If you’re looking for traditional Chinese ink wash paintings at Judith Neilson’s new collection of contemporary works Supernatural, you might be disappointed. But I strongly doubt you will leave this exhibition the same way you come in as her contemporary take on nature in Chinese art is informed by strong traditions but transformed into entirely new and unexpected ideas.

Classical Chinese landscapes have always embodied a sense of chi and life force in their steadfast vertical mountains heaped in abundance and violent seas conveying death. This is the type of work most Westerners think of when they hear Chinese landscape art; a harmonious monochromatic naturescape. However Neilson’s new exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale features no such thing and instead flips nature on its head and bullies it into 21^st century submission. Here is a collection of works that features a mixture of ancient and modern techniques fused together; that displays the ancient Chinese belief of the harmonious living between supernatural beings and the earth’s inhabitants through a dreamy lens.

Neilson, who has been travelling to China for the last 20 years – buys art on “instinct alone” says White Rabbit Gallery curator David Williams. Supernatural takes only a fragment of the works that happen to veer off what is considered natural. “It’s not just landscape” Williams states “but pushing nature to its extreme, this idea of nature being pushed and pulled and tweaked.”

The exhibition is curated in a way that is more conceptual than visual as Williams has designed an explorable landscape of 31 works. The first floor is a series of caves, the second is a mountainscape, and on the top floor is the ocean. The ancient Chinese believed that gods lived in the mountains and immortals dwelt in caves. This “idea of the landscape through time” allows audiences to wander through a new landscape; one that speaks to how artists are interpreting the built environment endangered by industry and urbanization.

It is perhaps an exhibition that can never be fully understood by Westerners. Consider Li Shan’s Deviation (2017), an unearthly vision of humanoid sculptures – dragonflies from the waist up and life-sized men from the waist down hovering above galley-goers heads. Song Ling’s Wildlife 2 (2017) uses up to 30 layers of subtle ink wash to create an intricate jungle of animals hunting and hunted in an Escher-like space. Or the work of China’s most famous dissident artist, Ai Weiwei. You may remember his Sydney Biennale sculpture, an enormous rubber dinghy crowded with inflated asylum seekers? In Oil Spill (2006), the artist once again works with monumental spectacle to present twelve black discs to form a giant, porcelain oil spill splattered vertically across the wall.

Apparently Supernatural has already surpassed previous attendance records so if you want to experience “an exhibition that makes sense of things that make no sense”, visit Supernatural any time from 5-10pm Wednesday through to Sunday at the White Rabbit Gallery at 30 Balfour St. Chippendale.

Please see their website for further information on this exhibition and all upcoming exhibitions.