‘Cultural Fusion’ @ BLOK Design Associates in Cyberspace
Lunar New Year is widely celebrated amongst Asian communities around the world as an occasion where families and friends get together under the same roof, share a sumptuous feast, and exchange heartfelt wishes.
In celebration of the beginning of 2022’s Lunar New Year, Brisbane-based curator Dr Martha Liew has pioneered Cultural Fusion, an online exhibition that showcases the works of five Asian-Australian artists. In both theory and practice, this fusion shapes and informs not only individual identities but also the collective culture of a place.
Through the exhibition, Elysha Rei, Jonathan Tse, Kay Watanabe, Louis Lim, and Paul Bai explore aspects of their cultural experiences as first, second, or third-generation migrants in Australia, seeking to broaden the audience of the often underrepresented genre of Asian-Australian art.
Jonathan Tse, Portrait of an Australian, 1998. Screenprinted artist’s book, 13 cm x 9 cm, 32 pp. Edition: 10 + 2 A.P.
“Having been raised and educated in Australia since the 1980s, I have witnessed the transformation of the Chinese community over the last three or four decades. As Paul Bai points out, even though we know many Asian-Australian artists are contributing to this great country’s cultural landscape and identity, Asian-Australian art remains underrepresented and misunderstood in some places. Cultural Fusion was designed to address this misconception by showing the diverse talent of Asian-Australian art through an online platform. My goal is to provide artists with an opportunity to expose their art to a broader audience.”
Elysha Rei, 2022 Year of the (Water) Tiger, Featuring Corona Virus, 2022. Sumi ink on hand-cut paper (unframed), 27.9 cm x 21 cm.
Japanese-Australian artist Elysha Rei presents three pieces of delicate paper-cutting artworks in BLOK Design Associates’ online showroom. Having spent her life in Asia and Oceania, she plants symbols from both eastern and western cultures in her artistic practice, giving special affiliation to her personal experience, family heritage, and the habitat that groomed her. In 2022 Year of the (Water) Tiger, Featuring Corona Virus (2022), she crafts a tiger standing up high atop the claws of the waves, his eyes piercing into the eastern horizon and his head radiating prowess against the coronavirus sign at the backdrop. This artwork opens the online exhibition in the Lunar New Year of the Water Tiger, projecting a triumphant and determined spirit to rise above the pandemic. Water is a recurrent motif in Rei’s creations, commenting on the drifting nature between countries in her upbringing and the sea journeys made by her ancestors to settle in Australia. Throughout the years, she has consistently paid homage to her hybrid heritage through her practice, especially her paper cut series that surrounds themes of drought in Australia and nuclear meltdown in Japan.
Jonathan Tse, Go Back to Where You Came From, 2016.
Installation with 2000 Australian stamps & 1 Hong Kong stamp, dimensions variable.
Memories result in compelling inspiration for artists. In 1975, Jonathan Tse migrated with his parents to Australia at the age of six. His artworks evoke a lingering sense of nostalgia through references to Hong Kong in the 70s, as if he could travel through time to reconnect with his birthplace. Amongst the multi-disciplinary practices he demonstrates in Cultural Fusion, we are brought to the many pages of an autobiographical ‘immigrant’s passport,’ trailing his life in Australia since his migration. Tse printed old images of his family and his new school, accompanied with simple sentences recording his migrant experience in children’s handwriting in both Chinese and English like, “me and my brother are our school’s first pair of Chinese.” The work narrates the simple mindset of a child migrant and evokes a feeling of passivity towards the life-changing decision of migration made solely by his parents. Through this work, Tse demonstrates a portrait of his younger self and reveals his own mental journey of how he came to identify himself as an Australian.
Pages from Jonathan Tse’s Portrait of an Australian, 1998.
Covid confinement has reconnected many people with nature. The therapeutic experience of walking in the woods void of urban interruptions has a profound impact on the dialogue we have with our inner self. Kay Watanabe’s artworks draw close resonance to nature, displacing the political or social definition of borders. During her trip to her city of origin Tokyo in 2020-21, she produced In the woods, thinking (triptych) (2020), by way of Japanese mokuhanga, a type of woodblock prints on Japanese paper. The arrangement of the three prints into a triptych expands the otherwise limiting landscape in the solo prints, allowing the trees and lakes to branch out beyond the boundaries of the paper–a proliferation of the sense of space and the view of the world. The human figures are humbled in the woods and invite us to rediscover our bond with the natural environment and reflect on the bigger questions of the impermanence of human existence.
Kay Watanabe, In the woods, thinking, triptych, 2020. Japanese mokuhanga woodblock prints on Japanese paper, 30 cm x 21 cm for each print and 30 cm x 63 cm for the triptych.
Coming from a Malaysian-Chinese migrant family, Louis Lim captures the under-represented human condition through photography. He features primarily human portraits and interactions in his photographs and conjures up a unique state of emotions frozen in frames. In Cultural Fusion, Lim exhibits two shots of cultivated plants in the Australian suburb of Sunnybank where he grew up, telling intimate stories tailing his Asian origin. Despite the absence of human figures, the static depiction of the environment evokes the human activities behind the garden arrangements. Passion Satellite (2017) features a satellite dish inhabited by passionfruit vines. Once an apparatus for his family to access TV channels in Asia, it has adopted a new role as a climbing frame to support the growth of plants. Lim reinvents the new identity of the “passion satellite” that thrives upon Australian soil with a sentimental foothold in Asian culture, with the reengineering of the satellite dish plotting the migration history of his family and silently echoing the reminiscence of his Asian roots. With a keen interest in light, he illuminates both the past and the present of the subject, revealing the anecdotes of his life at the intersection of the two cultures.
Louis Lim, Passion Satellite, 2017. Archival Inkjet print, 50 cm x 40 cm.
Born in Tianjin and later moving to Australia in 1988, Paul Bai creates art in various mediums including painting, sculpture, video, collage, and photography. He challenges the notion of space by studying the relationship of content in conjunction with context. In the four artworks showcased by Bai in Cultural Fusion, he employs bold block colours in acrylic, ink, and watercolour, and applies them on canvas, wood, and paper in conceptual configurations. The geometrical composition and monochromatic aesthetics accentuate not only the rich hues of colour but also the negative space. The fusing of these elements, as well as the fusing of the two materials, displays the breadth and depth of Bai’s artistic practice. Similarly to cross-cultural encounters, the relationship between these different elements is fascinating and is sometimes surprising and revealing.
Paul Bai, Untitled Study for line, form, inter-zone, night sky and other in-between moments (No.3), 2017. Japanese ink on watercolour paper, 20.8 cm x 28 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Australian Fine Arts.
Paul Bai, Sunrise and Sunset in the Landscape No.7, 2019. Watercolour on paper, 9.2 cm x 27.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Australian Fine Arts.
The journey of Cultural Fusion has taken us through many stories of the artists and their heritages, as well as the narratives of their cultural identities and their artistic practices. Consequently, this provides a unique point of view from Asian-Australian artists inside the art world. The online exhibition exemplifies the goodwill of the Lunar New Year, as well as the spirit of togetherness with the Australian community at a time when this unity is crucial.
In the past week, Eastern Australia has been battered by a “rain bomb,” killing more than a dozen and displacing tens of thousands from their homes. If you want to donate to assist in crisis relief and response in Australia, you can do so via the Australian Red Cross to help provide humanitarian support to people and communities in Queensland and New South Wales affected by the 2022 floods.
Cultural Fusion is on view online via BLOK Design Associates until 31 March 2022.
Alison Lo
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED