Chinese Museum, NGV (National Gallery of Victoria)

The promised rain kept its promise this morning. I wouldn’t have complained if it hadn’t. The precipitation’s intensity varied from drizzle to light rain. The temperature cooled quite a bit from yesterday’s tropical clime, with a forecast high of only 18°C* today, making a light rainjacket comfortable. And the wind died down from yesterday’s “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” gusts, leaving my umbrella operable. The precipitation’s lightness, my rainjacket’s comfort, and my umbrella’s effectiveness notwithstanding, I decided to go with indoor choices this morning, the Chinese Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria, commonly known as the NGV.

(* It might be illegal for someone from Canada to say “only 18°” in the middle of December. Please don’t report me.)

Chinese Museum

All of my sources—two guidebooks and a walking tour app—highly recommended Melbourne’s Chinese Museum. That, coupled with the fact that it’s not far from my hotel led me to choose it as my first stop of the day.

The museum spreads over three levels above ground, one in the basement, and more displays on the ground level beside the entrance.

The recommendation from the ticket seller was to take the elevator to the top floor and work my way downstairs, bypassing the ground level and going to the basement, and then “follow the dragon” back up to the ground floor.

The top level is titled “One Million Stories.” It relates a few individual stories of people who immigrated from China to Australia over the years. In some cases, the stories are told in videos by a multi-generation descendant of the immigrant.

This level also discusses in general the various waves of immigration and touches on some of the discrimination they faced.

The title of this floor might be a touch out-of-date. According to a video, there are now 1.2 million people in Australia with some Chinese ancestry.

Come to think of it, maybe the title isn’t out-of-date. Maybe there are 1.2 million Australians of Chinese descent, but only a million of them have stories. Sadly, 200,000 people have no stories to tell. Then again, many people probably have multiple stories, so there might be several hundred thousand people without a story. Life can be so cruel sometimes.

The next level down is about the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 202 BCE to 220 CE, with a gap of I forget how many years due to a civil war. (That is to say, the dynasty lasted that long, not the display at the museum.)

The exhibit includes some text descriptions along with a number of artifacts, including several jade pieces. However, a sign at the entrance to the floor says that they intentionally didn’t label the pieces as to whether they are genuine or replicas because some of the pieces haven’t yet been sent to a lab to verify their authenticity.

I’m not now, nor have I ever been a curator or archivist. So there might be reasons that haven’t occurred to me as to why my suggestion might be problematic, but why couldn’t they label all the pieces they know to be authentic as “authentic,” all they know to be replicas as “replica,” and all for which they aren’t sure of their authenticity as “authenticity unknown,” or words to that effect?

Two of the items on display on this floor are seismographs. One is very colourful. It involves a pendulum and balls that sit in the mouths of dragons arrayed around an urn. As an earthquake rocks the device, a ball will fall out and into the mouth of a frog. If that description is impossible to follow (it is for me and I wrote it) look at the accompanying picture of the device. That’ll make it clearer.

The level below the Han Dynasty floor is for temporary exhibits and was temporarily empty when I visited.

Because I’m a Canadian, I followed the instructions given. After leaving the Han Dynasty floor I continued down past the ground floor to the basement. That floor houses exhibits about Chinese migration during the Australian gold rush of the 1850s. Some Chinese had already migrated to Australia before then, but the first large wave came during the gold rush.

The first room on this floor is a recreation of a passenger cabin in a ship that Chinese gold rush immigrants came on. The room swayed as if it were out on the open seas. They didn’t provide sea sickness bags so there was only so long I could spend in there.

There was also a recreation of a Chinese kitchen along with some texts and videos about immigration at that time.

At the end of the exhibits on this floor, there is a curving ramp leading up to the ground floor. One side of the ramp is decorated with a very long ceremonial parade dragon’s tail for the full length of the ramp. “Ah, that’s what she meant by ‘follow the dragon.'”

The ground floor contains a display of other colourful, jovial ceremonial animal parade figures.

And then it was back out into the rain and on to the NGV.

NGV (National Gallery of Victoria)

The big sign on the exterior of the building calls it by its full, formal name, “National Gallery of Victoria”, but pretty well all of the internal signage refers to the gallery as just “NGV.” Maybe they want to save money on ink. Or maybe they’re afraid that someone named Victoria will lay claim to it. (As I’ve mentioned in one or two other entries on Melbourne, it’s the capital of the Australian state of Victoria. I think the state has a firm claim on the gallery. Sorry, Victoria.)

If you visit the gallery’s website, you’d also be hard-pressed to find the name “National Gallery of Victoria” there. It’s “NGV” pretty well throughout the site. Maybe they’re trying to save money on electrons.

