexity. We are delighted to present, for the first time ever, a print of Shen’s colossal masterpiece, The Tower of Babel (2023), an epic artwork 20 years in the making that recreates an alternative art history of the 20th century by tracing the biggest movement of all: the International Communist Movement. The whole work consists of 90 panels, with remixes of over 100 original artworks and containing 400 individual portraits of historical characters on four murals. The Tower of Babel is an extraordinary visual history of the political and art movements of the 20th century, reimagined and curated by the artist Shen Jiawei.

We invite you to join us for the Opening of this unique and spectacular exhibition that will be showing until 16 August 2024.