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
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
A soft touch
An exhibition of the work of seven women artists at Ngununggula in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales explores themes of tenderness and care through the rich possibilities of paint.
Emma-Kate Wilson
Talking painting with Wendy Sharpe
Wendy Sharpe’s expressive paintings incorporate social criticism and otherworldly dreamscapes, blending the real and imagined. With a current exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries, she reflects on her three-decade practice and that iconic painting of Magda Szubanski.