Wellington zine artist makes home-made history

Don’t move house, be sure to feed hungry ghosts and keep your sug­ar bowl full next month. August is the month of the Ghost Fest­iv­al (15 August) or ‘Chinese Hal­loween’ – the time when spir­its of the dead vis­it the liv­ing.

Chinese fam­il­ies observe this date through Bai Shan, which involves light­ing incense, burn­ing joss papers and pre­par­ing a ban­quet to share with ancest­ors. Such cus­toms have long been observed since the Chinese first arrived in New Zea­l­and nearly a cen­tury and a half ago. They also fea­ture in an upcom­ing exhib­i­tion by loc­al artist Kerry Ann Lee – Home Made: Pic­tur­ing Chinese Set­tle­ment in New Zea­l­and, which opens on 31 July at Toi Pōneke Gal­lery.

Read more after the jump…

Kerry Ann’s fam­ily, the Lees, ran the Gold Coin Café in Wil­lis Street dur­ing the early 1980s, where the back­room stor­age cup­board served as her first stu­dio. Of that time Kerry Ann says:

Grow­ing up as a post-punk baby in Wel­ling­ton for me meant demol­ish­ing gigant­ic bowls of wonton soup at the Shang­hai on Cour­tenay Place, watch­ing Jack­ie Chan chop, kick, and hi-yah on my grand­par­ent’s tele­vi­sion set and fall­ing asleep on chairs while my folks closed up the café each night

Kerry Ann cre­ates “play­ful and con­ver­sa­tion­al” worlds out of paper, scalpel and glue. Her col­lec­tion of col­lages, paper-cut­tings, and three-dimen­sion­al dioramas explore per­son­al and loc­al exper­i­ences of Chinese set­tle­ment in New Zea­l­and, both the Chinese face behind the takeaway counter and the home cus­toms housed behind the plastic rib­bon cur­tain. At the centre of the exhib­i­tion is a lav­ishly illus­trated artist book solely com­prised of cut-paper, paint, found text and images, a kal­eido­scop­ic tale told from a third-gen­er­a­tion Kiwi per­spect­ive.

Along with her involve­ment in com­munity art edu­ca­tion and com­mer­cial design pro­jects, Lee is known for her work in under­ground pub­lish­ing and punk fan­zines over the past dec­ade. A lim­ited edi­tion of the Home Made artist book will be avail­able for pur­chase at the exhib­i­tion.

Home Made: Pic­tur­ing Chinese Set­tle­ment in New Zea­l­and opens at 5.30pm on Thursday 31 July and runs until 22 August at Toi Pōneke Gal­lery, 61–63 Abel Smith Street.