Asian Aotearoa Arts 2024 Event

In March 2024, the final annual season of Asian Aotearoa Arts events — led by artist Kerry Ann Lee with the support of Masssey CoCA where Lee works as an educator — took place in Pōneke Wellington.

Running from Tue 26 March to Mon 29 April, a number of workshops, events and performances took place across the city in collaboration with local and visiting practitioners. This ranged from a South & Southeast Asian Solar New Year celebration at Mabel’s Burmese Eat & Drink Shop featuring a custom menu, a kōrero between authors Brannavan Gnanalingham and Rose Lu, and performances by DJ Prince Ferrari and the Burmese Karen community traditional dance group — to a collective cooking workshop with Whangārei-based Soil of Cultures, where guests were invited to prepare three traditional Filipino dishes together using banana, rice, sugarcane and coconut — staple crops from the Philippines that were used as launching points for discussion around “the challenges faced by peasants, plantation workers, Lumad (Indigenous) communities, and environmental defenders due to militarisation, commercialisation, and climate change”.

These public events culminated in an invitation-only three-day wānanga held at Te Rau Karamu Marae in Pōneke Wellington. With more than 50 Asian Aotearoa arts practitioners from around the country attending, the aim of the wānanga was to foster relationship building and knowledge sharing, with sessions from practitioners such as Grace Gassin (Curator Asian New Zealand Histories at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) on the museum’s approach to collection and Designers Jef Wong and Liam Ooi, who presented alongside historian Kirsten Wong on Te Hekenga Taikoa, their project on Chinese New Zealand heritage and community.

This event marked the final year that Asian Aotearoa Arts would be organised by artist Kerry Ann Lee, who has been leading the annual event since 2018. It represented a continuation of the inaugural Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui at Corban Estate Arts Centre (2013) and the Asian New Zealand Artists Hui at Te Tuhi (2017). Reflecting on the weekend, Lee wrote to the attendees saying, “The past-present-futures-forward thinking nurtured at Te Rau Karamu was enriching and hopeful, tracing movements from 2-4, 10-15+ years ago through creative affinities and aspirations, both individually and collectively. I was honoured to spend time with so many smart, creative, and caring individuals.”