Echoes of Home Index

ECHOES OF HOME:Memory and mobility in recent Austral-Asian art

The truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision. (1)
- Salman Rushdie

When one is ‘home’ it is not usual to question, or even notice, specificities or oddities of the surrounding society — that is, when ‘home’ is singular. Yet, traversing two or more ‘homes’ often prompts questioning and rumination on not only the new but also the old. From this comparative position, differences are accentuated and even discreet cultural variants seem to become manifest, stimulating enquiry into the construction of cultural norms, belief systems and boundaries. As Bombay-born, New York-based writer Salman Rushdie identifies, straddling two worlds provides double vision, often coupled with acuity. Even though this is not a new occurrence, ‘home’ is increasingly plural, with identities of selfhood blurring. Artists across various disciplines and of diverse ‘homes’, including Rushdie himself, draw on this double vision, an ‘in-between-ness’, not necessarily in a search to resolve their specific positioning, but as a means to use disjuncture to hone their gaze and consider their various worlds and their own elves.

The recent prominence of emigrant artists from Asia in Australia’s contemporary art trajectory is considerable, and has significantly influenced contemporary craft in Australia. ‘Echoes of Home: Memory and Mobility in Recent Austral-Asian Art’ explores the work of 14 Australian artists, all of whom have more than one sense of home. In addition to Australia, their homelands are throughout the Asian region. With their own specific approaches, practices and styles, and responding to a multiplicity of influences, these artists all use in-between-ness in some way to inform their practice. This project’s focus on Austral-Asian practitioners who use elements of craft or who draw from craft traditions is premised on the need to examine this area of contemporary Australian visual culture.

Fundamental to ‘Echoes of Home’ is the concept of the artist as an individual, with unique influences and experiences. The exhibition considers the various skills, traditions and stories from homelands that each of the artists brings to their contemporary practice, as well as the effect of their Australian lives, and other cultural stimuli. This inquiry into artists and their relationship with home, of course, is not new. We have seen increased interest in this association since at least the mid 1990s, with globalisation making even more pronounced the movement of people and ideas across borders, and lending greater urgency to the meaning of national identities. ‘Echoes of Home’uses this relationship with home to present personal story as a means to help dispel the misperception of the Asian region as a monolithic, culturally homogenous entity.

In doing so, the exhibition recognises some of the complexity and diversity of cultures within Asia and the ever-increasing presence of cultural practices by artists from Asian backgrounds within Australian culture/s (2). Questions of memory and mobility and their interrelationship are significant to this project. How does mobility affect memory, and how does memory determine routes for mobility? Memory is normally understood as a recollection of the past. But it is mobility that brings the past into focus as in the case of Australian-Vietnamese designer Alistair Trung.

Rather than presuming to survey the field of Austral-Asian craft or art practice, this exhibition explores the work of individual practitioners to offer vital insights. These snapshots of artists’ personal stories can provide a glimpse into some of the heterogeneity of cultural influences throughout the Asian region that these particular artists embrace. In some instances, such snapshots can also demonstrate the multiplicities within Asia’s nation states, and the growing porousness of national borders. Minority groups within cultures, varied colonial influences and shifting borderlines are but the obvious examples when considering the difficulties of characterising national identities within contemporary Asia. Often artists who identify as belonging to an ethnic, religious or historically stigmatised minority group within a specific culture will draw on this altered perception of nation and self, as the work of Dadang Christanto in this exhibition exemplifies.

Historically, and increasingly today, nations need to be seen as interlocking entities — although recently we have paradoxically seen countries including our own fortify borders. Across the Asian region, cultural and artistic transferences and interactions, have been taking place over the centuries. Buddhist artistic styles from India influencing Chinese style and aesthetic, is but one of many possible examples (3). The late Palestinian-American cultural critic Edward Said asked, ‘What culture today — whether Japanese, Arab, European, Korean, Chinese, or Indian — has not had long, intimate, and extraordinarily rich contacts with other cultures?’(4). Recent theoretical investigation of the permeability of national boundaries, with the growth of cosmopolitan cultures and concepts of unfixed, transnational and hybrid identities, shows how cultures can no longer be understood as having a static relation to a particular location (5). Cultural theorist, Ien Ang, herself an Asian-Australian, speaks about the growing importance of transnational connections and diasporic linkages in Asian-Australian cultural identifications. She explains that, as a consequence, ‘the representation of Asians “here” is inextricably linked to that of Asia “there”, making porous the boundaries between “Asia” and “Australia” (6)'.

