'Future Flowering"
Play_Station, Wellington (18/03/2020-04/04/2020),
Future Flowering comprises a series of handmade batik fabrics and two video recordings. One video features the Muslim call to prayer at a local beach in my hometown Aceh, Indonesia, at sunset time. Another video features the sunset scene of Pearl river in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, the nearest city to my ancestors’ hometown. Guangdong Province is also the province where the first recorded Chinese New Zealanders immigrated from, in mid-1800s. As the two screens meet, the two horizons converge as one continuous line, connecting the two places and countries I am affiliated with together.
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 cultural patterns I am connected with; they tell a story of my navigations across and between cultures. Using a Tjanting, the traditional pen-like tool for applying liquid 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.
Play_Station, Wellington (18/03/2020-04/04/2020),
Future Flowering comprises a series of handmade batik fabrics and two video recordings. One video features the Muslim call to prayer at a local beach in my hometown Aceh, Indonesia, at sunset time. Another video features the sunset scene of Pearl river in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, the nearest city to my ancestors’ hometown. Guangdong Province is also the province where the first recorded Chinese New Zealanders immigrated from, in mid-1800s. As the two screens meet, the two horizons converge as one continuous line, connecting the two places and countries I am affiliated with together.
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 cultural patterns I am connected with; they tell a story of my navigations across and between cultures. Using a Tjanting, the traditional pen-like tool for applying liquid 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.
