Asian New Zealand contemporary art and visual culture
AISHA JOHAN | Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan are a husband-and-wife team who emigrated from the Philippines to Australia in 2006. Their artworks often address themes of displacement, change, memory and community. Together they have exhibited at a number of international exhibitions including the 50th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia…
TESSA MA’AUGA | Mana is a significant concept in Aotearoa and the Pacific region. It has often been translated as ‘power’, ‘prestige’, and ‘authority’. Unlike the word ‘power’ though, mana as a concept has more quickly evolved away from associations with ‘domination’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘control’…
XIN CHENG | A few days after listening to ‘The Danger of the Single Story’, I headed to the other side of the earth, to join the class Design for the Living World at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. Quite a change of scenery — yet the questions remain, this time through the lens of ‘solidary societies’, as we prepared for a research residency in Mexico City…
NATASHA MATILA-SMITH | Yukari Kaihori is a Japanese artist based in Whanganui-a-Tara who creates paintings which examine the intersections between physical and metaphysical landscapes, often employing chance mark-making that invites rich associations between nature and the psychological. Her current exhibition at Corban Estate Art Centre runs until 27 May 2018…
AMY WENG | Louie Bretaña is a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts and the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines. His work actively challenges Euro-western colonial histories through relational practices, encouraging a respectful engagement with culture via conversation and food…
AMY WENG | Ruby White will be familiar to many as the creative mastermind behind Miss Changy, a food-as-art project that has recently brought some of the most exciting pop-up culinary experiences in Tāmaki Auckland. Amy Weng spoke to White about her practice, subverting the Ford assembly line, and the art and politics of food…
AMY WENG | The late 90s for me were spent being towed from gou ma to yi yi in the back of a sticky Honda Civic. At each stop my siblings and I would sit in terrified silence, guarded by a small yet aggressive terrier while our parents and elders poured tea and exchanged news from their homeland.…
XIN CHENG | The last three months of 2015, I lived on a trash mountain. I thought I was going to an eco-park. The morning after my arrival, I walked out of where I had slept, and discovered a giant dome building, a huge chimney, trucks coming in, and a blinking board of what looked like toxic chemicals with numbers beside them…
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangarangatanga maha, tēnā koutou katoa Hainamana invites you to a hui to discuss the role of Asian New Zealand artists in the field of contemporary art. Over the past two decades, the emergence of Asia as an economic and cultural epicentre has lead to a re-evaluation of…
AISHA JOHAN | FX Harsono is a leading figure within the Indonesian contemporary art scene. Over the past four decades, his work has developed against the backdrop of the rise and fall of the Soeharto regime, through revolution and reformation. On the eve of Jakarta’s election, which have incited simmering racial and religious tensions in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Harsono’s practice resonates with the national search for plurality. Aisha Johan caught up with the artist to talk…
AISHA JOHAN | I am very drawn to one of your works, Pilgrimage to History, 2013. I feel that you are giving a voice to those who no longer have one, from mass grave to mass audience. Could you please tell me more about the work? FX Harsono: In the beginning, I started this project about the genocide and mass grave that I had found out about in Blitar, a city where I was born and raised…
KAORU KODAMA | On 16 November 2016, there were protests on the Auckland waterfront. New Zealand Defence Industry Association’s 19th Defence Industry Forum was planned to take place at the Viaducts Events Centre, however, having one of the world’s largest nuclear arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, as its main sponsor, and described by activist organisations as a weapons exposition…