Unseen Worlds
The world is not only as it is
12 September – 4 October 2026
Opening: Saturday 12 September, 2–4pm
Aarwun Gallery presents Unseen Worlds, a group exhibition bringing together seven distinctive artists whose practices invite us to look beyond the immediately visible and consider the worlds that exist within, behind and beyond everyday perception.
The world we inhabit is never simply what it appears to be. Memory alters experience; mythology reshapes history; imagination extends reality; and nature continually reveals forms and relationships that remain unseen until we learn how to look.
Across the exhibition, the artists move between the familiar and the fantastical, the historical and the imagined, the physical and the metaphysical. Their works propose alternative ways of understanding the world—not as a fixed or singular reality, but as something layered, fluid and continually reinterpreted.
Guan Wei brings together mythology, history, cultural memory and contemporary technology. In As Myth Has It, superimposed images disrupt conventional perspective, creating encounters in which past and present, dream and reality become intertwined. His Journey to the West draws on Chinese mythology and Buddhist cosmology to consider a world in which ancient narratives meet the possibilities of artificial intelligence, and in which the boundaries between virtual and physical experience are increasingly fluid.
Wendy Sharpe's richly imaginative practice moves between the observed and the dreamlike, creating psychological and theatrical spaces in which memory, emotion, mythology and lived experience intersect. Her work invites viewers into worlds that are at once intimate and expansive, where the boundaries between inner and outer experience begin to dissolve.
Bernard Ollis similarly approaches painting as a space in which reality can be transformed. His distinctive visual language brings together figures, landscapes, architecture and fragments of narrative to create enigmatic worlds that resist a single interpretation. Familiar elements are rearranged into unexpected encounters, allowing ambiguity and imagination to take precedence over literal representation.
Simon Palmer explores imagined landscapes and alternative realities, drawing on the visual languages of architecture, landscape and abstraction. His paintings encourage a playful reconsideration of what a landscape might be—and where it might lead. Places appear both recognisable and impossible, suspended between memory, invention and possibility.
Peter Yu turns to the natural world, using colour, light and gesture to evoke forests, seas and landscapes as places of emotional and imaginative experience. His paintings are less concerned with literal representation than with the sensations, associations and memories that nature can evoke. The landscape becomes not simply something observed, but something experienced and remembered.
In the work of Yang Xifa, the visible world becomes a point of departure for considering what may lie beyond ordinary perception. His Genetic Representations series recombines biological forms to construct imagined organisms and possibilities, drawing connections between mythology, contemporary science, biotechnology and the future of life. His works occupy a space between the known and the speculative, prompting questions about how life might be imagined, altered and reinvented.
Zhang Jun approaches landscape through a non-realistic visual language, allowing the vitality of nature to occupy the canvas as an almost spiritual presence. His paintings seek a space of stillness and contemplation, encouraging us to pause and reconsider our relationship with the natural world. Landscape becomes both subject and state of mind—a place through which to encounter something beyond the purely visible.
Together, these practices form a constellation of perspectives rather than a single definition of the unseen. The artists remind us that perception is never entirely neutral: what we see is shaped by memory, culture, imagination, knowledge and belief.
Unseen Worlds asks us to look again—to consider what might exist beyond the surface of things, and to recognise that the world is not only as it is.
Aarwun Gallery
Canberra