Suggested Reading
Chinese Restaurant Playground: Steffie Yee shares off-menu stories
Steffie Yee spent many years gathering stories and images of her family’s history in the town of Branxton, NSW where her parents successfully ran a Chinese restaurant. Yee’s solo exhibition Chinese Restaurant Playground, which celebrates playfulness and joy, recently opened at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery.
Jasmeet Kaur Sahi
Wang Zhiyuan and our roles as little dictators
In an era of information excess and manipulation, Wang Zhiyuan’s Dictator Training Centre exhibiting at Passage Gallery, reminds us of contemporary art’s potential as an open-ended platform for reflection, dialogue, and shared authorship.
Michelle Wang
Shelf Portraits: Critical Currents
In our ongoing series, Shelf Portraits, Art Guide writers recommend the books—recently published or deserving of more attention—that shed new light on an idea that has long simmered in the art world or has helped them see a familiar medium in a different light.
Jane O'Sullivan
Nikki Lam’s ‘Unshakeable Destiny’
Premiering at the Sydney Film Festival, artist, curator and filmmaker Nikki Lam’s The Unshakeable Destiny trilogy, shot on 16mm, Super 8 and digital, explores her hyphenated identity as a “settler-migrant”, through an upbringing in “city-state” Hong Kong and the enduring influence this has over her artistic practice in Australia.
Cher Tan
What the bones know
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
Maya Hodge
Julie Fragar wins the 2025 Archibald Prize
Congratulations to Julie Fragar, who has won the 2025 Archibald Prize for Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), her portrait of fellow artist and colleague Justene Williams.