Join us for an afternoon with the curators and artists discussing the issues and ideas behind the exhibition Home and Away.

What does it mean to build an art practice in Australia while looking to ancestral ties to ‘elsewhere’? How is a transcultural or diasporic identity a form of ‘always postponed arrival’? And where is ‘home’?

Exhibition curators Dr Luise Guest and Jennifer Yang will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition and discuss the ways that the artists’ diverse material practices – from papercutting to painting, glass to bronze, textiles and ceramics to photomedia and video – are imbued with complex meanings related to their ancestral ties to Asia.

Artists Pamela Leung and Dr Tianli Zu will be in conversation with Luise and Jennifer to reveal more about the way they work within and beyond traditional media to explore complex issues of identity and language.

EVENT DETAILS
Saturday 2 December 2023
3-5pm
16albermarle Project Space
16 Albermarle Street 2042
Free; bookings recommended

About Tianli Zu

Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist Tianli Zu’s practice spans painting, sculpture, multimedia installations and video. But at the heart of her work are techniques of papercutting and Chinese folklore. Zu’s grandmother taught her simple paper cutting techniques, and her grandfather taught her calligraphy. Later, as an art student in Beijing she travelled to rural Shaanxi Province. Seated in tiny rural homes she learned papercutting from women who knew the traditional methods, listening to stories about the sources of imagery and symbolism. ‘It’s told through the story, the folklore, it’s lots of things that are forbidden, and there are lots of things that are so wild,’ she says. Her work in Home and Away juxtaposes Chinese traditions relating to health, longevity and the sharing of food with her love for the natural world.

About Pamela Leung

For Hong Kong-born multidisciplinary artist Pamela Leung, the idea of home is increasingly painful and the sense of loss acute. Is ‘home’ any longer recognisable when its history of a distinctly Cantonese language and culture is steadily erased? In neon signs, installations and performance works Leung examines how the loss of a unique Hong Kong identity exacerbates the pain of being separated from her own history. Her ongoing project, Agglomerate, is a collaborative work begun with her mother and continued with participants across the globe who send her long strings created from Chinese newspapers printed in the Traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. She crochets these into a woven mat of unreadable text – creating an artifact of an invisible and endangered cultural and linguistic history.

About Luise Guest

Writer, curator and academic Dr Luise Guest researches the work of contemporary women artists in Asia, most particularly in China. Her book Half the Sky (Piper Press, 2016) was based on interviews with more than 30 Chinese women artists, and she has contributed articles to numerous academic and generalist publications including the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Artist Profile, and Australasian Art Monthly. She curated Tao Aimin’s first Australian solo exhibition, Her Secret Code: Tao Aimin and Nüshu, at Vermilion Art, Sydney in April 2023. She is currently working on a book about women artists who subvert the male-dominated ink painting tradition, to be published by Bloomsbury Academic.

About Jennifer Yang

Art historian, arts writer, and curator Jennifer Yang completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Diploma of Language at the University of Sydney with First Class Honours and the University Medal in 2022. Jennifer has previously curated Our Grandfather Road (2022) at 16albermarle Project Space. Her writing appears in Artlink, Memo, New Mandala, Art & Market’s Check-In, Trans Asia Photography Journal, and Southeast of Now (latter two forthcoming). Research interests include photographic cultures, migrancy, and transnational and feminist histories in Southeast Asian contexts. She is due to commence her PhD candidature at the University of Sydney in 2024.