Renee So, Provenance, installation view, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and UNSW Galleries, Sydney.

Renee So’s idiosyncratic practice in ceramics and textiles is inspired by art history, museum collections and popular forms of gendered symbolism. It is distinguished by its embrace of traditional crafts, cross-cultural thinking, and underlying sense of the comedic and persistent feminist worldview.

While So’s early work used motifs of bearded men, full bellies and boots to explore popular archetypes and representations of (mostly) male authority, she has increasingly looked to representations of feminine forms, drawing on artistic precedents from prehistoric to modern times. Drawn to the history, materiality and the bearded faces of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German Bellarmine jugs, their features have been a dominant reference point for much of So’s ‘knitted paintings’ and ceramic objects, exemplifying her approach to museum objects as sources of inspiration.

Other references include classical sculpture, the Assyrian collections of the British Museum, objects looted by the French and British from the Qing Dynasty’s Old Summer Palace in 1860 during the Opium Wars, tiled murals in London’s Underground train stations, the glazed brick bas-relief of the Babylonian Ishtar Gate, c.575 BCE, and ‘Venus figurines’—small statuettes dating from between about 40,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE.

Provenance is So’s first major exhibition in Australia and continues a commitment to survey exhibitions that present the practices of Australia’s most exciting and innovative mid-career artists. This exhibition presents over a decade of So’s artmaking and features a series of newly commissioned works. Brought together for the first time in Australia, where she grew up after migrating with her family from Hong Kong at a young age, the exhibition constructs one narrative among many through So’s evolving practice.

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