Visual Art
The Neighbour at the Gate at Sydney’s National Art School explores the shared histories of Aboriginal and Asian Australians as joyful, resilient and inclusive. By Michelle Wang.
The Neighbour at the Gate
The neighbour at the gate conjures up slightly different but overlapping images. Is the gate closed or open – a barrier or a portal? How do you know your neighbour – are they a friend, kin, stranger? This ambiguity is part of the invitation in the National Art School’s latest exhibition, The Neighbour at the Gate. You might consider each artwork as a potential cuppa with your neighbour, a moment of warmth, discovery and connection in the day. Here, culture is something made in real time: as curator Micheal Do says, at “the speed of trust”.
The show offers six interpretations of the gate as an enticing series of thresholds for audiences to move through, around and dwell by. Each centres the perspectives of Aboriginal and Asian Australians, knitted together via their experiences of alienation, racism, cultural loss and dislocation. These works form a “counter-archive” of Australian history, while also providing a joyful coming together, and affirmation of non-white cultural identity. “This show is a calling in that centres ourselves as First Peoples and Asian Australians,” says curator Clothilde Bullen. “It is not a calling out that excludes anyone; all are welcome here.”
Core to this calling in is the diverse curatorium that Bullen (Wardandi Noongar and Badimaya Yamatji) put together to guide the show’s collaborative process and outcomes, with Micheal Do and Zali Morgan (Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar).
The three worked through an extensive longlist, bringing together artists whose work responded to the show’s narrative of connection between First Peoples and Asian Australians. This resulted in six new commissions from Australian artists with distinct cultural lineages and artistic approaches: Jacky Cheng, Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, Dennis Golding, Jenna Mayilema Lee, James Nguyen and James Tylor.
When James Nguyen speaks of his practice, he describes conversation as his medium, a thread that runs through works grounded in land and kinship-based research. Homeopathies – where new trees grow is a site-specific exploration of ties between Australia and Vietnam via the legacy of Agent Orange. Traces of the chemical remain in Parramatta River from local weapons factories and are used to dye Nguyen’s large-scale textile work.
Nguyen also introduces the scent of burning endangered agarwood, released via incense burners he shaped from discarded clay at the art school. The work’s iterative, unfurling form reveals how colonial legacies continue to recast native landscapes and cultural memory. In The Neighbour at the Gate, incense acts both as a boundary marker and a gesture of protection and welcome, signifying cultural solidarity and new beginnings.
Portal to the Bangarr (billabong) by Jenna Mayilema Lee similarly reclaims cultural memory and land. Her installation centres on a bangarr – a transitional water space – dotted with lotus plants crafted from old immigration documents. Sacred in many Asian cultures and found in northern Australia, the hardy, regenerative lotus becomes a symbol of cultural resilience. Lee’s accompanying video work shows the preparation of lotus root while her father repeats the Larrakia word for the plant, weaving together ritual, language reclamation and ancestral connection. Drawing on her heritage as Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater alongside Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian lineages, Lee’s multilayered work honours hybridity as strength.
Cheng’s Imaginary Homelands offers another immersive threshold that audiences must walk through to enter the exhibition. It calls to mind a paifang (牌坊), a traditional Chinese gate monument. Extending over three metres in depth and suspended from the ceiling, it is made from Xuan paper with Cheng’s own calligraphy in sumi ink, as well as golden silk tassels that Cheng learnt to make in Laos. The gate embodies the social contract of entering someone else’s space. It reflects her experiences moving from Malaysia to Broome, and the years she has spent getting to know the community of First Peoples and South-East Asians who live there. “We share this experience of being on the outside, looking in. You can be standing on either side of the gate and still have this feeling.” The work wrestles with ideas of memory and belonging from a distance – what Salman Rushdie described as an “imaginary homeland”.
Nostalgia is a potent gateway into the past. It shapes cultural attachments and the stories we carry forward. Through this lens, nostalgia becomes a decolonial strategy: amplifying histories built on memory, kinship and ritual. While the works in this exhibition unveil colonial legacies, they use nostalgia as a vital storytelling tool that invites warmth, recognition and connection. As Bullen notes, “So many Aboriginal and Asian communities do not have the level of ‘arts literacy’ our institutions demand, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t come along and experience it and feel like they can see themselves.”
Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding’s Bingo installation embodies this spirit. Based on memories of family bingo nights in Redfern, the work elevates daily ritual into a site of cultural affirmation. Etched into paper, cardboard, copper and wood, the bingo cards are a tribute to kinship, care and survival. Rituals such as bingo and karaoke night, which features in the exhibition’s live programming, resonate across First Nations and migrant households. As Golding says: “It wasn’t about winning but the feeling of freedom and connection.” Bullen recalls her own mother’s enthusiastic response to the work, drawing a connection to the karaoke business she runs in Broome. These shared practices become entrances to art for those often left out of traditional institutional spaces.
If Golding’s work opens a portal through play and memory, Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson’s moving image practice offers one through grief and love. Drawing from Persian poetry and spiritual philosophy, her work explores inherited trauma as a space of transformation. Through layered sound and image, she reframes displacement as an act of witnessing, of holding, of becoming.
Sensory pathways into traditional cultural knowledge are also offered in the layered soundscapes of Kaurna instruments and birdsong accompanying James Tylor’s daguerreotypes of Indigenous birds. Tylor’s layered work speaks to the Indigenous practice of embedding animal sounds into cultural expression, emphasising the inheritance of traditional ecological practices and language as acts of cultural continuity.
In a way, the curatorium and the artists are the neighbours at the gate invited inside by the National Art School. The show succeeds because it models the core themes of connection and friendship through the sharing of knowledge and resources between a colonial institution and traditionally marginalised voices.
This show is an affirmation of shared histories of loss and displacement but also a celebratory gesture. The speed of trust, of friendships formed and cups of tea shared by the gate, is how our social fabric can be strengthened and culture created. As Nguyen puts it: “All you need is a kettle, you know, when you’ve got the right people.”
The Neighbour at the Gate is showing at the National Art School, Sydney, until October 18.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "Portals to trust".
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