Cultivating Melbourne’s Art Scene, Esperanto Magazine

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Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Explorer Issue, Vol. 4, 2025 (print)

The Nicholas Building elevator has a way of making me feel like I’m travelling somewhere secret. The doors close, the world outside blurs and when they open, I’ve arrived in a quieter part of the city. Not higher, exactly — just elsewhere.

I think that’s what keeps drawing me back to Melbourne’s smaller galleries — places like Blindside Artist Run Initiative, CAVES, No Vacancy, fortyfivedownstairs — those rooms tucked inside old buildings, cafés or hidden behind restaurant staircases. Sometimes it’s even further out, like Heide or Villa Alba, the old mansion that hosted Melbourne’s first Sculpture Biennial last year. The elaborate trompe l’oeil murals there transport you from the quiet suburbs of Kew to far-off landscapes. At the Spring1883 Art Fair, held in the gilded rooms of the Windsor Hotel, the same feeling unfolded — contemporary works folding themselves into patterned carpets and chandeliers, proof that art is always in conversation with its surroundings. It isn’t the spectacle or the prestige that matters to me. It’s the way the city shifts when I step inside these spaces. Time loosens. Tightness begins to soften. In those rooms, art isn’t something to hurry through — it’s something to breathe with. It shifts and changes depending on where it’s held — always shaped by the space around it.

I keep coming back to art not just for its beauty, but for the way it helps me make sense of things I can’t always put into words. It reminds me how to feel again, quietly — through texture, colour and the smallest of gestures. There’s something about the way art holds contradiction that I find comforting: joy and sorrow, stillness and movement, solitude and connection.

Walking through an exhibition becomes a kind of private ritual. I bring my phone, camera and journal and let the world slow down. Sometimes, in those small rooms, I remember that thinking doesn’t always need to be loud in order to mean something.

People often talk about Melbourne’s “arts scene” as though it’s confined to institutions — the archives and marble floors of the National Gallery of Victoria, or the clean certainty of a state collection. But there are so many more spaces than that. There are artist-run initiatives hidden above stores. Pop-up shows in old warehouses. Newly-opened galleries run by young curators like Hayden’s Gallery who pour everything they have into keeping them alive. Some of the most moving work I’ve seen recently wasn’t in a museum — it was in a hallway in Fitzroy, or a tiny room overlooking Swanston Street.

Maybe that’s my version of exploring —tracing a path through the overlooked corners of my own city. The underground isn’t always dark or edgy. Sometimes it’s tender. Sometimes it’s being the only visitor in a gallery and realising you’re allowed to stand there for as long as you need.

There’s a kind of strength in the early career art scene. It’s constantly shifting, like a living thing. That’s part of what makes it so beautiful: you can never step into the same space twice. The shows change every few weeks. The walls get repainted. The light moves on. But something stays with you — the memory of a line, or a shadow, or a quiet moment that made you feel less alone.

Art doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t erase grief or make life less confusing. But it offers you a different way of holding it. And maybe that’s why I keep returning to these spaces — to remember how to sit with everything that doesn’t quite make sense and to find, in the cracks and corridors of this city, a small reminder that I’m not the only one searching for meaning.

Cultivating Melbourne’s Art Scene, artwork by Jennifer Chen, Esperanto Magazine, The Explorer Issue, Vol. 4, 2025 (print).