Becoming Home 安家. Stories of Chinese Australians. is a community engaging project with an exhibition outcome. It is initiated by the curator: Dr. Tammy Wong Hulbert and undertaken by contemporary artist Siying Zhou and sound artist Ai Yamamoto. This project is contributed by the engagement of the participants: Jenny Zhuang, Fiona Wu, Jiawen Lin, Leo Ren, Lesley Lowe (nee Cheong) and Paul Cheong, and in partnership with Museum of Chinese Australian History, RMIT University Contemporary Art and Social, Transformation (CAST) and Chinese Community Social Services Centre Inc.
The project explores ways that Chinese-Australians have made Maroondah their home through a journey of migration and finding an ideal place to live. Becoming Home also investigates the Cheong Family which settled in Croydon in the late 19th Century and donated land for public use.
Press:
An interview with Mo Lin for SBS Mandarin radio program.
Calling the Dead exhibited the selected works that are developed from ARART residency in 2019. The works are displayed in new permutation in accordance to the gallery space of FELTspace.
The works included in this exhibition include: the 6 channel video work, the digital print of a photograph on a large piece of fabric and the LED sign.
This exhibition reiterates the questions that I raised from the residency. What does the past of Australia mean to today’s immigrants? Do immigrants have the moral right to tell the history about Australia? How does immigrant’s engagement in the Australian history reshape the conception of truth and others’ imagination about the past? By showing a six-channel video installation, a photograph printed on a curtain and an altered LED sign, this exhibition uses multiple media to create a hybrid narrative space in which the contemplation of these questions can be situated. In this exhibition, the Chinese history in Ararat is presented through video narrative and imagined from the visual and audio cues. By showing the new tombstones of the Chinese graves in the Ararat cemetery in juxtaposition with the displays in Gum San Chinese Heritage Centre; by placing the narration of personal memories about the Chinese by the local European descendants in context of the artist’s representation of the Chinese history in Ararat, this exhibition propels the examination towards the authenticity of the narrated historical content and the conception of history. It also intends to underline a slippery relationship between immigrants and the Australian history. In front of the Australian history, immigrants are not only culturally othered but also othered by time.
