Perfect gallery day seeing two very different exhibitions - I had a free day today and went to the Art Gallery of NSW to see two very different exhibitions: a Magritte Retrospective and Cao Fei’s latest exhibition. Both are ticketed and if you buy tickets for both there is a discount. I saw the Magritte first. This is in the original NSW Art gallery building. Simply incredible seeing all these works all together in the one exhibition. The coverage is very comprehensive and a lot of his well known works are present. After a lunch break at the galleries MOD. restaurant. I went to see the Cao Fei exhibition situated in the new gallery building. A pioneer in immersive cyber art, who has been creating experimental art work for decades. This exhibition plays around the boundaries of what is real, creating fantasy worlds within reality, VR, even Cosplay, by mining popular culture & the transience of the past. This is such a dense collection of installations. I loved it. It is impossible not to walk away from it seeing things in a different light, or seeking a deeper meaning in the everyday. A full day of art and a delicious lunch. This was an ideal day.

Poor execution and no substance - As an Asian-Australian working in the arts, I really wanted to like this exhibition. The idea of a homage to Sydney's Chinatown and it's Chinese heritage resonates with me greatly. I really wanted to enjoy the high sensory neon experience that was promised from the social media ads. What I saw instead was an extremely incoherent exhibition with long rambling videos. I saw two other gallery goers asleep in what's supposed to be a "transportative" experience. Execution- wise, a teenager with a few weeks of experience watching YouTube tutorials could make better cg art than the dribble I saw here. I've seen better world-building by 12 year olds in Minecraft and Fortnite than the 'avante-garde' 2nd-life city that's presented as 'ground-breaking'. Thematically, a lot of the topics being explored don't go too much beyond a superficial surface layer. The hyper consumerist perspectives of modern Chinese culture being presented feel extremely cliched and one dimensional. To be very honest and blunt, 90% of the exhibition felt very cringe. If you want to turn off your brain and look at shiny lights maybe this might be for you, but if you want anything with substance, do yourself a favour and skip this exhibition and go see the Magritte exhibition in the main wing of the museum instead.