Future Flowering
18.03.20-04.04.20
Solo exhibition, Play_Station, Wellington
Future Flowering is a reiteration of Reconfigure(d) exhibition following my artist residency at Making Space in Guangzhou, China. It comprises a series of handmade batik fabrics and two video recordings. One video features a sunset scene at Pearl river in Guangzhou, another features a sunset scene with Muslim call to prayer at a local beach in my hometown Aceh, Indonesia. Guangzhou is the nearest port city to my ancestors’ hometown Huizhou. As the two screens meet, the two horizons converge as one continuous line, connecting the two places and countries I am affiliated with together.
Guangdong Province is also the province where the first recorded Chinese New Zealanders immigrated from, in mid-1800s. Located along the South China sea, Guangzhou was an important hub for maritime transportation and trades connecting China and the West from the early Tang Dynasty until the 17th and 18th centuries where tea, ceramics, and textiles were brought into Europe as luxurious items.
The batik fabrics incorporate diverse patterns I am connected with; they tell a story of my navigations across and between cultures. Using Tjanting, a traditional pen-like tool for applying hot wax, I draw patterns that never return to the same form – each repetition contains small differences and displacements. By leaving most of the wax on the fabrics, rather than boiling it all off, I am deliberately fabricating a language of non-integration, and incompleteness. This incompleteness and ambiguity in the process points to a temporality of the ‘in-between’. This in-between condition allows 'newness' to come into the world.
* All photos by Hendrix Brendon, courtesy of Play_Station
List of work:
Boteh/Paisley, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 4000x1080mm.
Peonies, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 3200x1080mm.
Cempaka/Magnolia, 2019, melted wax drawing on linen, 5200x1100mm.
Waves of Migration, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 3200x1080mm.
Pearl River, 2019, single-channel video, 5.21 min, colour and sound.
Adzan, 2018, single-channel video, 5.21 min, colour and sound.
18.03.20-04.04.20
Solo exhibition, Play_Station, Wellington
Future Flowering is a reiteration of Reconfigure(d) exhibition following my artist residency at Making Space in Guangzhou, China. It comprises a series of handmade batik fabrics and two video recordings. One video features a sunset scene at Pearl river in Guangzhou, another features a sunset scene with Muslim call to prayer at a local beach in my hometown Aceh, Indonesia. Guangzhou is the nearest port city to my ancestors’ hometown Huizhou. As the two screens meet, the two horizons converge as one continuous line, connecting the two places and countries I am affiliated with together.
Guangdong Province is also the province where the first recorded Chinese New Zealanders immigrated from, in mid-1800s. Located along the South China sea, Guangzhou was an important hub for maritime transportation and trades connecting China and the West from the early Tang Dynasty until the 17th and 18th centuries where tea, ceramics, and textiles were brought into Europe as luxurious items.
The batik fabrics incorporate diverse patterns I am connected with; they tell a story of my navigations across and between cultures. Using Tjanting, a traditional pen-like tool for applying hot wax, I draw patterns that never return to the same form – each repetition contains small differences and displacements. By leaving most of the wax on the fabrics, rather than boiling it all off, I am deliberately fabricating a language of non-integration, and incompleteness. This incompleteness and ambiguity in the process points to a temporality of the ‘in-between’. This in-between condition allows 'newness' to come into the world.
* All photos by Hendrix Brendon, courtesy of Play_Station
List of work:
Boteh/Paisley, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 4000x1080mm.
Peonies, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 3200x1080mm.
Cempaka/Magnolia, 2019, melted wax drawing on linen, 5200x1100mm.
Waves of Migration, 2020, melted wax drawing and fabric dye on cotton, 3200x1080mm.
Pearl River, 2019, single-channel video, 5.21 min, colour and sound.
Adzan, 2018, single-channel video, 5.21 min, colour and sound.
