Finding balance in Lunar Harmony

The Lunar New Year, a vibrant celebration with roots stretching back thousands of years across Asia, is a time to honour the past while envisioning the future. It’s a moment where tradition meets reflection, and memory dances with possibility.

This month at the Lane Cove Gallery, eight Chinese-Australian women artists come together in a striking exhibition that explores identity, culture and memory through their unique perspectives.

Lunar Harmony, curated by CBD Gallery director Xiaoxiao Zhang, invites visitors to experience a dialogue between heritage and contemporary life. The exhibition runs until February 21.

What binds the artists is a shared yet deeply personal reimagining of Chinese-Australian identity. 

Each approaches this negotiation differently, forming a constellation of perspectives rather than a singular narrative. 

Lin Tan Qi’s The Ceaseless Dance draws the viewer inward through intimate fragments of a large religious mural, isolating details that render divinity at a human scale.

“These subtleties resonate more profoundly than the whole,” she notes. The small scale compels close inspection; its quiet intensity sets a contemplative tone that reverberates throughout the exhibition.

If Qi’s works are hushed, the sculptures by Zi Xin, Amy Meng and Chunxiao Qu are exuberant. Light and playful, they inject the gallery with buoyant energy. 

Xin’s pastel horses, rendered with childlike simplicity, refresh traditional lunar symbolism, while Meng draws on kawaii culture to transform dumpling-folding into irreverent anime figures. 

Together, these works reframe cultural inheritance through colour, humour and tactile charm.

The calligraphic works of June Zhao and Mei Zhao pulse with an otherworldly vitality, combining script with swirling pastels and dreamlike bursts of colour and texture. There is a rawness to their mark-making, held in delicate tension by fine Chinese characters that blur, layer and accumulate as meaning is written over itself.

A similar aura surrounds multimedia artist Jennifer Van Ratingen’s works. Alongside her bamboo-painted canvases, a large carved Jelutong wood installation anchors the gallery’s corner, redirecting the viewer’s path and activating the surrounding space through movement.

Nicole Zhang’s paintings are a clear highlight. Depicting everyday scenes, a ping pong table left idle, dumplings being made, a community garden, she presents them from above, giving the audience the sense of looking down on the scene. She merges a simplified, cartoon-like sensibility with confident brushtrokes, making the ordinary feel vivid and observed.

In Lunar Harmony, the difference is not resolved but carefully orchestrated. Each artist maintains her own voice, yet together they form a resonant whole shaped by movement, colour and shared inquiry.

Thumbnail: Docqment