Mainstream public discourse in Australia is, however, still bound by binary oppositions such as self/other and Australia/Asia. Though Australia has embraced the varied cuisines of Asia, and indeed promotes the fusion between the ‘local’ and the ‘Asian’, there still remains superficiality when it comes to further notions of Australia as a blend of various Asian cultural elements. In its incorporation of cultural diversity, Australia remains largely selective, only accepting particular components that are ‘traditionally authentic’ and pristine, from Asian ‘imagined communities’ (7). Australia’s mainstream ideology of nationhood is still by and large framed with entrenched notions of difference. This can in part be attributed to the insecurity of Australia’s own identity. Former diplomat and writer on Australian-Asian relations, Alison Broinowski recently wrote of Australia as an unscripted continent, a country whose identity remains uncertain and indistinct (8). The ongoing enquiry into the need to collectively name Australians from backgrounds other than Anglo-Celtic reveals some basis for the ambiguity of this identity.

‘Echoes of Home’ hopes to add to Australia’s collective sense of pluralism — forming identities increasingly comfortable with a blend of diverse cultural elements. By gaining some understanding of the various layers of influence that inform the artistic practices of Australians from Asian backgrounds it is possible to deepen appreciation of the multiplicity of our society as well as that of the Asian region, and thus challenge stereotypes associated with both. Through this means it is also possible to help dispel the associative coupling of Asian art with tradition and Western societies’ art with contemporaneity. ‘Echoes of Home’ demonstrates that although some of these artists draw on the long histories of craft practices within the cultures of their ancestral homelands, they use such techniques for contemporary applications.

The artists included in the exhibition also reflect country-specific artistic strengths: there is a prevalence of artists of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) descent working with ceramics and metal, with artists of South-East Asian ancestry (exemplified here by artists from Vietnam and Laos) tending to draw upon their countries’ strong textile traditions. This media specificity brings into consideration the way particular crafts and art are integrated within the craft-art nexus of the various Asian countries’ discourses.

Recent Japanese and Korean artistic trajectories illustrate the reverence given to particular crafts, with many artists notably in Japan comfortably blurring any division between craft and art. One does not, however, see this craft-art unification across the Asian region. Textiles in many South-East Asian countries are still seen within the traditional craft construct, primarily due to market forces – tourism and the dictates of Western markets (9). Within their own communities, recognition of textile artists working across this craft-art divide is occurring more so as a consequence of their acknowledgment within Western institutions (10). One does see, however, a strong reliance on craft techniques, local skills and natural fibres in the practice of contemporary artists from this region, as evidenced in the exhibition.

When looking at the works in ‘Echoes of Home’ it is clear that the artists take various positions and approaches, at times allied but often distinct, when considering the societies they straddle and their own selves within these societies. Several artists compare and juxtapose elements from their two cultures, while others investigate associations between home, family, celebrations and particular designs, or incorporate influences from their local Australian surrounds into their established practices.

Liu Xiao Xian, Shine Myung-ok Shin and Jaishree Srinivasan all draw directly on aspects of Australian culture coupled with that of their respective homelands. Liu Xiao Xian, using a comparative thematic, employs a generalist East-West division and explores the various societal and cultural layers perceived as making up these two categorisations, which are often depicted as conflicting forces. Through various approaches, including humour, suggestiveness, irony and subversion, he comments on some of the absurdity, inequity and mainstream perspective he observes primarily in his Australian society. His extended period in China in 2004 marked his first substantive artistic return, and provided Liu with the opportunity to transpose his vision, looking at the ‘West’ from the ‘East’. The couple, his work in this exhibition made during this residency looks at the Eastern and Western models of medicinal treatment and shows, more than in previous works, a parity of vision and interpretation of his two societies.

