The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre
An innovative multi-arts hub in the heart of Blacktown City.
See You in Hell presents a collection of playful and subversive works by artists Louise Zhang and Jess Bradford exploring Chinese concepts of the afterlife.
Audiences will journey through the exhibition space encountering various hellscapes and mythology presented in painting and sculptural installation
Diyu, the Chinese Buddhist concept of Hell, is both a starting point and a meeting place for the artists to explore personal experiences and complex relationships to their shared Chinese cultural heritage as ‘third culture kids’. The exhibition is a bridge between their practices, and includes individual and collaborative works.
See You in Hell has been restaged for Blacktown Arts by Curator Talia Smith.
Download the original See You in Hell exhibition catalogue here courtesy of Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.
Bios
Jess Bradford is a Singaporean-born and Sydney-based artist, working across painting, ceramics, video and installation. Her work explores her mixed-race identity and Chinese heritage by questioning representations of cultural or national identity. Her current work focuses on a Chinese cultural theme park in Singapore called the Haw Par Villa / Tiger Balm Gardens. Having frequented the park as a child, Bradford uses the site to explore her ambivalent connection to Singaporean-Chinese culture; and concepts of collective memory and cultural inheritance.
Louise Zhang 张露茜 is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture and installation. Zhang explores the dynamics of aesthetics, contrasting the attractive and repulsive in order to navigate the senses of fear, anxiety and a sense of otherness reflecting her identity. Her work is inspired by horror cinema, Chinese mythology and botany, adopting and placing symbols and motifs in compositions of harmonic dissonance.
Presented by Blacktown Arts, supported by Create NSW, Blacktown City Council and commissioned by Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. Louise Zhang appears courtesy of N. Smith Gallery.
