INFO
| Name | Asian Aotearoa Artists Hui |
| Year | 2017 |
| Date of Event | 8 July 2017 |
| Organiser / Venue | Te Tuhi |
| City | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland |
ABOUT
The Asian Aotearoa Artists Hui was a gathering of 40 artists of Asian heritage, held at Te Tuhi in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2017.
The hui was organised by curator and writer Amy Weng, who had recently created the website Hainamana, which published writing on contemporary Asian arts in Aotearoa. At an event hosted in 2023, Weng said that one motivation for organising the event was to bring together artists she had met through Hainamana.
Weng was also working at Te Tuhi at the time, and the gallery and community centre became the venue for this hui. Although a Chinese New Zealand artists hui had been hosted at Corban Estate Arts Centre in 2013, this 2017 gathering was independently conceived by Weng — although some of the attendees did overlap.
Weng has said that another motivation for organising the hui was to encourage Asian artists to discuss their Tauiwi identity together: “I just wanted to create a space where we acknowledged that relationship to tangata whenua and maybe use that as a starting point to talk about art and its politics. It was really refreshing to see a lot of the students there that had that same understanding.” Weng also pointed to Tautai as an influence, saying, “I was really interested in what Tautai had done for Pacific artists over the past 30 plus years, in terms of supporting exhibition making and building a robust understanding of contemporary Pacific arts and how that fits within the local context.” This echoed similar calls for some sort of organising body for Asian arts in Aotearoa, which had been raised at the 2013 Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui.
Through this hui, Kerry Ann Lee connected with Weng, who became part of the organising group for the large 2018 Asian Aotearoa Arts Hui, which was hosted in Pōneke Wellington.