Shine Myung-ok Shin takes a far more localised approach, juxtaposing Australian and Korean texts and motifs in her textural enamelled metal ware. Unlike Liu’s works, Shin is not employing comparative social commentary between Australia and her homeland, but draws on recognisable clichés from both countries. Drawing on an intimacy with the Korean tea ceremony and its cultural import, she plays with Australiana and ‘Koreana’, creating objects that are removed from functionality by their construction and size. As the Korean sources for her motifs and texts precede the Australian sources by three centuries, Shin is largely concerned with their associative meanings within each culture and their combined visual juxtaposition.

Jaishree Srinivasan’s recent work, which draws on a richly personal visual language primarily from South Asian iconography, illustrates her ability to question the cultural norms, belief systems and boundaries of the two worlds she traverses. Her works in the exhibition, Sub version and Revision use the kolam – floor decorations drawn by South Indian women – to explore India-specific as well as universal perceptions and expectations of women. Prior to 2003, Srinivasan’s work illustrated a strong correspondence with personal memories and specific objects from her homeland. Recently, however, she has been able to combine these earlier links with an engagement with issues involving both of her societies and having wider human significance.

The works of Renee So and Pamela Mei-Leng See are also strongly informed by the legacy of their cultural heritages. However, both artists lack familiarity with and intimate personal knowledge of these cultures. For both, this sense of ‘home’ is removed from daily realities, remaining at many levels a ‘mythical’ entity. As a corollary, their respective works demonstrate representations of cultural heritage portrayed with distance and at times independence. Hong Kong born Renee So, speaks about her indistinct sense of ‘home’ — Hong Kong and/or the People’s Republic of China as well as Australia. Through her medium of knitting, her current work focuses on chinoiserie which itself is a (mis)representation of Chinese culture through a Western decorative style. Her five works in the exhibition play with this notion of Oriental/Occidental representation, a notion that has retained currency to this day. Renee So uses Oriental iconography within Occidental traditions ‘to create a fantastic and aesthetically pleasing ideal of an idyllic, alternate world … Asia’ (11).

Pamela Mei-Leng See is the only artist in the exhibition born in Australia. She maintains a strong identification with her Chinese-Malaysian background, an identification that has partly been fuelled by a recurring recognition within Australia as coming from ‘somewhere else.’ This stress on genealogy in Australian culture is an issue explored by many Asian-Australian theorists over the past decade (12) and this, together with See’s personal identification as belonging to a relocated cultural minority group has informed her practice over the past six years. See’s work in ‘Echoes of Home’continues her investigation into using the paper-cut craft techniques of her Chinese ancestors, applying a contemporary perspective to its inherently associated cultural significations. It continues her exploration of cross-cultural references, offering to her audience counterpoints from her dual identification for interpretation and reflection.

Dadang Christanto’s mixed media installation Daun-daun yang mengangis (The leaves that cry), presents another instance of an artist working from the perspective of identifying with a minority group within his cultural framework. Christanto, who is now based in Brisbane after living in Darwin for seven years, is an Indonesian of Chinese descent and one of many Indonesians who have suffered stigmatisation due to familial association with the massacres of 1965-66 (13). Since his move to Australia in 1999, Christanto’s work can be interpreted as relating directly to the Indonesian context from his personal perspective of belonging to a particular minority group. This is not necessarily a consequence of distance and retrospection but rather an example of autonomy and increased societal acceptance. Yet Daun-daun yang mengangis, like all of Christanto’s work, elicits multiple interpretations. This work can be read as a shrine to his father along with other victims of the Indonesian massacre, and to the countless others who have suffered systemic violence and racial discrimination.

