I was about 15 when I decided my favourite artwork was René Magritte’s The Lovers, having seen an image of it in a high school art class textbook. I think it was the melodrama of the whole thing. The blatant challenge to us, the voyeuristic viewers. The question of the lovers’ identities—who are they? Do they know each other? Can we ever really know someone? And why, among the melodrama, does it also feel so sombre? This last question, I later learnt the answer to. One interpretation of the shrouded faces is that they reference his mother’s suicide, which some Magritte scholars believe permeates much of his work. A gentle sadness peppered throughout a predominantly playful oeuvre.

Having found my first art crush, I progressed through the catalogue: relishing in the cleverness of The Treachery of Images and The Human Condition, the humour of The Listening Room, finally settling on a new favourite in The Empire of Light (it didn’t hurt that it influenced the iconic movie poster for The Exorcist.)

Nicholas Chambers of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) tells me that he had a similar experience of enamour after coming across a Magritte monograph at an early age. “He’s quite a singular figure in European modernism,” he says. “One of the things that’s interesting about his art is that, from very early on, it is attuned to the philosophical dimension of images. When we look back on his practice, it’s less about formal or stylistic evolution, and more about a development of visual ideas. He learnt the traditional techniques and subjects of European painting but used them to devise new ways of representing the world.”

Chambers has curated Magritte, Australia’s first large-scale retrospective on the artist. The exhibition is part of Sydney’s International Art Series, which last year brought Louise Bourgeois and Kandinsky to the AGNSW. This time, two similarly different exhibitions take the stage. Magritte is occupying the gallery’s Naala Nura building, while the newer Naala Badu building is housing My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆—the largest ever Australian retrospective of Chinese multimedia pioneer Cao Fei.

“Cao Fei is a great world builder,” says Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, curator of My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆. “The exhibition is an invitation into her world, which is a world of neon, a world of street dance, a world of pop music, a city familiar and warped, real and virtual.” Whether building digital cities on Y2K-era virtual platforms (as she did in RMB City: a Second Life city planning, 2007), or a recreation of an iconic, now-closed Sydney yum cha restaurant (one of two new Sydney-specific commissions in the show), Cao’s work is at once of this world and of another entirely. It hints at the future while referencing the past. It’s the feeling you get watching a sci-fi film made in the 80s and set in our present.

“Her world is one that collapses boundaries,” says Arrowsmith-Todd. “It’s this artistic universe where time is out of joint, reality slips into fantasy, people tap in and out of virtual realms, and radical disjunctive upheavals are an everyday fact of life. The works are sometimes very futuristic—she’s always been at the forefront of using new media—but at the same time she’s deeply interested in social history, and in technological pasts which never came to fruition. She’s interested in speculative worldbuilding that both looks forward, but also looks back.”

“It’s this artistic universe where time is out of joint, reality slips into fantasy, people tap in and out of virtual realms, and radical disjunctive upheavals are an everyday fact of life.”

In preparing to write this piece, I initially thought the connection I could make between Cao Fei and Magritte was obvious. In the Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton describes the intention of the surrealist movement to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” At first glance, Cao’s worlds fit within this description. They appear as futuristic dreamscapes toying with hyperreality. But the closer you look, the more you see her focus turned inward, examining the lives of the people around her. She documents rapid urbanisation and digital revolutions because she is interested in lived realities, in “transformations on the street, in the factory, and at the family house.” It’s seen in the way she incorporates Sydney’s diasporic community into this exhibition. Arrowsmith-Todd describes her determination “not to just have a blockbuster that’s transplanted from one city to another.” She says that the exhibition has been developed specifically for Sydney. “Cao Fei has taken a lot of inspiration for the history and material culture of Chinatown itself.”

Magritte, even as an unmistakable icon of the surrealist movement, had a similar predilection for a more inward focus. “Surrealism is often thought about as a singular monolithic art movement,” says Chambers. “But within it there are so many different artistic positions, different versions of surrealism.” He describes how Magritte was less interested in the ideas that preoccupied his peers, such as automatism, psychoanalysis and the power of spontaneity. “He was someone who thought very deeply about the power of the image. He brought a more analytical perspective to the movement. He was also an artist tuned into the everyday—he revealed the strangeness embedded within the spaces and objects that surround us. The mystery of the ordinary.”

Magritte
Art Gallery of New South Wales
(Naala Nura, south building)
On now—9 February 2025

My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆
Cao Fei
Art Gallery of New South Wales
(Naala Badu, north building)
30 November—13 April 2025

This article was originally published in the November/December print issue of Art Guide Australia.