By Alex Burchmore June 28, 2025 — 5.30am
Tenderness and camaraderie are difficult to find these days. Conflict and prejudice predominate, directed especially at those whose sheer existence seems unacceptable to certain regimes. Rights and protections hard-won through decades of collective action have been overturned at a single stroke of a permanent marker, institutional obligations and responsibilities ignored, and critical voices silenced. As in the not-so-distant past, many of those voices are now forced to speak in code, creating subcultures of mutual recognition and support to avoid censorship and persecution.
Tender Comrade, a thematically tight yet conceptually rich display of recent Chinese works at White Rabbit Gallery until November 16, is a timely invitation to enter some of these cultures and communities. The fine line between identification and voyeurism is an underlying theme across the exhibition’s four floors, positioning the visitor alternately as tourist, confidante, or something in between. Images of hidden or unspoken desires, masquerade and performance, coded messages and conscious artifice recur throughout, both in the works and in the nested composition of the display itself.
Lin Zhipeng (aka No. 223), Layers, 2018.
The show is billed as an insight into LGBTQ communities in China but primarily foregrounds gay and transgender iden
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