The coupled associations of home and family are a recurring thematic in ‘Echoes of Home’. Alwin Reamillo’s installation Study for the Mang Emo grand piano project (upright action), which comprises of experimental ready-mades and draws from the craft of piano design and assemblage, corresponds with Christanto’s work as it is also a shrine to an absent father. Reamillo’s recent work has seen him return to previous concerns of self and home, exploring the connections and contrasts between his own life with that of his own father, and his own son. Although based in Perth since 1995, his work has remained quintessentially concerned with the Filipino neo-colonial contemporary condition, using his distance to examine acutely the overarching concerns and nuances pertaining to this construct and his own sense of place and identity.

Central to Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s recent investigation into her cultural heritage has been her collaboration with her father. Over the past 14 years her paintings have engaged with repetition, investigating motifs from various sources including textile designs from her parental homeland of Laos. Three works from 1994 in ‘Echoes of Home’ exemplify this alliance, as well as her fascination with the Australian bush. Her engagement with repetition continues in her current series of paintings. Significantly, for the first time in her work, this series forms a direct and personal engagement with her Lao sense of home. In this series, of which two works are included in the exhibition, Vongpoothorn’s father not only assisted with the manual work of perforating the canvases, but also formed the source of inspiration. For Vongpoothorn, her connection with Laos is removed from geographical location; it is her relationship with her parents that informs her exploration and sense of connection.

The work of Humna Mustafa is intrinsically linked to familial associations and memories of celebrations. Recently arrived in Australia, Mustafa continues to look to her native Pakistan for symbolic and customary associations, and although created primarily as an act of devotion her work retains strong references to specific celebrations. The exhibited work Journey of patterns has moved Mustafa away from the domestic object to suspended silk panelling. This work is premised on the universal theme of the female lifecycle, which in itself is referential to the significance of henna and the analogy between henna and women in her homeland.

Memories of celebrations and festivals are also instrumental stimuli for Japanese-born jeweller Yuri Kawanabe. The process of paper model making rekindles memories — joyous memories that evoke a sense of excitement — of creating with her father Japanese ceremonial decorations for various seasonal festivals. Since moving to Australia and subsequent travel to various countries in Asia, Kawanabe has felt resonances with the traditional ephemeral decorations in other Asian cultures. Her works in the exhibition draw influence not only from Japanese decorations, but are also inspired by her travels in Asia, particularly, and most recently, India where she was captivated by distinctive patternings and the use of vivid and contrasting colour combinations.

Correspondingly to Kawanabe, Vietnamese-born Alistair Trung appreciates that he brings to his clothing practice a certain design sensibility from his homeland. For Trung however, this has been a recent recognition, a case of memory being sparked off by mobility. It has only been since his recent visit to Vietnam in late 2004 that he has become aware of the extent of the influence his familial home and surroundings have had on his practice. Although his practice involves an eclectic fusion of worldwide fabrics and influences, this visit highlighted to Trung that stimuli from his childhood — particular colours, patterning and design — are essential to his creations and clothing philosophy.

Inspiration from the Australian landscape is another theme that has emerged in the exhibition. Three artists, Won Seok Kim, Keiko Amenomori-Scheisser and Yoshie Minuzo, have all been influenced in various ways by the Australian landscape and incorporate these effects into their established practices. Korean-born Won Seok Kim, speaks of the polarity he feels between his two worlds: the societies’ constructs, ways of life and belief systems. By combining techniques from ancient Korean Punch’ong ware with imagery from his local Australian landscape, he has found a means of personal expression and cross-cultural significance. Kim talks of finding sympathy between Punch’ong ware and aspects of the Australian landscape, such as the rough textures and muted colours of the bush, as well as other associations.

Keiko Amenomori-Schmeisser is a cosmopolitan artist who has traversed between Japan, Germany and Australia for most of her life. She was drawn to the Japanese craft technique of shibori through the desire to find a suitable means to express her feelings of the Australian landscape’s restrained and, at times, potent energy, as well as her personal experiences. Amenomori-Schmeisser originally worked in fabric screen-printing, but found in her contemporary application of the craft of shibori, with the memory of its process retained and visible, an eloquence to speak of her Australian surrounding and life.

