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.

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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.