You’ve seen flags for this art show all over Sydney. But why?

2 hours ago 2

By Lara Chapman

September 20, 2025 — 5.30am

If you travel via Oxford Street to visit The Neighbour at the Gate at the National Art School, it’s hard to miss the flags lining the length of the road advertising the exhibition. Perhaps you’ve spotted a large-scale poster emblazoned with its title and a magpie in another part of Sydney or on your social media feeds. This exhibition is well-promoted, largely thanks to support from the NSW government’s Blockbuster Funding Initiative.

The risk of this level of build-up, however, is that when visitors arrive at the exhibition they might be surprised by its pared-back approach. The relatively small-scale show features new works by six commissioned artists, split across two floors.

Dennis Golding’s Bingo, 2025, at The Neighbour at the Gate at the National Art School.

Clothilde Bullen OAM, who led the curatorial team with Micheal Do and Zali Morgan, explains that the lack of spectacle is deliberate. “Instead of this idea of a blockbuster, where it’s all glitz and glamour, we wanted to do a tender calling in – to create a sense of community, which is often lacking at the moment.”

It feels fitting, then, that The Neighbour at the Gate starts not with a strong statement but a quiet invitation. Visitors will find it in the last sentence of the introduction text. After they have read about the premise of the show – which centres on the long-standing connections between First Nations Australians and Asian Australians – they’ll read: “They [the curatorial team and artists] invite you to reflect upon our similarities, which are more often greater than our differences, and to become part of this neighbourhood.”

In other words, you are encouraged to see yourself in the artwork on display. It is unusual for an exhibition’s text to address the audience so directly, the use of “you” breaking down the distance between visitors and creators.

The first artwork on the ground floor directly echoes this inclusive approach, inviting visitors to move through it, rather than look at it from a distance. Imaginary Homelands, by Jacky Cheng, is a floating gateway, created from 1110 strips of Xuan paper and hand-dyed silk tassels suspended from the ceiling.

Jacky Cheng’s Imaginary Homelands, 2025.

The shape of Cheng’s gate was informed by paifang – a traditional style of Chinese architectural archway or gateway that sits at the thresholds of temples, important places or districts – and her experiences as a migrant. As a second-generation Malaysian-Chinese artist who now lives on Yawuru country in Broome, she is interested in the symbolism of gates, which can both welcome and exclude, be a threshold or a barrier.

Working with similar architectural symbolism is the nearby artwork of Dennis Golding, a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay man who Do describes at the opening as “one of the busiest artists in New South Wales at the moment”. From afar, his piece resembles a wall constructed from bricks in various tones of orange, brown and beige. As you walk closer, each brick reveals itself to be an etching of a bingo board, a piece of cardboard or a rectangle of copper used to make the prints.

Titled Bingo, it tells the story of bingo nights in the ’90s that Golding’s aunty and nan hosted in an abandoned house in Redfern. The board’s squares contain hand-drawn numbers and illustrations of everyday objects and experiences: a tricycle, a worn and comfortable-looking armchair, a box of fries, someone jumping joyfully from a cliff into water as a friend watches on.

These images are charming and relatable. Underneath this familiarity, however, is another story – one of Redfern as a vital site of Aboriginal resistance with constant police surveillance. It speaks of the need for communities to find places of sanctuary. “My aunty and nan created bingo nights to lift this terraced house – this abandoned home – to a place of joy and laughter, and created such a safe space for us,” the artist says.

As the show goes on, the works continue to use specific and deeply personal stories to reflect on our larger culture. I invite you to pause here and think about another story: The word “blockbuster” is said to have emerged during World War II to describe new, large bombs designed to decimate, or “bust”, entire city blocks. It was later adopted by the film industry to describe successful box-office hits. Although the exhibition doesn’t explicitly address this story, it provides an interesting way of understanding artworks and a curatorial approach that together explore the often unseen or unacknowledged violence that has shaped our culture today.

Interestingly, two of the artists interrogate the importance of understanding where language comes from and how it can be reclaimed. James Tylor’s beautiful collection of photos of Australian birds printed on silver plates and accompanying soundscape highlights how language connects humans and nature. In the Karuna language from the Tandanya/Adelaide region, 95 per cent of bird species were named after the sounds of their calls, but many of these names have been lost to the prioritisation of colonial knowledge systems.

Similarly, Jenna Mayilema Lee, a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and Karrajarri woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) heritages, examines lost languages as a result of the White Australia policy. Her three-part installation captures the patience and persistence needed to relearn forgotten words.

The final two artists relate to this idea of a “blockbuster” more literally, by foregrounding the ongoing impacts of war. James Nguyen’s large-scale textile piece Homeopathies_where new trees grow is dyed from the waters of the Parramatta and Duck rivers, which to this day contain traces of Agent Orange. This chemical was manufactured in Sydney and used as a weapon of war in Vietnam. Nguyen’s family fled this violence only to find its traces were still part of their lives in their new home.

James Nguyen’s Homeopathies_where new trees grow, 2025.

Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, meanwhile, uses a video installation to explore mythology, memory, rage, love and displacement, informed by her family fleeing from Iran in 1979. The work was made before the recent attacks and feels particularly crucial today.

In subverting the blockbuster exhibition format, The Neighbour at the Gate gives space to stories that are often obscured, forgotten or unvalued. In doing so, it demonstrates how we can choose to do things differently, to use exhibitions differently. To make an impact not with a bang but with the gentle act of finding connections.

The Neighbour at the Gate is on display at the National Art School Gallery until October 18.

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