by Riley Landau. 

There is nothing you need to do here, more colloquially known as ‘that wheat field everyone and their mother is posting on insta,’ has certainly taken Perth by storm. From the Yagan Square tower, Simone McGurk’s Instagram, and The West Australian, Wonghan Hills Arts Co. (WHAC) clearly knows how to run a marketing campaign. Their inaugural show has attained almost Time Rone level popularity, or at the very least just as much virality.
        The exhibition is simple; a fair few thousand wheat stalks transposed into an empty office space on Mill Street. The result is an admittedly stunning and liminal space, where the warm toned wheat stands in stark contrast against the cool white tones of its corporatised interior. The wheat field interior is complimented by a somewhat lacklustre artificial soundtrack of birds, mechanised rumblings and a few other sounds that attempt to transport the viewer into the wheat field.
        “Weird shit happening in an office” is not a new genre. It has been plaguing 21st century visual culture for a long time: from Apple TV’s Severance, A24’s Backrooms and FKA Twigs’ Eusexua music video, the office space seems to be ripe for hermeneutic experimentation. At a time where the average person’s life is spent toiling away in a cubicle, or god forbid an open concept workspace, it is no wonder that artistic engagements frequently turn to capturing the odd and alienating atmosphere of an office. Wheat fields in odd places is also not a particularly new concept, with the most noteworthy being executed by Agnes Denes, who spent four months in 1982 growing an entire field in the middle of downtown Manhattan.
        Despite its somewhat unoriginal conception, WHAC has managed to execute it excellently. The space is genuinely enchanting, leaves a lasting impression and offers its viewers a truly unique visual encounter.  But despite this masterful execution, the exhibition still feels like a letdown. Its biggest issue is the overbearing Instagramisation of the show. At the end of the day, the wheatfield is nothing but a set piece for an aesthetic social media post. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with an exhibition being photographable, but there simply comes a point. On my visit, most visitors seemed to spend their twenty-minute time slot photographing or being photographed by their friends. The worst offender was a content shoot for a Christian themed streetwear brand taking place, closely followed by a mother berating her child, no older than 12, for not getting the right angles.
        Again, there isn’t anything wrong about wanting to have a cool photo in the wheat field—but it becomes an issue when the space is reduced to no more than that. I did not feel like I was transported to a wheat field and yet somehow still shackled into an office, I felt like I’d accidentally walked into a content shoot and would get yelled at for being in the back of an otherwise perfect photo. Furthermore, WHAC leans into its virality, plastering ‘tag us’ signs on the outer edge of the show, thus encouraging the viewer to take out their phones and pose with the wheat. This is complimented by a massive effort to include the WHAC title or branding wherever possible. When walking into the show, it felt more like a corporate brand activation than any art show that I’ve encountered before.
        The bigger issue with this influencer-breeding ground is that it becomes utterly at odds with what WHAC purports to achieve. If there is truly “nothing you need to do here,” as the title suggests, then perhaps more people would spend time in the space meditatively. Asking viewers to check their phones in on entry would actually utilise the site to push boundaries, fostering the idle disconnect stressed by the exhibition title and therefore encouraging its audience to grapple with its supposed curatorial intention. But that would require WHAC to sacrifice its most sacred metric: virality. At the end of the day, the social media popularity of this show was not just a means to an end—it was wholly the end product as intended. Hidden behind the branding, there really was something you needed to do here: whip out your phone and remember to tag WHAC.
        Despite being the most obvious issue, the brand-focused marketability is not in fact the biggest issue with the show. The far larger, far greater concern is its betrayal of regional Australia. Wongan Hills Arts Co. purports dedication “to developing an ecosystem and focal point for contemporary art, public art and cultural projects in regional Western Australia.”[1] You would think then, its art would help achieve something for regional communities. The didactic for the show describes regional towns as holding “extraordinary landscapes, stories and character” while also observing that they are “places we pass through, rather than destinations we travel to.”[2] This of course results in their grand vision to build a cultural destination that draws people beyond the city and gives people a “new reason to visit.”[3] This didactic is placed as afterthought on the way in, I did not witness a single visitor read it. On the same printout, WHAC advertises itself for new partners.
        Even if no one reads it, the goal seems nice enough. Promoting regional art is relatively universally a good thing to do for the art world. The issue is that the exhibition doesn’t even pretend to achieve this. People walk in, see a room full of wheat—maybe pay enough attention to hear the tractor sound—take some pictures and leave. The average visitor walks out with not a single ounce more of connection to the country than when they walked in. If I wanted to learn about Wongan Hills, I’d be hard pressed to find a sliver of any real information in the exhibition. But hey, that totally makes me want to visit, right?



