Starting next week: Cairns Art Gallery presents ‘House of Gold’, a special look on Dr Christian Thompson’s AO Chinese heritage, dating back to the 1850s migration boom. Dr Christian Thompson AO is a Bidjara/Irish/Chinese-Australian contemporary artist whose work traverses and dissolves binary boundaries through an artistic practice that spans photography, performance, sculpture, film and sound.
Dr Christian Thompson A0 b. 1978, Gawler, South Australia House of Gold Chapter 11 (Chinese Museum) 2023 Moab Slickrock Metallic Pearl paper, wet mounted on archival backing (unframed). © The Artist, Photo courtesy Studio Dr Christian Thompson AO
Drawing inspiration from a line of poetry from the Song Dynasty poetry, this exhibition was first presented at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2024 and celebrated the official debut of Thompson’s complete series House of Gold. Photographed on location, these works see the artist populating colonial historical buildings, utilising the body as a symbol of resistance, Thompson mines sites of colonial history as an act of quiet rebellion to the structural exclusion of authority within this country and subverts the power dynamics such institutions hold.
Dr Christian Thompson AO b. 1978, Gawler, South Australia House of Gold Chapter 10 (Chinese Museum) 2023 Moab Slickrock Metallic Pearl paper, wet mounted on archival backing (unframed). © The Artist, Photo courtesy Studio Dr Christian Thompson AO
