There is no Chinatown
Gallery
Snowwhait Gallery, Unitec
Year
2018
Location
Auckland, New Zealand
Ｍaterial
Hydrographic map, Namchow soap, dry day-lily, lithographic, clothing pattern of 80's Vogue, cyanotype
This project continues the creation of an archive begun in Shanghai in 2017 to develop a collection of documents and recordings that focus on ‘mobile’ identity and the archiving of ‘others.’ Few issues have aroused more interest in New Zealand in recent years than immigration – especially immigration from Asia. Since the gold rush in 1860, Asian immigration to New Zealand has steadily increased. We follow this story, looking for what has disappeared, and collecting what we can find -- looking for a Chinatown in New Zealand.
Although time is moving, light fades, and everything changes, the archive allows us to come face-to-face with something/someone passing, to see through the ghost of history into a parallel universe. Even though, over time, cultural differences have been minimized through globalization, we believe that specific signs still represent something for some people. During the residency, while immersing ourselves in the local environment, we have attempted to delineate the experience of Asian immigration in New Zealand through various activities: collecting and discovering ‘ready-mades’ from local second-hand markets, visiting the herbarium at the Auckland Museum to find Daylilies (‘mother’s flower’ in Taiwan), visiting the Auckland Lantern Festival and the Northcote Chinese New Year celebrations, making lithographic ‘documents’ in the Auckland Print Studio. These activities have allowed us to re-examine the relationship between notions of ‘we’ and ‘others’ (the figures of ‘those’ in the archive). We have tried to image, and to imagine, how immigrants build their identities through personal archives and histories that emerge between bicultural and multicultural perspectives.
Photo © Working Hard.