INSIDE WONDER: One Year at The Gladstone
Xinzhi Li, Unveiling IV, 2024, Oil and acrylic on stretched canvas, 120cm x 90cm
Written by Angelina Mirabito, PhD
Inside Wonder marks one year of Romulus Folio Gallery at The Gladstone.
The exhibition has taken on a meaning far beyond what I first understood when I titled it. In many ways, it reflects the trajectory of the gallery itself. What began as a three month response to the need for an exhibition space during Melbourne Design Week in 2025 has unfolded into something sustained, layered and evolving.
To wonder is a capacity we carry from childhood. It exists in the way we first encounter the world through colour, through people, through experience. It is instinctive, open and a way of being fully present.
This exhibition asks: what happens when we move inside that wonder? What remains within us as we navigate experiences that extend beyond language and comprehension? These questions sit at the centre of Inside Wonder.
Xinzhi Li standing beside I want to get inside you – Blue' (2022)
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 232cm x 130cm
Working with Xinzhi Li has brought me into close proximity with this space, where wonder is held and where it leads. Her practice engages painting as a site of perception, sensation and interior experience. Working across oil, acrylic and watercolour, her works emerge through an intuitive process where colour and gesture operate beyond direct control.
The paintings exist between abstraction and figuration, forming fluid and ambiguous spaces that reflect states of transition. Through luminous colour, soft boundaries and shifting forms, the work evokes interior worlds shaped by memory, emotion and bodily experience.
Informed by personal narratives of intimacy and the maternal, the work does not describe experience directly. Instead, it translates it into a visual language of permeability and transformation. What emerges is a tension between wonder and rupture, beauty and complexity, held in a state that resists resolution.
Xinzhi Li, She is four (Self-portrait), 2024, Oil on stretched canvas,
46cm x 61cm
This raises an important question for me as a curator.
How to hold space for this work?
How to speak about it?
How to present it in a way that honours its depth without reducing it?
It is a privilege to be in a position to present this exhibition and to work with artists in this way. To be part of what art has the power to do. To connect. To communicate. To make visible what is often unseen, and to give form to what cannot always be said.
Art opens pathways. It creates points of entry into experiences that extend beyond the immediate and into something shared. It allows new ways of seeing and understanding to emerge. It holds the potential for renewal.
Xinzhi Li, Unveiling II, 2024, Oil and acrylic on stretched canvas, 92cm x 76cm
Within the context of The Gladstone and the broader transformation of Fishermans Bend, this feels particularly significant. The gallery exists within a site that is itself in a state of change, shaped by forces that will define how people live, connect and experience place into the future.
The more we support artists and the stories they bring forward, the stronger we become as a community and as a culture. Art creates space for complexity, for difference and for perspectives that expand how we understand one another.
Inside Wonder sits within this space of encounter, reflection and possibility. It brings into visibility a space that is both intimate and shared, where wonder meets reality, and where past, present and emerging futures converge into the possibility of renewal.
Location:
Romulus Folio Gallery,
55 Gladstone Street,
South Melbourne, 3205
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: 12 pm – 7 pm
Saturday to Sunday: 12 pm – 5 pm