Yoshie Mizuno, who was also born in Japan, employs in her fibre installation, Aya, stimuli from specific formations from the Australian landscape such as the large termite mounds of northern Australia. Yet Mizuno’s work draws potency from her Japanese heritage, with these forms maintaining strong alliances with Zen philosophy, the Japanese sensibility of beauty, and the incorporation of traditional Japanese skills of wrapping and weaving. Through her art Mizuno attempts to bring together the nuances from her two cultures, exploring the connections, differences and tensions at play.

When looking at the artists’ work in ‘Echoes of Home’ the thoughts of Salman Rushdie once again seem apposite — ‘It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained’ (14). The concept of translation can, of course, extend beyond language, and through its various interpretations one can recognise the exhibiting artists’ use of translation as a mechanism to view the world through more than one perspective. In the words of cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s, this is the ‘third space’ of hybridity (15). Through an interplay of memory and mobility the artists incorporate ‘echoes of home’ in their works, not merely to reflect on memories but to add another layer to their artistic insights and practice. Whether as deep reverberations or as subliminal murmurs, these echoes offer to the artists and to the trajectory of Australian visual art, multiplicity, counterpoints and contestations in the interpretation of contemporary practice.

Christine Clark, 2005
© Museum of Brisbane and the author

Endnotes:
(1) Salman Rushdie, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p.5.

(2) The viewer/reader needs to be mindful that the artists and the works in this exhibition can not be read as ‘representative’, either of modes of expression within Asia or within current Austral-Asian artistic practice. It is also important to recognise that although the works in this exhibition are informed in some ways by the artists’ ethnic or cultural backgrounds, it would be erroneous to make this correlation with the work of all Austral-Asian artists.

(3) Caroline Turner, ‘Internationalism and regionalism: Paradoxes of identity,’ in Caroline Turner (ed.), Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1993, p. xiii.

(4) Edward Said, ‘The Clash of definitions’, in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 583.

(5) Seminal work in this area includes Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994 and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.

(6) Ien Ang, ‘Introduction’, in Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers and others (eds), Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media, and Popular Culture, Pluto Press Australia Limited, Annandale, 2000, p. xx.

(7) Mandy Thomas, ‘Fantasia: Transnational Flows and Asian Popular Culture in Australia’, in Ang, Chalmers and others (eds), pp.201-217.

(8) Alison Broinowski, About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia, Scribe Publications, North Carlton, 2003, pp.3-11,219-29

(9) Hazel Clark, ‘A questions of absence – or why is there not textile art in Hong Kong’, in Sue Rowley (ed.) Reinventing Textiles, Volume 1, Tradition and Innovation, Telos Art Publishing, Winchester, 1999, p. 134.

(10) An example of this was the inclusion of batik artists Nia Fliam and Agus Ismoyo from Yogyakarta, Indonesia in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, 1999. After their inclusion in this prominent ‘Western’ contemporary art event, their Indonesian contemporaries’ perception of their practice altered.

(11) Renee So, artist’s statement, 16 February 2005, in the possession of the artist.

(12) See the work of Ien Ang, Tseen Khoo, Jacqueline Lo, Suvendrini Perera. References include: Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers and others (eds), Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media, and Popular Culture, Pluto Press Australia Limited, Annandale, 2000; Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo & Jacqueline Lo, Diaspora: Negotiating Asia Australia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2000; Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, Routledge, London and New York, 2001.

(13) An abortive coup in 1965, supposedly orchestrated by members of the Indonesian military, led to massive reprisals against persons identified as members or supporters of PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), the Indonesian Communist Party, as well as supposed communists and many others. It is estimated that between 100,000 and two million people ‘disappeared’ in Indonesia from October 1965 to March 1966. The most common estimate of the death toll is 500,000.

(14) Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Granta Books, London, 1991, p. 17.

(15) Bhabha, pp.36-9.