The biggest betrayal of regional Australia comes in the most fundamental element of the show yet: its wheat. Supposedly, “There is nothing you need to do here,” which is ironic because wheat is the embodiment of human labour. Go back to Mesopotamia, or any early civilisation and you will see that agriculture is the foundation of organised labour. Moreover, talk to any farmer who actually works with crops. Wheat is labour intensive. Its planting, cultivation and harvesting results in intensely long workdays, backbreaking physical exertion, and massive financial gambles. But there’s nothing you need to do here, because you are not the farmer. You are just the consumer—consuming the exhibition in an entirely uncritical way, in the same way we eat and cook with the products of what without so much of a consideration of the labour that produced it. Australia’s regions are plagued with issues because of the intense labour of agriculture, but WHAC would have you come in and see wheat as nothing but a cute photo op. Rather than blurring the space between agricultural and office labour, as you might expect with the spaces merging, WHAC’s show does nothing except reify the division between agricultural producer and urban consumer.
        This lacking impetus to go into any detail about labour is made even funnier by WHAC’s own marketing, which draws attention to the huge effort it was to transpose individual wheat stalks. A 7 News feature describes how the set up took a painstaking 29 days of 10-hour long shifts to install the exhibition, while also drawing attention to the sheer scale of half a million wheat stems. It finishes on an optimistic statement that the show is a “timely reminder” of the work of agriculture, dropping Australia’s export statistics and cutting to an interview with a wheat farmer.[4] The feature left me feeling that we had seen different exhibitions, because any trace of this labour felt intentionally hidden, save the occasional soundtracked drone of what might be a tractor. My thirst to learn anything about wheat was left unquenched by the work.
        For a collective that “believe[s] culture can change the way people see a place,” WHAC makes no effort to do so.[5] They simply don’t portray Wongan Hills as anything, it’s a convenient name drop to appear more regional than it actually is. The show is nothing more than an urban exercise in voyeurism—where the actual labour of agriculture is metastasised into a trendy liminal office space.
        The comparison to Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield—A Confrontation is ripe for obvious criticism. Placing the wheat-works side by side, the gaping discrepancy in artistic ambition and impact manifests clearly. Denes’ work was used as a springboard for conversations about wealth inequality and the environment, and seeking to directly “call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.”[6] It functioned by “wasting valuable real estate and obstructing the ‘machinery’ by going against the system, was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought for the calling to account.”[7] It is also important to situate the work in its broader New York context, where artistic discussion and critical culture flourished far more than it does in the current arts landscape of Western Australia.
        This effort to question values and draw attention to the obstruction of capitalistic machinery are all things you could say about WHAC’s installation, but they clearly don’t suggest that themselves. In fact, the curatorial messaging seems to obscure any criticality. Instead, the exhibition by-line simply states “A field arrives where it shouldn't.”[8] In this, the field functions as an entity in and of itself. By granting the wheat a pseudo-mystical status devoid of labour and intention— simply appearing in the office space—WHAC sacrifices any capital to discuss the act of obfuscating the corporate function of the space.
        This isn’t to say the Denes is perfect and WHAC is bad. There is a more complicated relationship present. Denes has faced criticism for the way in which her wheatfield simply served to reify capitalistic notions of land and failed to acknowledge the question of Indigeneity.[9] These are all criticisms that could broadly be given to There is nothing you need to do here. But the most obvious difference between the two shows is the question of what happens to the wheat. Denes’ wheat was harvested and used to feed NYPD horses (an act not with its own set of problems) and the seeds were distributed in The International Art Show to End World Hunger. At the very least, the wheat and labour of Denes’ urban intervention was acknowledged and propagated. What will the afterlife of WHAC’s first project be? How long will the ephemeral image of an office filled with wheat linger in our zeitgeist? My gut feeling says it will disappear rather quickly, living on through the strange archival function of the internet. You might stalk someone’s feed enough to see a post of them surrounded by wheat, or see it as the backdrop on a Hinge profile—but that is where it dies. There is nothing you need to do here, I do not think, will live on in the minds of its viewers. It would have had to offer something more than mere aesthetics if it were to do so. The fact that the show is so easily compressed into a series of cute aesthetic pics is perhaps the greatest evidence in showing the utter shallowness of the installation.
        At the end of this, There is nothing you need to do here encapsulates the increasingly shallow landscape of Perth’s art scene, where our exhibitions are more about branding than anything meaningfully creative. It sells itself as a transformative encounter with regional Australia but manifests merely as a fun photo op that puts in some tractor sounds and didactics to distract from its hollowness. It is a project spiritually aligned with private equity, appealing to as much of the mass as possible and in doing so, losing any actual power to do much of anything.
        But the future isn’t so grim. This is only the first installation of WHAC, who will undoubtedly be making more art after the resounding popularity of their first show. In this, they’ve played to their strengths—creating a visually appealing installation that captures the market with its on-trend play on an office space. The hope is that they can learn from this experience, and that their next show will turn that same prowess with marketing into something that does Wongan Hills, and regional Australia more broadly, some real justice.

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Footnotes:

[1] See https://whac.net.au/

[2] As noted in the wall text for There is nothing you need to do here, 2026, exhibition by WHAC (11 September – October 11)

[3] Ibid.

[4] This interview has been recorded via WHAC’s Instagram profile (@whac.ltd), https://www.instagram.com/p/DdWCzybM2izxrBgbaVIf3mECIQNWhEBuRlJOgg0/

[5] Wall text for There is nothing you need to do here.

[6] Cited in Hessel, Katy. 2022. ‘A Field of Wheat on a $4.5bn Patch of New York: The Prophetic Eco Art of Agnes Denes’. The Guardian, July 18.

[7] Ibid.

[8] See WHAC Events, https://whac.net.au/projects

[9] See, as examples, Husain, Amber, 2025.You’re Missing the Point of Agnes Denes’s ‘Wheatfield’. March 5. https://artreview.com/youre-missing-the-point-of-agnes-denes-wheatfield-feature-amber-husain/; and Rina, Amelia. 2021. ‘Seeds, Sharing, Manifestos: On Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation and “Manifesto”’. Brooklyn Rail, March. https://brooklynrail.org/2021/03/criticspage/Seeds-Sharing-Manifestos/.

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Header images: Courtesy of WHAC.