Making a Scene

Billionaire arts patron Judith Neilson, who owns one of the world’s largest collections of Chinese art, is building a buzzing creative community in Sydney. She reflects on the first decade of her White Rabbit Gallery—and reveals what she’s working on next

- Oliver Giles

Judith Neilson was just a child when she caught the collecting bug. She was eight or nine years old and living in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, when on a day out with her family she bought a tiny bottle of Coca-Cola for a single penny. Neilson was hooked. She loved the drink’s looping logo—and of course its taste. Now, the 72-year old Sydney-based philanthropist owns more than 1,500 items of Coke paraphernalia, from run-of-the-mill red cans to a rare bottle covered in gold crystals that was released to celebrate the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Her sister has said Neilson has the largest Coke bottle collection in the world, something Neilson claims is not true.

But Neilson’s early experiences hunting for Coke have inspired her subsequent collecting, which has been record-breaking—over the past 20 years, Neilson has built what is widely described as the world’s largest collection of Chinese art made since the turn of the millennium, numbering more than 2,500 works by almost 700 artists. Many of those pieces are exhibited on rotation in curated exhibitions at Neilson’s White Rabbit Gallery, a nonprofit, free-to-all space in Sydney that is celebrating its 10th anniversary and attracts roughly 120,000 visitors annually. This year, Neilson marks another milestone: around the corner, she has opened Phoenix Central Park, a cultural centre envisioned as a gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that combines architecture, interior design, visual art and performing arts.