Hopalong to White Rabbit at HOTA
In a major coup for HOTA Gallery on the Gold Coast, Judith Neilson’s acclaimed White Rabbit Collection will showcase amazing contemporary art from China.
While the politicians compete with false narratives about China, Judith Neilson has spent time travelling across that amazing country collecting the best of its contemporary art.
China hawks tend to gloss over the many millennia of art and culture in China, but renowned philanthropist Neilson honours those traditions at her acclaimed White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney.
In the latest coup for HOTA Gallery on the Gold Coast (they’ve had a few in recent years), the White Rabbit Collection is set to show an amazing array of contemporary Chinese art from April through to October.
Inspired by the poem This Moment by Chinese poet-musician Yan Jun, the exhibition is called This Moment: Highlights from the White Rabbit Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art. It will feature a selection of works spanning video, photography, painting, light-based installations and monumental sculpture.
The White Rabbit Collection is one of the world’s most significant and influential holdings of contemporary Chinese art and was made possible due to Neilson’s philanthropy. It would be gauche to talk money, but we will anyway.
Neilson, now 80, was born in Zimbabwe and is a prominent Australian philanthropist, art collector and founder of the White Rabbit Gallery, with a net worth assessed at $1.23 billion as of May 2025, according to the Financial Review Rich List. Formerly married to billionaire Kerr Neilson, she has been listed separately as a billionaire since 2015.
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Judith Neilson Projects is a benevolent arts organisation established by her.
As well as founding White Rabbit Gallery, Neilson maintains a long-standing interest in architecture and a range of humanitarian causes. She has endowed a chair of architecture at the University of New South Wales that leads research into innovative housing solutions for people displaced by natural disasters and conflict.
Neilson’s motivating belief is that the arts and architecture make a vital global contribution to humanity and should be accessible to all – in all the world’s places and cultures.
JN Projects aims to contribute to the expansion of creative ideas in the visual and performing arts and architecture and she has done so, generously.
White Rabbit Gallery is listed named after the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which sounds feasible. But every time I hear the name I also think of the other White Rabbit – a brand of milk candy manufactured by Shanghai Guan Sheng Yuan Food, Ltd, in China. It is an iconic cultural brand and has been in production since 1943. Just saying.
Together, the works in the HOTA Gallery exhibition will reveal extraordinary technical mastery and deep cultural nuance, offering audiences insight into the complexity of contemporary Chinese art led by the first post-Mao generation. And that’s Neilson’s aim.
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“It is always incredibly gratifying to see White Rabbit Collection appreciated and celebrated by new audiences,” she says. “The collection has come together by working with artists whose work I personally find exciting and intriguing. For more than 25 years I have been travelling to China where I believe the most interesting art in the world is produced.
“This amazing country is so vast, diverse and hugely populated. It inspires so many artists and fuels such competition – resulting in the best to the worst and everything in between. White Rabbit Collection is a document of this energy and enthusiasm, created to prompt people’s own ideas and conversations. I am excited and flattered that HOTA have captured that energy with This Moment.”
Founded in 2009, the White Rabbit Collection has been built through extensive research and travel across China. The collection documents the country’s profound social, political and cultural transformation over the past two decades, championing experimental and often challenging artistic voices that reflect life in a rapidly changing society.
Presented during a time of ongoing global and cultural shift, the exhibition invites audiences into dialogue with Chinese artists responding to questions of identity, censorship, memory, tradition and transformation.
Artists set to be featured in the exhibition include Geng Xue, Guo Jian, LuYang, Peng Hung-Chih, Xu Zhen, Zhang Dali and Zhang Peili.
Capturing the energetic spirit of 21st-century China, this extraordinary exhibition features bold, experimental artworks produced over the past 25 years that interrogate authority, reclaim history and reflect profound social change.
Through diverse forms and perspectives, the works illuminate how contemporary Chinese artists are shaping new visual languages while engaging with their historical and social contexts. The exhibition will offer audiences and visitors to the region a rare opportunity to encounter a collection of work by artists of global significance.
This Moment: Highlights from the White Rabbit Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art, HOTA Gallery, Surfers Paradise, April 18 to October 11. Free admission.
hota.com.au/whats-on/live/exhibitions/the-white-rabbit-collection-of-chinese-contemporary-art
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