Why White Rabbit Gallery is Sydney’s haven of Chinese art

Whether it’s the lifelike salaryman hunched over his phone, a forest of cartoonish creatures made from fun clay or a collapsed life-size military tank of the finest Italian leather, they’re all here, inside an art gallery in Sydney, Australia.

Since 2009, the White Rabbit Gallery has carved its own niche in the Australian art scene, housing one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, an anomaly in a country where Asian art is mostly limited to state-owned collections.

“I have around 800 artists and there were 4,000 pieces the last time I counted,” says gallery owner Judith Neilson, 78, sipping an iced tea in the ground-floor cafe. “It’s probably more than that now.”

A couple of metres away, visitors stream in through a wide glass door, a mix of students, aficionados and visitors from Asia.

The former wife of South African-born billionaire Kerr Neilson – think Australia’s Warren Buffett – Judith Neilson has been collecting since the 1990s, when, in a Sydney gallery, she came across something that stopped her in her tracks. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she says. “I didn’t realise it was Chinese, I just thought, ‘That is something new, that’s something I’ve not seen in 40 years.’”

Neilson tracked down the artist, Wang Zhiyuan, who would become a long-term collaborator, helping to guide her subsequent purchases, introducing her to other artists, and guiding her around China on numerous trips over her 25 years of collecting, in which time she has amassed one of the largest collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world.

White Rabbit’s building, in the inner-city suburb of Chippendale – a formerly gritty fringe now the beating heart of Sydney’s creative scene – went through a complete refit by Sydney architect William Smart, to feature light-drenched interiors, a double-height ground floor and three more levels of art.