By coincidence, while I was there, the NGV was mounting their Triennial, exhibiting the works of 120 artists, designers, and collectives.

The works in the Triennial are all contemporary, and quite eclectic. They include paintings, video installations, sculptures of various types, and pieces beyond my ability to describe generically or specifically.

One room near the NGV’s entrance contains the works of Farrokh Mahdavi, listed as just “Untitled 1 – 9.” They are mostly similar cartoonish pink visages with different expressions. One holds a cigarette.

Some of the paintings are mounted on the walls. Others lie on the floor, making it impossible to walk across the room without stepping on at least a few of them. A sign at the entrance to the room asks people to walk carefully on the works on the floor and not touch the ones on the wall. Great. People can’t touch the ones on the wall, but they can walk on the ones on the floor, possibly after walking into the NGV just after inadvertently stepping on some animal’s excrement on the sidewalk. Lovely.

There are a few connected rooms where three Boston Dynamics dog-like robots prance around occasionally waving at someone in the audience. When I was there, one of the robots positioned itself in front of a blue wall and very slowly, very meticulously drew black lines and circles on it. Art, people. Art.

One piece in the NGV’s Triennial is a collection of carefully arranged, fully functioning Dyson HEPA air purifiers. The piece is titled “Privatization” (2020) and is by Carolyn Lazard. The description beside the piece mentions the “types of structural violence that are often encountered at the intersection of illness and disability with class, gender, sexuality and race.” Um. OK. Like I said, art, people. Art. At least I felt better about breathing the air near this piece.

I joke, but there is a room where one large wall is entirely white except for a single real banana duct-taped to it. I’ve read about this installation mounted somewhere else (I forget where). All it did for me seeing it live was make me hungry. They were lucky I wasn’t alone in the room. The NGV might have ended up displaying an entirely white wall if I hadn’t been.

The Triennial doesn’t take up the entire NGV. Some rooms are devoted to the Triennial. Others have regular collections on the walls, but Triennial entries in what I assume would otherwise be empty floor space in the room. And still others are dedicated to the regular collection.

One work in the NGV’s regular collection is a Pablo Picasso piece titled “Weeping Woman” (1937). It depicts a woman with tears flowing out of her two eyes, which are both on the left side of her face. No wonder she’s weeping. People could sneak up to her on her right side and she’d never see them coming. People can be so cruel and would definitely take advantage of that to antagonize her.

Then again, Picasso shows her in profile. Maybe she has another two eyes on the other side of her nose, but we just can’t see them in his painting. If that’s the case, she shouldn’t be crying at all. She probably has fabulous peripheral depth perception.

The NGV has some beauty in its structure as well. There is one large, high-ceilinged room in which a stained glass window fills the ceiling. One of the guidebooks I use tells me it’s the world’s largest stained glass ceiling.

Lunch at the NGV

By the time I’d wandered through the NGV, it was time for and I was ready for lunch. Rather than heading out into the elements and foraging, I decided to eat at the NGV. It offers three options: a “Tea room” on the first level above the ground, a cafeteria on the ground level, and a “Garden Restaurant” also on the ground level.

I passed the Tea Room on the way down from the exhibits. It had an interesting menu and offered items that appealed to me for lunch. But it was fairly open to the museum, so a little loud. And most of the tables were full and the few empty ones I saw had “Reserved” signs on them.

So I bypassed the Tea Room.

I walked past the cafeteria. It was quite full and very loud. I walked on.

I got to the Garden Restaurant. It has big windows looking out onto a garden. The restaurant appeared very pleasant. The menu items were heavier than I wanted for lunch, but the ambiance seemed worth it. Best of all, despite being in the middle of lunchtime, a little before 1:00 pm, fewer than half the tables were occupied, so I figured I’d have no problem getting a table.

I asked the person at the front for a table for one. “Do you have a reservation?” “No.” “I’m sorry, sir. We’re not taking walk-ins today. We’re all booked up.”

I went back to the Tea Room. I asked the woman at the front if there was any way I could get a table for one. The woman had a look of consternation on her face. She seemed about to say no, but she consulted a waitress. I got a table for one.

I had a meat and mushroom pie and a glass of wine. However, “meat and mushroom” was not what it said on the menu. It said, “kangaroo and mushroom pie.” So, for what I’m pretty sure is the first time in my life, I ate kangaroo meat. It tasted exactly like brisket. I like brisket. And mushrooms are my favourite fungus, so I enjoyed it greatly.

Buoyed by my kangaroo pie lunch, after lingering until after 2:00, I hopped out into the rain to begin my afternoon. More on that later.